MathWizard
Good things are good
No bio...
User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
I think there's a few subcategories of of boundary pushers that play very different roles.
There are people who deliberately make up a new word, or adapt an existing word or phrase to a new use. Science in particular is a common example. These people need to be able to communicate their ideas, generally new ideas about things people have never thought of before so there isn't a word for it, so language has to change or their ideas can't be communicated, or would be communicated very inefficiently with entire phrases. Pushback is not really needed here unless they make some really stupid choices.
There are people who modify or use words to mean things as slang out of some combination of convenience, usefulness, and laziness. Kleenex does not mean the same thing as "tissue", "Coke" does not mean the same thing as "soda" or "pop", someone who is "cool" is not actually cold, something that is "hella lit" is not burning with the fires of hell. Basically every contraction ever is just a shorter faster way of saying two words that go together so frequently that you don't need to say the whole thing in order for someone to figure out what you meant. It's laziness, but it's efficient laziness. Here, I think, is where your explanation makes the most sense. Some people will advance such slang, some people will push back on it, and hopefully the good ones that serve their purpose well will survive while the dumber ones will fail to become popular and die.
Then there are people who just learn and use language incorrectly. "Let me axe you a question", "supposably", "could care less". There's a thing they're trying to say, it's language that already exists, they just heard it wrong or remembered it wrong or pronounced it wrong. Unlike the above case where the user is generally aware of what the old language was and chooses to use the knew language, people in this category are not usually doing it on purpose. It's just a mistake. We don't treat five year olds learning how to speak as guides and copy their language, we correct them and teach them how the language is actually used. Similarly, we don't treat people with the language skills of five year olds as guides and copy their language, we correct them and teach them how the language is actually used. The only reason prescriptivists might not be useful here is that adults are hard to teach, and your prescriptivism is likely to fall on deaf ears, but they're absolutely right to enforce to the extent that it is possible here.
If we're looking at things from a coarse scale then all the boundary pushers can push forward, and the prescriptivists push back, and then the more useful things get more people pushing forward and fewer people pushing back and survive, and both forces are useful. But if we zoom into these categories, the third category is not serving any purpose. Vanishingly few if any of their mistakes are actually useful language changes, in many cases they make things more confusing and ambiguous. Most of their mistakes are destined to die because nobody wants to copy them, and the few that do survive end up making the language worse and harder to understand for future generations. Granted, there isn't an unambiguous line at the boundary between deliberate slang and mistake slang, but there are examples that clearly fall into one or the other. Meaning a substantial portion of "boundary pushers" are just useless and the prescriptivists who oppose them are just right, even if the dynamic you point out is occurring at higher levels.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
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Redundancy: Axe already has a meaning. It's primarily a noun, a tool/weapon that chops things. It's only a verb when you mean hitting something with an axe, in which case it's very much not very friendly to axe someone. Any language change that overlaps other meanings receives a penalty. I suppose the contraction "it's" overlaps the possessive "its", and being able to tell the difference matters: it will almost always be clear whether you meant to ask something or hit someone with an axe, so this isn't a huge point against it, but it is a point.
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Efficiency. "It's" is faster and easier to say than "it is". I very highly doubt that the legacy is actually people hearing, remembering, and pronouncing "it is" wrong, so much as being lazy and pronouncing it quickly. People who are entirely aware of what "it is" means might choose to say "it's" to save time. Meanwhile, "Axe" and "Ask" are approximately the same length to speak or write, and I think "axe" actually takes slightly more time/effort in the middle of a sentence because it doesn't flow as well. Nobody would ever use "axe" on purpose unless it's to fit in with other people who already do it by mistake.
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Momentum. I am not an etymologist, I don't know exactly when/why/how "it's" became a thing, but by this point it is clearly established, while "axe" is not. Maybe it was a mistake at the time when "it's" became a thing and if people had resisted it then we could have less ambiguity about "its" (and might be allowed to use an apostrophe like we do with every other possessive). I'm not sure. But at this point it has been established and people understand it and use it. The primary purpose of language is to communicate with each other, consensus is incredibly useful in that regard, so all changes are immediately suspect and need to have positive reasons to justify themselves. If the majority of people said "axe" and some people started saying "ask" instead, I would oppose that on the same grounds.
MathWizard
Good things are good
6mo ago
But it doesn’t always line up. I think conservatives should be more afraid of climate change, for example. Particularly if you don’t want lots of immigrants coming.
