MathWizard
Good things are good
No bio...
User ID: 164
Removing honors classes and putting the smart kids in an easy class where they don't need the teacher is comparable to just sending them home and having smaller class sizes. If they're not learning anything from the teacher because they don't need the teacher's help, then why are they even in school? It's just a way of having 20 actively learning students in a class but pretending you have class sizes of 30. I can see the appeal from a certain perspective, this combines the steps of:
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Have smaller class sizes, which increases learning and costs.
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Stop teaching smart kids, which reduces the costs created by step 1.
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Mask the whole process so it looks less obviously unjust than doing steps 1 and 2 in isolation.
But if you're actually paying attention, you realize that step 3 doesn't actually change how just it is, merely the surface appearance. I don't see the dilemma, this is a strictly worse policy than just letting smart kids test out of school so you don't have to spend money teaching them, and then having smaller class sizes for whoever's left. Which is itself a pretty dubious proposition, but still less dubious than wasting the smart kids' time.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
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The same would apply to a lesser degree when working for the government in a prominent position.
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Conservative women's clothing exists: women go to court all the time. A non-binary/gender fluid/trans person who stuck to their guns that they are genuinely a woman and didn't believe their gender nonconformity was obnoxious and unprofessional could wear respectable women's clothing to court.
MathWizard
Good things are good
26d ago
A good rule of thumb to predict a pro-life person's opinion on something is to mentally replace the fetus with a 1 week old (post birth) baby. Or, if you don't think babies should have rights either, maybe a two or three year old. That is the logical implication of believing fetuses are people.
Would you have sympathy for a mother who killed her 1 week old baby because her husband committed suicide? Would that sympathy extend far enough to excuse the act?
MathWizard
Good things are good
3mo ago
Not politically viable, but if the issue is the economy then the obvious solution is to just make worker visas that let them bypass minimum wage laws. Get a bunch of workers to come and work for the cheap jobs that nobody wants to do for low money, but they still have to pay taxes, don't get to have anchor babies, and they eventually leave when it expires and return with piles of money to their families back home.
MathWizard
Good things are good
4mo ago
The self-doubt in Empire Strikes Back and The Last Jedi always felt really weird to me. Like, Luke is never actually tempted by the dark side. There is nothing the dark side ever has to offer him that he wants, he never struggles with his darker tendencies. It's just people warning him "Darth Vader used to be on our side, then he turned evil, and you remind me of him". There's never actually any reason for him to turn, and never any threat that the audience could take seriously of it happening, even without plot armor. Even if he did obey the Emperor and strike down Darth Vader in anger, there's no plausible reason he would switch sides, he'd just strike down the Emperor too.
I think it's mostly just there to make it more cathartic when he does it the other way around and converts Darth Vader. But it's still weird how everyone in universe takes it so seriously.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
Centrists get high ground on this.
I've been consistently anti-violence, anti-terrorism, anti-riot, anti-extremism, etc, my entire life. Every gives centrists crap for not getting things done, but some things are better undone, and some better things would actually get done if it were possible to get more sane centrist candidates elected.
I have the high ground Anakin. Don't try it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
An important distinction needs to be made between the film "Starship Troopers" and the novel "Starship Troopers" that it's inspired-by/parodying. Given that the director did not actually read the novel, absolute despised fascism, and set about parodying and mocking the original story, they are clearly distinct stories in a way that most adaptations are not.
