MathWizard
formerly hh26
No bio...
User ID: 164
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Oh hey, I didn't even think of using flair for that. That's pretty convenient, I'll probably do that for a couple months.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
In my opinion, shadowbans are an appropriate measure in only two circumstances:
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the target is a bot, not a real human
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the target is an alt who is attempting to evade regular public bans
Precisely because these are cases where a real ban is ineffective because the target will just try again with new accounts repeatedly, and the shadowness helps prevent them from knowing it's necessary. Shadowbanning a real human for regular rule breaking is sinister and evil, the only purpose it serves is to reduce transparency for mod decisions.
Coming from a center-right Christian, I don't think you're doing anything wrong. I think the drive for making groupings reflect the population distribution of the country as a whole is misguided, overlysimplistic, and based on Goodharting. The argument for forced diversity is generally based on two premises (I apologize if these aren't steelmanned enough, but it's the impression I get from the mainstream):
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Lack of diversity is evidence of racism. If everyone were truly equally welcome, you would have equal representation, so the fact that you don't proves you must have secret prejudices and institutionally racist structures that are driving other races away.
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Diversity is a good unto itself. More diverse groups will be better and happier, and more cohesive.
I partially agree with 2, with a lot of caveats, most notably that I don't think race is the appropriate way to measure this. I strong disagree with 1, not least of which because it largely contradicts 2. Everyone is different, and has different talents and skills and likes and dislikes. This is a good thing, and should be celebrated. This is real diversity, the way God made us. It is written:
"We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith; if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully." - Romans 12:6-8
Different people are good at different things, which allows you to specialize. Maybe one person is a skilled businessman and earns lots of money to donate, maybe another person is good with children and helps in the daycare, and a third person is good at socializing and helps welcome new people. And this is true both inside and outside of the church. If one person is really good at electronics, and another person is strong and likes chopping down trees, then it would be silly to roll dice to decide what careers they end up in, they should do the thing that they're talented at and enjoy doing. And if it turns out to be the case that there are statistical difference in the talents and pre-dispositions of people based on race or gender, then this is perfectly acceptable within the Christian worldview. Similarly, if there are outliers/counterexamples, people who don't perfectly conform to racial/gendered stereotypes, then this is perfectly acceptable too. We should be celebrating people for who they are, not for whether they do or do not conform to stereotypes. If 90% of your skilled businessman charity givers are men and 90% of your daycare helpers are women, the woke would see this as a problem. The sexist logic says:
A. Being a skilled businessman with lots of money makes you better than someone who's good with children
B. Men are better at being businessman and women are better with children
C. Therefore, men are better than women.
The sexist says this is perfectly acceptable and the correct world view. The woke says that C is obviously wrong, and A is true, therefore B must be false, and everyone is equally good at everything. Which seems to me like an unhealthy perspective on diversity, and a denial of observable reality. The Christian says that A is false, therefore it doesn't matter whether B is true or not, it follows that C is false (or at least is not immediately implied by this logic, and is accepted as false for other reasons). We are all different, and equally valuable and loved children of God the way he made us.
I apologize for sort of going off on a tangent there, but I feel this is important as the foundation for the rejection of the woke view. We can reject artificial notions of equality and diversity because we have our own view which is founded in the Bible (or classical liberalism, for the atheists with similar worldviews). We can do things which the woke consider discriminatory and be confident that they aren't because they are working off of mistaken premises.
Bringing this back to race, we can then accept that there are nonrandom but not absolute trends in the talents, behavior, culture, values, and needs of people of different races, and that these are a good thing to be celebrated, not something to be denied or suppressed. But this also means that different people will feel comfortable in different environments, and that this will trend via race. Some people like loud exciting worship music, some people like more classic and solemn. Some people like shouting out when they agree with something the preacher says, some people find that distracting and want focus on the words being said. If you haven't already, I highly recommend you attend a couple services at your local black church. If you already have, try to recall the similarities and differences. And also think about other churches you've been too, regardless of the predominant race of atendees. Pay attention not just to the message being preached, but all of the differences in style and presentation. And which ones you liked/disliked. Why are you attending the church you are, and not a different church? Is it just because it's closest? Is it specific people you know and if they swapped churches you would follow them? And why is your church it the way it is. If your church and your neighboring church completely swapped styles, music/schedule/messages/pastors, would you keep going to your physical church that behaved completely different, or would you swap to the other church that became behaviorally equivalent to what you have now?
