RenOS
something is wrong
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User ID: 2051
RenOS
something is wrong
9mo ago
I know it's not a big issue, I know I should have expected it and I shouldn't let it get to me, but dammit. It's just so clearly reminiscent of the larger movements in ideology. Today I was asked whether we come with the entire family of four or with less to an event and I wanted to post the family-of-four emoji back. I'm usually not a big emoji poster, so I searched and searched and couldn't find it. Well, as it turns out, ALL family emojis were removed earlier this year and replaced with what looks like bathroom signs (and appropriately moved to the signs section as opposed to people emojis). The reason? Simple:
The Family Emojis Are Now Equally Useless For Everyone, And That's A Good Thing.
Direct quote from the author, who was on relevant committees, for some time even vice chair, for this decision:
Silhouettes might please no-one, but at least they might displease everyone equally.
First, I want to note how destructive this thinking is. A healthy attitude, upon seeing a sad and a happy person, would be to say: We should try to make the sad happier, even if they might not become as happy as the other person. It leads to more overall happiness, and also to more equality, an unalloyed on-net improvement. By their explicit, stated reasoning these committees would rather make the happy person's live miserable until they are exactly as sad as the other person.
And secondly, I can't help but notice how much this thinking is obviously directly descendend from communist/marxist economic thinking, just applied to cultural topics - i.e. cultural marxism. My wife was born and all her family lived in the DDR (soviet east germany). This is exactly what they reported about how life was structured - every time someone had something that wasn't attainable for everyone, you generally should try to hide it, lest someone might report you or otherwise try to make your life difficult. Exception were, as usual, only for special people. For example, my wife's grandfather was a reasonably well-connected and quite competent car technician working for the military intelligence, members of which were generally left alone by the much more well-known civilian intelligence, the Stasi. Among other things, he had access to a car cemetery, and through this he managed to build is own Wartburg, which was a more expensive car he normally wouldn't have access to, from parts of multiple destroyed Wartburgs. The only reason why he could do this was precisely because of his affiliations - otherwise simply having a better-than-usual car was so suspicious and dangerous that it's better not to try - a car after all you can't easily hide.
So life in the east was in large parts structured around seeming humble and normal and, from the perspective of the higher-ups, only giving people things which you're sure you can give it to everyone. Just like these bathroom sign families, buildings were often literally bleak and grey, which was considered good by the authorities since the alternative was inequality. It seems to me at least some portion of the people who make decisions concerning all our lives start again to think like this.
Third, this is often likened or even explicitly called "tall-poppy-syndrome", the attitude of cutting down the above-average successful. But it's actually worse than that: We steer towards a culture that uses the very least successful/happy as the reference, and that strives to drag the average down until it is exactly as unsuccessful/sad as them. It was trivial to include a bunch of skin colors to accommodate most cases, but since accommodating all possible variations was unfeasible, they decided against it, independent of how ever-rare these variations might be.
RenOS
something is wrong
2yr ago
I'm not interested in resegregation in any way, but I think people are really bad at understanding the historical perspective. For the great majority of history and places, the average person would see almost nobody except a very small set of fixed local ethnicities, often only a single one. The few situations where they would, it was either very strongly controlled like large-distance-trading (and even that was still often changing hands exactly at the lines where ethnicities changed) or in a very negative context like an invasion, vagabonds or large scale population movements (where the moving people might not necessarily be ill-intended, but the difficulties involving the movement still meant that it rarely worked out well).
It absolutely makes sense that historically, people would by default simply distrust anyone who wasn't of an ethnicity they knew; But in fact it was worse than this: People were xenophobic in a much more general sense in that they simply distrusted anyone, full stop, that wasn't already well-known in their local environment. And this made a lot of sense! Moving around into unknown communities back then was expensive and dangerous, something that was only done if you had no other option. And when would someone have no other option? Usually because they did something sufficiently bad somewhere that they had to flee. Not to mention that someone who has nothing to lose is inherently dangerous in an environment where everyone is still fighting for their survival. On average, even a single stranger arriving - not to mention a group of them - was a very net-negative thing for a community for most of history.
But even back then, there absolutely were ways around these problems; Letters of recommendation, bringing resources with you and immediately sharing them as a proof of goodwill, being part of a generally accepted institution like a monastery or long-distance-trading, let's call this whole category credentials. So the capacity to trust strangers has always been there. But credentials were entirely inaccessible for something like 99% of the population. Guilds were possibly the first larger scale credential that made the concept accessible for something like an extra 10% of the population I guess? I admittedly don't know the exact numbers here. There is some argument that christianity and religions in general can fulfil a similar role as a low level credential.
Now comes pre-modernity, or the colonialism period or however you want to call it. As rapidly improving technology allows people to move much further than they could before, suddenly the equations changed; The baseline for "my situation is bad enough that it's worth trying my luck elsewhere" increased and increased, and hence the average quality of the stranger (again, stranger meaning not just personally unknown but someone without credentials) increased from "probably literally a multiple murderer" to just "regular poor person" . Furthermore, our general situation improved enough that (violent) criminality in general was worth less, and violent mental illness also has diminished. But as it always goes, social technology tends to lag behind regular technology, and hence both people's instincts were slow to change and modern-style credentialism hasn't established itself yet (or just partially through the aforementioned guilds).
