MartianNight
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User ID: 1244
MartianNight
9mo ago
I wonder how much the choice of colors affected people's choices. Blue is the color of American Democrats. Red is the color of American Republicans. Most Twitter users are aligned with the American Democrats so they are biased towards "voting blue”.
The red pill is also a term that is also associated with the anti-feminist manosphere, which puts off the pro-feminist Twitter majority. Those people wouldn't want to be on record taking the red pill on any topic!
MartianNight
11mo ago
If she's intersex, she is definitely not a woman.
In reality, Caster Semenya is a male with 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency (I had to google this), which very woke and pro-trans Wikipedia defines as (emphasis mine):
5α-Reductase 2 deficiency (5αR2D) is an autosomal recessive condition caused by a mutation in SRD5A2, a gene encoding the enzyme 5α-reductase type 2 (5αR2). The condition is rare, affects only genetic males, and has a broad spectrum.
5αR2 is expressed in specific tissues and catalyzes the transformation of testosterone (T) to 5α-dihydrotestosterone (DHT). DHT plays a key role in the process of sexual differentiation in the external genitalia and prostate during development of the male fetus. 5αR2D is a result of impaired 5αR2 activity resulting in decreased DHT levels. This defect results in a spectrum of phenotypes including overt genital ambiguity, hypospadias, and micropenis. Affected males still develop typical masculine features at puberty (deep voice, facial hair, muscle bulk) since most aspects of pubertal virilization are driven by testosterone, not DHT.
So in every way that matters for the purpose of participating in sports, Semenya is male. I don't think it's reasonable to say that a male with a disorder of sexual development becomes eligible to compete with women. It might be different for people with disorders like CAIS, but obviously Semenya is a genetic male with a male-typical body and male-typical levels of testosterone. She has never acknowledged any of those facts, and neither have you.
Semenya identifies as a woman despite being genetically and phenotypically male. That makes her transgender, by definition.
MartianNight
11mo ago
If IMDB has admitted they had to weight the score of The Little Mermaid to combat review bombing and rottentomatoes is releasing a 95% with no comment, I find it hard to believe.
Again, it's not “with no comment”, RT explicitly tells you they are only including verified viewers, so that cuts out the review bombers just like on IMDB, and probably limits votes to American audiences (which are probably more supportive of race-swapping and other woke nonsense).
What I typically do when looking up ratings on IMDB is check out the distribution of votes (which I believe is not censored), ignore the highest and lowest scores, and then look at where the bulk of the histogram is. This doesn't work for movies that are extremely good or extremely bad (e.g., The Godfather, or The Room) but those are exceptions. It works great for controversial films, e.g. Cuties has an average rating of 3.6/10, and 70% of voters gave it 1/10, but the bulk is around 7/10 which I think is a fair grade.
Using the same metric, take a look at The Little Mermaid and the other remakes you mentioned:
You can see that audiences legitimately rated this one higher than all those other remakes (the bulk of the histogram is at 7/10 but 8/10 is really close with 6000 vs 5600 votes). Aladdin comes closest but cannot exactly match it. And yes, the score on IMDB is lower than on RT but that's partially because IMDB tends to be more critical overall, and because the calculation is different. Again, Aladdin has 94% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 6.9/10 on IMDB. Unless you believe RT fixed Aladdin's score too, it's fair to say that IMDB voting patterns support the fact that audiences liked The Little Mermaid at least as much as Aladdin.
MartianNight
1mo ago
Do you feel more pride over gaining a PhD, or gaining a bronze swimming certificate? Why?
This is the wrong comparison. You can feel pride in getting a doctorate degree, but does that mean nobody should be able to get a master's or bachelor's degree?
Saying “there should only be hard mode” is akin to saying “nobody should be allowed to get a bachelor's degree, so I can take pride in my doctorate degree” which is obviously (hopefully) nonsense. The fact that people can get bachelor's degrees doesn't invalidate your doctorate degree at all. Everyone understands that getting a doctorate degree is a bigger accomplishment than getting a master's or bachelor's degree. Why deny others the opportunity to get a lesser degree?