I can't say for certain, but a large component of it is in style and presentation. Different people like different things and, if you and the black church merged/mixed, and ended up with two ethnically mixed churches, you would inevitably have a bunch of people dissatisfied with the style and presentation of their new church, either because you kept things the same and the new people would lose the style they had before, or because you changed your style to match what the new people wanted, in which case the old people would lose the style they had before. Diversity doesn't just mean making every location a homogeneous mix that partially caters to the lowest common denominator to appeal to as many people as possible simultaneously, it sometimes means having a diversity of locations that appeal to lots of people. And this is something to be celebrated. Similarly, a television show doesn't need to have aliens and dragons, sappy romantic drama, and masculine sports, all in the same show (though you can do that if you really want to), you can have different shows that appeal to different tastes. And, importantly, you then don't gatekeep by stereotyping people and restricting them to only the thing you designed for them, you let people choose out of their own free will and they will sort themselves out according to their actual interests.
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That said, you don't want to take this too far. If we specialize too much and things segregate too much then we become fractured and separate communities, rather than one body of Christ. Imagine if all of the rich businessmen went to one church and had no one to take care of the children, and all of the daycare helpers went to another church and didn't have enough money. People with different talents and traits should work together and help each other and jointly advance the cause of Christ. While this does not require you to all attend the same church services, it would be good if you did stuff together and acted as part of the same cohesive community. My local (predominantly white) church regularly interacts with a nearby (predominantly black) church. The pastors are good friends and frequently meet, occasionally arrange joint services where both congregations come together and have both pastors preach, or occasionally the pastors will swap for a week and preach to the other congregation, and occasionally set up service projects to help out the local community and spread the gospel. In so far as there are cultural difference between our churches, both of us have valuable perspectives and things to say and share and teach each other, so it's good to be exposed to their perspective and view each other as part of the same overall community. But at the end of the day, I don't think we need to draw a meaningful distinction between their church or any other church, which also have different cultures and valuable perspectives, and we don't need to force or incentivize their congregation to join our church or vice versa. They're always welcome at our church, and we're welcome at theirs, and that's a good and acceptable system which isn't racist. If the rest of secular society had a better foundation for what's right and moral without being paranoid about racism, they could do something similar and function in a similar way. Sadly, they do not.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I don't think it's accurate to model progressives as a unified cohesive group working together to advance a single cause. Even though in some cases they emergently work together, and those are the cases where they tend to have the most influence, fundamentally I think the entire movement is founded on and obtains so much success because it's based on defecting in prisoner dilemmas that were previously in mutual cooperative outcomes, which means they are perfectly willing to defect against each other as well. (For instance, the only reason pretending to be a victim or oppressed makes you stronger instead of weaker is because it exploits the kindness of other people who take it on good faith and want to protect victims, and this exploitation in turn consumes the goodwill of people who do that)
So it's probably more accurate to model progressives as a collection of minor factions vying for power within the overall system, not as the entire system itself. Which means any particular faction benefits when they take actions which reduce the prosperity, or state capacity, of the state as a whole but increase their own share of the state. Suppose faction A is powerful and influential enough to control 1% of the entire U.S. government (which we will call 0.01 units of power), and by banning certain types of construction techniques they simultaneously cripple the ability to build bridges, reducing state capacity by 1%, and simultaneously cripples and/or takes over faction B which previously built bridges and controlled 1% of the entire U.S. government. By doing this, faction A now controls 2% of a government with 99% of the previous state capacity, and thus has 0.0198 units of power. Because the loss in state capacity was distributed to everyone, and faction A doesn't pay the entire cost. Repeat x100 factions and now you have a classic public goods dilemma.