It has always confused me why conservatives aren't the party of environmentalists and climate conservation. It's literally an attempt to prevent change. I can easily imagine a world where progressives are trying to build an economic utopia of plenty in order to make cheap goods for the poor, while the conservatives rail against the evil bureaucrats for destroying our god-given nature just to make numbers on a spreadsheet go up. And blaming foreigners for having terrible pollution and recycling policies (which they do).
You occasionally see this point trotted out as a counterpoint to liberal climate change policies (our country barely contributes to climate change, look at China's emissions), but always as a gotcha to shut down interventions, not because they actually care about China destroying the environment. It's weird. I don't understand why we live in the world we live in other than "left = government intervention" I guess. But the right usually supports government intervention if it's to prevent something they consider evil, and I would expect the destruction of nature to count.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10mo ago
What are the laziest healthy foods I can make. I'm fairly picky about what foods I like, but reasonably unpicky about what foods I'll tolerate. I don't have a clear concise way to list out all of them other than to say I have the palate of a five year old. Probably literally, I don't think my food preferences have changed substantially since I was a child other than an increased ability to tolerate foods I don't like.
I don't like cooking. I'm bad at it, it takes too long. I make simple things like soup or pizza, especially if I can make a bunch at once which increase the amount of food per effort, but foods which require less prep time are preferred. My go-to lazy healthy snack is raw vegetables. I will happily munch on whole tomatoes or baby carrots, which is just as easy as opening a bag of potato chips. But I need more variety, and something slightly fancier and slightly less lazy is acceptable. What are your thoughts and suggestions for maximizing health and taste per effort?
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
6mo ago
Is there some clever way that someone could make blockchain insurance? Like, a decentralized, transparent, nonprofit system where everyone pools money (probably in the form of some cryptocurrency) together, and then when someone makes a claim there's an algorithm to decide whether it's legitimate and how much money it should pay out (possibly variable depending on how much free money is in the system due to the frequency of past claims).
Legally and practically I don't think you could do this with health insurance due to patient confidentiality issues. But maybe for auto-insurance or homeowners insurance or something? Or if there's a mechanism to anonymize medical records prior to submission. And I've pretty much handwaved away the hard part which would be deciding which claims are legitimate to prevent bad-faith exploitation. But is that solvable? And would this actually be usable if it worked? The goal would be to remove the profit motive from insurance companies taking a cut as middlemen, as well as the adversarial relationship between them and both healthcare providers and patients. I suppose a mostly traditionally run but non-profit insurance company would have some of the benefits, but even those have some potential for corruption, and I'm wondering if a transparent and user-run blockchain thing would clear that.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10mo ago
I’m unpersuaded by the typical religious argument that life is so sacred we cannot take it. We do take it, all the time, in war and executions.
How do people keep ignoring the actual argument? Killing good people is bad, killing bad people is good. This has been more or less the justification for war and executions from religious and non-religious people alike for thousands of years. And within the past 40 years the majority of people not only stopped believing it, but completely and utterly forgot that this is what other people believe. Just because some people believe in a constant function: "killing people is always bad", does not mean everyone who disagrees with them believes its pure negation: "killing people is always good." There's a ton of room for nuance.
Given that the vast majority of potential euthanasia recipients are "good people" according to most sane definitions, ie they are not mass murderers or foreign soldiers that represent an existential threat to the life and liberty of your nation, any belief system that believes "killing good people is bad" and doesn't make exceptions for the will of the person will think that killing them is bad. Sophistication is not hypocrisy.
MathWizard
Good things are good
14d 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
4mo ago
Who is the best, most sane, and intelligent, centrist or left-leaning commentator/podcaster you can recommend for me to listen to? I'm a bit worried that as the Motte trends further rightward that I'm in too much of a filter bubble, and most of the stuff I naturally listen to is right-leaning, because the stuff that's explicitly leftist is braindead and infuriating. I don't want someone ranting about how Trump is Hitler, I want people good, calm, and reasoned defenses for their positions that I don't already agree with so I can understand their position and maybe find some insights that I previously dismissed as braindead because I only heard the stupid version of it before. I used to like Sargon of Akkad for this, because he was in a nice centrist zone: left on some issues but right on others, but every year he drifts further right and I don't think he serves this purpose anymore.
