NullHypothesis
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User ID: 2718
NullHypothesis
9d ago
I agree with the general sentiment, yet I'm not sure how much room for nuance your argument with the other party had, since you haven't mentioned it.
Are all tattoos the same? Is a full body tattoo equivalent to a tiny flower on a wrist you could barely see? Perhaps you would consider all tattoos to be negative, but surely there would be varying levels of how much of a negative impact a tattoo could have on your perception of a person based on what that tattoo is and/or how large it is.
I find both sides taken to the extreme a bit absurd. If one were to think all tattoos are bad and/or reflect poorly on the person and all tattoos are superficial fashion choices - I would think someone defending either position would have to start granting exceptions or resorting to logical fallacies to maintain their position. It's possible neither side actually has this black and white position, but the post certainly gives off that impression.
Perhaps in your personal experience, every person you met with tattoos gives off the quality of the type of individual you don't want to associate with. While on the other hand, the person you were arguing with might have a lot of friends that have tattoos (or even have tattoos themselves), so they don't associate negativity with tattoos as much, if at all.
Personally, I think both sides of the argument you presented are pretty weak.
First and foremost, they're ugly and I don't like them
This does technically support your position of you personally finding tattoos distasteful but will do nothing to convince others of why they should find tattoos distasteful. Also, beauty is subjective. Is there not a single tattoo you could find any artistic quality in? If someone drew something that wasn't ugly on a piece of paper, what is it that makes it ugly once it's put on the human skin? You need to expand on this point.
Anyone who gets a tattoo is comfortable with associating themselves in this way
It's likely many younger people with tattoos aren't even considering that. Tattoos are becoming more common in the United States. This Pew survey from 2023 found 32% of Americans have a tattoo. That's 1/3 of Americans. 41% of people aged 18-29 and 46% of people aged 30-49 have at least one tattoo. That's a lot of people, and I highly doubt most of them are making the conscious decision that they are associating themselves with criminals or other undesirable groups. While there is still a social stigma with tattoos, it's largely gone now, at least amongst the newer generation.
Tattoos are expensive and painful to get and permanent
This doesn't seem to really support your argument in any way. Also, you can pay money to get tattoos removed. It's going to cost money and time but tattoos aren't as "permanent" as they used to be. You need to expand on this point more.
To me, it seems only your first two points seem to support why you dislike tattoos and only the 2nd point seems to support why tattoos should be considered distasteful.
Meanwhile, assuming you have summarized your opponent's position accurately and fairly, it does not address your points at all and takes on an easily disproven absurd position. Superficial fashion statement? As you pointed out, tattoos are expensive and time-consuming to get. Referring back to the Pew study from before, 69% of people who have a tattoo stated its purpose was to remember or honor someone or something and 47% to make a statement about something they believe in. That doesn't seem like superficial to me. Only 32% of people stated their tattoo was to improve their personal appearance, which would qualify as a superficial fashion statement. At best, your opponent's position would need to be mended to "some tattoos are superficial fashion statements."
Also, even if I did grant your opponent's position that tattoos are superficial fashion statements, there aren't any reasons provided to argue why it's wrong to judge people for superficial fashion statements. People make judgments based on superficial fashion statements all the time. Of course, your opponent isn't here and would likely be able to provide some reasons as to why that is wrong, but considering you didn't flesh out their argument, I'm just going to assume your conversation with them didn't progress much further.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to make on the spot judgments based on characteristics because you can't perform any actions without judgments, otherwise you're no different from a random number generating machine. At the same time, acknowledging that your judgments could be wrong, or being open to the possibility that your judgments are based on falsehoods, will make you a better person. I tend to find the "you can never judge someone based on x factor" crowd to usually be hypocrites that want to feel morally superior, but it doesn't mean their points are always without merit either.
What you should judge people by are the factors that are relevant for what you are judging them for.
NullHypothesis
16d ago
That's actually a good point and yea you're right that anecdotes are pretty weak in the grand scheme of things.
I dont' think there's any disagreement that the percentage of people with college or higher tend to vote democrat especially in the last 20 years, but Turok's point was specifically that conservatism is increasingly becoming the party of the uneducated, yet if we look at the data for the last 3 election cycles the lead democrats had amongst people that voted with college or higher has actually been decreasing:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patterns-in-the-2024-election/
Percentage of people that voted for republican in 2016, 2020, and 2024 Post grads 29 > 32 > 33 Grads 41 > 42 > 46 Some college 49 > 50 > 54
It's increased for each group.