This doesn't mean state capacity will always decrease, if a faction can increase their power by increasing the power of the part of the state that they control directly, say by stealing it from the private sector and/or private citizens, then they'll do so. But because no single faction controls the entire government, (the actual elected politicians in a political party are only one faction among many, and even they can be divided into smaller subfactions), factions don't benefit just by increasing state capacity in general, it's only if it's the part that they control directly. (Note, this is why "defund the police" didn't really go anywhere, not because it was a terrible idea (it was), but because the people in charge of the decision are also the people who have more power from having police. Similarly, we see corporate welfare from both political parties despite it being unpopular, because the politicians in control increase their own power by doing it.
Although it's hard to make specific predictions from this model, because I have not been specific at all about what does or does not count as a "faction". But the general idea is that viewing progressives, or any large organization, as a single monolithic entity with a single agenda is oversimplified. It works on issues where every faction with power has the same agenda (for instance, spreading progressivism by dismantling and conquering non-progressive factions), but fails when they come into conflict with each other, or one has the opportunity to advance itself at the expense of the others.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Counterpoint, I check upvotes on my own posts some time afterwards and use them to retroactively approximate how much minor engagement they received: people who read the post and liked it but didn't feel like they needed to comment/respond. There's a difference between a post with 2 karma and 0 replies versus one with 8 karma and 0 replies. Assuming Although technically this can't distinguish between a pot with 8 upvotes minus 6 downvotes, and one with just 2 upvotes, but assuming I haven't written anything especially controversial then downvote proportion is probably low and it gives a proxy.
So I can in some sense using this as feedback to tailor future posts and determine which topics people do and don't want to hear about, or methods of writing, or length, or whatever. On the other hand, this might just be my monkey brain trying to get positive feedback for agreeing with consensus. But I think there's something valuable here that would be lost, even if something else would be gained. A voting system that could only be seen by the commenter would give this feedback without influencing public opinions, but that seems kind of silly and I'm not sure voters would care enough to use it.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr 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
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I would argue that this relation is flipped if you compare paid prostitutes to free porn, as opposed to paid porn. That is, paid porn is worse than prostitutes is worse than free porn, because paying for sex distorts everything and makes male-female relationships transactional rather than cooperative. There is a component to many relationships in which men give money for sex, and women give sex for money, even if this transaction is implicit. My belief is that the more explicit this transaction is, and the stronger it is, the worse the relationship is. Or, at least, the lower the ceiling for how good it is becomes. A healthy relationship ought to involve people who genuinely like each other doing things either that they both like, or doing things the other person likes because they want to be kind to their partner who they genuinely care about, not because they expect to get something in return. No real relationship is going to achieve that level perfectly, but the closer you get the better the relationship is (assuming both people are doing it and not just one person slaving away for the other).
Explicitly paying for sex is about as transactional is it gets, and normalizes it in the minds of both parties involved. Men who pay for sex are going to be more willing to pay in the future, are going to believe that they have less intrinsic value as a sexual partner. If they have low self confidence this makes them easier for women to take advantage of in the future and exploit for money, or if they have high self confidence it will make them feel more entitled to sex as long as they have money and respect women less as something other than a piece of merchandise. On the other side, women who are are paid for sex, or sexual content over the internet, will also come to believe that they have less intrinsic value other than their bodies, and/or will view men as having less value aside from their money. It actually sickens me when I see the way some female streamers view their own audiences, just cash registers waiting to be emptied.
While in-person prostitution is probably not as bad as online simping, because it involves some semblance of real connection as you explain, I think the main reason it's less bad is simply because it limits the damage. An extremely attractive woman can only ensnare so many men if she has to spend a night with each one in person, while an attractive woman online can ensnare thousands or possibly millions.
Meanwhile, I don't think free porn has the same damage because it's much lower stakes, and therefore lower emotional stakes. A man is much less likely to fall in love with an actress he saw in a few videos on the web than he is to a camgirl who keeps talking to him directly and thanking him by name every time he donates $100. And a woman who puts up an amateur video on a website is less likely to repeatedly do it day after day week after week until it becomes a part of her life like a camgirl or prostitute is.
It is inevitable that money will be some component of relationships, just like politics. And similarly, the more it can be minimized the better.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I don’t actually see prostitution as dangerously more transactional than 21st century intercourse, or maybe history’s intercourse.
