PokerPirate
1d ago
I've noticed the growth of a certain type of middle-aged-white-guy-dad who has a shortly trimmed beard and short hair. This is the style that requires the least maintenance (trim beard once/week, cut hair once every 2-3 months), and so seems to be popular amongst the very practical.
PokerPirate
1d ago
particularly obnoxious violations (like, saying "obviously we all know that [woke position] is wrong...")
I find OPs framing to be even more obnoxious than your quote because it buries the assumption of agreement until mid-post and never makes it explicit. So I was expecting to read a very different type of post, and was unhappy when I realized what was going on. At least when someone starts off "obviously we all know..." you know where they're coming from and can read/skip accordingly.
PokerPirate
1d ago
Flagged as consensus building.
What you call "optimal cultural leadership" is really just "how to make my outgroup not get in power". And your use of neutral language to cover this switch up is bad rhetoric.
A very large percentage of Americans still find the "social justice craze" to be a good thing, including many of the academics/religious leaders/politicians you are critiquing for not being anti-social justice craze from early on. It's fine for you to be anti-social justice craze. But you shouldn't be assuming that everyone else is or that it is the norm around here.
FWIW, I would be very interested in reading an ideologically neutral account of the failures of conservative leadership to account for the rise of wokism, and what lessons can be learned in order to better spread/suppress future ideologies.
PokerPirate
9d ago
I'm a just-received-tenure CS/math prof at a top rated teaching college. I've put in way less work than the traditional R1 faculty (but probably a bit more than what you describe). One thing I've learned since graduating is that the phd/postdoc life really only prepares you to think about R1-style academic work. But there's a huge world beyond the R1 research world that is much less intensive.
For example, there's definitely community colleges around where you live that have teaching positions you'd be qualified for. At community colleges, these positions are mostly non-tenure track these days, and won't pay a lot, but they'd definitely support a decent DINK lifestyle and give you the flexible hours to enjoy it. Based on what you described as your qualifications, there's probably proper 4-year colleges near you that you could teach at and get tenure as well.
I've been on a handful of hiring committees too at this point. If you want to PM me a CV, I'll take a look and provide more detailed feedback.
PokerPirate
26d ago
I respect their willingness to defy arbitrary rules.
This one sentence has done more to help me clarify my thoughts on illegal immigration than everything else written in this thread. To the extent that there is an "American spirit" that has been consistent over the past 500 years, it has been the desire to defy arbitrary rules.
PokerPirate
28d ago
From physics, I would have assumed that the friction of a ship has roughly two components...
The physics of shipbuilding is incredibly counterintuitive. This is because we have bad intuition about the physics of fluids in general, and the physics at the intersection of the fluids air/water compounds this.
One super counter-intuitive concept is the Froude number, which is a dimensionless quantity that determines (roughly speaking) how fast a ship can go at max efficiency, but doesn't depend on any of the quantities you mention. The formula is:
Fr = V/√(g×L)
Where:
- V is ship speed
- g is gravitational acceleration
- L is waterline length of the ship
There are dozens of other constants like this that ship designers measure/use, and none of them are intuitive.
PokerPirate
28d ago
If you're using any sort of real database (sqlite / mysql / postgres / mongo / etc) to store the documents, you'll never run into speed-related constraints. You might start running into semantic constraints about limitations of the models' ability to differentiate different topics, but that's unlikely with domain-specific applications like you have.
PokerPirate
29d ago
That is a truely awesome VEO3 shitpost.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
Yeah, I was discharged from the navy as a conscientious objector.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I don't have firsthand experience. But I've been around lots of marines who have. And I'd say infantry type jobs very strongly select for people who find the infantry "fun".
Notably General Mattis (quoted above) was an enlisted infantryman before becoming an officer and served as an infantry rifle platoon commander in his first leadership roles.
Also don't forget that gladiator fights in the Roman Colosseum were widely considered entertainment. There is a famous account from Augustine's confessions where he related an account of a friend Alypius. Alypius was outraged about the morality of gladiator fights and refused to participate. But some friends dragged him to the show anyways. Here is Augustine's account of how Alypius learned to enjoy the violence:
Alypius kept his eyes closed and forbade his mind to roam abroad after such wickedness. Would that he had shut his ears also! For when one of the combatants fell in the fight, a mighty cry from the whole audience stirred him so strongly that, overcome by curiosity and still prepared (as he thought) to despise and rise superior to it no matter what it was, he opened his eyes and was struck with a deeper wound in his soul than the victim whom he desired to see had been in his body. Thus he fell more miserably than the one whose fall had raised that mighty clamor which had entered through his ears and unlocked his eyes to make way for the wounding and beating down of his soul, which was more audacious than truly valiant--also it was weaker because it presumed on its own strength when it ought to have depended on Thee. For, as soon as he saw the blood, he drank in with it a savage temper, and he did not turn away, but fixed his eyes on the bloody pastime, unwittingly drinking in the madness--delighted with the wicked contest and drunk with blood lust. He was now no longer the same man who came in, but was one of the mob he came into, a true companion of those who had brought him thither. Why need I say more? He looked, he shouted, he was excited, and he took away with him the madness that would stimulate him to come again: not only with those who first enticed him, but even without them; indeed, dragging in others besides. And yet from all this, with a most powerful and most merciful hand, thou didst pluck him and taught him not to rest his confidence in himself but in thee--but not till long after.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
Where is your line?
