Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
The decline of the Literary Bloke: "In featuring just four men, Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists confirms what we already knew: the literary male has become terminally uncool."
Just some scattered thoughts.
The Great Literary Man is no longer the role model he once was. The seemingly eternal trajectory outlined by Woolf has been broken. The statistics are drearily familiar. Fewer men read literary novels and fewer men write them. Men are increasingly absent from prize shortlists and publishers’ fiction catalogues. Today’s release of Granta’s 20 best young British novelists – a once-a-decade snapshot of literary talent – bottles the trend. Four of the 20 on the list are men. That’s the lowest in the list’s 40-year history. In its first year, 1983, the Granta list featured only six women.
It has to be pointed out that any such "great upcoming young novelists" list must be comprised of mostly women, out of necessity. Otherwise the organizers of the list would be painted as sexist and privileged and out of touch and it would probably jeopardize their careers. You don't even need to reach for the more subtle types of criticisms that revisionists make of the traditional canon: "yeah, I know like you feel you were just judging works solely on literary merit, and you just so happened to collect a list of 100 deserving authors where 99 of them are men, but actually you were being driven by subconscious patriarchal bias and you need to escape from your historically ossified perspective and so on and so forth". What's going on now in the publishing industry is far more overt: "it's time to hand the reins over to women, period". In such a cultural context, how could a list of the "20 best young British novelists" be taken as unbiased evidence of anything?
The irrelevance of male literary fiction has something to do with “cool”. A few years ago Megan Nolan noted – with as much accuracy as Woolf on these men in Mrs Dalloway – that it might be “inherently less cool” to be a male novelist these days. Male writers, she continued, were missing a “cool, sexy, gunslinger” movement to look up to. All correct.
It's true that literary fiction is not as cool as it once was, although this in itself is not a great moral catastrophe. It's part of the natural cycle of things. The "cool" things now are happening in TV, film, video games, and comic books. When was the last time a literary fiction author of either gender captured the imaginations of millions of people the way Hajime Isayama did? The literary novel is not eternal (many will argue that historically speaking, it's a relatively recent invention) and it is not inherently superior to other narrative art forms.
The decline of male literary fiction is not down to a feminist conspiracy in publishing houses
Correct, it's not a conspiracy, but only because there is nothing conspiratorial about it. If you were to ask any big (or small!) publishing house if they gave priority to voices from traditionally marginalized groups, they would say yes. If you were to then ask them if women are a traditionally marginalized group, they would say yes.
...
It's not a conspiracy if they just tell you what they're doing!
The most understanding account of male literary ambition was written by a woman.
There's been a meme for some time that goes something like, "men don't understand women, but women understand men - maybe even better than men do themselves", which I find to be quite obnoxious. If there is any "misunderstanding", then it surely goes both ways. There are plenty of things in the male experience that have no natural analogue in the female experience, same as the reverse.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
Research Finds Women Are Advantaged in Being Hired in Academic Science
We evaluated the empirical evidence for gender bias in six key contexts in the tenure-track academy: (a) tenure-track hiring, (b) grant funding, (c) teaching ratings, (d) journal acceptances, (e) salaries, and (f) recommendation letters. We also explored the gender gap in a seventh area, journal productivity, because it can moderate bias in other contexts. We focused on these specific domains, in which sexism has most often been alleged to be pervasive, because they represent important types of evaluation, and the extensive research corpus within these domains provides sufficient quantitative data for comprehensive analysis. Contrary to the omnipresent claims of sexism in these domains appearing in top journals and the media, our findings show that tenure-track women are at parity with tenure-track men in three domains (grant funding, journal acceptances, and recommendation letters) and are advantaged over men in a fourth domain (hiring). For teaching ratings and salaries, we found evidence of bias against women; although gender gaps in salary were much smaller than often claimed, they were nevertheless concerning.
It's amusing that one of the categories where women are disadvantaged is also one of the least important categories (who cares about teaching ratings? especially at an R1 institute), and the category where women are most advantaged, hiring, happens to be the most important one - being hired in the first place is the necessary precondition for being able to compete in any of the other categories at all! Salary can't be said to be wholly unimportant, but, most people aren't going into academia for the money anyway.
The discussion related specifically to hiring is in the "Evaluation Context 1: tenure-track hiring" section. For example:
In a natural experiment, French economists used national exam data for 11 fields, focusing on PhD holders who form the core of French academic hiring (Breda & Hillion, 2016). They compared blinded and nonblinded exam scores for the same men and women and discovered that women received higher scores when their gender was known than when it was not when a field was male dominant (math, physics, philosophy), indicating a positive bias, and that this difference strongly increased with a field’s male dominance.