I'm assuming /u/bearmarket is referring to the film, whose main character "John Rico" is white. But if so, this undercuts his actual point, since this is a parody attempting to demonstrate how this white imperialism is BAD, not celebrating it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
This culture war has been happening for decades, it will likely continue for decades into the future. We need to do other stuff to help ourselves in the short term, but not doing this is just going to make the problem continue to get worse in the long run.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Right, but it does have extra charges after 45 minutes to prevent someone with the subscription claiming a bike in perpetuity for free and denying them to paid customers. You don't get 720 hours of bike rental for $5, you get 45 minutes each time you need it over the course of the month, plus more if you pay more. Which these kids were deliberately attempting to subvert, exploiting the technicalities to claim bikes for long periods of time, denying them to paid customers.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
But you could make a similar argument that a human brain is a derivative work of its training data. Obviously there are huge differences, but are those differences relevant to the core argument? A neural net takes a bunch of stuff it's seen before and then combines ideas and concepts from them in a new form. A human takes a bunch of stuff they've seen before and then combines ideas and concepts from them in a new form. Copyright laws typically allow for borrowing concepts and ideas from other things as long as the new work is transformative and different enough that it isn't just a blatant ripoff. Otherwise you couldn't even have such a thing as a "genre", which all share a bunch of features that they copy from each other.
So it seems to me that, if a neural net creates content which is substantially different from any of its inputs, then it isn't copying them in a legal sense or moral sense, beyond that which a normal human creator who had seen the same training data and been inspired by them would be copying them.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I don't think this is as separated as you seem to think. One of the main tactics of wokeism is to hijack and abuse the government's regulatory apparatus. Ie, a bunch of woke idealogues see something they dislike, complain enough to raise it to public awareness, a woke bureaucrat in the government raises legal action against it via some sort of ambiguous law that can technically be said to apply if you stretch the language a little, and then a woke judge rules against the company.
This only needs to actually happen in a small number of cases in order to create a culture of fear that disincentivizes companies from invoking the ire of the woke, same as with any other legal threat. And because the law's are often ambiguous and/or selectively enforced, this can be wielded as an idealogical weapon. If the government selectively enforces ambiguous regulatory laws against wokeism's targets more often than its allies, then companies can reduce their regulatory burden by being an ally.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
My brother has a gluten issue (I don't know if it counts as a "sensitivity", but the doctors aren't 100% sure it's celiac, but is extremely similar so the distinction is moot), which causes him to be lethargic, messes with his digestive system and causes him to break out in red sores all over his body. The latter of which can last for weeks after having eaten nontrivial amounts of gluten in a single meal, and is the most obvious and provable evidence that the condition is real.
It's not like it's going to kill him (though the doctors say that it may increase the risk of colon cancer), but neither will drinking a small amount of bleach. It's basically literal poison for his body.
I understand that it's inconvenient to plan around. And it's especially annoying given that hypochondriacs and trenders and exaggerators exist and are difficult to distinguish from people with real biological conditions. But from the perspective of someone who actually has one of those conditions, if the choice is to be inconvenient to you, or eat literal poison in your food, they'll be inconvenient. And if you don't like it you don't have to invite them for dinner.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
As a libertarian, I don't see much difference between a government and a sufficiently competent/potent drug cartel.
I tentatively agree, but with the caveat that a strong drug cartel is a type a government, not that government is a type of cartel. That is, you can governments which are and are not cartels, or an spectrum more or less cartel-like (show me a cartel that lets all of the citizens in their territory vote on their leadership). So it's definitely a noncentral fallacy to say something like "government are like cartels on these metric, cartels are bad, therefore government bad". Which you didn't say outright but appear to be suggesting (please correct me if this is a wrong interpretation of your view).
But as your own post demonstrates by comparing Philadelphia vs Juarez, having a force with a monopoly on violence can create stability and order that otherwise wouldn't exist. If we just abolished governments then everywhere would be like Philadelphia but worse, with various competing gangs violently competing over territory. And any coallition that became powerful enough suppress or unite them would be de-facto a government.
But I think the main distinction here between a good government and a gang-like government-like thing is something like Legitimacy. Which is hard to define perfectly objectively, but is related to the following:
1,) True Monopoly on violence.
If you have five different gangs trying to control the same area, making different rules and overlapping in territory, it's hard to say that any one of them is the true government. Or even one gang (or official government) makes rules but can't enforce them and other people run around doing whatever they want, then this detracts from the legitimacy of the supposed government.
2,) Consistency/Integrity/Honesty.
