MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
In general I think AI content belongs in separate designated zones. If not its own website, at least a dedicated section. AI fiction should be found in the AI fiction section, not mixed with the regular fiction. AI art belongs in the AI art section, not mixed with the regular art. AI non-fiction... probably doesn't need to be posted anywhere. It's going to end up some combination of wordy filler and stuff that's already been said somewhere else. Basically a super fancy version of a google search. If you're not prompting it yourself such that you want a super fancy version of a google search, reading essays someone else told an AI to make is unlikely to provide value.
A general exception to this is AI content which is supplemental in support of a greater creative work. If you're designing a game and the primary design and development is original work, but the art assets and/or music are AI generated that's probably fine. They're there to maintain immersion for the game. Or if you're writing a novel and the cover art is AI generated. I think this is an excellent use to allow AI to cover for your weaknesses so that you can play to your strengths. If the majority of something is AI generated then it belongs in the AI generated section so that people can voluntarily choose to engage with it with that in their mind.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
The best partner is both, imo. Half my jokes are silly stupid nonsense (I can't even count the number of times my wife and I have accused each other of being a "Sneef Snorf") and the other half are clever and elaborate constructions designed to sound like something reasonable and/or intelligent until they think about it for several moments and untangle the hidden meaning: which turns out to be silly stupid nonsense. I once wrote a two page short story with seemingly arbitrary fantasy and fairy tale features all to build up to the conclusion which was a sentence consisting of weird typos my wife (then girlfriend) had sent me while drunk the previous night.
I suppose someone less intelligent could still have appreciated the goof, but probably not to the same extent. Or wouldn't have taken the teasing in as much fun, as part of the embarrassment at her misspelling is because she ordinarily spells things correctly while sober. And someone less intelligent probably wouldn't have been able to respond to my hack MSPaint "photoshops" of our cat's head onto movie characters with an even higher quality photoshop of her own. And someone who took themselves seriously just wouldn't have appreciated the goofs at all.
You need both.
MathWizard
Good things are good
4d ago
I would broadly agree that glory as a motivation is easier to follow, as it's more inherently rewarding. While love for others is less inherently rewarding and thus a larger sacrifice. Which in turn is why it is MORE good. It is... easy is not the right word... easier to follow glory, to do good things which will give you glory, than it is to do good things which will merely help others but not yourself. Someone who is filled with a desire for glory but not a love for their neighbors might do all kinds of things, and only by sheer coincidence will those things be truly good, while someone who is filled with a love for their neighbors and no desire for glory will live a humble and self sacrificing life doing small amounts of good. Although someone with both will do large acts of good that help many many people, and thus is even better.
A motivation for glory is a smaller, easier stepping stone to reach. A motivation of love for humanity is a greater goal which is much much harder to attain but of greater value if attained.
If Christ’s motivation was glory, both for his Father and for his divine family and for himself, then we would likewise imitate this, and this would lead to glorious moral acts. But if Christ’s motivation was pure and uncorrupted “love for humanity”, then we will only feel a gnawing discomfort at the impossibility of our ever replicating this motivation in any legitimate sense.
It's axiomatic that no human can possibly reach the true goodness of Jesus. We are imperfect sinful humans. So you have to figure out how to not despair at never reaching the goal, and do your best anyway. Again, I think that on a fundamental level there isn't truly a distinction between actions which glorify ourselves, actions which glorify God, and actions which show love to humanity. They're the same actions. There are things which people might define as "glory" which harm people like being a murderous conqueror, but don't give true glory because they are evil and sinful. Ultimately true glory comes from doing the most good. So you don't really have to choose, just do all the good things for all the good reasons. But I think love for humanity, although harder to attain, is harder to corrupt once present. Still possible, but harder. There are fewer examples of actions which superficially seem loving but are actually evil than there are actions which superficially seem glorious but are actually evil. But in the end I think Jesus was motivated by all of them, so imitating him by yourself following all of the motivations seems like a more robust way to do good than following one of them to the exclusion of the others. You're more likely to notice when you're being led astray when the motivations appear to diverge instead of converge like they're supposed to.