This raises a natural question: how much empirical evidence would be necessary to overturn the idea of "male privilege"? How much evidence of a reversal of power would have to be accrued before it became acceptable to start talking about "female privilege" instead? It seems to me that the existing ideology is so entrenched that it could only be overcome with a Kuhnian paradigm shift - no matter how much the actual empirical facts change, ideology will only (possibly) catch up after a generational shift and a changing of the guard.
Not that I think it's appropriate to just say flat out "women are privileged" of course, as a simple pure reversal of the leftist claim of pervasive male privilege - reality is obviously much more complex than that. But, as this paper suggests, the last several decades of feminist activism has obviously succeeded in securing certain concrete privileges for women.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
11mo ago
I acknowledge that Covid was an actual disease that actually killed people. But for most of the people who got swept up in Covid safetyism, what they were really responding to was the media campaign, not the underlying empirical facts about the disease itself. That was the core of my complaint.
Covid is still killing people - why aren't we still in lockdown? If reducing deaths from communicable airborne illnesses is a terminal value, why don't we have lockdowns and mask mandates and vaccine mandates every flu season? The major difference between the Covid lockdown era, and the time periods before and after it, is the force of the public propaganda campaign. That was the real operative factor. I didn't think that so many people would be so responsive to that campaign, but they were.
I also wonder if you're living in a blue tribe setting
Yes, deep blue. It was inescapable here, impossible not to notice anytime you set foot outside.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
11mo ago
Most people, male or female, operate on the principle of "what's good for me is good simpliciter, and what's bad for me is bad simpliciter". When evaluating any ideology, philosophical theory, or political system, the most important question is always "what's in it for me?". Only a relatively small number of people are able to break out of this type of thinking and evaluate things more objectively. In keeping with the general trend of women clustering more tightly around the psychological average, I would be willing to believe that women are somewhat more prone to this type of thinking than men are; but in most cases that will be hardly worth bringing up, because most men are prone to it too.
You may be able to better understand the responses you're getting from women if you look at things from their perspective. If someone said "I have this idea for an alternative political system where men will not be allowed to own property or assets, they will be barred from most careers and schools simply on account of being male, and they will not be allowed to control their own bank account separate from their wife's", how do you think most men would react? Maybe you can do the 150 IQ big-brained Rationalist routine and say "that sounds unappealing to me on a personal level, but I'm willing to hear out the rest of your proposal and make a holistic evaluation once I have considered all relevant information". But most men wouldn't react that way. They would just say "what? No that sounds dumb, I don't want that. No I don't care about the abstract spiritual benefits of living in accordance with natural law. Go away."
Same thing is happening here.
There seems to be a small movement by Republican lawmakers to put legal pressure on the excesses of woke universities.
The STEM Scott writes about several bills up for consideration in the Texas state senate:
This week, the Texas Senate will take up SB 18, a bill to ban the granting of tenure at all public universities in Texas, including UT Austin and Texas A&M. (Those of us who have tenure would retain it, for what little that’s worth.) [...]
The Texas Senate is considering two other bills this week: SB 17, which would ban all DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs, offices, and practices at public universities, and SB 16, which would require the firing of any professor if they “compel or attempt to compel a student … to adopt a belief that any race, sex, or ethnicity or social, political, or religious belief is inherently superior to any other race, sex, ethnicity, or belief.”
Florida is considering a similar bill, HB 999, that would place restrictions on DEI-related initiatives and majors at public universities. Already the effects are being felt at SLACs like the New College:
We have seven or eight tenure-track candidates coming up for tenure this year. Everyone has a positive recommendation for tenure. The next step is supposed to be the Board of Trustees, which in April will approve or deny tenure. Traditionally, the Board of Trustees just rubber-stamps the tenure based on the recommendations that are made. Now, recently, President Corcoran has met with the president of our union to recommend that the candidates withdraw their files before it’s too late. My interpretation is that Corcoran suspects there’s probably a non-negligible proportion of the trustees who want to make an example out of those people and deny them tenure. The trustees as a whole, Corcoran and DeSantis want to turn our institution into something different. And in order to do that, they need to hire new faculty. The best way for them to hire new faculty is to get rid of the faculty who they can fire without breaching contract. So that means firing the tenure-track faculty. [...]
The most likely thing to happen is that they’re going to impose some changes on the curriculum. It’s not clear exactly what form and with what faculty input, but they’re getting rid of gender studies and critical race theory—they have said that publicly many times. The law, HB 999, is hopelessly vague. There’s so many things that could fall under the umbrella of gender studies and critical race theory, and we don’t know what programs, classes or parts of a given syllabus are likely to be illegal if it passes. We don’t know if that will mean we will have to submit our syllabi to the provost or the president or the board, or what authority they will have.