I think people underestimate how much of pre-modernity style racism is mostly just the combination of this instinctive, historically rational distrust of strangers and the poor experiences that predictably happen when groups with very different norms clash. And unlike a teutonic moving into a roman village, who might cause some issues but who can show his goodwill, adopt local norms and become increasingly indistinguishable, the obvious differences between very different ethnicities makes fitting in much more difficult and hence slows everything down. Racism is not in any way this special kind of evil that is entirely irrational, it's just our instinctive distrust of strangers that used to be very adaptive.
As we near modernity, people increasingly start to trust strangers more in a fully general sense, and modern-style credentialism gets established so that almost anybody can travel from one place to another where they literally know nobody and still show proof of who they are, what they are capable of, that they're not a threat to anyone, etc. And this process happened almost simultaneously as racism toned down, and I don't think that is an accident. It's fundamentally the same process in my opinion. In medieval times, a black guy turning up somewhere complaining that nobody trusts him falls on deaf ears; they're trusting no strangers, and they are struggling to survive already. Today, if anybody turns up somewhere and is treated with distance and distrust, you need a specific reason and "racism" as a concept starts to even make sense at all. Early this century was just the weird inter-period when our society hadn't fully caught up with the changes. Or more precisely, societies, since I think other ethnicities actively westernising has been a large part of the process as well.
Btw, none of this is incompatible with the sort of "light" HBD that expects some average differences between groups (but which is unfortunately still taboo in the modern western consensus position). I guess this post also ended up slightly off-target in that it is not describing how the switch actually happened in detail, and more on the why it was the way it used to be and why it has changed. but I hope it's still interesting enough for some people.
RenOS
something is wrong
3mo ago
The part many on the left are missing is that puberty itself is a large part of the mechanic by which teens become heteronormal. When I was around 12, I felt disgusted by teens, sexuality in general and was a somewhat odd kid to begin with. At that time there already was lots of talk about nonstandard sexualities and I strongly identified with asexuals. I also thought that I was very far from the average male, among other things refusing any kind of violence (I distinctly remember refusing to even watch shows/movies or play games portraying violence), an intellectual above all kinds of base instincts. Typical arrogant nerd stuff. Especially early puberty then felt like shit, very moody & scared of what happens with me. Then sometime in late puberty all of that went out of the window, suddenly I was a temperamentally fairly stereotypical guy. And even in retrospect, I had been to some degree in denial even when younger. In elementary school I was often beating up other kids for various reasons. I just learned that I was going nowhere with that attitude, so I had to force myself out of it and pretended that it never happened. Which combined with my otherwise bookish personality naturally led to the described intellectual self-image.
Conditionals are obviously hard to prove, but I could easily see my pre-puberty self taking puberty blockers to not become a disgusting, violent, sexual men. Especially with the argument that oh, it's reversible anyway, so just try it out. It would have been a grave mistake, but I wouldn't have known, and in particular it's easy then to then just stay the course and tell yourself you took the right option.
My wife is very similar in the other direction; She always was a tomboy who felt more comfortable with boys, then puberty hit and she changed. She also could see herself mistakenly choosing to take puberty blockers in her youth. And now our daughter is just the same, so we make sure to always tell her that her mom had the same struggles. Imagining her mistakenly getting talked into puberty blockers is horrifying, and worse, very plausible.
So overall while I have quite some sympathy, going through puberty seems like the less-bad option even for the majority of those who feel somewhat uncomfortable with their sex.
RenOS
something is wrong
9mo ago
Are we better than you? We tested this claim by asking ourselves and we say: Yes!
It's not quite CW but since I've stumbled over this paper twice now in completely different contexts (once from Marginal Revolution, another in my mainstream news reel) and don't know where else to post it, I want to talk about it. Especially since people clearly, uncritically have taken it at face value.
The authors, who studied philosophy, mention that philosophy student often think they are more rigorous thinkers, and claim to test the claim. They do it by using two scales by the "Higher Education Research Institute". Both of these are purely self-ratings, i.e. they strictly measure students perception of themselves.
The result is, unsurprisingly, that philosophy students self-rate as rigorous thinkers. This then gets reported by the authors as "empirically tested" higher rigorousness and open-mindedness. For extra laughs, political science is among the highest-scoring.
Tbh there is not much else to say here. It's damning that the authors did this, it's damning that the journal published it, and it's damning that this now gets smugly, uncritically shared in news, social media and blogs. Remember kids, this is how science works!
RenOS
something is wrong
4d ago
I'm pretty confident that if Bezos would have married a literal nubile twenty something, we would have feminist journalists write about how this proves that men are shallow. If he had married a lower class mexican wife, it would be decried as vaguely coercive and that this proves men enjoy power differentials. If he had married white trash, he would be ridiculed as going back to his roots. Hell, if he married a conventionally attractive, age-appropriate, low-agency woman with a conventional job, that would probably also be insinuated as some sort of tradwife, wanting the woman to go back to the kitchen situation.