Laws and processes which are consistent and predictable are much easier to follow and create more order and stability relative to their cost. If someone has a 5% tax imposed on them for thirty years, they can plan around that. They can get a job to earn enough money, save enough, make businesses, that all factor this constant tax into account. If instead you have a dictator or gang that randomly smashes and loots businneses whenever they feel like it, or suddenly doubles taxes on whatever company or businesses they temporarily dislike, then it makes it much harder for citizens to plan ahead and feel secure investing in long-term projects. Similarly, if a new gang replaces the old one every 5 years and changes up all the rules, none of them is especially legitimate. It sort of accrues over time. Or a government which pretends to obey a certain set of rules but blatantly violates them is less legitimate than one which consistently follows its own rules.
3,) Consent of the governed.
This is probably the most important. Obviously, the highest score it would be possible to have on this would be to literally have people sign a social contract in which they agree to allow the government to rule over them in exchange for the government agreeing to various things. Most places don't do this (though I think some charter cities like Prospera are doing this). But we can still get some of this by considering hypothetical questions. Like, if you had a magic button that would cause the government to suddenly vanish, or be replaced by a random or average different government, and presented the button to random citizens, what percent of them would press it? Or, how badly would they want to press it, how much would they pay for the option to press it? How much would they pay to prevent the button from being pressed? A government which does not require the consent of the people because it's powerful enough to force its will on them, but nevertheless has their consent anyway, is more legitimate than one which only forces its will to great protest. Note that this does not require the government to be a Democracy, a Monarchy in which everyone agrees that the Monarch should rule them is still legitimate.
All of this is on a spectrum. No existing government is perfectly legitimate, and any individual who wields a nonzero amount of force could be considered by a tiny government with a tiny amount of legitimacy under this perspective. But usually you'll find one entity, which everyone considers to be "the government", which is orders of magnitude above all of the various gangs and cartels and forces within it. (In cases where there isn't one unique outlier, we call it a "civil war", and it tends to be a temporary arrangement until one faction wins.) Nevertheless, I would argue that governments with high legitimacy, according to this metric, tend to be significantly better, both morally and pragmatically for the people living under them. It is inevitable that someone is going to use force on someone. If you are counting gangs and cartels, then having no government at all is not an option, so pick the best you can. I'd much prefer it be a mostly legitimate government like the one I have now that wants to tax me my entire life rather than some gang with low legitimacy and low time-horizons such which would rather loot my corpse while they're still in power.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Disclaimer, while I am accepting of trans people as human beings with rights, I am highly skeptical and in some cases openly hostile to the efforts trans activists to dismantle the concept of gender or biological reality. I'll do my best to explain my perspective on the issue without strawmanning anyone, but given that I don't know your actual beliefs on this, I can only speak for trans arguments I typically see.
It really depends on your definition of "man" and "woman". For hundreds of years in English, and via translation in the majority of historical languages, and still for the majority of the population, there is no meaningful distinction between "woman" and "cis-woman". They don't even use the term "cis", because you can just say "woman" when you mean an adult human female. For anyone who still holds this definition, then to "pass" as a woman means that people to mistake the trans person for a biological female. This is inherently deceptive, because the trans woman is not a biological female, and yet is deliberately causing themselves to be mistaken as one.
I'm pretty sure this counts as transphobic, despite not really being a normative claim, because it ignores/denies attempts to change language that trans activists have been making recently. I personally think all of the "-phobe" words are overused and nearly meaningless, but I usually interpret it as meaning something along the lines of "hinders the trans agenda", which this definitely does.
If you take the opposite extreme, and define "woman" to be purely "anyone who identifies as a woman", and if everyone embraces this definition you end up in circular logic where the word becomes meaningless. Why would anyone care what word they or another person identifies as if the word means literally nothing other than identifying as it. You might as well identify as a "snurxoth". This is consistent, it's just no different from having a name. Someone might identify as "Alex", and it doesn't allow you to infer anything about them at all, it's just a word you can use to pick them out of a group of people with different names.