MartianNight
2mo ago
Can you please just summarize the whole thing for people who aren't in the know and aren't motivated to watch a 15 minute video?
MartianNight
9mo ago
The point is that to a utilitarian rationalist who optimizes for expected utility, the mechanism shouldn't matter, only the (expected) outcome.
MartianNight
11mo ago
So at least one person on the left (cautiously) believes him enough to honour his request to be addressed by the relevant pronouns.
I don't think you can conclude that they believe he is sincere. It seems more likely that they are willing to humor an obvious troll to cement the rule that everyone's preferred pronouns must be respected. If they make an exception in his case, it becomes clear that the rule is not absolute, which raises the question: who gets to decide who is truly trans and therefore deserving of their personal pronouns? It's better for them to insist that the rule is set in stone and accept the occasional troll as the cost of doing business.
It also reminds me of how Black Lives Matters supported Jussie Smollett even after all the evidence came out that proved his story was a hoax: “In our commitment to abolition, we can never believe police, especially the Chicago Police Department (CPD) over Jussie Smollett, a Black man who has been courageously present, visible, and vocal in the struggle for Black freedom.”
Does the black professor writing this actually believe Smollet is the more credible party here? I doubt it. But throwing their support behind an obvious liar just because he's black reinforces their rule that all black people must be believed over the police all the time.
MartianNight
11mo ago
I guess my overall point here is that “woman” isn’t some mysterious reified category. Like many words for humans, it includes three facets: biological, behavioral, and relational.
I don't think I follow you. Yes, there is a biological definition for both "woman" and "mother", that is clear. Genderists reject biological definitions of women, though.
Then it comes to behavior: it's clear there is some behavioral definition of "mother", or rather "parent", where "mother" refers to a parent that's also a woman. What's the behavioral definition of "woman", though?
Finally, relational: I have no clue what you mean by that, neither in reference to mothers nor to women.
So please, define these terms.
MartianNight
11mo ago
Based on this explanation, the kids were 100% in the wrong, and the nurse 100% in the right. They might not have been trying to steal her bike and make her pay the lost fee, but they were still entirely at fault for the whole interaction.
The entire point of public bikes is that anyone can reserve them. When the kids returned the bikes they no longer had a claim on them and the nurse had every right to try to rent one for her own use. That she was pregnant and came off a 12 hour shift doesn't even have anything to do with it: the boys had not rented any of the bikes, and did not want to rent any of them at this moment, which meant they had absolutely no justification for stopping the nurse from renting one.
their version is that if they'd given up the bike, one of them would have had to find some other way to get back to the Bronx
This is a pitiful excuse. First, that's not her problem in the least. Second, this has an obvious solution: the final guy just waits until someone else returns another bike.
Even if you accepted that there were only X bikes and X+1 people needing to get home. Shouldn't one of the healthy able-bodied teenage boys walk home rather than the obviously heavily-pregnant nurse?
In conclusion, according to your version of the story, the boys were selfishly abusing the system. This is why we can't have nice things: assholes want to benefit from the system (free rides), but don't want to play by its rules (after a certain amount of time, you either start paying or return the bike so someone else can rent it).
MartianNight
11d ago
So are you arguing that without the extrajudicial home raids, the ban is useless? Because I'm fairly certain home raids aren't part of the current proposal.
MartianNight
2mo ago
The Oslo Accords ended because of suicide bombings and the start of the Oslo Accord.
Yes, Hamas tried to frustrate the peace process, but so did Orthodox Jews. You conveniently forget to mention that the PM of Israel was assassinated, not by Hamas, but by a Jewish extremist.
This was the moment where moderates on both sides should have stood their ground and enacted the two-state solution. But Israelis didn't want to do it. They reneged on their promise of withdrawing from Palestinian territories.
This of course completely destroyed the support Palestinian moderates had among the people, because it made it clear to the Palestinians that the Jews cannot be trusted and cannot be bargained with. Israel drove Palestinians into the arms of Hamas. And of course that's exactly how people like Netanyahu like it: the more extreme Palestinians are, and the more they support Hamas, the easier it is to justify killing Palestinians and annexing Palestinian lands.
