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Lykurg

We're all living in Amerika

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joined 2022 December 29 10:51:01 UTC

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Lykurg


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
We're all living in Amerika

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 December 29 10:51:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				To Escape the Body: A Review of Helen Joyce’s Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, pt. 3 – How Transgenderism Harms Women And Children
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Why would you need to be trans for this? You can just not care about your appearance and not spend time with the chick cliques. If youre enough of a nerd to be on here youve probably seen a few girls like that.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Where are the people smarter than us hanging out?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I forget the quote and context completely, but the gist is that you can recognize intelligence below your own, but not above.




It actually says that it does extend above a bit:




It spoke well of Mike Li that he was able to sense the aura of formidability surrounding Jaynes.  It's a general rule, I've observed, that you can't discriminate between levels too far above your own. E.g., someone once earnestly told me that I was really bright, and "ought to go to college".  Maybe anything more than around one standard deviation above you starts to blur together, though that's just a cool-sounding wild guess.




				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think the barberpole theory is pretty lame.


First of all, it doesnt actually tell you what new thing the upper classes will adopt. Before modernism, public art and architecture was neoclassical. If I had asked you at that time what style one could adopt to best differentiate from neoclassical, would you have come up with modernism or postmodernism from first principles? I think the best answer there would have been imitating rural peasants, but its hard to say. In practice a "style" has lots of attributes, and giving an exact inverse is difficult and also unnecessary, because anything thats different enough cam be used as a repudiation.


And "obvious inversion" is only one way this could go. Another example that certainly seems to be true often is that only the people youre signaling to can read the signals. If this is "elites compete for adulation of their peers", that doesnt explain the uglyness. It only needs to be obvious if you want to show the proles that youre different from them.


Also, theres a lot of low-class coded things that lower-class people themselves dont consider beautiful. Consider for example these very loose-cut shirts littered with branding: The people who wear these like them, and they think theyre cool, but they dont think theyre beautiful. You have to really scrape the bottom of the barrel to find people who e.g. wear them to a wedding.  Returning to the topic of public art, I have yet to see anyone argue we should have e.g. a statue of Mickey Mouse in public square. Why not? Mickey Mouse figures are certainly more popular home decoration than classical statuettes.


So, its not given that the lower classes will even dislike it, if public buildings and art are distinctly higher-class. I dont think postmodern art is an obvious consequence of post-scarcity. Theres plenty of people floating around telling us that things shouldnt be beautiful because thats fascist: consider taking them seriously.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Re the first part, I think your reasoning here depends on the directions orthogonal to beauty still corresponding relatively closely to terms in which we normally think about art.




the SF Federal Building, the Toronto subway sketches and the MLK Embrace statue all achieve their hideousness in unique ways, and all seem to strive toward various other indicia of elite art




Do I read correctly that you think its possible to make something thats clearly art of our current elite and also beautiful?




We also hear that beauty is consumerist, looks cheap, is reactionary, means embracing an aesthetic of a white supremacist past, etc




What did you have in mind with "looks cheap"? Are there really people who would say e.g. the Lincoln memorial looks cheap?


"Reactionary" here means basically the same thing I did with "fascist", and the association with bad old times is somewhere between made up and self-fulfilling, so it cant be the cause of the dislike.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Except...if one can just say it out loud, how cool and secret can it really be?




And if you could say it out loud and you just dont, thats somehow cooler? Because the point of themotte is that there is a way to make a claim overtly. All the cases I can think of when some "darkly hinting" got popular in ratspace is when "You wouldnt understand it even if I said it out loud, because its so hard to explain and/or understand" like TLP or the meditation guys.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


How to Win Friends and Influence People: the Rationalist Edition




My reaction at this point:




At this point, reading an article a comment like this one, you already know what the next “narrative beat” has to be.






The fact that this has to be the next narrative beat in an article like this should raise red flags. Another way of phrasing “this has to be the next narrative beat” is that it’s something we would believe / want to believe / insert at this place in our discourse whether it was true or not. That means we need to be on extra special good epistemic behavior when we try to consider whether it’s true in this individual case, understanding that we’ll have a strong bias towards assuming “yes” that needs to be counteracted.




So I checked your points against both the latest 7 top-levels in the thread 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and my memory of popular comments.




Extreme (emotional) Decoupling.




Not true of any of the top-levels. Some popular comments are like this but some are also earnest presentations of a situation that doesnt fit any mayor narrative, or being vocally angry at the outgroup.




Long, internally consistent logical chains based on premises with monstrous error bars/uncertainty




Not true of any top-levels nor of popular comments. Long arguments tend to make their points in more detail rather than make more points. Including multible examples for something. Adding visceral details to a situation youre asking people to consider. Countering first-order objections. Even just repeating yourself in different words. Very long comments mostly invest in parallel rather than serial argumentation.