Sounds like the slippery slope keeps on slipping. I don't entirely disagree that there's a lack of categorical difference, but see that more as an inditement of 21st century intercourse.
Or rather, there is a spectrum. Everyone is different and has different levels of promiscuity and transactionality, and prostitution is on the far end (imo the bad end) of both but not quite an outlier. I don't think pointing out that it has existed for a long historically has much bearing on whether or not it's healthy. Lots of people have done lots of unhealthy and destructive things throughout history. And lots of people didn't, again everyone is different. And I would argue that the people in the past with less transactionality in their relationships had, with positive but less than 100% correlation, healthier relationships.
Additionally, historically in a lot of places going to a prostitute was seen as shameful or taboo or low class. Although this is not universal, it was at least true in the near past, so pushes towards normalizing it are part of a modern phenomenon at least locally. Which I view as bad because people respond to incentives, so normalizing it will increase its frequences, which then funges against healthy relationships. Which we can see occuring in real time. Gender relations have not been going well recently. An awful lot of men are alone and angry and purposeless. And they respond in different ways. Some become angry incels who hate women, some become pickup artists who try to trick women into sex on false pretenses. Or chads stringing along dozens are women. And women aren't happy either, with femcels, and feminists, and the MeToo movement. Things have gotten worse for an awful lot of people within the past few decades, and while I can't say that sex work alone is responsible for all of it, it's both a symptom and a cause of some of these problems.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
If you want to cut medical costs in the US in a meaningful way, you need to cut wages, salaries and benefits for doctors/nurses/other employees. The end.
Not quite. You need to cut total spending, which is spending per capita multiplied by the number of employees. So an alternate solution is to cut employees and manhours spent doing stuff. My impression is that a large component of cost disease is an oversized beurocracy: receptionists, lawyers, and people who deal with piles and piles and piles of paperwork and insurance companies. Stuff that isn't directly providing value to customers, didn't exist a hundred years ago, but is necessary as a result of the way the system currently works. If we found a way to streamline the process, cut a bunch of unnecessary regulations while keeping the few that actually matter, then a lot of these people could be let go and reduce costs without reducing the salaries of the employees who remain.
This isn't to say that some salaries couldn't simultaneously be reduced. If you make it easier to get licensed as a doctor then that increases the supply and thus reduces the market price. But these two avenues for cost reduction can be approached independently from each other.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr 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
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Yeah, I think that makes sense. Looking at some of the graphs in that link, the fastest growing category is "Personal Care Aides", ie people who take care of old people in nursing homes and stuff. Which makes sense why that's growing: as people live longer and longer the fraction of old people increases. In some cases, old people would have been taken care of by their families instead of by a paid health care worker. But in many other cases they would have just died.
I suppose from this perspective then, cost disease is largely akin to social security. A bunch of young people pay in more than they take out for their insurance and taxes, and then when they're old they are subsidized by the next generation of young people. Which seems like a massive principal agent problem, but not one with an easy solution unless we want to let all the old poor people die in order for young people to keep more of their own money and get better cheaper healthcare while they're young (but not live as long unless they invest their extra money in a healthcare retirement account for themselves)
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Maybe kids are great qualitatively but they are certainly low status.
This seems like a solvable problem: make having kids higher status. You can't just unilaterally declare something to be high status by dictatorial fiat, but there are things you can do to push in that direction, or even more easily, stop pushing in the opposite direction. I think this one of my main complaints against the Blue Tribe, and all this stuff about the destruction of the family unit, is that they seem to be deliberately lowering the status of children and families. There's a qualitative difference between removing oppressive structures that force people into certain lifestyles, and actively disparaging those lifestyles and mocking people who like them.