Sorry you are just behaving in bad faith.
Don't throw baseless accusations around. I'm arguing in good faith, and if you are too, you should be able to support your position with arguments, instead of personal attacks.
MartianNight
2mo ago
If Hamas agreed to release the hostages, then there would have been a ceasefire for at least six weeks, possibly forever.
Again, how is that supposed to be an enticing offer? “Hey Hamas, we want to murder all of you, but we can't do it while you have hostages! So we propose that you release the hostages, and in return we promise to wait six weeks before we murder you.”
MartianNight
2mo ago
I don't think simply being uncool equals punk, though. Punk is being counter-cultural plus being dramatic about it in a somewhat stylish way. Someone like Sam Hyde is punk, but your run-of-the-mill white guy isn't punk, he's just not considered fashionable by anyone.
MartianNight
5mo ago
This sounds unsurprising so I'm willing to assume it's broadly correct, but if you're going to cite specific statistics like “5 years after conviction, 14% of offenders have been charged with or convicted of a new sexual offense” could you please explicitly cite the sources behind your claims?
Numbers that are so specific must come from one specific source. There is no way that there are multiple independent sources that investigated this and they all agreed the number was exactly 14%, not 13% or 15%.
MartianNight
6mo ago
For people unfamiliar with Dutch politics, it might be interesting to compare these polls with the political compass (the horizontal axis denotes economic left/right policy, vertical axis socially progressive/conservative policy).
(For the logos: the butterfly represents the Animal Rights Party (PvdD), the seagul Geert Wilders' Freedom Party (PVV), and the Greek building Thierry Baudet's Forum for Democracy (FvD)).
The current elections are interesting because a large number of party leaders stepped down before the elections and have been replaced with “fresh” faces. Meanwhile, the political landscape has not shifted all that much.
As you mentioned, the historically important Christian Democrat party, which was in decline for a while, has now been almost completely replaced by two new parties: New Social Contract (NSC) lead by Pieter Omtzigt (himself a former Christian Democrat) and the Farmer Citizen Movement (BBB) lead by political outsider Caroline van der Plas (whose party was at one time leading in the polls, but has gradually declined almost to insignificance for reasons that aren't quite clear to me).
Meanwhile, the Labour party (PvdA) and Green party (GL) have merged into a single moderately progressive/leftwing party (uninspiringly named PvdA/GL) lead by former Labour-party Foreign Affairs Minister and European Commissioner Frans Timmermans.
The key to understanding current Dutch politics lies with the VVD, the quintessential (neo)liberal party that supports globalism, open borders, low taxes, minimal environmental protections and less regulations for businesses. Their voters consist mainly of the “haves“ in society: wealthy people, high earners, business owners, home owners, pensioners; people who are happy with their lives, do not favor income or wealth distribution, and do not feel especially threatened by globalization or immigration.
The VVD has been part of the government for the past 13 years. The main reason for this is that despite being economically right-wing, they are quite flexible when it comes to social issues, which has allowed the party to form coalitions both with conservative Christians and with progressive liberal parties.
In terms of coalition building, based on the current polls, there is an obvious three-party coalition of PvdA/GL + NSC + VVD. While these parties cover a broad part of the spectrum, the combination isn't as far-fetched as it might seem: PvdA and VVD have governed together in the not-too-distant past (two cabinets between 1994 and 2002). Adding a third party would seem to complicate things, but on paper, Omtzigt's NSC is ideologically somewhere in between the two, so it feels like it should be possible to include them as well, though much depends on how flexible Omtzigt turns out to be: if Omtzigt insists on social conservatism, and the VVD insists on economic rightwing policy, then together they have nothing to offer PvdA/GL: the VVD's past success has hinged on yielding progressive topics to their left-wing coalition partner to secure the economic right-wing policy they really care about.
It's worth noting that historically, a coalition between PvdA and VVD has hurt PvdA much more than VVD. So it's unclear if they will dare to go for it again this time.
No other coalition seems immediately viable. It's probably best to wait for the election to see where the chips fall.
