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MaiqTheTrue

Zensunni Wanderer

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joined 2022 November 02 23:32:06 UTC 

				
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MaiqTheTrue


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Zensunni Wanderer

				
				
				

				

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My working hypothesis on bad writing is at least in part due to the hyper-professionalization of movies and games.  In both cases, the people making them don’t come from all walks of life.  They come from a rather insular world of people who have gone through specialized training at university, and they then go on to live in the same town and hang out mostly with other people like themselves who went to the same professional schools and so on.  They’re rarely if ever outside that bubble.  They rarely know anyone who came from outside that bubble.  And as this goes on for generations, the lack of contact with the normie world makes it impossible to create movies and tv and games that feel realistic.  Nobody in Hollywood shoots guns, and probably very rarely would they even know anyone who collects or uses them.  When it comes to writing a story about the kind of person that owns or shoots guns, they aren’t referencing their own lived experience with gun owners.  They’re referencing other works about the topic, they’re referencing their political views about guns and the people who own them, and maybe stereotyping they’ve seen about gun owners.  That doesn’t allow for much depth.  It’s like a copy of a copy of a copy — every step away from the real thing makes it less like a real person and thus less interesting.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I agree that it was urban vs rural.  But the biggest difference was in the effects of pretty standard policies.  It was painfully obvious that most of the CDC had no idea how the rural economy works.  Shutting down an office and going remote is no big deal.  Those office workers didn’t lose their jobs, the owners of those companies were in no danger of losing their businesses.  It frankly mattered so little that most office workers are fighting tooth and nail to not go back to the office.  In rural areas, the exact same restrictions were absolutely devastating.  If you worked in a factory, a small business store, a restaurant, a construction company, you got a layoff.  If you owned those kinds of businesses, you had bills pilling up at a time when it was illegal to do business.  At the same time, big businesses doing the same thing could often poach your customers by simply being allowed to do business.  If you needed something, you went to Amazon or Walmart or Target, nobody else was open for business.  And the cruelest part was that the owners of those businesses were basically forced to watch and forced to let it happen.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I’ll agree that parents are responsible for their kids, and I’ll agree that in this case (as they bought the weapon and took him out target-shooting with it) they are responsible for enabling the shooting.


But I think as a blanket thing, I’m less convinced simply because preventing your kids, especially if they have ongoing mental health issues, from doing anything wrong is an impossible task.  Once a kid has access to money and a vehicle, your ability to control them is pretty small. It would take an extreme level of helicopter parenting to prevent a teenager from doing this.  He goes and steals a gun from somebody else, and you don’t know.  He builds bombs out of household materials, and you don’t know.  You’d have to track him to be sure, and watch his internet to be sure.


Worse, I fear that the looming threat of liability might make parents less likely to seek help.  If you have your kid diagnosed with something like bipolar or borderline personality disorder or something that makes them more likely to be violent, you’ve now created a situation where you’re admitting possible guilt — you know your kid has issues, and if they act out, well, you knew about it. The best defense is that the child isn’t diagnosed with anything.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think this is the correct answer.  It’s a power move plain and simple.  The powers that be want to be able to shut down things they don’t like and are forming “relationships” with the people running the choke points.  If a site can’t process payments, it can’t survive long.  And if ISPs refuse to direct traffic to them, again they can’t survive.  But because it’s not the government, and nobody gets arrested, it’s not technically censorship so there’s nothing wrong with it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I hadn’t heard this particular story, but it absolutely tracks with the naive way that modern western leaders approach global politics.  There’s just a weird thought that all they need to do is “be the good guys” and they win by default.  Couple this with the idea that bad actors wouldn’t use subterfuge to get what they want and it’s a system that’s not hard to either work around or subvert.  We expected Russia to just collapse when we disconnected them from the global exchange.  We sneered at them rushing western stores to get the last goods before they closed.  What we never ever seemed to consider is that Russia might well have had contingency plans for the sanctions they knew the west would impose, that they’d already created BRICs and could do just fine without us. We expected a short war tha5 they would lose any day now.  Annnnd guess which side is lowering their draft age.


We’re in some sense victims of our own success.  We have been so dominant for so long that we don’t think about how vulnerable our systems are or what a determined nation can do.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think the big and frankly unmentioned part of the phenomenon is that we in the WEIRD west have long been accustomed to defining ourselves and choosing our lifestyles and interests accordingly.  If you’d been born in almost any other era and any other set of countries, your life would have been largely predetermined before you could walk or talk.  There were exceptions, but for the majority, what you were was handed to you, and in some cases still is.  You practice your ancestral religion, you worked at whatever it was your parents and grandparents did.  Your ability to go to school was determined by social class.  Your roles and expectations were largely defined fairly rigidly full of expectations for the roles you were born into. Religious rules.  Gender roles.  Job roles.