I'm in a bit of an odd place with regards to these issues. I don't fit neatly onto the woke "how dare you attack our most hallowed and sacred institutions!" side, nor the anti-woke "stop teaching this pinko commie crap to our kids!" side.
I really do have an almost naive faith in free speech for all, even for my worst enemies. Despite being an avowed rightist, I not only want leftists to be able to speak, but I want them to be platformed! I want to help you get the word out! I think our public life really should play host to a diversity of viewpoints. I think the university should be a hothouse of strange and controversial ideas. By all means, keep teaching CRT and women's studies and black studies and whatever else you want. I know that leftists don't extend the same courtesy to me, but that doesn't invalidate the fundamental point that I should extend that courtesy to them. Even just beyond extending formal charity to my political outgroup, I actually enjoy a lot of this type of scholarship and I find value in it, I like Marxist literary criticism and the obscurantist mid-20th century French guys and German phenomenology and all the rest of it, and I think it should continue to be taught and studied on its own merits, even if I don't necessarily agree with the politics.
But! It really is hard sometimes. When things like this happen, when a book chapter that was, by all accounts, a completely anodyne explication of the official party ideology, whose only crime was that it didn't go far enough in advocating the abolition of all gendered pronouns, is met with public humiliation and a tarnishing of the reputation of the author... it does make my blood boil and it's hard to maintain my principles. It makes me want to go "ok, yeah screw it, ban all liberal arts programs at universities, I don't care, whatever, I just want these people to lose." I'm on their side on a lot of the key object-level issues and I still want them to lose! That's why I constantly feel like I'm of two minds on these questions.
In spite of all the problems with the modern university, I still think it's important that we have at least one institution that acts as a countervailing force to utilitarian profit-maximizing techbroism. The university as it stands now leaves a lot to be desired. But if the choice is between the university we have now, or nothing, I'll stick with the university.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
I never encountered a contradictory set of definitions for sex and gender.
As far as I know, the sex/gender “distinction” was invented wholesale in very recent history for overt political purposes. I reject that there is such a distinction.
This is pretty clearly a woman.
To me it’s clearly a man, due to his facial structure. But it’s possible I could be mistaken.
Being a man or being a woman isn’t about what clothes you wear or how long your hair is. They’re biological categories.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage
I occasionally see this self-deprecating tendency among fans of sci-fi and other types of genre fiction, where they assume that there must clearly be some inherent property of classical literature, unbeknownst to the plebians, that sets it apart - that the English majors are hoarding the secret sauce for what makes a work "actually good". I assure you that they're not.
The average work of canonical literature is, in my opinion, not that good, and most of these works have "stood the test of time" only due to accidents of history, rather than their own intrinsic merits. This isn't because of any particular failing on the part of the writers or critics involved, but is instead a simple corollary of the fact that the majority of works in any domain will tend towards mediocrity. The average sci-fi story ranges from "meh" to "ok", just like how the average work of "literary" fiction ranges from "meh" to "ok". It's debatable how many truly Great Books have ever even been written - think of how many physics books/articles throughout history have truly advanced the frontier of understanding in a deep and meaningful way, compared to the mountain of unread and irrelevant papers produced each year to feed the tenure committee machine. All domains of human activity function in essentially the same way, including art, including "high" art.
Of course I'm by no means advocating for total aesthetic anarchism. Some works are better than others; some works are really bad and some works are really great. And being conversant in artistic theory and the history of art will help artists produce better works instead of worse ones. I just want to be careful that we're not engaging in a knee-jerk elevation of the classical just because it's classical. In fact 20th/21st genre fiction has made clear advancements that were largely undreamt of in previous eras of literature, particularly in terms of the range of plot structures and character types that it treats.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
I was browsing the latest new journal articles on philpapers.org, an archive of (mostly analytic, mostly Anglophone) philosophy papers, and came across the following: Demanding a halt to metadiscussions:
How do social actors get addressees to stop retreating to metadiscussions that derail ground-level discussions, and why do they expect the strategies to work? The question is of both theoretical and practical interest, especially with regard to ground-level discussions of systemic sexism and racism derailed by qualifying “not all men” and “not all white people” perform the sexist or racist actions that are the topic of discussion. [...] I find that social actors use strategies that may at first glance appear to be out of bounds in an ideal critical discussion—e.g., demanding, shouting, cussing, sarcasm, name-calling—to cultivate a context where using not-all qualifiers becomes increasingly costly.
Something amusing about this abstract is that a statement of the form "not all men are like that" hardly qualifies as "metadiscussion". Challenging your opponent's assertion by pointing out counterexamples isn't metadiscussion - it's just discussion. I would expect "meta" discussion to be something more along the lines of "what epistemology allows you to KNOW that ALL men are sexist?" or "let's examine the sociological history of the concept of sexism and what political or psychological factors may be causing you to deploy it in this context".