MathWizard
Good things are good
4d ago
Maybe this is just the consequentialist in me, but it seems like love for humanity and the enabling of their salvation has to be the overriding one. Suppose that you literally had to pick one:
1: God will get glory equal to saving all of humanity, but you will not be gloried, and humanity will not actually be saved and they'll all go to hell
2: God will not get glory (at least, not any extra from your decision), but you will get glory from God as if you had saved humanity, but humanity will not actually be saved and they'll all go to hell
3: God will not get any additional glory, and you will not get any personal glory or credit, but humanity will be saved (or at least, have the ability to repent and be saved if they so choose)
Setting aside the inherent contradictions (because it would be unjust for God not to glory you or himself for saving humanity) for the sake of the thought experiment, it seems to me that the actually most good action would be 3: save the people. And this is in line with everything else Jesus preached. You do good works, even at the cost of your own material well-being, and then this automatically glories God and yourself automatically as secondary effects. But you have to actually do good.
Now, in reality all of these are inextricably linked: God only gives commands iff they are good iff they benefit people iff they glorify Himself iff they glorify the person who does them. I think that on a fundamental level there isn't even a meaningful distinction between "doing good" and "glorifying God", otherwise God would have said different things until they became the same thing. So I strongly suspect that Jesus had all of them as equally strong motivations because they're all the same thing if you have true understanding (which he did). But in-so-far as you consider them to be distinct, I think the saving of humanity was the primary motivation (but this might just be my perspective as a selfish human who loves being saved more than I love glorifying God)
MathWizard
Good things are good
6d ago
See, that would have made sense. Assuming the magic sex change spell carries fertility with it (not sure how that interfaces with chromosomes, but maybe you can handwave magic that), I can easily imagine oppressive social norms that forces everyone to do like a clownfish thing. They have to be female in their late teens and early twenties to have a bunch of kids and then when they get older they turn male and go off to war to protect the society, with the most successful (and surviving) war heroes getting rewarded with breeding the younger females. Oppressive and constricting to be forced into as a citizen, but super beneficial for the society and the people ruling it since you get the advantages of both sexes, and maximizes chances of survival against an enemy force that outclasses you. (It especially makes sense in a LitRPG context where you can do easy fights and level up while young and will be multiple times stronger when you're older)
I'm not saying the author needed to make it be a rationalfic and actually do that. I can suspend disbelief enough for them to have a relative normal medieval culture or something close. But it makes no sense to make everything about the world gritty and harsh except for their gender norms.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7d ago
Related to the above, modern progressive attitudes everywhere. Of course men and women are exactly the same. Of course everyone is having casual, consequence-free sex. Of course anyone who finds meaning in faith is secretly cynically corrupt or else a psycho child molester.
There was this one story where it was like a dungeon/system apocalypse sort of thing. Dude ends up in a world where monsters and dungeons are gradually expanding in power and humanity is being driven back further and further, the population dwindling over the course of centuries as the monsters continue to gain in power.
And then the characters make some offhand comment about a magic spell that lets you switch gender which certain people who were "born in the wrong body" use to cure their condition. And then MC from Earth explains how in our world those people are oppressed and everyone shakes their heads about how unenlightened that is. Now, on an object level it makes sense that if such spells were available people with gender dysphoria would want to use them. But the language was very obviously dated as 2010+ progressivism, which would have no way of being the same in some fantasy world. And more importantly there is no way a world on the verge of extinction with massive attrition due to a constant multi-generational war against monsters is going to end up progressive, especially with regard to gender roles. They are going to want women pumping out as many kids as possible so they don't go extinct. Or rather, any subculture which chooses to be progressive in any way that reduces birthrates (as opposed to some free-love variant that encourages promiscuity but discourages birth control) will quickly die out and be replaced under such strong selection pressures.
I made a comment to this effect, to which the author replied "my world, my rules". So I stopped reading.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10d ago
I was pointing towards the general concept (disproportionately high rate of incidence) not the specific numbers involved. I suppose 13 52 is a minority -> majority not a minority -> higher minority, so maybe a bad example.
MathWizard
Good things are good
12d ago
He also thinks gay men are unfairly blamed for both HIV and monkeypox, and claimed that heterosexuals now acquire both at higher rates while gay men are just more honest and tested more. I had strong reservations about that claim, and made a note to check later.
My understanding is that it's a 13 52 kind of situation. On a per capita basis gay men are way more likely to catch and spread it, but in absolute numbers there are more heterosexual cases because they are the vast majority of the population. If you're outnumbered 20 to 1 then you can have up to 19x the incidence rate and still have fewer total cases.