Granted, just because you voted for Trump doesn't mean you are conservative. Possibly other factors such as people not voting that could impact the numbers. I guess Turok is technically correct since High school or less also increased from 51 to 59.
Maybe you're right and mods are unfairly applying mod posts to Turok. Personally I don't think Turok should have been modded for that statement specifically but looking at Amadan's post it seems to come off as a mod post about his behavior across multiple posts and not specifically the post he made that got the modded comment.
Anyways it looks like the virulent post that modded and I see some mod comments as well so hey seems like you are making an impact.
NullHypothesis
17d ago
I looked at the three examples you provided as bad posts and they don't seem to be the same level of bad as some of Turok's post. Obviously I am biased so I may be blind to the stake in my eye but I'm going to give it some effort.
If making a statement about a group that could be considered negative is mean then you can never have any discussions about anything. The difference is the negative statements about the groups in the three posts are about specific behaviors and aren't just calling the groups names. It's part of an argument that could be challenged. And then you have to consider how people response to criticisms/challenges of an argument. I don't think I've ever seen Turok acknowledge someone made a good point and he usually only responds to direct questions. It is infuriating to have a conversation with someone that never engages or acknowledges your strongest points and only nitpicks your weakest points. Which is an effective tactic in a debate, but then it's not really a proper conversation in good faith. It's even more infuriating when the same line of reasoning that was never addressed is then repeated in future posts.
I actually didn't see anything in 2rafa's post that could be considered a generic mean statement about a group. The worst thing I could see is this statement.
An America after mass Hispanic migration (now occurring) is a poorer, more corrupt, more violent, more dysfunctional America
But that's actually a conclusion in an argument, something that can be challenged and dismantled if one provides evidence otherwise. It's not a statement like "hispanics are trash", even if you think it is implied that's not what is stated. If the implication is bad dismantle the argument.
Sohois says the African "immigrants are much lower quality" but this is followed by a list of characteristics that could be challenged. If the Africans in Europe aren't lower quality to hispanics in America, they must be the same or higher quality. If you take issue with that statement, can you provide evidence proving otherwise?
Worst thing I could see in Sloot's comment is this initial statement
The modal chick’s interests and hobbies consist of consooming, painting her face, taking selfies, and teeheeing around in skimpy outfits, but she will complain men are BORING with no sense of irony. Men have the burden of performance.
This is a statement about a group's actions and behaviors. You can challenge this statement. Is Sloot wrong? It could be implied sloot thinks the modal chick is dumb but sloot doesn't actually make that statement.
Meanwhile Turok's post:
The issue I see here is that conservatism is increasingly the ideology of uneducated people and those who went to third-rate universities. Instead of thinking about how to acquire power, or attract EHC who have power, they're smoking copium about how noble manual labor is.
I consider myself leaning more conservative, I went to a top tier university and I have a degree. I know many people who have gone to high tier universities. An increasing amount of them are leaning more conservative as time goes on. So from my experience his statement is incorrect. Perhaps if we really want to be technical, I'm being uncharitable here and my point doesn't actually address his claim, but he hasn't provided any evidence for his point. Are higher percentages of people with no college degrees becoming conservative? What exactly are third-rate colleges and are they producing more conservative leaders than before? He might be correct that conservatives have been losing in institutional powers like academia but that's not the claim he made here.
Also, there's something about this line of thinking that I have issue with. It's as if I said bananas are the food of poor people. Poor people do eat bananas so it's technically true. But what if I made this statement to a group of rich people using bananas as part of their morning smoothie? What was the purpose of making that statement? What's the implication here?
His statement on how conservatives are smoking copium about how noble manual labor is - this seems like making a mountain of a molehill. I see no concerted effort from conservatives in trying to push summer jobs to kids. Until conservative right adjacent sphere tiktok and social media is full of influencers bemoaning how the youth should be getting a summer job because it's going to teach them the value of hard labor one article from one conservative leaning site doesn't really mean much. I haven't seen this talking point in like years until I saw this post.
I have never heard of the group CommonPlace until yesterday. Their twitter has less than 5k followers. Linked in around 100. Facebook under 100. This is very weak evidence for conservatives as a group smoking copium. They might be a conservative think tank and maybe the people they actually reach have more influence, but until I see the messaging reach the intended audience this is nothing to me.