Literature references.




Not true of any of the top-levels. Occasionally in popular comments.




Write like a high-schooler who just discovered the wonders of a thesaurus.




True of one of the top-levels, and I would guess a similar rate for popular comments. I think the author of that one top-level is ESL and that probably contributes. Then again so am I, so maybe comments that dont seem pretentious to me (or my own) do seem that way to natives.




Why post a succinct list with references when you can write a 30,000 character multipost that is a struggle to get through?




Not true of any of the top-levels. Popular comments are sometimes very long and a struggle to get through, but its not clear that they could be effectively shortened into a list of references. The last multipost I remember is this, if you want to try at compression. Its also built around a literature reference and has a pretty decoupled premise, but its doesnt seem bad to me.




...respond to people with a half dozen links to your corpus of 10,000 word posts amounting to a small novella for them to read!




OK I think at this point there are two people doing this and only one of them where you actually find it annoying.




Complain about the normies in academia, MSM, HR, government, your life, etc vocally and frequently. This communicates that you're smarter than them, and remember, criticism is always easier than defending a thesis or building something worthwhile and thus disproportionately easier for gaining status.




Depending on how you count it, up to 4 of the top-levels. Id say one of them is mainly about that. It seems hard to avoid criticising academia, MSM, HR, or government in CW posts, and "normies" doesnt restrict the description very much. I think this is actually a bit less common/intense in popular comments.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Making Cognitive Enhancement Palatable
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Poor areas are not awful because of tragic dirt; they are awful because they are filled with stupid, violent, impulsive people.




Yes, but its not clear IQ 120 by itself would fix that. Genetic enhancement would be a thus-far-impossible level of decoupling between intelligence and other correlates of good outcomes, it might break currently observed correlations.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Making Cognitive Enhancement Palatable
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
One example for what this could look like is low mutational load: Its also correlated with all the good things, including IQ, and certainly causally upstream of it. Genetic IQ enhancement in a narrow sense wouldnt fix that, and if it has any effects not mediated by IQ (it almost certainly does), you wouldnt get those, whereas currently they strongly correlate with IQ. Now, in this case, if you know about it and are already doing genetic enhancements, its easy to fix that as well. But there could be more things like this.


Basically, noone has run an RCT on IQ increases, because we havent been able to do them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Making Cognitive Enhancement Palatable
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mostly agree.




nor any interesting non-additive effects




I dont know what people have with non-additive effects. In a highly polygenic trait, non-additive effects of genes are hard to detect because theyre almost certainly irrelevant even if real.




Would they be better off – in the expected direction of less dysfunction – than the baseline, or rather, than random implanted embryos? You can bet on it.




That is mostly what I expect as well. Im just saying that theres a lot more evidence that it "might as well be" IQ/genetics, than that it actually is.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I do identify as a "secular humanist" at times, and I think I do have a fairly solid foundation within that tradition. The problem is, that it's a fairly iconoclastic, aniconic life path.




(From the top-level)




It's superficial, but I've sometimes envied devout Christians the way I envy superfans on Tumblr. Like, sure there's a lot of weird restrictions their devotion creates, but I wish I cared as much about God or Star Wars as these people seem to.




I would say that Enlightenmentism does care this much, just about something thats not so concrete. I mean, would a normal person write stuff like this:




I was just there for warm fuzzy feelings, because they had a reliable package for eliciting a psychological state I otherwise have trouble achieving. The Hare Krishna's may be against intoxicating substances, but for a brain like mine they have a powerfully ecstatic intoxicant at the core of their practice, and I wanted to be warmed by it without getting burnt.




No, its really quite a small group that thinks like this. Even starting from the water-supply in the West, this takes years of intentionally reshaping your mind. Unfortunatly it also involves thinking that the shape of mind achieved is standard, unremarkable, characterised mainly by absences, so you dont really appreciate it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
From a purely biological point of you foo and bar are propably pretty similar. Both are a person having AIDS. If this is accurate, the relevant difference between foo and bar is moral, not biological. Both involve getting infected with HIV, but in the foo case, the effected person is sexually oriented towards getting infected and participated willingly, and so its fine. In the bar case, the effected person is unwilling, so its bad.


So, should your purely apolitical taxonomy of mental physical disorders classify foo as a mental illness, or should it refuse to classify bar as a mental illness?




When the FTX thing happened recently and people argued about consequentialist justifications for lying, I realised Scotts theory of categories literally cant tell the difference between the truth and the highest-utility-thing-to-say. Now, he doesnt seem to know this. He thinks that:




There are facts of the matter on each individual point – whether a whale has fins, whether a whale lives in the ocean, whether a whale has tiny hairs, et cetera. But there is no fact of the matter on whether a whale is a fish. The argument is entirely semantic.