Anyway, philpapers is pretty indiscriminate in what they archive, so I checked to see what journal this was actually published in. Argumentation is "an international and interdisciplinary journal that gathers academic contributions from a wide range of scholarly backgrounds and approaches to reasoning, natural inference and persuasion: communication, classical and modern rhetoric, linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, psychology, philosophy, formal and informal logic, critical thinking, history and law" (i.e. the type of publication that would have uncritically accepted the original Sokal paper), so I wouldn't expect the publications in this journal to all conform to the standards and values of analytic philosophy.
Ultimately I don't think that this paper is an isolated incident though, but rather it seems to me to be representative of broader trends in all schools of western philosophy, including analytic philosophy. The Philosophical Quarterly, for example, published a glowing review of a book entitled The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle. My general impression of academic philosophy for the last few years is that departments have shifted focus away from the more "pure" research into questions of metaphysics and epistemology and have put more emphasis on hiring for positions with a focus on social and political philosophy, and the faculty who fill those positions are of course expected to produce research that advances the party line.
If even analytic philosophy, which was founded on norms of disinterested rigor and an explicit suspicion of moral and political philosophy, can become subject to institutional capture for political purposes, then it seems like truly nowhere is safe. The hard sciences are certainly more resilient than the humanities are, although not completely.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
21d ago
My memories of the earliest days are very fuzzy, but as far as I can remember even in the /r/slatestarcodex days, this forum always had a noticeable rightist bent, simply in virtue of the mere fact that it allows rightists to speak freely. If you're one of the few places that doesn't subject witches to trial by water, then you're going to attract an unusually high percentage of witches, even if that's not your explicit goal.
That being said, I think we have hit an all time low when it comes to the number of active leftist users, and I think that's due to a couple factors:
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I think that the average leftist simply isn't interested in dialogue with rightists. This is evident in how they moderate their own spaces. Frequently when leftists get power, they simply ban (certain) right-wing views. If they don't want to deal with rightists in their own spaces, why would they want to come here and deal with us here? There's a reason that the left has become the party of deplatforming. I think it's pretty straightforward.
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Regardless of how open you are to dialogue, it can be mentally draining to be the only one arguing for a certain viewpoint while everyone else is against you. Once leftists start to self-select out of the discussion, more and more of them will start to decide it's not worth staying as they become a smaller and smaller minority, creating a vicious cycle. We also don't have an easy free source of new users because people can't just stop by with their reddit account when they see this place linked on subs like /r/sneerclub or whatever.
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Users with unpopular viewpoints are more likely to feel embattled by the general forum atmosphere, more likely to get heated during debates, and thus more likely to get banned. I don't want to litigate the cases of specific users here, but I can think of at least a couple examples of this.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
24d ago
that governments may make figleaf declarations about opposing these types of slander but will never actually enforce them because they actually are inherently conservative entities that are on the side of the privileged and the default, that anyone can make the most vile comments they want and always could without fearing legal reprisals
It heavily depends on the government and the type of speech in question. Holocaust denial is currently illegal in multiple Western countries and has been successfully prosecuted.
The Peterson/'free speech absolutist' wing points at 'cancel culture' and the specter of government censorship as a general bludgeon against the left, but they're actually committed to a much more broad model of conservatism and just using that to stir up their base.
So, I think this is a common cognitive bias to fall victim to. When you encounter someone who has views that are dramatically different from your own, you don't have an internal mental model of what it would feel like to actually hold those views with sincere conviction. So you assume that they don't. It's easy to reach for an alternative explanation of, oh they don't actually believe that, they're just saying that they believe it because of X Y Z.
I catch myself falling into this trap sometimes when I think about leftist views. Like when people complain about movies and TV shows being too white and not diverse enough. Sometimes I think, look it can't actually bother people that much when this or that piece of media doesn't meet their own preferred racial quotas, they have to just be saying this because they like the feeling of power it gives them, or maybe so they can get a cushy sinecure as a diversity consultant. But when I take a step back and think about it rationally, I realize that that's not a psychologically realistic model of how people operate. Most people don't just make shit up for years on end, even when they can derive some personal benefit from it. The simplest and most plausible explanation is that people really are upset about a lack of racial diversity in media, and they really do experience it as a serious injustice, foreign as that notion may be to me.
Similarly, I can assure you with full confidence that when rightists complain about leftist speech censorship, they really are angry about it, legitimately. It's not a ruse, it's not a Machiavellian attempt to advance some other covert agenda. You might think their reasons are bad, but the emotions are real regardless. If nothing else, you should be able to appreciate the obvious self-interest angle. If I want to say X, and other people are stopping me from saying X, then I'm naturally going to be upset about that.