MathWizard
Good things are good
18d ago
Or take the stock market. Nvidia has a net profit of 76G$/year and a market cap of 4T$, so it is worth about 50 years of profit. If there was less capital around to be invested, it might only be worth 2T$ instead, but I fail to see what would be so bad about that.
Tiny probabilities of huge profits are what drive Venture Capital to take risks. If a Venture Capitalist sees a chance to spend $10 billion for 10% chance of $90 billion, they don't take that risk. If they see a 10% chance of $180 billion they probably do.
Nvidia is currently planning to invest $500 billion in new infrastructure over the next few years. If hypothetical Mvidia startup entrepreneur sees that and thinks they have a 20% chance of rising up to compete with them to also be worth $4T (average output $800b), investors will throw those dice and happily pay $500b. We end up with more competition and diversity, lowering prices for consumers. If taxes go up and Nvidia and hypothetical peers are worth $2T, the dice odds don't look so good and there's more of a monopoly (unless someone is so confident that they can compete with 40% odds.
For any marginal tax increase, the cost/benefit ratio for new competitors shifts and it requires greater odds and more monopolistic profits before you get more entrepreneurial competitors. This leads to more monopolies, higher consumer prices, and people working for megacorps instead of starting their own small businesses.
I don't think there have been any prominent "calling it" moments like this. The four most similar cases I can think of where someone is/was crying wolf about their assassination and it didn't happen, but if they had died (or do die) there would definitely be retroactive conspiracy theories are Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Julian Assange, And Edward Snowden. So if you're being maximally harsh you could call it 1/5. But none of these have had quite the same level of strength. Everyone believed that Epstein had dirt on prominent politicians that he had not yet spilled, which made getting rid of him quickly a priority. People hate Trump and Musk for public reasons and while killing them would remove them as an annoyance, it wouldn't keep any politicians out of jail. Assange and Snowden already leaked their secrets and assassinating them would just be petty revenge, it wouldn't unleak the secrets. Assassinating any of those four would increase the risk of a politician going to jail, not decrease it as in Epstein's case (conditional on the probability of getting caught being less than the probability of him spilling the beans). Additionally, the U.S. government has never had one of those four in custody in a way that would provide such an easy opportunity to off them. And, while I don't pay a ton of attention, nobody has been warning about the potential for assassination attempts on these four except for Trump, who has in fact been the target of attempted assassinated multiple times (though not necessarily by a conspiracy unless you count stochastic terrorism). So depending on how you categorize it we're either 1/5, 2/5, 2/2, or 1/1. Personally I'd go with 1/1, since Epstein was (as far as I know) unique in circumstance of being in a prison with known incriminating evidence on (probably multiple) politicians.
The biggest argument in favor of EDKH, and the reason I endorse a (mild) version of it, is that it was predictive, and already existed prior to its occurring, giving the authorities every opportunity to prevent it. Almost all conspiracies are post-hoc rationalizations that look at the facts and then concoct a theory to retroactively explain the events. But EDKH predicted it ahead of time. Everyone knew that Epstein had dirt on famous and powerful people. We still don't know exactly who, you can't point to any one specific person and say for certain that they went to Epstein's island AND committed crimes while there: anyone who visited might plausibly not have known exactly the details (they might have come expecting sexy 18 year old prostitutes and been shocked and offended when offered an underage one, or Epstein might have known their temperment and offered exclusively legal and willing prostitutes to certain members.) In fact I would be shocked if there wasn't at least one person who physically went to the island and yet committed no crimes there. But there were lots who did, and some of them are probably politicians, and each has a large incentive to want him dead before he can spill the beans. And we knew this and they should have had him on extra super suicide watch as a result. He was one of the most at risk and most important prisoners in the last century. I don't care if they had to have a guard paid to literally sit outside his cell and watch him 24/7, it should have been completely and utterly impossible for him to die via any cause, even a heart attack, without immediate intervention.
The reason I believe EDKH conspiracy is because Epstein is dead, and if there wasn't a conspiracy he should be alive. Now, in a literal sense I think the most likely scenario is that Epstein physically did kill himself with some sort of deal with the powers that be regarding his legacy or heirs or something or other, and then they had the prison warden turn a blind eye. The reason I don't think this falls afoul of the Basic Argument Against Conspiracy Theories is exception D that scott points out in his article:
D. All else being equal, small conspiracies are likelier than big conspiracies. A cult may take over a town without the average person knowing it; it would be more surprising for them to take over a country.