But thats not how it works. If tomorrow the Ministry of Hide-tanning decides that whale skin is hairless, you might insist that it obviously has hair, I mean look at it (possibly with some magnification). But they could just as well say "Well, there are facts on each individual point - whether they hold water, whether they resist against the grain, whether theyre made of ceratin, etc. But theres no fact to the matter whether theyre hairs."


More generally, "X falls in category(set) Y" and "X has property Z" are isomorphic - everything you can express in the first form, you can also express in the second, and vice versa. If "is a fish" really were just semantic, then by the same mechanism "has tiny hairs" would be just semantic. So there would be no facts based on which you can classify things.


The only thing that makes this theory remotely workable is that you already know which things you want to apply it too. Its pure Humpty-Dumpty-ism in practice.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


there are a few natural categories like periodic elements, since every element has an exact integer number of protons; but pretty much everything more complex than an atom does not fit into a natural category.




Here too there are intermediate states where its unclear whether a proton is part of the atomic core. During radioactive decay, at what point does the atom change element? Now, these intermediates are fine to ignore 99% of the time... just like with lots of other categories that people want to deny being natural.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think youre missing an important part. The whole conversation the idea describes goes more like this:


A: "We shouldnt do Y, that would imply we should also do X, which is bad"


B: "X will never happen, it would be totally safe to do Y"


Y is done, X happens


A: *angry*


B: "Obviously its good that X happened, its good for the same reason Y is good, are you really such a backward bigot that you think even Y is bad, or are you too dumb to understand consistent principles?"


Your third scenario is not a case of the pattern at all, because the "X will never happen" isnt used to assuage. Your second scenario might be, but I think youll find very few examples of conservatives using it that way. They just dont get enough wins for that.


As for the first example... well somewhere in between those two totally different people saying these things, the X did in fact happen. That would be very unlikely if noones mind changed. So propably there is a significant faction who made the switch in-one-person.


But thats not particularly relevant. The point is that you shouldnt believe the "X will never happen", and waxing about how totally sincere the liberals are and how mean and unsportsmanlike it is to say theyre not doesnt change that.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[META] Something Shiny and Two Things Boring
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Some suggestions for the Inbox:


    

  1. 

    I think displaying the notified comments in context is a bad idea. When multiple people resond to one of your comments it gets unwieldy and you have to scroll around to find the comment thats actually new. Also indentation gore. If I need the context, Ill open a new tab to read it anyway.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    Opening Inbox automatically marks all as read, and theres no way to turn it off. Back on reddit it didnt do that, and there was even a button to mark them unread again. I used to leave things set to unread if I meant to respond to them later. I cant do that now and I dont have a good replacement.
    

    3. 



Also if I have suggestions for evaluating the volunteer data, where should I make them? Some of you comments suggest you might not want it to be public knowledge how exactly you use them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[META] Something Shiny and Two Things Boring
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, obvious part is getting the regressions for (user, judgement) against various mod decisions. Getting interactions between different users is propably not feasible, but we could try clustering them. (Which reminds me, is there still any interest in this?) This could let us consider interactions between those, and help assign comments to volunteers to get a representative quorum faster. Do you think you can afford to double-check all decisions that went against the user? And there should propably be some report number over which to check approvals.


How would you document actions the system took? You wanted people to not know they had an impact, but the modlog would obviously show the action as not taken by a human, and however the modhat comments are handled would show it too.


I checked the modlog for this and have some suggestions there as well: First, bans arent robustly connected to their modhat comments. If you view all actions you can tell chronologically, but filtering for bans you dont get it. Also there apparently arent modhats for removed comments, or did I just not find them? No list of currently banned users either. I think it would also be nice if the list where you select a mod action to filter for had little numbers showing how many of each occured in the last month or so.


Also: I know how to programm in principle (coming from mathematics), but I dont have experience with git, interacting with databases, etc. How much of a time investment do you think it would be before I could contribute to dev?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Weren't things we call 'corruption' today, from "bribes" to "nepotism" ... rampant and even accepted among many premodern societies?




Important I think. It does seem that in the past leaders had less of a problem with their actions being seen. That could be interpreted as social norms being enforced on them better. "Prosocial" in the relevant evolutionary sense is not the same as pro-equality. Moldbug argument about unclear assignment of power being the problem.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for January 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
@aiislove:



This is truely strange to see. Normally its rare for an interesting comment to also get an interesting response, but this is an entire thread thats almost all people bouncing schizo theories off each other.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You could have made that argument about things that actually happened as well though. It needs to get a foot in the door somehow first, unassited, doesnt need to be very big or mainstream. Then I think liberals would support it. Not to increase minorities, or because they believe being gay is better, but in the same sort of way they do with trans now.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[META] Something Shiny and Two Things Boring
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


isn't it just going to end up with everyone in an echo chamber?