MartianNight
9mo ago
I don't think that's nearly as subversive as you suggest, since Yudkowsky ends up endorsing the orthodox libfem belief that the central example of a transgender person is a male body with a female brain in the skull (a view that is, as far as I'm aware, completely unscientific):
But if brains were not sexually typed, brains born into the wrong bodies wouldn't be in such awful straits - they could just construct a gender that matched their body. Yes, there are androgynous men and women, bisexuals, people who go transgender for other reasons... But to deny that many brains are strongly sexually typed is to deny the very real problems of a male brain born into a female body or vice versa.
MartianNight
9mo ago
a double-blinded study would actually provide evidence for the efficacy of magical healing in those times
Why would magical healing prove more effective than a placebo in a double blind study, where, by definition, neither the doctor nor the patient knows whether the patient receives the “real” treatment or a placebo?
MartianNight
10mo ago
Your use of the word "luddite" suggests that you have a negative emotional valence towards the Actors' Guild strike.
It's unfortunate that Luddite has a negative connotation, but it seems useful to have a term to refer to people who are concerned about AI taking their jobs, to the point that they're willing to go on strike to enact a ban on AI. Can you suggest a more neutral term you would prefer?
MartianNight
11mo ago
You tell me. You told me that transwomen never pretend to be ciswomen. I mentioned Semenya because she is a male (or at least nonfemale, if you think her disorder disqualifies her from being a regular male) who against all objective facts insists she's the same as ciswomen. Objectively, Semenya should be competing with other males, because she is genetically and phenotypically male. She isn't female in any way except the fact that she was incorrectly assigned female sex at birth, and these are facts she continues to deny to this day.
The trans activist motte is that “womanhood” is separate from being male or female. But then the bailey is that all privileges that have been granted to ciswomen based on their female biology must also be extended to transwomen because “transwomen are women” and distinguishing between ciswomen and transwomen based on their biological sex is bigotry.
This doesn't make sense in any of the main debates around gender. We have women's sports divisions because males are stronger than females because of biological differences; therefore it makes no sense to include trans-identified males in the women's division. If we did, males would win both divisions and biological females wouldn't be able to compete, which was the whole purpose of introducing a women's division in the first place.
MartianNight
11mo ago
This change is uniformly impacting everyone
This is plainly false. The API changes mostly affect third-party app users, and moderators that rely on bots/external tools that depend on the Reddit API. Users of old.reddit.com or even new.reddit.com aren't directly affected.
I always assumed that phone users made Reddit worse for people interested in information and discussion: following external links is harder in apps so this discourages citing sources or reading external resources, phone screens are too small to read long-form content, and writing detailed messages is hard. Consequently I imagine app users disproportionately write one-liners and upvote memes and short comments (the opposite of what people do on The Motte).
I think reddit without phone users would be an improvement over what it is today, even if it doesn't fix the moderation problem.
MartianNight
11mo ago
Of course, if you assume that Rottentomatoes is not manipulating any data than the data comes back to show exactly what they're telling you.
I don't assume that; I tried to investigate the possibility by corroborating the RT figures with more transparant sources like IMDB, and I think it's plausible that the RT verified audience score is real.
It sounds like you've predetermined that RT is explicitly manipulating the data (beyond the biased selection mechanisms which we've already discussed) and you are not willing to consider evidence to the contrary.
I get that if you're an old conservative curmudgeon on a forum of likeminded people it's hard to imagine that 95% of the audience could like this movie, but you should at least be able to realize you're not the target audience, and consider the possibility that the actual audience doesn't have the same preferences as you do.
What percentage of Mottizens do you think are fans of Cardi B's music? And what percentage of people who attended a Cardi B concert do you think would say they enjoyed the show?
It seems easy for a website like Rottentomatoes to just turn off commentless zero star reviews for something
Okay, but this is a testable hypothesis at least. I don't see any reviews with less than ½ star or with no text. Is it even possible to give a zero-star rating or leave a rating without any comment? Or maybe comment-less ratings don't show up on the site but are still included in the score?