Fast forward to today and we really don’t have any of those things.  You can become anything you darn well please.  The son of a welder can become an artist, or a doctor, or an actor.  You can freely choose your religion or lack thereof.  You can dress any way you like.  You can take on or abandon social roles with little regard for what other people think.  Gender is really the final frontier of this process.  It’s the only reality of yourself you don’t get to decide on.  Everything else, religion, job, hobbies, clothing styles, education, etc. can all be bent to the whim of the individual.  So why wouldn’t gender be something a culture like ours would try to negate with medical science?  Why wouldn’t a society that treats every other identity as if they’re fashion accessories not try to make gender and sex into yet another consumer choice?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I totally agree.  The stuff that grabbed me about Fight Club, and The Martian is just how close Palahniuk and Weir seemed to be able to get the mindset of ordinary working class people stuck in extraordinary circumstances.  A lot of sci-fi seems to assume that everyone is PMC and that ships in space or colonies are going to be large and clean and have lots of cool gear.  They’re cruise ships built for luxury run by people who cry but rarely experience a real hardship.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I’m personally of the school of thought that interventions should be minimal until at least the mid teens.  Don’t make a fuss about their clothes, their hair, their activities.  Give them a nickname if you must, but keep it somewhat gender neutral.  At 16 or 18 if the child is still thinking they’re the wrong gender, then and only then is there a subject worth talking about.  There are real trans people.  They do exist, though I suspect they are much rarer than supposed.  But I don’t think we need to go much beyond “don’t be mean to people who look weird or act weird” in a grade school classroom.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think there’s also an aspect of “fashion barber poles”.  I think my clearest political example would be something like color-blind politics where the race of the person wasn’t supposed to matter at all.  This was the goal in the 1970s and 1980s.  A not-racist believed that race didn’t matter.  The problem was that “normies” started to buy in to that.  Essentially they won.  Everyone from Reagan to Bernie Sanders believed in that at the time.  So it loses a bit of cred not because of internal problems with the movement, but because if you’re upper class, there’s a certain amount of pressure to not be mistaken for the unwashed masses.  And much like fashion, food trends, and media trends, ideological trends follow in a predictable pattern of the aspirational trying to imitate the elite, the normie imitating them, and the elite wanting to separate themselves from the mainstream.  Thus the movement changes to things that normies don’t do.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If that were the extent of the advice, I think it would be fine.  Put sunscreen on is good advice.  Don’t let your kids play outside is batshit insane.  In fact, to my mind the benefits to children from playing outside are substantial enough that if I thought talking about sunscreen would keep a kid indoors I’d never tell parents about sunscreen.


The physical benefits are that a kid gets actual exercise, running around, playing.  They develop better coordination.  A kid who’s playing is basically getting hours of aerobic exercise, building muscles, and so on.  A kid stuck inside gets none of that.  They sit and stare at screens and get fat.


Then there’s the social benefits.  Making actual real life friends improves mental health.  It embeds a child in a social network of peers and other adults.  It teaches social responsibility and empathy and a whole host of social skills that simply cannot be learned by chatting over a headset.


It teaches good problem solving.  Kid wants to get across a stream, he might accidentally learn something in trying to figure out how to do that.  He might want to play a different game than the other kids and have to learn to negotiate with the other kids to get that.  He might learn how to practice a skill so he can get good enough to play with the other kids.


If children only got one single benefit, I’d still be in favor of having the kids play outside.  Even if the only benefit were preventing obesity, it’s an easy trade.  Cancer at 70+ is bad, but if caught early is fairly treatable most of the time.  Obesity is a chronic disease that often causes heart attacks in fairly young people.  Taking 5 years off retirement or 30 years?  Easy choice.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
At risk of wildly extrapolating from my own experience with my peers, women generally don’t care that much about sports.  They’ll watch if someone they know is on the team, or if the other members of their group want to watch or if their SO wants to watch, but they only rarely seek out sports on their own.  They also don’t follow as closely even if they do watch.  The male sports fans I know can name players, know stats, follow trades, know coaches, etc.  so this also boosts the sports men like because it’s not just catching a weekend game, it’s following news about their team, it’s buying merch, attending in person (if one has the means).


I think the only way to get profitable as a women’s league is to do what women’s tennis does — make the players dress in cute outfits, push the players to be media personalities that women bond with, sell the kinds of merch that women buy because it makes them look cute.  Have pinups for the men.  The WNBA suffers because they can’t admit what their audience actually wants.  The men want women’s sports to be hot pinups that look cute in short skirts.  The women want to have pararelationships with successful women on social media.  What they’ve done instead is treat the WNBA as a “men’s NBA, but with women,” which doesn’t work.  Men follow men’s sports for the competition and women’s sports for the hotties.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think there’s probably a good amount of political manipulation just like there are accounts that give high reviews to products or to review bomb rivals.