I like to listen to people talk about stuff while I'm playing casual games that don't take up too much brain power or require audio themselves, so multi-hour broadcasts with a lot of backlog are ideal. I do read things sometimes, obviously since I'm here, but I'm mostly looking for audio right now.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5mo ago
I've heard this "liberalism doesn't work" idea before, but never really been convinced by it. Equality of opportunity doesn't need to be taken so literally that you toss it all away when one person is born with 1 IQ point less than another. Treat people equally before the law, and generally socially and culturally. Treat people according to the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Most of the "counterarguments" I've heard are that if people are born with different talent or even just different inherited wealth from their parents then this doesn't work because they don't really have equality of opportunity, but... so what? If people are born with different circumstances then equality of opportunity doesn't inevitably lead to equality of outcome and that's okay. Set up a society in which everyone has an opportunity to thrive and carve out a happy healthy life for themselves, and let them sort themselves out. Maybe the 70 IQ person have a small apartment and a job at a fast food place while the 130 IQ person lives in a fancy manor and works at Google. Let them. I don't see how liberalism or the enlightenment prevent this. Instead, it is the regression from this ideal that wokeism represents that is the problem. We went from "people of the same skin color should share the blame and credit for each other's actions" to "people should be treated according to their own actions" back to "people of the same skin color should share the blame and credit for each other's actions". Wokeism is explicitly illiberal, not a failing of liberalism.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
There are a class of cellular automata which follow some form of the rule "look at what your neighbors are doing, then copy the state that is most common among them". There are variations of this: sometimes the copying is probabilistic rather than deterministic so the most common is simply the most likely to be copied. If you attach some game theory or other fitness function you can get an evolutionary system where higher scoring traits are more likely to be copied and you can watch natural selection play out across the model.
What these tend to have in common is that under a broad range of parameters they eventually result in consensus. Even if all of the initial strategies are completely arbitrary, just numbered differently, you still by random chance have one of them end up more prevalent and then it snowballs out of control until it is universal or near-universal.
In the case of language, that would be useful. My point is not that the oldest form of language is the most correct. My point is more that the most common use is the most useful, unless some objective concern such as use efficiency or uniqueness can overcome that. Having minor dialectic enclaves within a language are burdensome and confusing. Therefore, the burden is on all new changes to prove themselves worthy of the cost of breaking consensus. If I lived in Chaucer's time and everyone said "axe", if that was just what that word meant, I would likewise oppose changing it to "ask" for no reason. But if 95% of people say "ask" and 5% of people say "axe" then, unless they've got a really good reason, it is useful to pressure them to conform and bring the language back together instead of splintering it, or trying to convert the remaining 95% their way.
MathWizard
Good things are good
6mo ago
That's merely the distinction between why they think it's wrong in the first place, not the harm reduction variable.
That is, a general form of the "Harm Reduction" argument says that if thing A is bad because it leads to bad outcomes, then a decriminalized harm reduction environment where it can be done more safely with fewer negative outcomes is good because, although the thing is still bad, it's less bad here and they were going to do it anyway.
The tradeoff is that you are implicitly endorsing the behavior in exchange for this harm reduction. This argument doesn't really depend on the type of harm involved. If someone is being non-consensually harmed by DV, and this is extra bad, then the harm reduction is even more good, and the implicit endorsement and incentives are more bad, and presumably these are proportional so it should still be worthwhile or not for the same reasons as with drug use.
I suppose you could try to make specific mathematical arguments about the tradeoff values where harm reduction facilities for DV would be less effective at reducing harm and more legitimizing to DV such that the net effect would flip signs for this but not for drugs, but we've never tried it before, nobody has that data, and nobody who advocates for harm reduction for drugs seems to do any math or acknowledge tradeoffs in the first place.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9mo ago
This overtime proposal is interesting since it only rewards people who are already working more than 40 hours a week.
Policies like this always take too static/naive of a world view. You imagine how people currently behave, and This rewards people who are "working" more than 40 hours a week after all of the employers and employees update their behavior to exploit the new system. Instead of offering a 40 hour week at $20 an hour, companies can offer $10 an hour for 40 hours and then with 10 $30/hour "overtime hours" of make-work to make up the difference. Maybe they'll have people be "on call" so it counts as overtime but doesn't actually add work.
And then the salaried people will all want to be "hourly" so they can get two thirds of their pay count as "overtime". Your $80k/yr Secretary and your $300k/yr chief engineer are going to become hourly employees whose total yearly pay just happens to coincidentally always adds up to approximately $80k and $300k respectively, but technically half of it is overtime. A lot of the more highly paid people already work more than 40 hours per week anyway, so it wouldn't be too hard for the business to fudge the values around and count their pay as overtime. And for the people who don't, again I'm sure the business could just make make-work for them to technically count as overtime, while shuffling the numbers around to keep their total pay the same, or even less, since if the employee is paying less taxes their effective pay is higher even at a lower nominal value. And that's why the companies would go through the effort of doing this. Why pay $60k for an employee when you can pay $50k to one who gets to evade taxes via loopholes?
