NullHypothesis
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User ID: 2718
NullHypothesis
2d ago
If you go through the sources for example the Iraq War which has documented deaths between 187,499 – 211,046 and filter for deaths caused by only "US-led coalition, no Iraqi state forces" that number is 17,076. For comparison, ISIS is directly responsible for 26,751 civilian deaths.
So Phailyoor is likely correct. He also linked the same source I found by looking at the source of the number on Wikipedia article you linked.
NullHypothesis
7d ago
We have Tik Tok women who believe Patrick Clancy's is obviously guilty because he looks mean. I think its easy to project a certain image of whatever stereotype you want because we literally have thousands of stories we can pull from that can likely fit any mental image we have. In fact I think being more well read (or more watched?) might make you more susceptible because you have a greater mental library to pull examples from.
If I had a steelman an argument, it's possible that "good" looking people are treated better throughout their lives and are more likely to develop a nicer/charismatic temperament. Conversely, "ugly" people are treated worse by their peers and are more likely to develop a negative temperament. But a big component of beauty is a reflection of the effort put in by the individual (as much as it can be faked by filters, make up, plastic surgery etc, even that requires some effort) and people that put effort into their appearance are more likely to be social (since they understand the social advantage of good looks). Good looks can be considered somewhat synonymous with good health, and healthier people are likely to be more positive compared to unhealthy people.
NullHypothesis
7d ago
The left is more likely to restrict language because they understand the power of language, yet also has many members that continue to use maximalist inflammatory language with terms like "defund the police" and "Islamophobia" and "trans genocide" and labeling their political opponents as "fascists" and "nazis" as well as pushing slogans like "words are violence". And I have not seen much pushback against this type of rhetoric from people on the left, but instead I've seen those on the left play defense for usage of these terms. And why would they stop? They face little to no consequence for it and it only serves to push their agenda and rile up their supporters.
Can you get more intelligent left leaning people to acknowledge that they don't actually believe those terms literally? Yes, but it seems to me that there are enough supporters that actually take those terms literally enough to have real world impact. Defund the police actually did defund the police instead of reforming police like the apologists argued it would and only after it's disastrous impact lost nearly all support. It's likely that type of language played some role in Tyler Robinson's decision to shoot Kirk. We've also had multiple assassination attempts on the President and this has been met with cheers from many of his detractors. Conservative speakers literally need extra security if they want to host an event at a college/university and there are at least several examples of events being cancelled due to security concerns.
It turns out many people are prone to being influenced by the messaging they constantly receive, and that most of their beliefs are not derived from first principles. It's why they cannot adequately defend the positions they hold and why it's often easy to find contradictions in their belief system - they never had to consider it before. Or if they have, they choose to ignore it because it's easier to pretend the contradiction doesn't exist than grapple with the possibility that their beliefs are wrong.
In the case of BLM this is especially true, because advocates usually assume the issues are systemic, and not the result of a shadowy cabal, which is what a conspiracy would require.
Actually a really great observation, since a lot of leftist beliefs on issues hinge on the idea that the problem is systemic in nature, so perhaps it is a major contributing factor to the left being less prone to conspiracy theories. There are likely other factors such as where these ideas can fester and how much push back these ideas usually get that can contribute to the growth and existence of conspiracy theories.
Also I think the term conspiracy theory itself is often used to dismiss ideas without discussing their merits. Alex Jones was right is a meme for a reason. The idea that Covid was leaked in a lab (and many other issues around covid), or that Hunter Biden laptop story was real, or that government was pressuring social media to suppress speech, or that the investigations on trump (e.g. Steele Dossier) were politically motivated and conducted via improper means, were just some of the "conspiracy" theories from the right that turned out to be true or had elements of truth within the claims, but were instead dismissed by opponents by labeling them as conspiracies. How many "conspiracies" from the left turned out to be right? I can't think of any from the last 10 years, I asked AI and the examples were all from the previous century. Maybe you can count the Russia 2016 election interference theory as having an inkling of truth to it? The lack of examples is to be expected since the left has much less conspiracy theories for the reason stated previously, but I think this is a contributing factor to the right's propensity for conspiracy theories, since some of the most impactful of them have turned out to be true.
Speaking of the worst argument in the world, I think it also applies to labeling Jan 6th as a coup, which is something Hanania does in his article.
NullHypothesis
13d ago
Most people don't practice for most things in life, and public speaking is no exception. By practice I mean deliberate concentrated sessions with the explicit goal of improving something, not just going through the motion. That's how you get teachers that such at teaching 10 years into their career, public speakers who suck after giving 10s of talks, gamers that are stuck in silver after 1000s of hours played, even if their intelligence is at least average.