Whereas people like Rowling aren't fully committed to that broader conservative project, they just want to slander and eradicate trans people
Saying that MTF transsexuals are not women is not in any way "violence", "hatred", or a call for "eradication".
I think over the last few months we've established that AI issues are on topic for the culture war thread, at least when they intersect with explicitly cultural domains like art. So I hope it's ok that I write this here. Feel free to delete if not.
NovelAI's anime model was released today, and it's pretty god damned impressive. If you haven't seen what it can do yet, feel free to check out the /hdg/ threads on /h/ for some NSFW examples.
Not everyone is happy though; AI art has attracted the attention of at least one member of congress, among several other public and private entities:
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) urged the National Security Advisor (NSA) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to address the release of unsafe AI models that do not moderate content made on their platforms, specifically the Stable Diffusion model released by Stability AI on August 22, 2022. Stable Diffusion allows users to generate unfiltered imagery of a violent or sexual nature, depicting real people. It has already been used to create photos of violently beaten Asian women and pornography depicting real people.
I don't really bet on there being any serious legal liability for Stability.AI or anyone else, but, you never know.
I've tried several times to articulate here why I find AI art to be so upsetting. I get the feeling that many people here haven't been very receptive to my views. Partially that's my fault for being a bad rhetorician, but partially I think it's because I'm arguing from the standpoint of a certain set of terminal values which are not widely shared. I'd like to try laying out my case one more time, using some hopefully more down-to-earth considerations which will be easier to appreciate. If you already disagree with me, I certainly don't expect you to be moved by my views - I just hope that you'll find them to be coherent, that it seems like the sort of thing that a reasonable person could believe.
Essentially the crux of the matter is, to borrow a phrase from crypto, "proof of work". There are many activities and products that are valuable, partially or in whole, due to the amount of time and effort that goes into them. I don't think it's hard to generate examples. Consider weight lifting competitions - certainly there's nothing useful about repeatedly lifting a pile of metal bricks, nor does the activity itself have any real aesthetic or social value. The value that participants and spectators derive from the activity is purely a function of the amount of human effort and exertion that goes into the activity. Having a machine lift the weights instead would be quite beside the point, and it would impress no one.
For me personally, AI art has brought into sharp relief just how much I value the effort and exertion that goes into the production of art. Works of art are rather convenient (and beautiful) proof of work tokens. First someone had to learn how to draw, and then they had to take time out of their day and say, I'm going to draw this thing in particular, I'm going to dedicate my finite time and energy to this activity and this particular subject matter rather than anything else. I like that. I like when people dedicate themselves to something, even at significant personal cost. I like having my environment filled with little monuments to struggle and self-sacrifice, just like how people enjoy the fact that someone out there has climbed Mt. Everest, even though it serves no real purpose. Every work of art is like a miniature Mt. Everest.
Or at least it was. AI art changes the equation in a way that's impossible to ignore - it affects my perception of all works of art because now I am much less certain of the provenance of each work*. There is now a fast and convenient way of cheating the proof of work system. I look at a lot of anime art - a lot of it is admittedly very derivative and repetitive, and it tends to all blend together after a while. But in the pre-AI era, I could at least find value in each individual illustration in the fact that it represented the concrete results of someone's time and effort. There are of course edge cases - we have always had tracing, photobashing, and other ways of "cheating". But you could still assume that the average illustration you saw was the result of a concrete investment of time and effort. Now that is no longer the case. Any illustration I see could just as easily be one from the infinite sea of AI art - why should I spend any time looking at it, pondering it, wondering about the story behind it? I am now very uncertain as to whether it has any value at all.
It's a bit like discovering that every video game speedrun video you see has a 50% chance of being a deepfake. Would you be as likely to watch speedrunning videos? I wouldn't. They only have value if they're the result of an actual investment of time by a human player - otherwise, they're worthless. Or, to take another very timely example, the Carlsen-Niemann cheating scandal currently rocking the world of chess. Chess is an illustrative example to look at, because it's a domain where everyone is acutely aware of the dangers of a situation where you can't tell the difference between an unaided human and a human using AI assistance. Many people have remarked that chess is "dead" if they can't find a way to implement effective anti-cheating measures that will prevent people from consulting engines during a game. People want to see two humans play against each other, not two computers.
To be clear, I'm not saying that the effort that went into a work of art is the only thing that matters. I also place great value on the intrinsic and perceptual properties of a work of art. I see myself as having a holistic view where I value both the intrinsic properties of the work, and the extrinsic, context-dependent properties related to the work's provenance, production, intention, etc.
TL;DR - I used to be able to look at every work of art and go "damn someone made that, that's really cool", now I can't do that, which makes every interaction I have with art that much worse, and by extension it makes my life worse.