Pushing political views online on any site has a whole host of advantages.


1).  It’s cheap.  If I can get a package deal for 50-100 bots for less than $500, then this is going to be much cheaper than trying to use traditional advertising in the same platform, to say nothing of traditional TV, radio, or print advertising.  This means that a single person can get thousands of views and upvotes on a topic with little investment.  If I wanted to promote Jill Stein (who’s running for Pres. with the Green Party) spending $500 to get 10,000 views is pretty cheap.


2). It at least looks organic.  People generally scroll past advertisements or ignore them.  Ad blockers are common.  Very very few people see an ad and pay attention to it.  But if they see a post on their social media, they might read it and the comments below and thus the owner of the accounts has some opportunity to make their case.


3).  You can quite easily tailor your message to specific people and interests.  If I wanted to convince Biden voters to vote Stein, I go to progressive subs.  I don’t have to get into conservative and pro Trump areas at all.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The problem of people no longer seeking treatment is to my mind one of the more serious problems with this ratchet.  Managed properly, people with even serious mental illness can live somewhat normal lives.  But untreated mental illness can easily become a time bomb in which the person muddles until they can’t anymore.  And removing guns for mental illness or cars or knives doesn’t help when the people with those mental illnesses decide not to risk losing their guns or their car by talking about their anger issues or depression or bipolar.  Then it goes off in an explosion when the person with anger issues takes them out on a room full of people.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for March 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think this is what made Rome great.  They had entire systems that gave great rewards for creating great political leaders and military leaders.  And they started grooming people into those positions fairly young.  Ambitious young men would seek status by working for a great patrician leaders and later do things like build public works, conquer new territories, or work for the government.


Come to that I think the reason for our current malaise especially for men, goes back to us not allowing men to just be men and therefore learn that they can achieve status by doing great things.  Men trash talking and competing learn to achieve.  Achievement gets them stays and further develops a taste for achievement.  Then they go out and do more in hopes of getting more status and in the meantime build the confidence to actually try.  This creates a virtuous cycle and if it’s widespread, it creates a culture of achievement.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think, if schools wanted to, they could absolutely teach people how to actually think and solve problems.  Plato and Aristotle and other philosophers could do so with nothing but a bunch of eager students meeting outside in the agora and listening to him talk.  We’re actually shockingly bad a thins. I honestly think high school students in the 1950s and 1960s were actually better thinkers than college graduates and in some cases college students in the 21st century.


I have my theory as to why this is.  I think the classical model of education worked much better than modern educational methods.  I also think that the demand for rigor and precision in thought and the need to actually understand rather than simply memorizing the correct answers to questions is more or less dead.  The value we used to place on dispassionate inquiry died long ago and has been replaced by narratives determined by the culture.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It’s not a scam it, like solar is overrated for large swaths of the globe simply because the weather and geography often make those solutions impractical.  Solar only works in places that have a lot of sunny days.  And transmission can only go so far.  Wind has a similar problem— if the place isn’t windy enough, there’s no power.  Add in the space requirements for either solution, and it’s a minor source of power that people overhype because they want to believe you can get free-ish energy that’s perfectly green and leaves no waste.  I think it’s a step backwards simply because for most of the globe nuclear fission is so much more efficient per meter of space used and produces so little waste that anything that stops people from wanting more nuclear energy is a step away from green energy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But at least in the case of a getaway driver, the driver absolutely knows and is an active participant in the murder.  He knows he’s driving someone to a place where they fully intend to shoot someone, and they know after the fact they will be helping them escape.  If an adult I share an apartment with takes my car keys and drives to someone’s house and shoots them, I’m not involved.  I had no reason to think that a crime would result from me leaving the keys on the counter.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I’m glad we agree. My point though is that this is a huge problem with trying to turn schools into one stop shopping for solving everything that affects kids.  They’re daycares, cultural centers, therapists, art centers, sports leagues, enrichment activities, and when they can find the time and money, education centers.  I don’t think it’s possible to have schools take over everything that other institutions and families drop and still perform their primary function as education simply because everything added takes time, energy and resources away from that purpose.  And I think this is also a major factor in teacher burnout.  They’re wearing so many hats, many of them contradictory, with little to no support and often forced to deal with serious mental health crises while trying to teach the other kids something.