Protecting TV shows/videogames/movies from review-bombing for political reasons is considered just what a good/respectable company does these days.
Again, you assume that measures against review bombing are taken only for political reasons. Even witout politics, you need to do something to prevent review-bombing, otherwise scores reflect nothing but which group was able to drum up a larger army of trolls. That's obviously not what movie ratings should be about, regardless of political views.
I don't blame review sites for trying to combat that; I would probably do the same thing if I ran such a site, and I'm not left-wing and definitely not woke.
MartianNight
10d ago
For someone who uses words like “lies” and “literally” quite liberally I'd expect you to stick closer to the truth yourself. The research grant isn't about banning real meat at all. To quote:
The long-term goal of this research proposal is to explore and explicate the emerging social and bioethical implications of cellular agriculture (i.e. "lab grown meat")
So the purpose is literally “to explore and explicate”. Maybe you think there is some more sinister hidden purpose, but if so, it definitely does not literally say that the goal is to remove meat-based options, and if you think that's the actual purpose you will have to make an argument for it. (How annoying! That's much harder than simply calling people liars!)
The part that you are upset about is this:
a nascent industry that portends to disrupt traditional livestock production by bioengineering animal products through cell cultures
This is just standard fluff you put in research proposals to make the topic of your research sound super duper important: why should someone pay you USD 500,000 to study a phenomenon if that phenomenon isn't something earthshaking? It's no different from the hundreds of blockchain startups that claimed they were going to disrupt the financial system in order to secure VC funding (spoiler alert: they didn't).
But even taken at face value, “disrupting” traditional livestock production doesn't imply that real meat will be banned. It's easy to imagine a future with 50/50 fake/real meat; that would be pretty disruptive to the agricultural sector, but it still doesn't make real meat unavailable.
MartianNight
10d ago
"nobody is trying" is kinda consensus-building, but probably fine.
I never wrote “nobody is trying” to ban real meat. I'm sure there are some PETA-style militant vegans who'd love to ban real meat, but they are a tiny minority that does not have enough power to enact such a ban, and I don't see a likely scenario where that changes in the near future.
What I did say was:
Having lab-grown meat available as an option does not force anyone to eat it, and it doesn't take away traditional options.
I've not heard a convincing argument against this, and can't imagine one that doesn't rely on a lot of assumptions and slippery slope type fallacies.
Meanwhile, there is real-world evidence in favor of my claim, in that restaurants already serve vegan and vegetarian options in addition to meat-based options, and this hasn't lead to meat becoming unavailable in general.
If lab-grown meat ever becomes commercially viable (which is a big if) I can see large chains like McDonald's introducing it as a separate option, just like they now offer a plant-based burger. The plant-based option isn't there to force you to eat it. It's there so that if your friend group consists of 9 meat eaters and 1 vegan, you can all go to McDonald's together.
MartianNight
11d ago
Sure, let's say, when left to their own devices, people will choose to eat garbage. Is it the government's job to prevent this? If yes, then why single out lab-grown meat, when hot dogs, jellybeans and soda are just as bad? If not, then what is the basis for banning just 1 of 1000 unhealthy foods that people already consume?
I'm starting to think you're trolling me, but in the interest of assuming good faith, I'll say for the third and final time: the question isn't whether he had the intent to set off the fire alarm but whether he set off the fire alarm with the intent to stop the vote.
It only speaks to an intent to set off the fire alarm, not an intent to disrupt an official proceeding. The question is: why did he set off the fire alarm? Three options:
You can say the obviousness of the fire alarm makes option 1 unlikely (and I mostly agree) but it does not prove option 3 over 2.
Yes, that's a problem, but that doesn't prove the intent of Bowman.
Maybe it makes sense for the Republicans to assume the worst because when it came to the January 6th protesters the Democrats assumed the worst, but here on this forum we are not active participants in the culture war, we're only discussing it. I think the Jan 6 protesters were judged much too harshly, but I'm also willing to entertain the notion that Bowman is just a dumbass who was in a rush (option 2), rather than a man intent on undermining American democracy (option 3).
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