If you look at the parent post, his analysis is contradicted by evidence in the article itself, which I quote in my reply to him. I didn't bother touching on his 2nd paragraph earlier but I might as well expand on why I have an issue with his analysis. He makes this argument:
Doing so will help shape a happier generation of young people. A Harvard study that ran from the 1930s to the 1970s tracked the lives of more than a thousand teenage boys in the Boston area. It found that "industriousness in childhood—as indicated by such things as whether boys had part-time jobs, took on chores, or joined school clubs or sports teams—predicted adult mental health better than any other factor."
This is the same kind of error Leftists make when they see that kids whose parents took them to art museums have higher incomes than kids whose parents didn't and conclude that it means we need to subsidize art museums. In both cases, genetic confounding is ignored. But while the left fetishizes education and high-class culture, the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools.
The causal link between higher income and going to art museums is very weak, while one can come up with a causal link between industriousness and adulthood happiness (work hard > more purpose in life > more likely to have material goods to have a higher quality of life). I don't disagree with him that genetics is a factor, but the two positions are not equivalent in their erroneousness. For them to be equally flawed statements would suggest a human being can never learn to become more industrious, and that industriousness has no effect on mental health. Yet surely we can find examples in our own lives that would suggest otherwise. Think of people that after being put into a sports team learned to work hard with a team, or even all the statement made here in the motte of people talking about how working a job helped them appreciate hard work or motivated them to work even harder to get more lucrative jobs. There is also psychological literature supporting the idea that it's possible to increase conscientiousness. I have just made an argument for why increasing industriousness can increase adult mental health. I would struggle to make a coherent argument for why subsidizing art museums would increase income.
To be honest, I should probably ask Turok to expand on his points rather than typing out why I think his argument is flawed in a post not even responding to him directly, but based on his previous interactions with others and to my post I can't say I have much interest right now in actually talking to him specifically.
If there are issues with those bad right wing posts, surely someone could put in the same level of effort I just did here to break down why they think it is bad. Perhaps my analysis is flawed, but at least I put in the effort. Where's the effort to show why these right wing posts are bad or flawed? Even if there is some level of group consensus, truth should prevail and if an argument has no flaws at that point the only option would be to ignore it or to resort to bad faith tactics and logical fallacies, and at that point it's breaking the rules and should be moderated. Upstream, there are some people making an effort to argue with that "virulent invasive species" metaphor is flawed, and I'd like to see more of those conversations than people complaining that the statement is mean. I do agree with you that people on the other side complaining about left leaning posts should also be better and try to address the argument instead of getting mad.
NullHypothesis
17d ago
Depending on the summer job it could be considered as one of the extracurriculars in your college application.
The competition Asian applicants have for top-tier colleges are other Asian applicants. If all they have are high academics, their chances of getting in are low. If they had all the extracurriculars on top of academics, well they likely didn't need the summer job to stand out and have likely built their soft skills in stuff like sports/debate/etc. When you consider the students that only have their academic scores to stand on, it is likely their soft skills are not as developed as peers that have more than the academic scores. It's this group that could potentially benefit.
A lot of colleges claim their goal is to create a diverse student body group. Whether or not you agree with this, it's true that a lot of colleges and universities after reaching a certain number of the "smart Asian student" archetype will stop accepting more Asian students. Hence, why colleges that didn't have affirmative action like UCLA have significantly higher Asian student populations. There are probably smart, well-spoken Asian students that got rejected from colleges because there are Asians. But there are also smart, awkward Asians who got rejected because they didn't look the interviewer in the eye and stumbled over their words. Yes, Asians have a higher hurdle to enter the top level colleges. Some people would call it bullshit, but your goal should be to minimize the potential checks that could weed you out.
I don't have any stats at the moment so I'll speak from personal experience. I'm Asian and I had a lot of Asian friends, and literally none of us spent the entire summer studying. Sure, some of did stuff like SAT prep school, but that didn't exactly take up the whole summer... it was like a once or twice a week thing. Basically a few hours a week. If you have to spend the entire summer studying just to keep up to the point you don't have the time to hold down a summer job then you'll probably struggle in college relative to your peers that just fucked around and got similar scores to you. Of all of us that got 1500 or higher on the SAT, the ones that got into the top tier schools like Harvard/Stanford/CalTech also just happened to be the most social and well-spoken of the bunch. Personality might be difficult, perhaps impossible, to objectively measure, but it's not like it doesn't matter either.