I get the sentiment of wanting to pay blue collar workers more in a way that doesn't enable welfare leeches. But this isn't the way to do it without some serious modifications to fix the incentive structure.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
What gardening plants/projects/techniques have high value per effort? Now that I'm married and we have our own place I actually have control over a garden rather than helping with my parents as I did growing up. I'm fairly picky about what foods I like to eat, but there's still a wide range within that, and my wife is less picky, so we have a vegetable garden with a bunch of stuff. We also recently got a variety of berry bushes we are trying to go, and I'm experimenting with growing potatoes in cloth bags. So right now we have a bunch of different plants and I don't especially know any of the details about which ones like what conditions or what makes the difference between a mediocre yield and a good yield. We put down mulch to help block weeds, and a wire fence to keep out critters, but aside from that, what are things I can do that are especially beneficial relative to their effort and cost? Also, which plants give disproportionately high value relative to their effort to grow? For context, I am in the northeast U.S. with a relatively unshaded yard, at least where the garden is, and partially clay-ish soil.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
What's the best way for me to upgrade to Windows 11?
I've had my current computer running Windows 8.1 for about 10 years. When Windows 10 came out a bunch of people complained about it and I was happy with what I had so I never upgraded. And no longer being forced to update my computer suddenly and without my permission was really convenient. I've upgraded the actual physical computer itself multiple times, basically ship of Theseusing out parts as they wore out or just got outdated such that at this point I don't think a single component is the same as it was 10 years ago, but when the hard drive got upgraded I cloned it over so I had continuity of experience, and it stayed on Windows 8.1. So most of the actual computer parts right now are two years old and mid to high end, but some are older and cheaper.
Gradually though, the amount of videogames that I can't play because they don't work on Windows 8.1 has increased and become rather inconvenient, so it's probably time to switch. Unfortunately, the time period where I can do that for free has long passed, presumably because they don't want people digging up old decrepit computers in order to recycle the windows keys. And some... nautical attempts at downloading and manually upgrading didn't work, I'm not entirely sure why, but I eventually gave up.
My computer skills are kind of mishmash hacked together by necessity. I did build my own computer myself, but only with a lot of googling, advice from my brother, and suffering. I would very much prefer not to have to learn more command line registry nonsense, but can probably follow step by step instructions if I have to. So I think my best bet is to just buy a new hard drive with Windows 11 installed on it, but I'm not sure. I don't actually want a new computer, I want my computer, but able to play modern games. I would like to keep continuity of experience as much as possible, including if possible all my files and folders, their positions on the desktop, my hundreds of Firefox tabs that I use in lieu of bookmarks. What's the best route for me to take to get my computer upgraded with as little difficulty as possible?
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
I think the implication was that the "solution" actually solved their homelessness (ie housing them, finding them jobs, treating their mental illnesses) rather than solving the issue of them being unpleasant for locals, like kicking them out or throwing them in jail. It's not a real solution if you simply push them off to be someone else's problem, then you're just in a prisoner's dilemma where everyone does that to each other.
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
9mo ago
I tentatively expect this to shift things towards Trump.
There's an old article on SSC: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/
about how right wing politics are optimized towards surviving, ie in an apocalypse, and left wing politics are optimized for thriving when there are plenty of resources. When things are tough you make tough decisions and sacrifices in order to survive, and make stable family units that can replace the people who inevitably die. Which right wing politics are optimized for. When things are great and there's plenty to go around then you can do whatever you want and be inefficient but free and happy, and anyone trying to restrict you is doing it for selfish reasons, so you should ignore them, which left wing politics are optimized for.
Maslow's Hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid, but perhaps it would be more appropriate to tip it sideways, so the lower baser needs are on the right while the higher needs are on the left, as those are their strengths.
When things are tough, people want a tough leader who does what needs to be done, who will ensure their basic necessities, security, and establish confidence and project strength. Regardless of whether Trump is actually more effective at this than Harris, he certainly appears that way superficially. I expect more swing votes to shift towards Trump compared to the counterfactual scenario where these floods did not happen, though I have no idea how strong of an effect this will be, so not sure if it will matter or even be statistically significant.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10mo ago
Better yet, just close the loopholes on capital gains taxes.