I don't think this requires a lot of people to actually be in on it. Possibly as few as three: one politician, one highly ranked prison officer (not necessarily the top, but high enough to pull some strings), and Epstein himself. Politician gives the go ahead wink wink nudge to the officer, officer arranges the schedules, residence, and guard patrols, and temporarily disables a camera, and then Epstein hangs himself with no witnesses in exchange for whatever the politician promised. It's likely that it was a little more involved, there were probably a lot of politicians on his list who gave tacit approval or wink wink nudge nudge when big politician says he'll "handle it". A bunch of guards might have been suspicious about the slightly unusual orders they received. But most of them don't need to be directly involved or have any incriminating details with which to whistleblow, just conspiracy theories of their own. Even the stronger version where Epstein was literally murdered only requires one additional person: the assassin, who has obviously strong incentive not to whistleblow themselves.
This is important because Epstein had important information. I firmly believe that the real Epstein list was in his head. Any physical list is going to be something like "visitors" to the island which is suspicious but not incriminating enough to act on. Without Epstein's testimony we have no way to distinguish stupid people who wanted to have creepy but legal fun with young adult women, sex offenders who had sex with underage girls, and national traitors who had sex with underage girls and then got blackmailed by Epstein into abusing their political power for him. They're all going to get away with it. Even if his death involved no conspiracies at all I still want everyone we can possibly verify as responsible to at minimum lose their jobs, and probably go to jail for criminal negligence. He should not have died and we knew he would anyway, before it happened, and yet it still happened. That's why you should care.
MathWizard
Good things are good
24d ago
I'm generally sympathetic, but even if your utility function has a straight 0 for the welfare of bums, you still have to account for second order effects of any policies you implement on ordinary people.
Simply displacing them immediately runs into public goods dilemmas. If you don't want them in your neighborhood so you bus them a couple miles East, then they start harassing the people who live there. But then your neighbor doesn't want them in their neighborhood so they bus them a couple miles West and they're your problem again. Now you both have the same number of bums but you're both paying extra for wranglers and bus fares for no net benefit.
Massive jail terms for small misdemeanors runs into issues with non-bums who occasional have small misdemeanors. You get drunk at a bar and your asshole buddy who's supposed to be the DD bails and leaves you stranded so you try to walk home but fall asleep on the sidewalk. Or your spouse cheats on you and you find out while in public and start yelling at her. Or a bum starts assaulting you and you defend yourself but the police end up arresting both of you and both end up in trouble. Ordinary and sympathetic people get in trouble with the law way way way less often than bums, but it's not unheard of. It's not as if the laws are perfectly just and you, by being a good person, are automatically immune to ever getting in trouble with it. If you get a 5 year jail penalty for something stupid it could ruin your life, which is why small things normally carry small penalties.
If you straight up genocide the bums you run into huge PR problems, human rights violations, and again, the opportunity for this to sometimes happen to regular people.
There are sophisticated, intelligent, and probably effective solutions that people are unwilling to do, such as escalating penalties for repeat offenders (much more than whatever they do now). But then it DOES matter what the solution is, because bad solutions are bad, even for you.
MathWizard
Good things are good
25d ago
My go to strategy as a kid was to walk through the library looking for Unicorn stickers (which signaled fantasy) in the children and/or young adult section (and later the adult section when I became a teenager). And then look at the cover, read the synopsis, and pick out books that sound interesting. (I eventually picked up intuition based on the cover art too, since that's correlated with... something something target demographic and sub sub genre, but I can't really articulate any of that in words other than to avoid books which look too much like other books you've read and disliked, and try to read books that look like other books you really liked).
However this was like 20 years ago and I have no idea to what extent the woke has penetrated fantasy. And also don't know what your niece's preferred genres are. So my actual advice is 1: have her just browse through the library and pick things out, and 2: don't be afraid to go slightly over age range. A Precocious 9 year old can handle books intended for 14 year olds, they're unlikely to have anything truly inappropriate, it's mostly an issue of word complexity and character age.
MathWizard
Good things are good
28d ago
I score INTJ half the time and INTP half the time, so I'm like right on the threshold of J/P, but the INT are pretty strong.
It is obvious that it's NOT just pseudoscience (in the way that astrology is), otherwise we wouldn't see so many real correlations. Also every woman I've ever been seriously interested in beyond surface level attraction, including my wife, has been INTx.