That being said, my experience might be less and less relevant. From I last remember Harvard lost the case on affirmative action and checking the class of 2028 numbers it seems the number of accepted Asian students have gone up (37% same as previous year, but class of 2026 says 27% which is a significant jump). https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/09/harvard-releases-race-data-for-class-of-2028/
I wasn't able to find the percentage of Asian applicants that got admitted, only the percentage of accepted applicants that were Asian. It's possible more Asians are applying to Harvard after the supreme court decision.
Also found this chart which is pretty interesting:
It's a graph of the "personal" rating applicants to Harvard received, split between Harvard Staff members versus Harvard Alumni.
And in the article linked: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/andrew-gelman-sharad-goel-daniel-e-ho-affirmative-action-isnt-problem/
Among the most competitive applicants, the graphs show that Harvard staff are still more likely than alumni to rate whites more favorably than Asian Americans. In the top academic decile of applicants, Harvard staff put 23 percent of Asian Americans and 31 percent of whites in the top two personality categories. In contrast, alumni interviewers gave this group of Asian and white applicants these top ratings at much closer rates (64 percent and 66 percent, respectively).
Like you said, Harvard staff members were harsher on Asians relative to how alumni did the scoring, but across the board both groups rated a lower percentage of Asians top scores for personal relative to other races. Harvard staff was also harsher on all races across the board relative to alumni scoring. There probably is bias, but there is probably also some truth to the personal rating, at least based on my personal experiences of academically gifted Asians. There were Asians that got top scores on personal and Asians that didn't - what was the difference maker? I don't think luck on who interviewed them is the full answer. Even if it was true Asians would have to do better to get the same "personal" score, it's not as if there is absolutely nothing you can do to become a better speaker or to be more charismatic.
Also interesting to note that the students that did the best academically also tend to do the best on personality. The bottom 25th percentile score at Harvard is 1500, so these are all top 1% students from the country. I'm curious if the people rating the personal score had any idea about the person's actual academic scores, but it's all speculation at this point.
NullHypothesis
18d ago
From the same article:
Surprisingly, teens from high-income households are more likely to have summer jobs than those from low-income households. The Department of Labor found that in 2023 households earning $100,000 to $150,000 per year had teen summer employment rates of 46%. For households earning less than $60,000, it was below 30%.
This might seem counterintuitive. You’d think rich teens would have the luxury to spend their summers traveling or pursuing hobbies, while working-class teens have to work to save for college and other expenses. It turns out that teen jobs are actually the luxury.
Statistically speaking, the households in the middle to upper-middle class are more likely to have teen summer jobs than poor households. Maybe there is something to learn from the wealthiest group in America. Asian kids growing up in households where they have to study all day would probably benefit from having a summer job in a customer facing role since they would learn to interact with larger segments of the population, which would improve social and communication skills. Elite-tier colleges often reject Asian applicants with high academic scores due to a lack of "soft skills". In the case that this is true, perhaps those Asian teenagers would have been better served building skills in a summer job than studying to get 50 more points on the SAT.
Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
The reason conservatives are not dominating top tier colleges is not because their kids worked a summer job.
There is a significant reason for the drop in teenager summer jobs that the article does not address or mention, which is the increase in the minimum wage. It's simply more expensive to hire people now than in 1950. Wealthy neighborhoods are less impacted because businesses there have more money to be able to afford to hire temporary work. Meanwhile, most businesses in low income neighborhoods are operating on razor-thin margins. They might have been able to afford teenagers to work for $5 an hour, but at $15 or higher they simply cannot afford to anymore. Cheap labor is one of the main reasons to hire a teenager over any other demographic; make all labor more expensive and there is less of a reason to hire teenagers.
One factor is immigration. Many of the jobs formerly held by teens are now held by immigrants, especially in food service, by far the most popular industry for teen workers. High-immigration states have the lowest teen summer employment rates, including California (24%), New York (29%), Nevada (24%), and Texas (29%). The states with the highest teen summer employment rates, at 75% and 67%, are Maine and Vermont.
Factor in immigration, which increases the supply of labor, and it's obvious why teen summer jobs are on the decline. If you're a restaurant, why would you take the risk of hiring and training someone for only 2-3 months of labor, individuals that could be lazy or awkward or fickle or more risk oriented on account of them being teenagers, when you can hire older immigrants instead? It's not Maine and Vermont that's responsible for the drop in the nation-wide teenager employment rate.
If you haven't watched it yet, I suggest give Code Geass a try. Although people often say Code Geass is actually not a real or true Mecha anime. I hate the art style and character design and I still watched the whole thing and don't regret it. It's widely considered to have one of the best endings in anime and I have to agree. Also the OST is great.
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