My sister in law teaches elementary school.  She had a kid in her class who was cutting herself as a way to get attention as well as acting out a lot.  Because the resources are minimal she had to deal with this, and pretty well beg the school to get the kid more help than she could provide (parents didn’t seem to care).  In the meantime, the class could get nothing else done.  That’s the result of turning public schools into the Swiss Army Knife of society.  Once it does everything, you no longer have time for teaching.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I’ve always found the “history” argument weak.  The reason people protest is at least ostensibly because there’s a moral wrong being committed.  Yet, the “right side of history” argument doesn’t even engage with the moral arguments.  If the cause is morally right, then it is right, whether or not history goes along with it.  Second, history isn’t even a line, it’s a graph it can and has changed direction multiple times.  The Romans were okay with being gay, until they became Catholic.  Several countries have gone from being communist to being market liberals at the same time other states have gone the other way.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Except that I’ve never ever seen this drive more people to support these causes.  In fact, it’s almost always a negative publicity to the point that it would often do the cause better to not protest at all.  Your protest blocked a road, now everyone is pissed because they were late to work, or missed a flight, or other activities they needed to get to.  Are people talking about the cause as in “does this idea have merit” or in terms of “what a bunch of inconsiderate losers making people late for work and making people miss their flights.  It’s negative at least around me.  People outright cheered when the people blocking roads in Europe got pushed out of the way by SUVs or were manhandled to the side of the road by outraged drivers.  Not one person seeing the souping of the Louvre paintings got curious about the cause, they were upset about the destruction of the art.  So on net, it’s more likely to turn people away.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think a lot of this could be somewhat curbed if there were reasonable requirements to get various helps from the government.  If you want assistance, it should be assistance and therefore you should have a job.  That doesn’t seem controversial to me.  And it would work.  If having sec 8 housing required having a full time job, then people would be much more likely to find and keep a job.  Add in a requirement that nobody living at that house commit a felony and a lot of these sorts of problems get handled.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think dogs understand very concretely, and very short causal chains (say 2-3 steps).  It can understand “I find thing, my human gives me a treat.”  Or “when human makes that one noise, he wants me to sit, and gets angry if I don’t.”  But I’ve never met a dog who could reason more than a 2-3 step solution.  A dog won’t fetch a bunch of sticks to make a raft or a bridge.


Humans probably have a much larger causal chain understanding, but even then, it’s not infinite.  We can reason causes and build machines, but beyond a certain complexity, it’s too much for the median human to understand.


A dog couldn’t trap you in your home because it’s simply not smart enough to understand or anticipate the moves you’d make to get away.  It thinks “I go out the front door for my walk, so if I block the front door human can’t leave.”  But it can’t anticipate side doors.  It can’t anticipate you bribing them with a treat, it can’t understand what a key is.  So you can easily leave.


Humans, with an IQ of 115 or so, are in the same situation with a true AGI.  We know how we think, we know what we’d do, but the AGI will be so much smarter that it will be able to work around whatever “controls” we stick in its brain.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I’ll agree to the decline in quality of entrants.  But I think the bigger issue is student loans and the ease with which those institutions can make money by reducing rigor even in high rigor subjects.  A butt in the seat of any university makes them 30,000 a year.  This is putting enormous pressure on schools to not only admit anyone with a pulse, but to reduce the difficulty of coursework so students don’t fail or drop out.  So you basically remove the difficulty from the courses, handhold everyone in the class, and offer more extra credit to shore up flagging grades.  Which means students are no longer thinkers, innovators, readers, or otherwise able to do anything beyond regurgitating whatever is in the study guide.


Another issue, which I think has also reduced the usefulness of college is that really, the ability of any program at any school to be held to any sort of account for not actually teaching students to do the things that are a major part of doing that work.  As it sits now, what students and employers know about what the program does is what the school says it does.  If I’m looking at a program in biology, I honestly have no way to know whether a program I’m looking at is going to teach me to do the labs, or to teach me the fundamentals of biology or statistics used to analyze the results of an experiment.  I can use reputation as a proxy, but it isn’t a very good proxy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think the applications matter as well.  When is the last time you cared about the artist who designed a package you bought?  Or ad art or copy?  Even as far as book covers go, I generally don’t pay that much attention to the person behind that art.  In business, I really don’t think anyone particularly cares about who wrote the reports they get, the papers they sign, or the emails.  Sure they’d notice if it were bad, but unless it stands out either positively or negatively, hundreds of pieces of art and lines of writing you see everyday would be seen without you caring about who wrote it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There’s a bit of a confounding factor on a lot of Olympic sports— which is that especially for those you mentioned, being able to compete requires a lot of training at very early ages.  Winter sports have a second cost sink— the equipment and venues needed to train for these events is expensive.  Thus for a lot of sports, your ability to even reach a level of competition where it would be worth training you to compete in the Olympics requires tens of thousands of dollars and years of very focus training.  And thus if you’re not of reasonably successful stock, including intellectual ability, you won’t get the opportunity to try.


Boxing, running, basketball, soccer and other similar sports are light enough in equipment that it’s at least plausible that you could be from a working class family and be able to try.