Nobody should be forced to be a stay at home parent and raise seven children, but if somebody chooses that lifestyle then we should celebrate them as a strong person and a valuable contributor to society. Not mock them as backwards and oppressed and quaint. Everyone who mocks and disparages traditional families and cultures lowers the effective status of those lifestyles and makes other people less likely to choose them. People shouldn't be forced between a high status job versus a low status family, they should be able to have a high status family, provided they actually do a competent job of raising kids. But traditional families are yesterdays fashion, and red-coded which makes them automatically distasteful to the blue tribe. Families didn't used to be low status, but in the process of destroying gender roles our society has completely and utterly ignored the collateral damage, resulting in the current situation. Victory at any costs indeed.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I'm not convinced that this is truly the Molochian equilibrium in the long run. The whole race to the bottom via market forces occurs in highly competitive industries because any industry that chooses morals or slack over profit gets outcompeted and replaced by the more ruthless ones that optimize for profit alone. The market forces in culture cause cultures and ideologies which deliberately propagate themselves and suppress other cultures to spread, while cultures which are tolerant and allow dissent get replaced. Things which are more likely to spread are more likely to exist, even if they sacrifice things we like in exchange for spreadability. It's just the tautology of evolution applied more generally.
So in a cultural sense, people who sacrifice families for careers will have more wealth, and thus more power and status in a society that rewards wealth with status. And thus this ideology spreads conditional on society, or significant subsets of society, conveying status for wealth. But actual evolution still exists, so this is inherently unstable. People who don't reproduce will get replaced by people who do reproduce. We see this via demographic shifts, as some races and cultural subsets reproduce much more than others and their relative populations increase. Now, maybe some of those people will be culturally captured by the Molochian culture giving status for wealth, but some of them won't, especially if they have a culture which has anti-bodies against this particular meme.
I don't think the Molochian future is one where anti-family leftists take over everything and then the human population dies out, it's one where all the anti-family people get replaced, either by an offshoot that re-prioritizes family, or more likely by a new culture driven by immigrants or Amish or something who resist the temptation to change cultures, keep having large families, and eventually grow to large enough numbers to impose their own views on status
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I too would agree with "the core SJ movement >99.9% believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil". But I would not agree with "the core SJ movement >99.9% earnestly believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil. Because their beliefs are driven in part by corrupt biases.
I think trying to make a distinction between someone genuinely believing that they're making the world a better place, and having corrupt motivations that advance their own interest, is a false dichotomy. Both can be true simultaneously and interlinked. I know Scott wrote a post on this on SSC, but I don't remember which one, if anyone does please let me know. But the point is through something involving or similar to cognitive dissonance, people are biased in favor of beliefs that justify things they already wanted to do. Rich people are more likely to believe in trickle down economics, or that poor people are lazy and deserve to be poor. People who are good at art are more likely to believe that art is beneficial to society. People who are charismatic and politically ambitious are more likely to believe that the old politicians are corrupt and evil but they themselves are incorruptible. Only to gain power and then be corrupt. Scott's conjecture is that this is evolutionary advantageous because lying is hard and possible to see through, but if you convince yourself then you don't have to explicitly lie, and can honestly convince people of your position, gain power, and then your brain switches gears and you reap the benefits of being corrupt and in power.
So the fact that many of their beliefs and practices of Social Justice involving cancellation and being an ally happen to have the property that they remove non-members from positions of power and replace them with members, is highly relevant. Even if the individual members are not consciously corrupt grifters trying to deceive people, those properties affect them subconsciously and shape their practices. You could imagine a more Christian-like SJ movement that believed in forgiveness and redemption, where people in power accused of racism could repent and be forgiven. But then SJ members couldn't create holes above them to advance their own careers, so they are incentivized not to believe in forgiveness for powerful people.
Beliefs are complicated, and not absolute. So I think each individual SJW has a mixture of genuine belief and corrupt motivations. For the majority of SJW people, they probably don't seek direct power, I believe the corrupt motivation is just that they find poor people distasteful, especially rural poor people, and need an excuse to keep hating them instead of feeling guilty about their privilege. Everyone needs an outgroup to channel their negative feelings and blame for the fact that their life isn't as good as they wish it was, so everyone is biased towards exaggerating the flaws of whoever their chosen outgroup is. So they end up believing their movement is true, but corrupt motivation is a key and relevant part of explaining and understanding that belief: they weren't reasoned into the position via facts and logic.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
(I don't think that's the exact article I'm thinking of, but it contains some of the same concept.)