If you buy $100 mil of stock and it grows to $1.1 bil, you have capital gains of $1 billion. Someone needs to pay capital gains taxes on that $1 billion. Figure out exactly how each wealthy family is paying less tax, and change the laws so that that process results in an identical tax burden. If you sell the stock, you pay tax. If you give the stock as a gift or inheritance, have the tax burden stay attached to that stock and then when they sell it, it gets taxed. If people take out loans using the stock as collateral, make sure the tax burden stays attached to that stock, which deflates its value because eventually some day it will be sold and whoever sells it owes the tax out of the proceeds. The only way the tax never gets paid is if the stock crashes in price, in which case the stock didn't actually generate a real profit that needs to be taxed, and nothing was dodged.
Inheritance and estate taxes shouldn't be relevant here, just tax the profit directly when it's realized, no matter who is currently holding the bag.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3mo ago
As a general rule, actions which are immediately and directly harmful to others should be outlawed by the state. Actions which are generally anti-social but via some combination of indirectness, mildness, or fundamental to freedom or other universal human rights are not appropriate targets for the State's jurisdiction should be shamed and shunned but technically permitted. Actions which are neutral or have primarily personal impact (no externalities) should be tolerated. Actions which are positive but indirect should be socially praised and encouraged. Actions which are strongly positive, and have direct and objective measuremes should be subsidized, funded, or directly done by the State.
I see no reason why actions being done related to sex or done by women should be exceptions to this rule one way or another. Harmful actions like rape should be illegal. Anti-social actions like spreading STDS or having children outside of marriage should be shamed. Non-diseased non-procreative sex should be mostly ignored/tolerated. Having healthy happy relationships should be celebrated. Having reproductive and well-run families should be subsidized.
Half the problem is society and the media shaming housewives and celebrating career-obsession and promiscuity. If that just stopped a lot of people would have nicer relationships and families of their own volition, no compulsion required. Just stop digging the hole deeper.
MathWizard
Good things are good
6mo ago
I don't think I mind the mythologizing all that much. There were a lot of brave people who helped slaves before and during the civil war, they deserve credit. As long as it's directionally true (Harriet Tubman did actually help slaves), I don't mind her being a stand-in for the credit that they deserve.
What I do object to is attempts to elevate her beyond that, especially in the role of a political leader, which she was not. Andrew Jackson was the President of the United States. He's on our money because we put Presidents on money (And Benjamin Franklin, because he was important in founding the nation). All of the leaders in Civ games are Presidents, Kings, Chiefs, etc: actual historical rulers, because you as the player are making the decisions controlling your nation. Harriet Tubman was not. Every single thing she said could be true and she still wouldn't belong on money or in Civ because, despite being a good person, she wasn't actually a political leader. It's a category error.
MathWizard
Good things are good
14d ago
Framing things in terms of "pro-single-mother" vs "anti-single-mother" makes about as much sense as being "pro-orphan" or "anti-orphan". You can believe that a situation is bad to be in and therefore want to help people who happen to be in that situation AND try to prevent people from falling into that situation AND not Goodhart the numbers by killing them.
DO: Help kids with no parents with money and support structures (without actively incentivizing the status)
DO: Try to prevent people from becoming orphans.
DON'T: Reduce the number of orphans by killing them
Really, a child of a single parent is just a half-orphan. Therefore
DO: Help single parent families with money and support structures (without actively incentivizing the status)
DO: Try to prevent people from becoming single-parents.
DON'T: Reduce the number of single-parents by killing them (or the children)
All of this follows trivially from the quality of life the child can expect, on average, in each state:
Full family > Single Parent Family > Orphan > Death
Whether you want more or fewer single parent families then depends on which direction you're coming from. Trying to pin people down into "pro" or "anti" single parents only makes sense if these were terminal ends rather than proxies for quality of life.
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
3d ago
Has anyone done work for Data Annotation or other similar online AI labeling jobs? I have a PhD in math, and have spent the past few years doing mathematical modeling in Postdocs only to realize that I don't really like writing and publishing papers. Some combination of not feeling like the work matters, getting bored of working on the same project for a long time without any feedback, and then eventually finding out that nobody thought my paper was interesting. Mehhhhhhh. And then I lose motivation and do lower quality work and my next paper is worse. I need to get out of academia. But I also don't really know what else I want to do. I'm good at math. I'm decent at programming, but I don't have experience making truly functional consumer-facing apps, all of my coding has been mathematical models that I run myself and keep tinkering with to add features whenever I want to experiment with what happens when different features or parameters of the model get tweaked.