What it isn't is some sort of scientific causal phenomenon where your brain is somehow biologically born as one of these types and they then cause you to exhibit external behaviors. It's a classification scheme. A compression algorithm. It asks you how introverted, extroverted, emotional etc etc you are in a bunch of ways and then condenses that into four letters so you can communicate more concisely without sharing your entire 50 question response with everybody you meet. I can just say "INTJ" and someone else says "INTJ" or "INTP" and I'm like "oh, we probably have a lot in common" and then we do.
MathWizard
Good things are good
29d ago
There's an important distinction between a person speaking to masses on behalf of or as a representative of their employer, and someone who merely happens to be an employee speaking their own opinions as a private individual in a context unrelated to their job, and having activists dig up their messages and threaten the company over them.
It is an imposition of government power to prevent an employer from firing an employee for their private speech, but not an authoritarian one. It is also an imposition of government power to prevent an employer from firing an employee for being the wrong race, and yet most of us would agree that is appropriate. It is worth it for the government to intervene and restrict freedoms if those restrictions create more freedoms as a result. In this case protecting the ability of people to speak and not be mindslaves to the megacorps (and the activists who cherry pick people to bring to their attention).
And in a game theoretic way the corporations will actually be better off this way! If corporations were legally prohibited from firing employees for first amendment protected speech when that speech was made outside of the workplace, then no activists would have any incentive to boycott or threaten the company for refusing to fire such individuals. They wouldn't be able to get anything out of it, and if they try to accuse the company of tolerating bad speech, because the company could simply point to the law and use that as an excuse and so their reputation wouldn't suffer and they wouldn't be forced to fire their otherwise competent and well behaved employee. Win-win for everyone except the mob.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
It's not the initial cause that rubs me the wrong way, it's the response. If someone's response to any scenario is to passive aggressively threaten to leave then I would tell them to not let the door hit them on the way out.
If, after having read a decent sampling of the overall posts here, you feel that this is a good place but one guy is kind of a jerk to you once, then argue back or just ignore him. There's no need to try to guilt trip the rest of us into apologizing on his behalf or berating him or begging you to stay. If it's actually something outrageous and bannable, report it and wait for the mods. If not, ignore it and engage with the rest of the community. Don't let yourself get One-Guyed.
If, after having read a decent sampling of the overall posts here, you feel that the overall culture is not to your taste then just leave. You don't need to threaten it, and if you're brand new then you don't need to announce it. Nobody will notice or care. Don't try to guilt people into feeling bad that they could have had one more person if we were a completely different kind of place that catered to that one person's tastes.
If, after reading one message by one person, you assume that the overall culture is not to your taste based on that one experience then either lurk more or leave if you can't be bothered to do that.
I'm all for making this an open and welcoming place that lets people come here and engage with ideas and discussions. But (and I've made similar arguments about this in regard to dating profiles) negative filters aren't automatically a bad thing. Our goal is not to maximize the total number of people, but to optimize some balance between quantity and quality. Which means when someone sees this place and decides "this isn't for me" and leaves that's actually a good thing for us because we don't want people here who don't like what we are. Within reason, of course, we're not tautologically perfect and having more people would probably be better. But I'm not going to complain if some people self-select themselves out for petty reasons, that just means they were petty people and we don't need to stoop down to cater to that in order to retain them even if it succeeded at retaining them.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Meh. If someone's so thin-skinned that their response to "you don't know the context" is a passive aggressive "sorry to disturb you I'm leaving and never coming back" instead of lurking more and/or digging through to find context, or at bare minimum shrugging off the critique and ignoring it, then they're probably not a good fit anyway.
I don't think threats to leave, from new people, or old people, or in real life, should be met with begging "no please stay." That sets a bad precedent. As a matter of principle I think you call the bluff and either they stay or they leave and it's a win-win either way.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
That's probably fine though, because the image you build in your head will be built on the implicit stereotypes that you derive from reading their words. Which means that if you subconsciously ascribe certain properties to someone here based on how you imagine they look, those properties will likely be accurate. You're essentially going Words -> Impression -> Imagined Appearance -> Impression rather than going Appearance -> Impression and biasing your perceptions (the way everybody does in real life).