There's this interesting article by Dan Luu where he argues that 95th percentile is not that good. He talks about public speaking as an example too so quite relevant to your point.
Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do
Your own experience supports his thesis. You had a class on communication, you acknowledge applying it wasn't difficult, and you can identify yourself as being in the top 10-20% of presenters.
To give a couple of concrete examples, I helped Leah prepare for talks from 2013 to 2017. The first couple practice talks she gave were about the same as you'd expect if you walked into a random talk at a large tech conference. For the first couple years she was speaking, she did something like 30 or so practice runs for each public talk, of which I watched and gave feedback on half. Her first public talk was (IMO) well above average for a talk at a large, well regarded, tech conference and her talks got better from there until she stopped speaking in 2017.
As we discussed above, this is more subjective than game ratings and there's no way to really determine a percentile, but if you look at how most people prepare for talks, it's not too surprising that Leah was above average. At one of the first conferences she spoke at, the night before the conference, we talked to another speaker who mentioned that they hadn't finished their talk yet and only had fifteen minutes of material (for a forty minute talk). They were trying to figure out how to fill the rest of the time. That kind of preparation isn't unusual and the vast majority of talks prepared like that aren't great.
Most people consider doing 30 practice runs for a talk to be absurd, a totally obsessive amount of practice, but I think Gary Bernhardt has it right when he says that, if you're giving a 30-minute talk to a 300 person audience, that's 150 person-hours watching your talk, so it's not obviously unreasonable to spend 15 hours practicing (and 30 practice runs will probably be less than 15 hours since you can cut a number of the runs short and/or repeatedly practice problem sections). One thing to note that this level of practice, considered obessive when giving a talk, still pales in comparison to the amount of time a middling table tennis club player will spend practicing.
If you've studied pedagogy, you might say that the help I gave to Leah was incredibly lame. It's known that having laypeople try to figure out how to improve among themselves is among the worst possible ways to learn something, good instruction is more effective and having a skilled coach or teacher give one-on-one instruction is more effective still5. That's 100% true, my help was incredibly lame. However, most people aren't going to practice a talk more than a couple times and many won't even practice a single time (I don't have great data proving this, this is from informally polling speakers at conferences I've attended). This makes Leah's 30 practice runs an extraordinary amount of practice compared to most speakers, which resulted in a relatively good outcome even though we were using one of the worst possible techniques for improvement.
If you practice and do any sort preparation for your talk, you're already better than the average person. Most people go through most of life just winging it, and out society is built to be resilient that way. The upside to this is that you can probably become an "expert" relative to the population on most disciplines with just some effort.
Seems like there is some opportunity to teach effective communication as a side hustle. Business professionals already pay $1000s for bullshit courses anyways.
NullHypothesis
13d ago
This case seems to have brought to the public discourse (at least online) the idea of repealing the 19th amendment more so than any other gender culture war story of this century. I know some here have floated around ideas of alternate voting systems e.g. only net taxpayers should have voting power. In the early days of the United States, only those who owned a certain amount of property were allowed to vote. This usually meant adult white men who had a tangible stake in society (some states had some exceptions). Perhaps our founding fathers had some wisdom in restricting who can vote. It's not clear to me that despite all our advancements in public education and technology that the modern average person is more educated and intelligent than the average person eligible of voting in the late 18th early 19th century.
Don't know if this discussion has already been hammered out already but I haven't given it enough thought/research to make this a top level post.
NullHypothesis
13d ago
Massachusetts specifically having the burden of proof on the prosecution to prove that the defendant is sane, rather than the defense having to prove the defendant is insane, seems backwards to me. The downstream implications of this seems disastrous to me? Nevermind the fact that proving a negative is often much more difficult, sometimes even impossible.
So anyone can go to Massachusetts, act insane and get diagnosed with some kind of mental illness, then go out and commit a crime, and has the excuse that they were not mentally sane and get away with the highest charges in their court? 25% of women and 13% of men already take some kind of psychiatric drug, and that number only seems to be going up decade by decade. All the defense has to do is show some possibility someone is not sane, then the prosecution has to do the much harder task of proving someone is not insane?
In my non lawyer/medical opinion, someone who commits a crime is already someone that is abnormal, someone that murders other people with no cause (e.g. self defense) I would consider mentally ill already, because regular sane people do not typically murder people.
If "insane" people cannot be criminally responsible for crime they commit, then it stands to reason that they lack the mental capacity for entire other categories of living, like voting, holding a job, access to social media, just being part of society in general. For most of the world this is not an issue because the default assumption is that you are sane and that your insanity must be proven. But in Massachusetts it seems there is an inconsistency is not choosing to apply same standards outside the court of law.
Honestly seems to me the real issue is Massachusetts' backward stance on the burden of proof having to prove sanity.