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For the thought leaders and developers of this idealogy, it is largely about career advancement or just status/prestige/respect from the masses. For the majority of people, the status/prestige/respect is more about being associated with the movement and in the good graces of the leaders and each other. That is, Joe Schmoe doesn't need to personally become the Diversity and Inclusion Officer in order to benefit. If their friend becomes the Diversity and Inclusion Officer and then starts suppressing other people then Joe Schmoe benefits by having a high status friend.
In the context of internet discussions (in the days before cancel culture), the benefits are marginal, but so are the costs. It's not like it's a huge investment of resources and effort to yell at people on the internet that they're stupid and wrong. And I don't think it's inaccurate to describe as, at least in part, status seeking. People want to feel smart and morally superior and convince their peers that they're right and their opponent is wrong. And hijacking the definition of racism or sexism in order to tarnish your opponent with that label is an easy way to do that. This doesn't officially put you in power, but it does give social power/respect/esteem to the conqueror and potentially ostracize the victim, so it is, on a micro scale, a similar effect.
More importantly, the ideology has changed over time. Maybe the old original incarnation of SJW was less about power than it is now and just happened to be coincidentally good at acquiring it because of how powerful the label "racist" is, but the original adherents were true and honest believers (I'm not convinced of this, I think this philosophy has been brewing in the universities for decades, but I guess the modern incarnation took off online). And then as soon as it started to gain power it started to acquire power-seekers. Again, not necessarily people with the explicit psychopathic desire to lie in order to gain power, but the kind of people who instinctively like and imitate winners and high status people, and despise low status people, so end up adopting the behaviors and beliefs of the new high status group that they see. So even if the early movement contained mostly pure believers, more and more impure believers are drawn to it as it gains power.
"Imitate and flatter high status people/groups" is absolutely an instinct most people have, which is driven in large part evolutionarily by the ability to share status and privilege, or just avoid punishment, by the high status people. Again, it doesn't mean that their beliefs aren't as literal as any other belief, but there is an extent to which it lacks genuinity. That is, if the exact same person had been born 30 years earlier they would be a devout Christian condemning Pokemon for being demonic and trying to cancel people who like rock music, because that's what the consensus was at the time. And maybe they would have literally believed in Jesus and that they were making the world a better place. But they still believe it more because it's what they've been told and what the people around them respect and less because it's something they reasoned themselves into. There's a lack of genuinity to it.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I was not previously aware of this event, but my guess is that this is an isolated demand for rigor. All of the major news outlets are biased and unreliable when it comes to politics and science, and have tons of skeletons in their closet regarding mistakes that have either not been retracted, or not retracted very publicly or noticeably. They probably all belong under "generally unreliable", and I would support Fox News being put there IF all of the other major news sources were subject to the same level of scrutiny and most of them placed in the same bin.
If it's being considered in isolation though, then I expect people to use this as an opportunity to discredit and censor right-wing positions by holding it to a higher standard than everyone else.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Some of that's because meaningful pathfinding AI is hard
Could this be resolved in part by having the player design routines for the AI? Like a Minecraft/Dwarf-Fortress/Factorio hybrid thing where you have a colony of NPCs and deformable terrain and you map out what paths you want them to take and what areas to go to for each activity and how to get there. Hand hold the NPC through a daily routine, and then let it copy it and/or adapt based on modular subroutines or something. It would be more effort for the player to have to manage a bunch of stuff every time they changed the terrain, but the player designing the area is going to have a better idea of what they intend than the AI is going to, and if the NPC management and automation was a core part of the gameplay experience and well-fleshed out then it wouldn't be pointless hassle for the player.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I don't think that indigenous people are inherently special, I don't think their culture or rights are any more or less deserving of consideration or privilege than those of any other human being, and I don't think they should be legally treated as meaningfully distinct from any other group of people. They're regular people, just like you or me, and they deserve the same dignity and respect for their rights that you and I deserve.
