MotteInTheEye
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User ID: 578
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
Great post, but I think the pattern you briefly mentioned at the end bears a much deeper examination.
Red Tribe America is not actually very fit at all, while Blue Tribe power centers consistently have quite a few fitness-minded individuals.
This really understates the phenomenon. As a conservative from a blue tribe stronghold, my visits to red tribe strongholds like the deep south are extremely disillusioning. It's hard to overstate what a dramatic difference there is in the obesity levels everywhere you go. And this in turn leads to much higher consumption of public health resources.
It's hard to square these realities with common sense arguments which ring true to me, like the ones you made above. It doesn't seem debatable that self-sufficiency is more a red tribe value than a blue tribe value - so why are blue tribe individuals, as a class, more self-sufficient when it comes to diet and health?
There are a number of explanations you could hypothesize: maybe personal belief in the importance of self-sufficiency is irrelevant in a system that doesn't incentivize it. Maybe if you controlled for poverty / IQ the differences are explained or the sign of the correlation flips. Maybe it's a Simpsons paradox thing where within a given region, right-wing beliefs are correlated with fitness, but the correlation doesn't hold across the whole population. But it feels like it's crying out for some sort of explanation.
MotteInTheEye
29d ago
Unfortunately it's inevitable even if every single voter fully intended to vote for quality, not agreement, simply because of the fact that you notice flaws in arguments that you disagree with much more easily than in those you agree with.
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
So all you would have to do is say "I regret my abortion" and you get a free payout? There's a rather obvious downside to this policy...
MotteInTheEye
3mo ago
There's no doubt that plenty on the right are going after Taylor Swift in cringey and conspiracy-minded ways. But I don't get Hanania's idea that she and her fans should be natural allies for the right. She's the icon of modern feminism.
MotteInTheEye
6mo ago
It seems like what you are really asking is "why are people acting like this is solely an ethnic Jewish/Arab conflict when Egypt is at least partially cooperating with Israel against Gaza." Because all of your questions are easy things answer if ethnicity isn't the only lens you use to look at the conflict. Egypt and Israel would both rather not have this impoverished and violent population incorporated into or freely mingling with their own people, and they act accordingly.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
Think of topics like "how AI algorithms discriminate against underrepresented minorities", "why do tech companies hire so few black people", "here's the latest outrageous thing Trump/Musk said on Twitter", "Amazon suppresses worker organization at its warehouses", "which tech giant has the greenest commitments and initiatives", "sexist gamers are review-bombing the latest AAA video game because the protagonist is a woman", etc etc.
MotteInTheEye
2mo ago
That post, and especially OP's interactions in the comments, is setting off my troll alarm. I think there were plenty of bait-takers, but my hunch is that OP's goal was to a) see how ludicrous of a statement he could get the sub to agree with and b) possibly trick a few people into learning some undesirable facts in the gaps that his arguments led right up to.
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
I'm not convinced by OP's arguments either, mainly because as others have pointed out it's trivial for the community to define a bar that earns respect regardless of what settings the game allows. But this is going too far. It's reasonable and inevitable to seek a more objective lens on an achievement that feels substantial to you by comparing it to what others can do / have done. It's easy to say "measure yourself by yourself - if you sink 200 hours into beating easy mode because your thumbs just won't cooperate like a normal person's then you can be just as proud of that". But the failure mode there is that we are liable to deceive ourselves and let ourselves off the hook too easily if our only standard is subjective difficulty.
MotteInTheEye
7mo ago
When my Dad was 16 or 17 (on the eve of the first OPEC embargo), he worked for summer and bought an old Cadillac. Today, not only is no job you do at 17 going to pay you enough to buy a decent car, a 'decent car' (that you buy with parental support, even) is going to be a 2000s Camry or equivalent highly functional, probably Japanese or Korean vehicle designed for middle class parents like your mom and dad.
I don't think I understand this part of your comment. I think you could buy either a very functional but uncool car like you describe, or a cooler car requiring maintenance along the lines of the old Cadillac, for $5k or so, which seems pretty achievable for a conscientious teenager to earn in three months at post-pandemic entry-level wages.
MotteInTheEye
3mo ago
That's like saying "if you were going to let the Nazis occupy France, you may as well let them occupy England too". The fact that the death penalty takes decades to apply is the result of action by its opponents, defended against mostly unsuccessfully by its proponents.
MotteInTheEye
6mo ago
The Venn diagram overlap of the sort of people who administrate hobby groups and the sort of people who bird watch is not your most testosterone-fueled set.