Under this definition alone, then, it's impossible to pass as a woman or man without wearing your pronouns written visibly somewhere on your person. If gender is purely a construct of the mind and a person's self-identification with no external foundation, then you can't infer that the person you linked is a woman. Maybe they identify as a man and just like that style of hair or clothes. Maybe they're nonbinary. More importantly, why would you think that hair and clothes are associated with women at all? If everyone's gender identity were purely internal, then there would be no reason for all of the biological females, who tend to have long hair and wear that type of clothes, to decide that the word "woman" was their gender identity. If the word doesn't refer to anything physical, then there's no reason for people to divide themselves up into the same two categories that most people are in now. Rather, I would expect most people would identify as random stuff they like like "Dragons" or "Princess", or just their names.
I'm pretty sure this definition is also transphobic from a different perspective, because if you entirely deny the existence of a biological basis for gender, then trans people basically don't exist. Or rather, they're not meaningfully different from cis people. Everyone is just born as a person, has a gender identity, and their physical body doesn't matter at all, so there's no such thing as bodies that men have or women have, because anyone who identifies as a man or woman is equally a man or woman. There's literally no reason for anyone to try to transition or pass, because even if they do, there's no way anyone could know their gender identity afterwards without reading their mind, or asking, same as before. On the other hand, there's no way for this to be deceptive, because claiming a thing is literally all it takes to be that thing. Except in circumstances where someone outright lies (you ask to be referred to as a man but secretly identify as a woman in your mind).
But what I mostly see as the accepted trans activist position is a Motte and Bailey at play. The Motte is the above position, that gender identity is just self identification, the Bailey is that gender identity means a bunch of things that historically it has meant tied to biological sex. Most trans women don't want to be perceived as "someone who identifies with the word woman" or the pronouns "she/her", they want to be perceived the same as biological women, with all of the cultural baggage that that perception has picked up over the centuries. It's only because the majority of the population believe that "women" have meaningful physical and behavioral differences than "men" (a statement which is factually true if gender = sex), that trans women want to be categorized alongside the cis women and trans men want to be categorized alongside the cis men. Imagine if tomorrow all of the cis women decided that they no longer identify as "women", they have a new word, I don't know "snurxoth", and suppose all the cis men decided to go along with it and the word was quickly adapted to regular use and the old one abandoned.
I highly doubt the trans women would continue happily identifying with the word "woman". No, they would want to follow suit. Because at the heart of trans ideology isn't self-identification, it's factual and normatative claims that trans women and cis women aren't meaningfully distinct, and similarly for trans men and cis men. There's no point for trans women to want to pass as trans women but fail to pass as cis women, because it doesn't truly mean anything. Or, maybe there is some point. Other trans activists will use certain pronouns and treat them a certain way because that's what you're supposed to do to be a good ally. But it seems to me the real Bailey is that they want to be treated the same as cis women, and the only way to do that in a society that treats biological males and females differently is to deceive people into thinking you are a biological female: a cis woman.
I guess a society that treats biological males and females differently would be considered inherently transphobic . Your specific question of whether it's transphobic for you to think of passing in terms of passing as cis, conditional on already living in this society, are going to depend a lot on what that word even means for you. Is it more important to advance the trans agenda as a whole by dismantling the gender norms and deny biological differences matter? Or is it more important to help individual trans people try to slip into the existing categories by imitating the other sex? Either could be considered transphobic depending on the priorities of the accuser (which is why I don't think the word has much bite).
MathWizard
Good things are good
5d ago
I have literally never seen a classical Neo Nazi on here calling for the death of Jews. It's against the rules and they would be banned immediately.
I don't know exactly what you've seen, but my guess is you've seen some of the more nuanced moderate Nazi-like posters who dislike Jews and/or Jewish Supremecists but don't call for their death. And are strawmanning/patern-matching them to the more classical Nazis. I think there's a really important distinction, because first and foremost, the rational Nazi does not want you to die. They might dislike, want you to have less power and influence, might want you to leave, but they don't want you to die and if they saw you on the street they would not attack you. Second, the rational Nazi does not necessarily hate you, personally, if you are not yourself a supremecist. They might not even be a bigot at all, in the same way that an anti-woke person is not necessarily a racist.