*(I'm speaking for convenience here as if AI had already supplanted human artists. As I write this post, it still has limitations, and there are still many illustrations that are unmistakably of human origin. But frankly, given how fast the new image models are advancing, I don't know how much longer that will be the case.)
EDIT: Unfortunately, this dropped the day after I wrote my post, so I didn't get a chance to comment on it originally. Based on continually accumulating evidence, I may have to retract my original prediction that opposition to AI art was going to be a more right-coded position. Perhaps there are not as many aesthetes in the dissident right as I thought.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
It’s unfortunate that discussing the link between transgenderism and sexual fetishism has been made taboo in public discourse. If you spend any amount of time in online transgender communities you’ll see that the fetishistic aspects are clearly a huge component of it.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
7mo ago
Peterson disparages a former client as "vindictive", dismisses their complaints as a "pack of lies"
I don't see the problem here? There's a good chance that the client was vindictive, and their complaints were based on lies. As long as he doesn't reveal any of his clients' personal information, there's no issue with him expressing his views on these matters.
and refers to a fellow practicing physician as "criminal" for performing an otherwise legal surgery.
Obviously he's using "criminal" in this case to pass moral judgment on the physician's conduct, rather than making an accusation about actual illegalities. Censuring Peterson for this statement comes off as an attempt to establish this physician's conduct, and the medical establishment's treatment of gender issues more broadly, as being beyond ethical scrutiny - which is something that I certainly cannot accept.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
it's the vast resources that have been marshalled to save these people that's been challenging me. A quick skim through the wiki article lists 9 ships and 5 planes with back-office coordination across 3 military branches and 4 countries.
Well, what else were we supposed to be doing with all those ships for the last 4 days?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2d ago
Ukraine suspends consular services for military-age men in draft push
Ukraine on Tuesday suspended consular services for military-age male citizens until May 18, criticising Ukrainians abroad who it said expected to receive help from the state without helping it battle for survival in the war against Russia.
Hundreds of thousands of military-age Ukrainian men are living abroad and the country faces an acute shortage of troops against a larger, better-equipped enemy nearly 26 months since Russia's full-scale invasion.
[...]In practice, the suspension means military age men now living abroad will be unable to renew expiring passports or obtain new ones or receive official documents such as marriage certificates.
It's been interesting to watch the reaction from Western pro-Ukrainians to Ukraine's sweeping new mobilization orders. The prevailing sentiment seems to be "that's a tragedy, and obviously the draft shouldn't exist to begin with, but what can be done?" Suggesting that it would be better to negotiate a peaceful end to the conflict is outside the Overton window. It's a foregone conclusion that Ukraine must fight to the last man.
There is something hellishly dystopian about fleeing to another country, possibly even across the ocean, and your country of birth is still trying to pull you back. Particularly because women are given a free pass. It's natural to feel like there should be some cost associated with the privilege of not having to be forcibly conscripted to fight against an invading army.
This raises questions about Ukraine's ability to keep their fighting force well-staffed going forward, and also questions about the morale of Ukrainian soldiers. Every conflict has some number of draft dodgers, but I wonder if there are any hard stats about whether dodgers are particularly overrepresented in this conflict? That could help adjudicate the question of whether the Ukrainian resistance is an authentic homegrown phenomenon, or if it's largely being sustained by Western pressure.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9mo ago
Why treating Harvard admissions like a prize the right thing to do?
Because it is a prize. This is an objective, undeniable fact. It confers a great deal of status on the person who receives it. Basing admissions on academic achievement rather than the subjective whims of the admissions officers is at least an attempt at making it "fair".
Unless you just think that upward social mobility itself is not something that society should be optimizing for. But then that's a separate discussion entirely.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
The decimation of the last vestiges of humanistic culture at the hands of our technocratic society continues: The End of the English Major
According to Robert Townsend, the co-director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators project, which collects data uniformly but not always identically to internal enrollment figures, from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.
Reasons given by students for choosing STEM majors over humanities majors are in line with what you would expect: STEM majors teach you economically useful skills that translate directly into gainful employment, and humanities majors don't. Especially because ChatGPT just put a lot of copywriters out of business over night.
Although the crisis of university humanities departments has frequently been blamed on recent events like the 2008 Great Recession and the covid pandemic, these trends are not exactly new. In a collection of lectures delivered at Princeton and published in 1938 entitled The Meaning of the Humanities, the sense of crisis was already palpable:
Granting that the humanities are so interwoven with the fabric of society that the world cannot be entirely "dehumanized," a modern humanist can hardly help feeling that his position is far from being secure. In fact, the humanities are attacked on every side; they are losing ground every day; the host of their enemies is legion and their defenders a mere handful. When they are not in danger of being starved and annihilated, they risk being absorbed or annexed by peaceful penetration through the inroads made into their rightful domain by specialists on "human relations," psychologists, educators, and humanitarians.