MotteInTheEye
9mo ago
For me at least, this is just a change within the last few months. Up until then my Facebook feed was exclusively activity of my friends, groups I had joined, and pages I had liked (even if it was stuff like "Bob liked a post in Nature Pics") and ads. Now it's probably 60% meme posts from random pages that I've never interacted with.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
It just doesn't seem to stick at all to me. If you were going to choose a group to call "sanctimonious" in our current political climate, it would have to be the woke, and if Desantis is known for anything these days it's for finding new ways to get the woke worked up.
MotteInTheEye
2mo ago
Obviously there was plenty of room for trickery, but Altman was apparently fielding random requests on Twitter and sharing them out with a few minutes of turnaround after the launch announcement. There was likely plenty of selection going on and of course it's possible that the requests were preplanned and posted by plants, but OpenAI's track record suggests that this will be available for the public to play with before long so any major shenanigans seem unlikely to me.
MotteInTheEye
4mo ago
Indeed. I imagine that a teacher has a breakdown on this level once a week or so in this country.
MotteInTheEye
9mo ago
I think you are right about the quality of the average Hollywood screenplay, but I don't think it's even correlated with the "sit down and write a whole script for this concept" skill of the individuals involved. What is required from a screenwriter to produce an excellent movie is the skill set to get an excellent script onto the screen through the gauntlet of executives, producers, directors, and actors who all have a stake in the final product, which your average fanfic writer would be completely incapable of. An LLM may or may not fare better.
MotteInTheEye
10mo ago
For shipwrecks, the captain would certainly bear a lot of the responsibility. I don't know how rare captains getting murdered during shipwrecks was historically though.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
For 5, what's your explanation for why their reported numbers are shooting up now? To me it always seemed likely that they were covering up their real numbers but I don't see why they would stop that now, whereas if they were telling the truth and have a mostly COVID-naive population then it would make sense that at some point they would have to pay the piper.
MotteInTheEye
17d ago
It seems like a progressive sales would inherently require tying your identity to every purchase, which seems like a huge inconvenience and a tough sell from a privacy perspective.
MotteInTheEye
3mo ago
It's not substantive and I agree with your point but it is really astonishing to me that anyone could get the year in which the world reacted to COVID wrong. I feel like "2020" will never look the same as any other number to me again.
MotteInTheEye
3mo ago
Gender equality before the law must have even higher support, and the Equal Rights Amendment has failed to be ratified for 100 years now because plenty of state legislators know that the signal something sends to their base can be very different from the plain text of a law.
MotteInTheEye
3mo ago
I think this is probably the main thing. Voters know that they can't control what happens once the candidate gets into office. Maybe Desantis wusses out on all his promises. Maybe Trump flounders and runs through a staffing treadmill and accomplishes nothing. But what the voters can control is who gets into office, and the left is busy sending the signal as loudly as possible that the mere fact of Trump getting elected again would be a major blow to the establishment, and conservative voters believe them.
MotteInTheEye
11mo ago
He expanded the death penalty. True pro-lifers are against that.
I predict that support for abortion and support for the death penalty have a strong negative correlation. Do you predict the opposite or is there some other meaning to your claim?
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
Almost definitionally none of us here can provide good tips for breaking free from Internet addictions. That said, something that has seemed fairly effective when I've used it is Focus Mode on Android phones. You can specify what apps you are and aren't allowed to use and it at least provides a roadblock that you have to consciously overcome if you want to relapse, without depriving you of any of your phone's functions that are actually useful to you.
The whole "growth mindset" bundle of ideas trades a lot on this motte-and-bailey.
Motte: All else being equal, someone who believes that hard work matters and innate talent does not will perform better than someone who believes the opposite.
Bailey: It is actually the case that hard work matters and innate talent does not.
My understanding is that the studies focus on supporting the motte - to the extent that there is good science here, it supports the motte. (It's social science so of course that extent is very little.) But most of the discussion around growth mindset acts as if the bailey was proven, which the studies don't even attempt to prove.
It's interesting because it's hard to know how self-consciously this substitution is made. Is it done intentionally by people who believe the motte and therefore wish to convince people of the bailey for their own good? Is it simple confusion? Is it bad faith twisting of social science to support a politically desired conclusion (the blank slate hypothesis)?
I suspect that a large component is that believers in the motte want to resolve cognitive dissonance when it comes to acting on the motte. They are convinced that it will be good for others if they are persuaded of the bailey. But this holds whether the bailey is true or not! And trying to convince people of something that's not true for their own good is the kind of thing bad guys do, and they are not bad guys, so the bailey must be true.
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