Let me explain. Even though "Jew" is not technically a race, for most purposes we can consider it to be in the same general category and treat it the same way. This means that it should not be treated any differently from other races in terms of rights, restrictions, terms of discourse, etc. This means that Jewish Supremacists exist, are bad because they are bigots, and some but not all Jews are Supremacists, in the same way that Black Supremacists and White Supremacists exist, are bad because they are bigots, and are some but not all of their race. There is a huge difference between criticizing white/black/Jewish people universally (which makes you a bigot), and criticizing white/black/Jewish Supremacists (who are bigots worthy of being criticized). People tend to be okay at drawing this distinction for actual races, but when it comes to Jews the nuance vanishes, and any criticism of Jewishness in any form indicates Nazis.
It should hopefully be rather uncontroversial to state the following claims are true:
-Jews are disproportionately likely to be wealthy and/or in positions of power relative to their frequency in the general population.
-Jewish Supremacists exist in nonzero numbers who want to discriminate in favor of their own kind (just like all Supremacists do)
-Jewish Supremacists are less likely to be criticized or called out by polite society (the media, educated people, politicians) compared to other Supremacists, and get more defense when they are criticized (by accusing their critics of being Nazis)
Someone who takes these observations and extrapolates it too far might then conclude that Jewish Supremacists are more numerous and more influential than they actually are: collectively and conspiratorially controlling all of the media and institutions in order to ruin our society. While I don't think this is the world we live in, it is a coherent world state one could live in and would be bad. A century ago we DID live in a version of this world with White Supremacists pulling the strings to privilege white people, and that was bad, so it doesn't require a moral monster to conclude that a Jewish Supremacist world would also be bad for the exact same reasons. This does not require hating Jews, or you, or your family, in the same way that hating White Supremacist world does not require you hating me or my family. It only requires a somewhat distorted view of society, which rational debate and discussion should be able to solve.
Unless you yourself are a Supremacist, then criticisms of Jewish Supremacists are not actually criticisms of you. Unless you are a political or military leader of Israel, then criticisms of Israel's actions in war are not criticisms of you. Unless the critics are actually collectivizing to criticize all Jews, in which case you should counter them (or just sit back and watch the entirety of the motte come down on them for being stupid bigots). But if someone is being polite and precise but criticizing someone who happens to be Jewish, don't mistakenly collectivize for them and assume they hate you if that's not what they said.
Those people are welcome here. And you are also welcome here. Your own identity is not particularly relevant on the scales, just your arguments. You can unapologetically be who you are and admit to being Jewish, but unless that identity is somehow adding to the discussion via you providing anecdotes or something then we don't actually care. You won't be attacked for it, but you won't be protected for it either, unless someone is actually breaking the rules and calling for violence. Just say things and let your words speak for themselves.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5mo ago
Pop is a verb. It means things. People use it to talk about non-beverages, creating potential collisions in language usage. While collisions in language happen all the time and are manageable, it's still a point against.
Coke is a horrible term to use, because Coke is a specific beverage. Use of brands for generics, like saying "Kleenex" for tissues only works when those things are interchangeable. If you ask someone for a Kleenex and they bring you a Puffs tissue you can just use that instead. You might not even notice. If you ask someone for a Coke and they bring you a Sprite you're in for a rude surprise
Soda is clearly the superior choice. The only collision is for things like Soda Water, which is just carbonated water that they use in soda, or sodium compounds in chemistry (which the majority of people don't talk about).
You have been Culturally Imperialized, by the correct and dominant Empire. You are welcome.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
My Grandpa used to chew tobacco in secret. Officially, this was not okay behavior. He wanted to do it, Grandma disapproved, so he "wasn't allowed to". Partly because it was bad for his health, partly because it's gross. So, not wanting to cause trouble, he pretended to quit, and then went off and did it in secret.