I'm also settled down in a medium-sized town with existing but limited local career options. I have a house, and a wife who is very attached to her job and family, so remote work is vastly preferable. I'm also pathologically terrified of getting stuck in a boring 9-5 office job that eats my life away. I very much like the flexibility of working from home.
So... at least for now, Data Annotation looks promising? The advertisement claims that it pays $40/hr for Math and Programming talents, which I think I can do (unless they're super ultra competitive and only give the good work to people better than me?). The internet consensus seems to be that it's not a scam, but you might have trouble getting enough work to do it full time. And I could work my own hours, and work on discrete completable projects that feel more gamey and give feedback.
Does anyone have direct experience with this and can provide a more accurate and detailed account? Also, I think there are a couple of other similar companies that do this, so I'm not sure whether I should apply to one of those instead if they're better somehow. Or if I should apply to multiple and split my time between them in order to get a better pickings of the higher paying work? Or do you just anti-recommend the entire thing because it's not worth it? I'd like to hear thoughts and opinions from people who have either done this or know people who have done this, or know of similar remote work for someone with my talents.
Do some people enjoy being raped?
I normally don't wade this deep into controversial gender stuff, but... once I had this thought it won't leave my head. It's super anti-memetic, the sort of thing that if true nobody would want to admit and everyone who found out would suppress other than misogynists who people would ignore. If it were known to be true and widely admitted then rapists would just use it as an excuse, therefore the media/scientists/everyone lie and say it's not?
A bunch of people have rape fetishes. They are aroused by power and strength, or the courage and audacity to defy social conventions, or the idea of being so desirable that they drive someone insane and make them lose control. Or I've heard someone describe being raised in a super conservative household where you need to be pure and chaste, but they secretly want sex, so fantasize about being raped so that they could experience sex but it wouldn't be their fault and they haven't done anything wrong. I personally can imagine scenarios in which as a teenager a hot girl could have offered to have sex with me and I'd say no because I was a good boy who didn't do that sort of thing, but maybe would have ultimately been happy if she had forcibly insisted? But that never happened so I don't actually know.
Now of course, fantasies are not reality. Actual rape is going to be more violent, less perfectly tailored to someone's ideals, more terrifying, and probably with a much less attractive person than in an imaginary hypothetical. Lots of people have fantasies that they wouldn't actually want to carry out in real life. But it seems like the translation should be nonzero. And the translation of that it actual rapes is also nonzero. That is, if the proportion of people with rape fetishes is A, the proportion of those people who would enjoy actually being raped is B, and the proportion of those people who experience rape is C, and if all of these proportions are nonzero (and not so tiny as to pragmatically be zero), then the product, ABC is the proportion of people who have actually been raped and enjoyed the experience.
And it seems like they would experience an entirely different set of issues than normal rape victims. On the one hand, the experience is going to be a lot less traumatic: Instead of a horrifying and degrading experience they got to have an enjoyable if unexpected sexual encounter. On the other hand, they probably feel guilt and shame for their feelings, which they cannot voice without severe backlash from society. Rape is "the worst crime" possible, it's victims are permanently "Victims" and "Survivors". Its existence is a weapon to bash men and promote women. Mainstream culture is super well equipped to support and assist typical rape victims, at the expense of absolutely silencing and shunning anyone who might have not had a terrible experience and not been traumatized by it. And that itself might just amplify the shame and guilt and trauma for this subset of people. Like the kid who doesn't cry until they know someone is watching, I suspect that this subset of rape victims might not be traumatized from the rape itself, and wouldn't ever be traumatized in a different society, but are traumatized by our society's reaction to them and the need to stay "in the closet" so to speak, because of the backlash they'd receive if anyone found out the truth.
I'm not crazy, am I? Is this secretly a thing that nobody is allowed to talk about? I'm not sure it's really actionable if true. I don't think it makes rapists less horrible people even if they get lucky and target someone who secretly enjoys it, because the expected value of their crime is still catastrophically negative. So it wouldn't indicate reducing criminal or social penalties for rapists. And I don't think it would indicate reducing support or funding for rape victims, a majority of which are still traumatized in the normal way that everyone thinks they are. But maybe it would suggest something along the lines of... giving people the benefit of the doubt? Having more options for how people are allowed to cope with rape on their own terms without assuming they are "victims" when they might just be fine? I'm not sure this makes much difference, but I'd like to hear thoughts and/or statistical/scientific evidence for or against this (if that's even meaningful given the massive reporting biases this would create)
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