There was also an acknowledgement that, unfortunately, most people do have to work for a living:
The easiest way to solve the problem is to ignore it, namely, to follow the line of least resistance and to continue along the old traditional lines. It is easy to declare that some studies, called disinterested studies, a polite euphemism for useless studies, will remain accessible to a chosen few, while useful studies, studies preparing for life, meaning by that equivocal term, for a profession, trade or business, shall become the lot of the masses.
It turns out there was never a time where the majority of people could decide on a whim to spend their formative years of education studying fictional events that never happened. Who would have guessed?
There is certainly something to mourn in the gradual erosion of the traditional support structures for western elite culture. I don't take it lightly. But I also believe that there is a fundamental resilience to what one might call the "humanistic mode of thought" that will ensure its survival, even if there were no universities at all. Humans will continue to do philosophy, and make art, and reflect on art, for as long as there are entities that are still recognizably human. There has never been any other time in history when narrative fiction played such a large role in the lives of so many people - it just comes in the form of TV shows and video games now, rather than novels. Although some Rationalists are prone to triumphalism about science and self-perfection through technology, a significant percentage of the output of LessWrong is dedicated to the analysis of philosophical questions, and the single most famous work to come out of the Rationalist movement is a work of imaginative literature. The call to authentic reflection may only be the purview of a small minority of individuals in any given society, but to those who are attuned to that call, it is ineluctable.
I suppose what ultimately saddens me the most about the fall of the English major is that it seems to be yet another indicator that the world I once knew - the world that extended roughly from the end of World War II to the 2008 financial crisis, the heyday of middle class consumer capitalism - is dying, if not already dead. As the linked article alludes to, the internet itself may be partially blamed for the decline of traditional university studies:
Shapiro picked up an abused-looking iPhone from his desk. “You’re talking to someone who has only owned a smartphone for a year—I resisted,” he said. Then he saw that it was futile. “Technology in the last twenty years has changed all of us,” he went on. “How has it changed me? I probably read five novels a month until the two-thousands. If I read one a month now, it’s a lot. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred Web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.” He waggled the iPhone disdainfully. “Go to a play now, and watch the flashing screens an hour in, as people who like to think of themselves as cultured cannot! Stop! Themselves!” Assigning “Middlemarch” in that climate was like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip.
It made sense for academic discourse on literature to be centralized at specialized locations called "universities", back in an era when all information was not free and infinitely reproducible. It still partially makes sense for STEM as well, since there must be a centralized governing body to certify that students have gained the requisite skills. But for the humanities? Why go to college to read Shakespeare when I can just read him on my own time? I have the whole western canon available for free in my pocket, I don't even need to buy all the books one by one. If I have questions about the reading, I have youtube and blogs, I can instantly ask questions of anyone in the world, I can even access most major works of academic criticism for free or relatively cheap. The image of students actually gathering in a physical classroom, with paper books, for the privilege of hearing the opinions of someone who may not even be as insightful as the average 4chan /lit/ poster, starts to look woefully antiquated.
It sucks that it's antiquated. I am a hopeless nostalgic. But it is antiquated nonetheless.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
So - what are your recommended solutions to the issue of transgender ideation and other culturally bound issues?
I'm not trans, but I do have a lot of personal experience with transgender ideation. When I was younger, I seriously considered transitioning many times - it came to the point where I had resolved to confess it to my parents, and ask them about actually getting treatment. I ended up chickening out at the last second though, and never went through with it.
What really got me off the idea for good - what made me stop viewing transition as a live option - was discovering radfem (TERF) blogs online. They were completely unabashed in saying, this is ridiculous, you are not a woman, we will never view you as a woman, what you're doing is harmful to actual women, and you really should just stop. And I ended up concluding, you know what? You're right. This is silly, and I should stop.
So, I'll reiterate what I said earlier and what others have said as well. The solution is to encourage a culture of open and honest discussion where no meme is above criticism. Some people will still choose to go through with medical transition anyway, or develop an eating disorder, or what have you. But it will certainly be less people, if the broader culture encourages them to be exposed to alternative viewpoints.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2mo ago
Broke: "It's my fault that I failed so I should just give up."
Woke: "It's other people's fault that I failed, so I should try again."
Bespoke: "I am responsible for everything that happens to me and everything that happens to everyone else. I have failed before and I always will fail, but I'll keep trying anyway because as the Kierkegaardian Knight of Faith I embrace the absurd. God is that all things are possible, and that all things are possible is God."
Supreme Court strikes down Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan:
The Supreme Court on Friday struck down President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, denying tens of millions of Americans the chance to get up to $20,000 of their debt erased.