Obviously, Grandpa knows that grandpa chews tobacco. Let's call this level 1 knowledge. Knowledge of the object level fact itself.
He thought he was being sneaky about it, but he wasn't all that sneaky. Grandma found enough evidence to figure it out, so she has level 1 knowledge about him chewing. But since he obviously knows he chews, Grandma knows that he knows, so she has level 2 knowledge: knowledge that Grandpa has level 1 knowledge.
But she doesn't confront Grandpa. Because if she does they might have a fight, or he might decide that now the cat's out of the bag he might as well do it openly in front of people, which is gross. So she says nothing. Everyone knows that Grandpa chews, it is shared knowledge. But it's not common knowledge, because Grandpa doesn't know that she knows.
The lack of common knowledge is meaningful because it allows people to credibly pretend and act like they don't know even when they do.
Now, this didn't happen in real life (I think), but suppose that Grandpa is snooping around and happens to see a text (or more likely overhear a conversation, they're old after all), where Grandma was telling someone about this situation. He's like, "oh crap, I've been discovered. But Grandma chose not to confront me because she doesn't approve but also doesn't want to start a fight. If I want to I could just address this openly, admit what I've been doing, and then either stop or else have the fight and force my way to doing it openly. But I'm reasonably happy the way things have been going, and also I don't want to admit that I've been snooping, so I'll just keep chewing in secret and pretend I don't know that they know." Grandpa now has level 3 knowledge. Everyone knows that Grandpa chews, everyone knows that everyone knows, it's a bit of an "open secret", but not everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows, because nobody knows about Grandpa's snooping, so everyone else thinks that Grandpa is still oblivious to their knowledge, when he's not. This is meaningfully different from the previous scenario, where Grandpa actually thought he was being sneaky about the chewing, and is meaningfully different from common knowledge where it's all out in the open and nobody thinks they know more than someone else.
You can continue this pattern any finite number of steps upward, maybe Grandma planned for Grandpa to overhear her, and maybe Grandpa then discovers that it was a ruse, and so on and so on, but it becomes increasingly convoluted to understand or explain, and also there's little practical difference between level 19 knowledge and level 24 knowledge other than who happens to be on top at the moment, but they still differ from common knowledge, in that any large but finite number of steps creates an open secret that everyone knows but doesn't talk about, while the infinite recursion of common knowledge makes it just not a secret at all and it's harder for people to pretend it's a secret when it's obviously not.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
In fact, before this controversy, the main thing gamers were complaining about was in-game transactions.
Maybe it's just because lean right in my media consumption, but I've heard a lot of complaints about woke nonsense in videogames. Horizon Zero Dawn made the main character way less attractive, The Last of Us killed off the main guy from the first game in a disrespectful way. GTA 6 looks like a woke disaster. And of course I've seen quite a few games with the weird lefty art-style that indicate them as obviously woke that nobody ever plays or cares about because they aren't beloved franchises (though I don't think it's reasonable to complain about these. If woke people want to form their own IP and let people freely choose to play or not play, good for them, as long as they aren't co-opting non-woke franchises and destroying them)
I don't know that Sweet Baby Inc was involved in the games I mentioned. The Sweet Baby Inc Detected only has 16 reviews and those aren't any of them, so either they're not thorough, or something else is involved. But some sort of woke force has been going around corrupting games just like it has in comics and movies, and people have been complaining about it for the last decade. Not as much as they complain about in-game transactions, because it is less prevalent, but it's been there.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Oooh this is good trolling. The "you did this to yourself" aspect is very strong here, despite it being obvious that the poster is creating this combination on purpose, which is precisely the balance that a good troll creates.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Pressuring victims of anything to retract their claims gets my hackles up. There are forms of "obstruction of justice" that don't outrage me, where people resist arrest, or destroy evidence when they get caught doing something illegal. Like, you shouldn't do that, but I get it. But witness tampering, threats, corruption? That's unacceptable, regardless of what it's in service of.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Since I aim to be sincere in my beliefs with minimal delusions of convenience, I respect such adherents more than insincere mealy-mouthed Cultural Catholics or the "moderate" Muslims who eat pork, smoke and drink while nominally calling themselves Muslim. Do I get along better with such people than a Hamas operative? Of course, doesn't mean I don't respect them less.