Personally, I think if they made a stronger effort to integrate and adapt to modern society they would probably end up with better economic and life outcomes, but I feel that way about most minority and/or immigrant communities. The ones that value education, technology, respect for the rule of law, tolerance of others, and stuff like that, end up doing just as well as white people, while subcultures that obsess over their race and origins, and refuse to adapt end up poor and angry. Maybe I'm mixing up culture with class, but there's not always a meaningful distinction there, a lot of subcultures feel like variations of "lower class behavior", but I think there's something extra damaging about going off into a separate physical and legal area and preventing the natural spread of ideas and behaviors that the rest of the first world uses to great success.
Which, they're free to do. And in some cases it works out fine, I think the Amish are pretty happy. But if they end up unhappy, which they often do, then I can only shrug and point out that they could at any time be regular citizens like everyone else, and instead choose to be special.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
Sounds like an inadequate equilibrium to me. That is, mass immigration has been around long enough that all of the systems, procedures, habits, and prices of goods have adapted to their existence. So a sudden rapid change is likely to disrupt a bunch of stuff. On the other hand, if illegal immigrants had not been here to begin with, or were phased outslowly, then either farms would adapt to require less labor, or raise prices on fruit so they could pay higher wages, or more local people would move to those regions and gain experience and skill doing the job, or some combination of the above.
And, even if we did conclude that cheap immigrant labor was an appropriate solution, turning a blind eye to illegal immigrants is strictly inferior to increasing legal immigration and simultaneously lowering minimum wage, or giving out migrant work visas attached to a lower minimum wage. Because then you don't have people hiring cartels to smuggle them over the border and dying along the way, and you can pick and choose to let in honest productive people instead of workers and criminals alike and hoping you end up with more of the former than the latter. Illegal immigration specifically selects for people who don't respect the law. The only reason it's being used is because there isn't bipartisan agreement that cheap immigrant labor is good, so the people who want cheap labor use illegal immigrants to get their way and circumvent the legal system and minimum wage laws.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
The original post describing Moloch from Scott in case you haven't read it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Moloch is neither evil nor good, on its own. Moloch is the blind idiot God, a process that does what it does for its own bizarre reasons that are difficult (though in some cases possible) to comprehend, is extremely powerful and difficult to resist, and does not care about you or the things you care about. It's often hard to even notice, because it's not a real person doing things for a reason, it's an emergent property of numerous people doing different things. It's the structure of incentives driving in a direction that almost nobody actually wants to go. In some instances, it will actually do things you like, though mostly by accident, and usually people only use the term for negative things. But I would argue that evolution is probably the number one notable Molochian process and I very much like many of the things it's done for me and the human race, and all of the various positive traits I have, though it's also responsible for zero-sum and negative-sum features and drives that lead to ruthlessness that I don't like. So I don't necessarily think describing something as Molochian necessarily implies that it's entirely evil, but it is usually implied at least that it's negative, or else a different term would be used, so I sort of see your point.
To address some of your other points, I agree that preferring childlessness, as an individual, is not necessarily anti-family. But I think a large subset of modern culture is anti-family, either explicitly, implicitly, or both. Just check out /r/childfree, though that's probably a bit of a weakman, I think the much more common situation is just people disvaluing children and disincentivizing it in others. Poor maternity/paternity leave, poor ability for someone to take a decade off work and then come back without crippling their career, lack of shame and social sanctions against men who impregnate women outside of marriage, or for women who get pregnant outside of marriage, lack of respect for dedicated parents who choose families instead of careers. Lack of support for homeschooling, increasing idealogical capture of schools as moral authorities replacing parents rather than as educational supplements, expansion of the welfare state and the governments role in caring for children rather than the parents, etc. All of these contribute to worse incentives to have children, which I would describe as anti-family incentives, and then people rationally respond to incentives and choose to not get married or get married later, and have fewer children, or children in less stable homes (family does not mean maximize total fecundity, it means raising happy healthy families, which massively benefits from two parents)
So I wouldn't describe people who choose not to have families for personal reasons as necessarily anti-family, but I would describe the general culture that's obsessed with careers, money, and casual sex as anti-family.
