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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
				


				
					

					
Hello back frens



				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Every people has a need for self-justification: "why do we rule this land and not you?"




"Because we started a city in a swamp with a bunch of bandits, and then raided our neighbors for wifes." - this is not quite "because we won", but it sure is getting there. Also this is coming from the greatest state of ancient europe that everyone else is legitimating themselves from.


EDIT: Actually, this is another thing that goes against the theory: All the europeans who claimed a right deriving from the roman conquerers, as opposed to "We lived here so long" - most of them until the age of nationalism, and a few persisting.


The spartans did not write much, so we cant be sure what they thought, but I think they had a similar mentality. Certainly the part where they officially remained at war with the helots would suggest it.


I dont know where I got this from, but: "Straussian reading is pretending everyone smart has always been a liberal".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Living out one's ideals is a costly signal of sincerity, and achieving success and happiness by doing so is the least refutable argument. This is a big reason why religion is so persistent despite sounding batshit crazy from the outside — and I say this as a religious person.




Is it? AFAIK religion is negatively correlated with most measures of success before you correct for income and education and such. Now, it might be that those corrections are necessary to find the true causal effect, but its clearly not just "follow what the successful people are doing" any more.


In fact I think this works against religion. Far more people avoid religion because its associated with low-status people then would ever care about whats objectively reasonable.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The philosophy may still be sound, we don't judge the art by the artist




An important part of the philosophy here is the claim that you can improve rationality in a domain-general way. That you could learn to avoid e.g. motivated reasoning in a way that would work on all topics simultanuously, so that your preformance in even the weakest field that a critic might adversarially pick will be ok (and that he has done this, obviously). Claiming to have a metabolic defect that would be lethal in the ancestral environment is strong evidence against that.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
IMO this is just people not believing AGI is possible, or only believing it in the sense the physicalism requires them to say so.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I remember sitting in elementary school reading classes, where kids would be randomly picked to read some passage out of a book, and it was painfully obvious which of my fellow students could only read by sounding out syllables based on the spelling of words; they had absolutely no idea what the semantic content of what they just read actually was.




That propably means they (were made to) go too fast. If you can sound out the text, and you can understand speech, then you can understand the text. If you try to go very fast and throw every letter out of working memory as soon as you read it, thats bad. The teacher should make you repeat each word after you finish it, without looking back at the text, and same for sentences. Eventually youll learn to read fluidly just from practice - but better to read non-fluidly before that.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


There's been some research to check for transfer to offline environments




Well yes, if we believe in reinforcement or some other mechanism like that, that can carry the short-term consequences into the long term. But there the proteus effect is not an alternative way that the character can take over long term. All the stuff about the mechanism of it suggests it doesnt have an independent long-term effect.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				In defense of simplicity
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.




				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				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.






				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				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?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for January 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thank you for your service.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				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
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				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 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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yes, but that doesnt mean its true. Black activism has always mostly looked how progressivism at the time thought it was supposed to look, and its successes were mostly given to them by white people either directly or by giving them things that materially imply them.


I mean, if our elites decided that riots will no longer be tolerated, what do you think happens? You of all people should know better than to think a reverse of the old race relations could really happen.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Similarly, the number of people moving into a city will be upper bounded by some multiple of the number of salaried jobs that the city can support.






And it historically kept being met. In the 1980s people randomly decided that cities around the world were 'full'. By what mechanism did the degree of fullness get determined and why stop at this arbitrary time in the late 20th century ?




The 80s were the inflection point of an economic change, where now the number of salaried jobs increases as the people in the city increase. In the old days, a city would be built around a resource, often a trade route, that had some absolute size of economic surpluss to be extracted. There were jobs for the people extracting it, those brought people in, then there were jobs for services for those people, which brought more people in, etc, but this would taper off quickly and the population stayed limited. Then with industrialisation, you could create surplus anywhere. But you still need food as an input for the workers, and initially that still limited the growth of the cities by how far it could (afford to) be transported. But eventually, technology became so good that its now basically irrelevant where a city is. Really only container ship access matters, and thats a matter of if. ~Noone who has it is physically blocked from expanding it. Now, the best place to run your generic company is in the biggest city, and so it the best place to look for a job, and the only price that can go against it is that of the space.


If you solve this by just building ever more, the result is maybe ten gigantic cities in the whole world (plus small mining towns scattered far apart). And that might be the most efficient thing to do in some sense, but housing still wont be as cheap as it used to. Things just want to clump together now, and they will always want a bit more.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for December 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Of course it's not exactly hard to figure out why that might be




And if there were a lot of overlap, it would not be hard to figure out its because the revisionists are far-rightists and so obviously carry water for Putin.