This only makes sense if you are assigning respect entirely based on honesty/loyalty/commitment, and not at all on things like caring about the welfare of other people. That is, the amount of respect I lose for a hypocrite is less than the amount of respect I lose for a murderer. Even if an honest and committed terrorist Muslim is more respectable for their commitment than a terrorist atheist who just kills for fun, it's less respectable than a Muslim who realizes that murder is wrong and chooses not to do it, even if they reduce themselves to hypocrisy in the process.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
I'm still uncertain of whether this term actually applies to this trend or if there are subtle nuances making it a mismatch, but it might be "Californication", the mechanism by which Hollywood distorts and perverts culture and art and beauty by amplifying its own degenerate tendencies.
People are not actually rational calculating agents, a lot of learning happens implicitly by associations. So suppose Hollywood gathers a bunch of incredibly beautiful people, suppose they have 3 times average beauty. And then they get older which drops their beauty by 20%, and then suppose they get botox which counters 10% from the aging but adds a separate 30% loss multiplicatively. So now you have a bunch of older botox women whose beauty is (3 * 0.9 * 0.7) = 1.89
That is, these botox women are still almost twice as beautiful as a random average person off the street. In reality, this beauty is entirely from genetic and selection effects: Hollywood finding and collecting the most beautiful people it can find. But what people see is really beautiful people with Botox. If enough people do this, then some people may start mentally associating Botox with beauty, implicitly assuming that that's what distinguishes Hollywood women and causes their beauty, rather than it being selection effects. This self-reinforces especially among people who actually live in Hollywood and encounter these people regularly in real life, which is how distorted memes like this spawn and spread. One or two beautiful but psychologically damaged people do X, people in Hollywood falsely associate X with beauty and fame and do it more, people outside Hollywood see them on TV and falsely associate X with beauty and fame and do it more.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
I don't think noblesse oblige comes from hard times, I think it comes from a combination of culture, tradition, education, and honesty about privilege. The nobles of yore were rich and wealthy because
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Their parents were rich and wealthy. Therefore their parents could educate them and teach them about how to properly handle being rich and wealthy with the proper composure and respect for each person in their position.
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They happened to be lucky enough to be born into said family. This makes it clear that their position is one inherited, not earned by their own efforts.
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The peasants underneath them work hard and pay taxes to them. This makes it clear where the wealth is coming from: the efforts of the peasants under them. Of course the nobles did their own estate management and politics and whatnot, but the core production and farming is done by the peasants and with no underling peasants the noble has no income.
Further, the peasant noble relationship is less distributed. You don't have millions of peasants paying taxes which are combined and then divied up among a bunch of nobles, each noble family is in charge of specific peasants. If those peasants thrive, the noble thrives. If the peasants suffer, (at least economically) the noble suffers. You can't tax what isn't there. These together create an environment in which noblesse oblige can thrive. A Lord which makes good decisions will simultaneously benefit their peasants and themself. A Lord which makes bad decisions will have poor peasants and thus make themselves poor. A Lord which makes very bad decisions will have suffering peasants who have a very specific target for their anger and can rebel against the Lord specifically, rather than trying to overthrow the entire kingdom which consists of a mixture of good and bad elites.
Modern elites rise and fall in power and influence in a massively distributed system in which increasing your ability to capture larger slices of the existing pie dominates over trying to tend your own garden and increase the size of the pie. The ability to charisma and politick your way up the ranks causes new elites to rise higher than they deserve, while the competent value creators end up in middle management. And the high mobility across space means that terrible mistakes are met not with rebellion and death, but with an escape to a new job with a blank slate reputation, or a cushy golden parachute retirement.