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
What's the best Disney sequel movie? I've watched basically all of the classics at some point in my life, but there's a bunch of stuff like Cinderella 2 or Mulan 2 that I just assumed were cash grabs based on the popularity of the original, and never bothered watching because I didn't think they'd be worth the time and the original movie closed its story on its own without needing continuation.
Is this assumption universally true, or are there exceptions? Am I wisely saving my time and money, or have I been sleeping on the hidden gem Aladdin 2: Electric Boogaloo?
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
We are experimenting and learning and inventing. Every modern AI is a brand new prototype, mass released to the public only because of how interesting and useful they are despite their newness.
Nearly every new invention is massively overpriced compared to its long term potential unless the "invention" is a refinement of an old invention optimized specifically for its affordability. Cars used to be crazy expensive luxury goods, now they're expensive but affordable staples of modern life, much cheaper than trying to walk across the country on the Oregon Trail. The literal first refrigerator was vastly expensive as the inventor prototyped it out without a factory to stamp them out, now everyone has one. The first GPT-4 quality LLM was vastly more expensive to design than GPT-4 quality LLMs will be 10 years from now. We have no idea where AI intelligence will plateau, and we have no idea what cost it will asymptote towards over the next few decades as people discover more and more efficient methods and technologies. Current quality is merely a lower bound, and current costs are an upper bound, not the true long term potential, and probably not anywhere close.
The answer to every (non-safety) criticism of AI is that we're not there yet. But we're getting somewhere.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
How do I respond without sounding like an asshole....?
It's a combination of things which just make life easier. The positive traits, near-synonyms but not quite, are things like being kind, generous, quiet, agreeable, un-argumentative, untroublemaking. These are almost universally positive traits unless you happen to enjoy arguments and rambunctious trouble-making and think such a person would be boring. I find them to be wonderful traits, some of which I share in common.
The riskier way of putting it, and I caveat this by saying she was already this way when I met her and not beaten or threatened into this, is that I can always get my way. In more wholesome cases this is simply her being indecisive and not having strong preferences, so when we go shopping for food she wants me to choose what we're going to cook that week. Both because she wants me to like, and so that she doesn't have to make up her mind. She'll still veto things that she doesn't like or we've already had recently, but then she wants me to think of something else. When we want to play a game she wants me to decide what we're going to play. Again, when she has a preference she'll speak up, but the majority of time she's just happy if I'm happy so I can do stuff.
In more conflicting scenarios, she's is afraid of conflict and will typically end up backing down given any level of pushback on any idea. Now, she's at a level of submissiveness that's unhealthily too far, we've been working through building her self-confidence and getting her to stand up for herself, both to me and to others. But when push comes to shove I can, at any time I choose, put my foot down and win any argument simply by insisting. Calmly and rationally, I don't have to get mad and threaten, I try really hard not to take advantage of this and only do it when I genuinely think I'm right and my decision will be best for both of us. The only real example I can think of is one time she wanted to get this giant tattoo on her back and I though it looked kind of tacky and gross, and although it's her body I was going to be the one to see it the most often, more often even than her, so I said I didn't like it and she shouldn't get it. While the argument was not pleasant for either of us, she didn't get the tattoo, and I'm still confident that was the right choice for both of us. And, importantly, it's not a recurring argument that keeps coming up with her harassing me about how I won't let her do what she wants or something.
And such scenarios are incredibly rare because we rarely argue in the first place. Because she naturally inherently wants to please me and it makes her happy when I'm happy and make decisions for us. It's just convenient and simple and easy. And she's still a person with preferences, she runs around decorating the house with flowers and animal-shaped pots and dragon figurines. But the docile is about... voluntary hierarchy. I did not ever ask to be put at the top, in charge of the household. I didn't ever even ask or attempt to be there. She does not feel comfortable or safe unless someone is above her to make the important decisions when she gets to stressed out to think clearly, and I comfortably slot into that role. Once there, having a clear and mutually acceptable hierarchy clearly established leads to a lot less ambiguity or conflict that other couples seem to have as both of them jockey for top position. You can't have a Democracy with two equal citizens: someone has to break ties.
Well, "we as a culture" don't ever fully agree on anything. A hundred voices are screaming a hundred different things, and the truth is lost in the noise.