The ruling, which matched expert predictions given the justices’ conservative majority, is a massive blow to borrowers who were promised loan forgiveness by the Biden administration last summer.
The 6-3 majority ruled that at least one of the six states that challenged the loan relief program had the proper legal footing, known as standing, to do so.
The high court said the president didn’t have the authority to cancel such a large amount of consumer debt without authorization from Congress and agreed the program would cause harm to the plaintiffs.
The amusing thing here to me is that we got two major SCOTUS rulings in two days that are, on the face of it, not directly related to each other in any obvious way (besides the fact that they both deal with the university system). One could conceivably support one ruling and oppose the other. The types of legal arguments used in both cases are certainly different. And yet we all know that the degree of correlation among the two issues is very high. If you support one of the rulings, you're very likely to support the other, and vice versa.
The question for the floor is: why the high degree of correlation? Is there an underlying principle at work here that explains both positions (opposition to AA plus opposition to debt relief) that doesn't just reduce to bare economic or racial interest? The group identity angle is obvious. AA tends to benefit blacks and Hispanics at the expense of whites and Asians. Student debt relief benefits the poorer half of the social ladder at the expense of the richer half of the social ladder. Whites and Asians tend to be richer than blacks and Hispanics. So, given a choice of "do you want a better chance of your kids getting into college, and do you also not want your tax dollars going to people who couldn't pay off their student loans", people would understandably answer "yes" to both - assuming you’re in the appropriate group and that is indeed the bargain that’s being offered to you. But perhaps that's uncharitable. Which is why I'm asking for alternative models.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
And where are we going to be in another few decades?
The Right needs to learn that 2010s trans activism - Trans Women Are Women, respect people’s pronouns, etc - is believed by 90% of people even in a conservative workplace.
Someone needs to put their foot down.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
Maybe being sexually unsatisfied is just normal? Maybe there’s no reason to expect otherwise?
What baseline are we comparing against here? If you polled men in rural England in the 1500s and asked them “Are you satisfied with your sex life?” what sort of responses would you have gotten?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
4d ago
I mean, what do these people hope to accomplish? Like what are their demands?
Can't you ask that about most protests?
I never really "got" protesting. I have to assume that the main purpose of it is just to serve as a social activity for the protesters themselves. If it's something like workers going on strike, where the group in question actually has some leverage, that's a different story, but a bunch of random people just gathering in public to "support a cause"? It doesn't make a lot of sense.
Sometimes I've heard it justified as a way of building positive publicity. You're supposed to see the police or other authority figures mistreating the protesters, and that's supposed to make you support their cause more. But usually it just makes me end up supporting the cause less, because the protesters are obnoxious. Their own actions make me want them to lose more.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
16d ago
Indians consistently overestimate how much time we spend thinking about them.
At least in America, in terms of the groups that grab headlines and really dominate the political discourse, it's blacks, South Americans, Chinese because of the geopolitical tensions, Jews to some extent recently because of the Palestine conflict, Muslims too because of the same conflict although not as much as during the Bush years or even the peak ISIS years... Indians are honestly way down there, most Americans don't have much of an opinion on them outside of some vague stereotypes.
When I was quite young, I adopted the stereotypical pretentious reddit fedora mentality - other people are just dumb sheeple who follow the herd, I'm smarter than them, I'm an independent thinker, etc. As I got a little older I softened on that. I thought, well that's not really fair, people generally do try their best and everyone has a reason for acting the way they do, I shouldn't be so arrogant as to think that I'm all that different from them.
But Covid kinda tanked my assessment of humanity in general and I'm back to thinking that most people really are just dumb sheeple who follow the herd. Covid was empirical proof of that. The media really can just turn mass sentiment on or off, like flipping a switch, and people will go along with it because it's "the right thing to do". Turn the switch on, and people who are ordinarily perfectly reasonable are frothing at the mouth saying you're killing grandma, you're a menace to society, you're a dirty plague rat. Turn the switch off and it's all forgotten. Like it never even happened. They don't even think about it anymore. How can I trust that they have any deeply held convictions or principles at all, if the sentiment comes and goes that easily?
Granted, people have always believed dumb things throughout history. Mass psychosis has existed for as long as we've had mass society. So, taking a broad enough view, Covid didn't really teach us anything new. But I do think it was possibly the first example that showed how spectacularly easy it is to manipulate mass sentiment in the social media age. At least communism required a commitment on your part; it demanded that you have skin in the game for the long haul. Now the political flow of society can be turned on or off like a faucet, they can direct people over here one day and over there the next, running everyone ragged because they're deathly afraid of not getting enough likes on their TikToks from The Right People or whatever the hell it is that kids worry about these days.
With each passing year, reality does more and more to chip away at my faith in the inherent nobility of the human spirit. I'm bitter about it.
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