I don't see how hard times would change this, there were both good times and hard times in the past, and noblesse oblige was present through both, though was universal in neither. It's the skin in the game by which peasants and elites shared good times and bad times that enabled and incentivized noblesse oblige at all.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
I'd like to chime in here, because although I lean libertarian in general, am very fond of capitalism as a system, and don't think corporations are fundamentally evil to the very core as /u/ScrimbloBimblo states, I do think that in practice most large corporations are evil. And I mean that in the same sense I would if an individual person behaved the way they do, I would call that person evil too.
Because human beings are not profit maximizing agents. In-so-far as a person might be described as rational and thus utility maximizing, their utility function is not literally just money. People value lots of things like friendships and relationships, and honesty, and reputation, and their conscience. If you leave a bicycle unlocked, most people aren't going to steal it even if they could get away with it. Obviously if enough people pass it it will eventually get stolen, but the amount of people that have to pass it is more than one. If you make an informal agreement with someone, most people are not going to obsessively look for opportunities to screw you over. If your friend lends you $5 they are unlikely to obsessively hound you about paying them back and calculate the exact amount of interest you owe them. Obviously people like this do exist, and they're assholes, and most good-natured people try to avoid them. The more greedy, money obsessed, and sociopathic someone is, the more corners they're willing to cut. And even if they follow the law and restrict themselves to nominally consensual economic deals they still force people around them to constantly be on guard about what deals they make because the sociopath is trying to trick them to get more money.
And a large corporation nonrandomly selects for these people and promotes them and socially and legally insulates them from the consequences their actions would face if done as an individual. It's much harder to shame someone for scamming an old granny out of her life savings if it's a faceless bureaucrat "just doing their job" than if it's the local small town repair shop run by Tom. It's much harder to pressure Tom to give the money back, or spread the word that Tom is a jerk and everyone should boycott him, if Tom just acts on behalf of a multinational corporation with only two meaningful competitors, both of whom are equally scummy because they similarly promote sociopaths.
Ethical corporations should seek profit in the same way that you do when selling your labor: as an important consideration that you want to get a fair value for and need in order to survive, but not literally the only thing that matters in the world such that you're willing to tradeoff literally all other concerns for marginal slivers of extra cash. Technical "consent" is neither necessary nor sufficient to define ethical behavior, though it is an important component. Corporations, and the people making decisions within them, should be held to the same ethical standards that everyone else is when making economic transactions. And I think ethical companies do exist, but typically the larger one is the less likely that becomes.
I think it's important to still care about convincing the other side, because it's useful. We live in a democracy, therefore more public support for our side increases our chances of successfully implementing it. If we lived in a dictatorship with you or I in charge and could just ban it immediately, then authoritarian suppression would be the way to go to guarantee it stops as soon as possible.
If, in the current environment, everyone on the right gives up on persuasion and just decries their opponents as inhuman monsters then all of the areas controlled by the right will ban it, all of the areas controlled by the left will not, and everyone in the center will see one side pretending to be kind and compassionate while we superficially look like authoritarian bigots despite being the ones actually helping people.
In general, the right has a huge optics problem. Or rather, the left has an optics advantage because the majority of their positions are chosen based on optimizing for feelgoods and superficial appearances, which makes them look better than they are in practice. The only way the right (and moderates, and logical people who don't optimize exclusively for optics) can stand a chance is by being logical, persuasive, and thorough enough that the superficial appearances are stripped away and the actual superior policies are revealed to the people around.
Gender affirming care for minors is an evil policy with horrible results. Most people who support it from a distance aren't evil people, they're naive people who haven't actually looked into the details and have just bought into the propaganda that all anti-trans arguments are founded on bigotry and hatred. And you don't change their minds by acting the same way someone who irrationally hated trans people would act, if you try then they'll stop looking further as soon as you confirm their prior beliefs. You change their minds by being kind, compassionate, logical, explaining this in detail, and then banning child mutilation because it's the kind, compassionate, and logical thing to do.
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