I'm not able to articulate it. That's largely because I've never liked the framing of there being a spectrum of bad things that can happen, and everyone draws a line somewhere, and violence is allowed below the line but not above the line. In this framing, pacifism is a totally passive thing that just places the line somewhere very low.
I think if pacifism is going to be viable, it needs to have a much more positive framing than merely as rejecting violence in some circumstances.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
There's a reason there's no Oakland Amish.
There's no Amish, but there are self-declared pacifists. See for example https://oaklandcatholicworker.org.
This is not an argument against the values described, just a note on their evident limitations.
I disagree this is a limitation of pacifism. No body wants to live in "Oakland" (which I'm assuming is metonymy for any violent place). I claim that pacifism has better outcomes than non-pacifism for someone who must live in such a place. I don't think these are always strictly better outcomes for the individual, but that these better outcomes are society-wide.
Pacifism works when you live with other committed pacifists.
You imply that it doesn't work around non-pacifists, which I disagree with. Although the disagreement is probably about the aims that we should be working towards.
Distance can replace walls and spears.
Most reasonable people would prefer to be away from violence. So I don't think this is a unique jab at pacifism.
The implication is that pacifists cannot strategically interact with violence in a way that achieves their aims. But there are plenty of pacifists who would strategically reduce their distance to conflict in order to effect change that cannot be accomplished with spears. The AFSC ambulance units that helped combatants and non-combats on all sides in WWI and WWII is a standard example. In my own life, I've lived in North Korea trying to reduce conflict between them and the US.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
This is a straightforward example of my claim that "basically all objections to pacifism boil down to rejecting the doormat failure mode", and so whole-heartedly disagree with you :)
PokerPirate
1mo ago
Parenting win?
My 3yo has a tough life. He's got two older brothers (4, 7) and all the neighbor kids are older. The 3yo is big enough to want to play with them all, but small enough that he's not quite capable of understanding their games or communicating his thoughts. So the neighbor kids end up picking on him a lot, calling him "poop boy", taking his toys, and other misc mischief. Because they're not my kids, I can't do too much to stop the neighbor kids from being jerks. I've managed to convince the older brothers that they have some sort of brotherly-responsibility to stick up for their sibling, but there's also only so much they can do.
The 3yo is tough and violent. He's been stung by bees ~5 times over the past year, and each time he shouts "die bee", grabs the nearest rock, and smashes the bee to death several times before running over to me/mom crying that he needs a band-aid. So he's pretty good at standing up for himself when the big kids are mean by trying to punch them / throw toys / etc. I'm proud of him for sticking up for himself, but we've been trying to work with him on helping him control his violence.
We found a new tool to keep his violence in check this week.
At the beginning of the week, one of the big kids came over and dumped a bucket of water on 3yo's head when he was playing nicely by himself. I had the idea that we could get revenge by using the hose. We setup an ambush for big-neighbor-kid around the corner of the garage, and 3yo got big-kid right in the face at point blank range. The shadenfreude was great. Big-neighbor-kid learned a valuable lesson about why other people don't like getting water dumped on them and not to mess with my 3yo. 3yo now is the only one with permission to use the hose, and everyone talks about how they shouldn't mess with him anymore. 3yo also has a lot more confidence interacting with both the neighbors and his brothers, and there's been much less hitting and throwing of rocks.
Overall I feel good about how this played out, but I have some questions about what this is teaching my kids about violence. I'm a committed pacifist (in the style of the Amish), and I'm trying to raise the kids to also be pacifists. The hose-to-the-face is obviously less violent than throwing rocks: there's no potential for lasting injury, and it's not nearly as "escalatory" since the big-neighbor-kid already used water as a "weapon". But there was still lots of "evil" in 3yo's heart. He clearly wanted revenge and specifically aimed for the big-neighbor-kid's face so as to cause maximum damage.