Some people are telling the truth, and some people are not. But these signals are not all received equaly. But collectively, the average socially acceptable advice given by the mainstream media and by middle aged women to their younger colleagues tends to be feminist nonsense. And then a lot of young men, seeking not to give good long term advice but instead to get an easy lay, are giving the advice that they want women who are easy and sleep with them immediately. And the women believe them and become "popular", but nobody wants to marry them and the men get bored and leave. This in turn causes them to doubt advice from men and listen more to the feminists.
The problem isn't quite as simple as men saying what they want and women spitting in their faces. The scenario is older men saying what they want, younger men saying what they want short term and pretending it's long term too, older women who've been burned by this spitting in the faces of both, and then younger women watching this exchange and then eventually following the older women, possibly after getting burned once or twice themselves.
I think a third factor is that women are no longer as much expected socially as they probably were in the past to have the kind of men-pleasing, friendly, docile personalities that a large fraction of men find sexually desirable, which explains part of men's motivation problem.
This. 100% this. I spent many years on dating platforms and saw hundreds and hundreds of young women who were just.... unlikable. Shallow, prideful, promiscuous, and just generally masculine. The number one lie that modern feminism has sold to women is that the male gender role is what defines success: money, strength, ambition, stubbornness, ruthless competitiveness, etc. Men had all of those and that was oppressive and if a woman wants to be successful she needs to have all of those. And women believe this and become strong independent faux-men and don't even try to be good women. To be clear, I think it's acceptable if a woman naturally inherently through her own preferences wants to be ambitious and strong and all that. But that doesn't make her an attractive dating partner, and more importantly we shouldn't have a nation-wide psy-op trying to brainwash young girls into becoming this because they were born too feminine or something. And we shouldn't lie to girls and tell them that masculinity is attractive. If we as a culture openly and honestly told young women what men actually want a lot of them would become more feminine on purpose because they like men and want to be attractive to men.
I happened to luck out and eventually find one of the few remaining friendly, docile, feminine women left and married her. But now she's not in the pool anymore. This is not a generalizable solution because there aren't enough of them to go around.
Well, this can still be corrected without resorting to biological birthrights. That is, the community can encourage and educate (or pressure and threaten, if we're not mincing words) people who seem to be slacking off and not contributing in good faith. You're supposed to, of your own volition, do the best you can. But if you aren't doing that people can notice and call you out for it. And this can be done in a nice way "hey, I notice you are really good at cooking and whenever you make soup everyone loves it, why don't you do that more?" or in a mean way "You don't seem to respect others or want to contribute, because you keep ignoring the previous ten conversations we've had about this. This is not Godly behavior and you need to re-evaluate your priorities if you want to remain a member in good standing."
And sometimes this leads to conflict and drama and politics. Our one pastor ended up getting kicked out by the Elders for reasons that aren't quite clear to me because they didn't publicize all the drama, and I don't think was anything particularly scandalous in non-church terms, I think it was some combination of them not liking his preaching style and him getting worked up and yelling at people when he got angry or something (This was told to me second hand by my parents, so it's not like he was going off on people in public, but apparently it was bad enough to contribute to his removal). But my point is that there are still all the normal corrective measures of a community. When someone does wrong other people can push back. Everyone should fulfill a role to the best of their ability, and should be pressured if they're not fulfilling a useful role, and none of that requires the role be based on their gender, race, or perceived social class except indirectly as those influence their abilities and preferences. Your role is a combination of your abilities, desires, AND the needs of the community. The problem was not that it was a women or someone else's role to read poems in a corner instead of bringing chili and your father falsely slotted himself into that role in place of them, the problem was that this was not a useful role that anybody needed to fulfill.
My guess is that they're being attracted to the silliness part of it and attributing the lack of intelligence as a cause of the silliness. Which potentially has some merit: I think there is a negative correlation between intelligence and silliness on average. I could be wrong, some people do just want to be way smarter than their partner, as some combination of pride and the ability to win arguments and control things, but I think most of it is correlations and stereotypes connecting intelligence to other things. If I had to choose between an intelligent bitter feminist constantly comparing everything I do to a historical dictator, and a sweet highschool dropout country girl with rocks for brains and a heart of gold, I'd choose the latter. If for some reason I was convinced that intelligence inevitably produced the former and wasn't aware of the exceptions I would have been tempted to join more unintellectual activities to try to find unintelligent women. Or just despaired and given up because I don't think they would like me even if I did like them.
The point being, I think some men do think this way. And I think statistically they're partially correct but missing plenty of exceptions.
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