I think its less of an echo chamber than sorting by upvotes. And as I said:






Personally I would like to see a replacement for sorting by new. There are fewer deep-in-the-tree discussions and more first-order replies without further replies than there used to, and my impression from memory is that this came gradually after the change to sorting by new.






So clustering could hopefully solve that with less of an echo chamber effect. But if you weigh the risks of partisanship vs declining quality differently, maybe you do want to stick with things as they are.




as long as you're reasonably experienced with Python. You do get to learn Python if you don't know it already :V




If you think thats the time-consuming part, then the whole thing doesnt sound too bad. I hope Ill get to it after finals season.




So I'm currently making no attempt whatsoever to cluster users :V




Well, Im glad I gave a new idea. Feel free to ask me about math details.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for January 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thank you for your service.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It seems that, "casting monogamy as a lifestyle governed by jealousy, and polyamory as a more enlightened and rational approach," is interpreted as "shame" or "pressure".




I think that can be a reasonable interpretation. Depending on what kind of autist you are, you might not relate to this, but theres a state where people believe that they have lost an argument, really lost and not just because of some stupid tactical error that they can fix, but also not believe they were wrong. They will agree that youre right, and that they should do X, but also obviously not want to do X, and not really do it. In that case, if you keep bringing up the argument to them, that is generally considered bad manners and a kind of social pressure. Basically its a bit as if ordering them.


Now you can propably see why the rationalists wouldnt like this kind of norm, and I grant them that theyre propably consistent in not applying it, but it does take some protection away from people.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Why Are Women Hot? – Put A Number On It!
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


minimalist 30 minute




My condolences. Seriously though, how early do you have to get up for that?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Why Are Women Hot? – Put A Number On It!
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


-- I've nominally been a big advocate of the binary rating system (1= I'd hit that, 0= I wouldn't) and "it's all the same in the dark" when offering advice to friends on romance. All that matters is that you find her attractive enough to make love to, anything else beyond getting hard is irrelevant ego. But if I'm honest, when I look at my own life, I married the (objectively) hottest woman I ever dated, we have a near perfect relationship. And the absolute best hottest sex I've had, the best lovers I've had, have pretty strongly correlated with the societally hottest women I've been with. Maybe this indicates that sex, for me, is at some level about status, that my superego is hiding in the corner even when the lights are off. Maybe it indicates that those women had the kind of confidence that leads to really good sex. At the same time I suspect that a big reason I've been successful with objectively hot partners is because at a conscious level I'm less interested than others, precisely because of the conscious advocacy of the binary rating system.




What lead you to this opinion in the first place? It seems there would be a fairly straightforward biological reason to expect sex with hotter people to be more desired. But Jacob also reached for a status explanation of hot people seeking hot partners, without even mentioning the obvious first idea.


You remind me a bit of this, but with efficiency instead of progressivism:






Like, and I'm definitely not being 100% charitable here, reading between the lines, you almost hear, "Men want to rub their bodies against women sometimes and then ejaculate when their genitals are in the rough vicinity of that woman's genitals or other parts and crevices various and sundry. Women also sometimes want forms of this, too. There are some variations about the identities of the bodies involved, but this covers the general case. We will call this interaction "sex", and claim to be the champion of it. Now, how can we eliminate everything else that has historically made this transaction problematic, from a disease perspective, from a fertility perspective, and especially from a social / emotional / power / interpersonal relationship perspective? Once we stop permitting all that other stuff, once we heavily stigmatize all that other stuff, we will be left with 'safe sex', and we will loudly encourage it. And this is what 'sex' will mean as we march into the future, and this will be progress."










Again, I'm being unfair. But if this is someone's model of human sexuality, it's a model that has almost no room for things like seduction, and is likely wary of most kinds of flirting. It's a model that is very uncomfortable with human brains being the most important sexual organ, and of the deep pleasures of sexual tension and the role of uncertainty and imagination and play and teasing in desire.






				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


also – possibly – by guilt-tripping the cream of the crop of «white culture» inferiors into maintaining automatic weaponry and such.




That doesnt really sound like retreating to ancestral homelands to me.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Is there some sort of gross statistic that bears out this impact on the whole economy, other than your disposable income one? In terms of GDP and GDP growth, Japan looks like bottom of the first world country. The "conventional wisdom" is that Western countries are mostly the same economically.