So the lesson here wasn't perfect, but I do think it was at least "directionally correct". One common failure mode of pacifism is to become a doormat for other people to run over you---basically all objections to pacifism boil down to rejecting this failure mode---and I don't want to instill this failure mode into my children.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I've got 4 kids (2f, 3m, 4m, 7m) and 2 kids bedrooms. Every week, there's a different combination of kids in the 2 bedrooms based on who's on the ins and outs with each other (and who wants to sleep/read vs play). This all mostly takes care of itself though at least with the kids being young.
The real difficulty is meal time. Each additional kid limits what can reasonably cooked for dinner so that everyone will eat. We've started doing 2 main courses of kids food (e.g. nuggets + pasta or pizza + fish sticks) where we know that each kid will like at least one of the 2 choices. Otherwise, 4 hasn't been any more work than 3.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
This researcher has done a fair bit of work on how people's perception of their own race can change in response to their politics
And this is a great example of the other type of motte post I enjoy: Fancy new facts that make me reevaluate my worldview! It never occurred to me before that people might change how they perceive their race based on politics.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I certainly do think it's both! And part of my changed-world view is that I'd never considered the other direction before. It's a bit like OP's link to "Leftism is both a cause and effect of acute mental illness".
I suspect basically all statistically correlated human behavior also has a 2-way causative relationship.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
It strikes me that I've also seen a lot of marriages turn to divorces in the 2015-2020 time frame. I've always just assumed I was in that "season of life" where my friends get divorced because we're all in our 30s and that's just what people in their 30s do these days.
You seem to suggest a radicalization -> divorce pipeline, but I wonder if the reverse is more true? People ruin their relationships and this leads them to a political radicalization as a way to find their true family / identity. I can think of at least a couple of cases in my own life where I've always assumed the later direction was more true.
In any event, this is an excellent example of a certain type of post on the motte that I really enjoy: I can't say I learned any useful facts reading your requiem, but I do certainly view the world in a slightly different way now, and that's quite useful.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
It's pretty obvious that using a pile of linear algebra gives the best outcome for loans, and literally every bank in the word has been doing this for >30 years. The more old fashioned banks have just been using a person to enter the data into the linear algebra.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
Has no one here been in the military?!
Weapons of war are very commonly referred to as toys in the military. And there is a simple reason: They are fun. There really is nothing more fun than wielding the power to end life. 4 star Marine Corps General James Mattis famously said:
It’s quite fun to shoot them, you know. It’s a hell of a hoot. It’s fun to shoot some people.
And basically everyone in the military agrees. Some non-military folk use the word "toys" to mock the military's enjoyment of violence, but for the most part people use the word positively.
(I say all this as a former Naval officer who was become a committed pacifist. One reason among many for the transformation is just how fun it is to kill.)
PokerPirate
1mo ago
You've correctly pointed out a very real failure mode of our modern atomized lifestyle, and highlighted that many people do in fact fail because of their own ineptitude. I agree with all of that but also think it sucks for Dennis that he failed in this way and that it sucks for all of the other people who also fail in this way. Maybe I have too much sympathy for people who suck at modern life.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
The court obviously did the right thing to maintain a functioning society based on existing laws. But it's easy for me to imagine an IQ ~80 person getting sucked into this shitty situation without any intentional malice on their part. IQ 80 corresponds to about 10% of the population. If we can't get a system that is "easy" for these people to navigate, then literally millions of Americans are doomed to a shitty life full of the Man ruining their shit.
In a perfect society, I think that the cops / county clerk / local priest / bartender would have pestered Dennis multiple times in person at their house / church / pub until this got resolved amicably. This pestering would have ultimately saved tax payers tons of money in legal fees as well.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I've worked with this type of business before, and I think you've diagnosed the problem correctly. I don't see them being able to get AI to automate any of these steps though for the same reasons that they couldn't get spreadsheets to help them.
Man, that really sucks for Dennis.
This case seems like a great metaphor for America these days: Everyone (but Dennis) did everything by the book, and the court seems to have made the right decision based on the facts, but no one had the decency to knock on Dennis's door a couple of times and let him know of his impending legal doom because he didn't check all the right boxes in the right forms.
Life in America sucks for people who can't / won't jump through legal hoops. Basically everyone I know who is on-again-off-again-homeless has a story like this about how the system fucked them over. But the Man oppressing them is just "doing the right thing by the book". I'm sure there were other problems in the 1800s, but at least the downtrodden/not-quite-dregs of society didn't have to deal with paperwork.
Yes, I meant on the order of 30%. That's not a majority, but it's large enough that you can't just assume that everyone in the world agrees with it. For the type of framing that OP used, I think you need the percentage of people to disagree with it to be on the order of the lizardman constant.
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