My point was that this is Molochian on a memetic sense, in that it spreads via culture and is bad for the people living in it. If the culture giving status for having a big family was memetically Molochian, it wouldn't be getting replaced so easily. But I think that it is genetically Molochian, in that as certain people have fewer children they will get replaced by people who have more. I don't think western society being wiped out and replaced by immigrants and/or Amish and/or some cult that explicitly requires all women to birth at least 10 children is a good thing, but is the direction I predict the pendulum going if the anti-family culture goes too far. I actually think that a reasonable balance involving children incentivized but not mandated such that we end up at or slightly above the replacement rate of 2.1 would be a useful anti-body against this outcome.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
People bring up the discrepancy in sentencing between white collar and blue collar crimes as a flaw in the justice system all the time and I've literally never heard this counterargument. And I have no idea why, because it makes perfect sense and reading it made me do a 180 from tentatively against this apparent double standard to tentatively in favor of it.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I'm generally of the opinion that games, and players within games, should almost always be as un-meta as possible. Each player should act according to the best strategy they can deduce that maximizes their own probability of winning. In some cases, you might choose strategies that you find more fun even if they have a lower probability of winning, but even then I consider that to be a flaw in the game: the best strategies ought to be the most fun. Or there might be actions which are technically legal in the rules but are unsportsmanlike, so it's probably fine to play nicely in that way (though again, this is a flaw in the game design).
Your relationships to other players shouldn't matter, the actual human person you're playing against should barely matter except in-so-far as it allows you insight into their tendencies and biases and intelligence that helps you predict their behavior. At least with regards to the actual decisions you make within the game, obviously you can like talk to them outside of the game while the game is happening. But you shouldn't modulate your in-game behavior based on out of game information, because the actual best strategy in the game doesn't depend on out of game stuff.
On the other hand, I also find over-optimizing out of game to be kind of unfun and cringe. The best example would be people studying chess strategies and memorizing positions and moves and stuff. Because then you're not getting better by playing the game, you're just studying for an interactive exam. The fun part of the game is deducing strategies and figuring stuff out and encountering new situations for yourself, not memorizing strategies that someone smarter than you figured out.
When you're playing the game, you should be playing the game properly. And when you're not playing the game, you should not be playing the game. Kingmaking is not playing the game properly, because it strictly reduces your position in the game, and provides no in-game benefit. The only purpose it has is meta, and thus is bad.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
I'm always suspicious of theories that conflate changes in observable group opinion with changes in the opinions of actual people. Comments are not polls, they are not proportional representations of the total quantity of people with each opinion. Maybe it's just that there are a large quantity of both pro-lockdown and anti-lockdown people, but whichever group seems to be losing keeps quiet out of fear of being criticized, while the winning group mouths off and pats each other on the back.
So we could easily see comments from a group seemingly shift completely as the environment changes, while literally no individual actually changes their own opinion or temperament. Or maybe individuals are changing their opinion because they are easily-led sheep, but we certainly can't conclude that just from the general feel of comments shifting.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1yr ago
What I do remember quite vividly is hating English class for the next two years, because as often as not it was just hours of identifying sounds in words I could already read just fine, followed by homework of more of the same, all while I would rather just be reading a book.
That just sounds like an argument in favor of better tracking. Students who have already mastered a topic, in any subject, should be allowed to test out of it and move on.
Not an actual question, just a minor announcement that I am hh26 from Reddit. In case anyone has paid enough attention to notice or remember me. I figured the migration was a good opportunity to change names. "hh26" was originally intended to be a throwaway account when I started casually participating in pro-trump subreddits, to keep my main from getting banned or tarnished by leftists reading my comment history. I eventually got bored of most of the mainstream subs and ended up using my main less and less, so I haven't posted on it in years and hh26 became my main, (I also eventually got bored of the fanatical devotion of the explicitly pro-trump subreddits, slightly before they got banned, and ended up mostly here). But I also got stuck with the name hh26 which is kind of silly and unmemorable.
Additionally, this being a new site without all the usernames claimed means I can claim something relatively normal looking like MathWizard.
I don't especially have a lot of direct relationships here, but post semi-regularly and occasionally get Quality Contributioned and would like to carry forth whatever good will and reputation I may have with me. I look forward to more interesting discussions and not being awful to each other.
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