NullHypothesis
25d ago
Some of it just the usual misinformation. Some of it is biased interpretation of facts. A lot of it just women in group bias. There is no steelman because for many of her supporters there is no logical argument for why they actually support Lindsay other than she is a fellow woman.
There's a go fund me for Lindsay's parents. It's surpassed a million in donations. There are some comments that could give insight into why some people are donating.
There is an entire headcannon from some of her loudest supporters about how the husband actually did it or egged her on to do it so that he could get out of his marriage and get married to his now wife. I think some people have too much spare time.
I've heard Girls Frontline also has good gameplay for a gacha game. Watched a friend play GFL2 on steam which seemed to have XCOM style 3d grid based combat but it also had an autoplay mode.
I haven't played it because I refuse to play gacha games anymore but I did play Reverse Collapse: Code Name Bakery which is a standalone title by the same developers also in the GFL universe. It's a tactical turn based RPG with a pretty lengthy story and time travel mechanics. Despite the graphics looking like a mobile game I ended up completing the game 100% (Steam says I have 140 hours on it). You can consider the story to be told in a similar format to visual novels and the script is 300,000 words long. The prologue cutscene of the final chapter takes 2 hours if you let all the voice lines fully play out. Also the game is considered on the more difficult side even amongst people that play tactical rpgs and some of the later missions can take up to an hour with how many enemies there are so it's a pretty hefty time investment to complete this game. I like tactical rpgs though so it wasn't an issue for me.
Time travel is big part of the game and even death is explained as Jehuty (the female protagonist of the game) sending herself back in time via a "reverse collapse" mechanism. You have to play through 4 timelines (essentially replaying story missions in each timeline but with a twist of having the knowledge of the future which changes what you have to do in the missions) to unlock the 5th timeline which has the true ending.
There was a discussion previously here on TheMotte about downer endings and I'd say the ending of Reverse Collapse would count as one since the main character Jehuty has to sacrifice herself to essentially save the world. There's too many plot points to explain but the ending reveals Jehuty was able to go back in time via mind transfer by swapping her consciousness with Lusica which is essentially a clone. Said clone is instrumental in the bad guys plan to destroy the world, and in the original timeline Lusica was the only entity left alive, which she found was too lonely, so she makes a deal with Jehuty to have them swap consciousness in the past to change the future. Because Jehuty loves Mendo (the other protagonist) and wants everyone else to live she agrees to let Lusica take over her body and to let herself be the one captured by the bad guy instead (there's an in game explanation for why this has to be done this way but I can't remember why). At the end of chapter 5 Jehuty swaps places with Lusica (Mendo and everyone else has no idea this swap has happens). Lusica presumably goes on to live on as Jehuty while Jehuty goes by herself to have one final last stand before she lets herself be captured. T
The final mission plays on this one last stand theme and is reminiscent of Halo Reach's ending where you try to survive for as long as you can but you ultimately cannot win. The enemies spawn endlessly and only get stronger and stronger until eventually you lose and get captured. The mission itself is sort of a mix between rougelike (rougelite? vampire survivor likes?) mechanics where you get bonuses you can pick from every number of turns and the standard turn based gameplay you've been playing for the entity of the game and can be replayed endlessly. I think it's pretty interesting and a gridbased tactical turn based roguelike survival could be a standalone game if that mission had more polishing.
Having played through this game I have to admit it did increase my interest in the GFL lore and universe, although I still refuse to play the two mainline games due to it being a gacha game. Apparently a lot of these gooner gacha games with waifus have pretty depressing storylines and settings. Nikke takes place in a post apocalyptic earth, although the gameplay as mentioned in the parent post seems to be quite something. Arknight (at least the orignal mobile game, dunno about endfield) also takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, but the gameplay here is more like a strategic tower defense, and friend says the game is quite friendly for those that are f2p and that people have beat end game missions with low tier units so it seems strategic play probably has more importance than having the highest tier waifus. It seems to me the writers of these games stories wanted to create some sort of grimdark, post apocalyptic dystopian world but they also need to make money so they put sexy gooner waifus to capture the gacha playing audience.
The game itself has some interesting facts such as it is a remake of a remake. It also has a remaster of the of the remake you can play after completing the game (completely optional and has 0 achievements) which has the much more bland original story (and blander gameplay mechanics). The original game was strictly a visual novel that the developers made before they made Girls Frontline and the remake was a turn based tactics game, and the remaster of the remake is a mostly faithful recreation of the original remaster.
Another fact, apparently Chinese gacha players got angry that in GFL2 a female character has close relations with a male NPC character that they felt they were being NTRed because only the player should have any sort of relationship with their gacha waifus so they review bombed Reverse Collapse instead. Chinese gacha players seem to be a different breed entirely.
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