As several people have pointed out, Sanchez is in many ways precisely the sort of high-agency go-getter that should be popular with feminists, but who in practice always seems to be hated instead. In practice, feminist journalists always want highly successful men to marry women like themselves.
RenOS
something is wrong
1yr ago
I also have to vote for "seems fishy" here. OF has a known problem that most models aren't actually super-profitable, with two broad exceptions: A tiny number of superstars, and those exploiting parasocial relationships with whales. The former is quite hard and unpredictable. For the latter, the model needs to convince the guys that she isn't just some camgirl, but that she is special. There are obviously many ways to do this, but some of the most popular are "I got exploited in the past and now just trying to survive, this isn't the REAL me", "actually, I'm a virgin/have a low number of physical partners, unlike all those other sluts" or "but I'm really smart". In this essay, she is hitting ALL these simultaneously. She gets a shot at superstardom, and if it doesn't work out, she has the necessary background to still go for the parasocial relationship.
In general given her OF, the essay is also quite hypocritical imo. She is literally exploiting what she is decrying.
RenOS
something is wrong
10mo ago
I just told my wife (2 kids and counting) about this article and her reaction was (roughly translated): "weird how many women have multiple". There is not much to add here; The only people having actual experience on the matter, i e. mothers, will happily choose to go through this allegedly grueling experience again. While people with zero experience, such as the childless author, will make these wild, outlandish claims. It should have been instructive for you that your mother, who knows exactly how bad pregnancy/childbirth is or isn't, was exasperated.
RenOS
something is wrong
8mo ago
This is unfortunately pretty standard nowadays in science. A PhD candidate in our group (we're in genetics) has the the displeasure of working in a larger project (which concerns a certain kind of inborn disability) involving social scientists, and not only do they make crazy comments on her presentations such as "there is no genetic causes for any disability" or "any research on the causes is at best wasted money or at worst ableism, it should all go into how to support them", they also explicitly either identify as activists themselves or will closely work together with explicitly activist groups.
RenOS
something is wrong
9mo ago
Some observations:
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As multiple other commenters note, residential schools were a very progressive idea for their time. The kind of person running it was clearly the same kind of person now criticising it, even with largely similar values. Given that progressives are considered the side of empathy - most conservatives main complaint is their excess of empathy - this makes me weep for the project of empathy as a whole. If people fail to empathize with themselves, projected into the past, how can they possibly empathise with other people?
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The contrarian in me obviously wants to just exhume everything and see whether there is anything at all; But to some degree that still buys into a framing that imo is entirely unfounded. To our knowledge, we know that conditions in foster institutions were generally quite bad independent of the skin color of the child for a long time, not to mention that many kids already were mistreated even before they entered them. We know some of them died due to this. Even if they were being buried locally, that is still no proof whatsoever for the wild claims of murderous racism.
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It strikes me again just how little connection there seems to be between people getting into positions of power in native american councils and actually being, you know, native american. "Chief Rosanne Casimir", who argues against exhumations, looks much less native than "Rancher Garry Gottfriedson", who argues in favor! And sure enough, Garry is an actual former residential school student.
RenOS
something is wrong
3mo ago
Schools are falling over backwards to fight right-wing "toxic masculinity" and "incel culture" while referring to this show. It portrays this as a general problem of white boys. Yet, the real cases it's based on are extremely disproportionally minorities. It's a moral panic designed to misdirect from real problems (misaligned minority cultures) to imagined problems (white young boys being frustrated with progressive values).
Universities were, objectively, massively expanded in that timeframe. "We increased the number of students tenfold, but this did not change quality or composition or culture" is just not a very credible claim. On the other hand, it's just common sense that if you try to take in the top 5% vs the top 50%, the average student will necessary be MUCH worse, even if your measure of competence is unreliable. Likewise, if a professor suddenly has to teach a multiple of the students he used to, the quality of the education almost necessarily suffers (not to mention a similar effect to the students, in which people are given increased responsibilities to handle the load of teaching that in the old regime would never have been given such responsibilities).
Pretty much all older staff reports roughly the same story: In the past, professors had reasonable loads of students, which they could handle on a more individual basis, and which were mostly capable of acting independently. Nowadays, the professors have so many students that they had to transform everything into a standardized, school-like environment. This includes a lot of busywork that can't be too hard since - and here is some divergence - one side says the students are just way worse but we don't want failure rate of >50%, the other side says because it would require more personal interaction for struggling students which the professors simply can't supply anymore. To keep the appearance of excellence, this busywork is also often more time-intensive for the students than the technically harder assignments that students would have gotten in the past. The few professors that don't standardize but keep open-ended problems often don't manage to teach anything and end up having to just pass everyone. The style of political courses functor is describing fits into the same mold imo. It's just really convenient to reduce everything into a one-dimensional political analysis and works very well as a standardized approach.
In fact, I'd argue that most older staff even underestimates the scale of this process, since a large part happens through the generation of new fields that have minimally trained professors and low to no enforced standards. My university for example almost doubled its student body since I started studying here, went away, and came back. All the original courses, however, still have almost the same size. Instead, we have A LOT of new courses that frequently are just thinly-veiled ways of enrolling marginal students that didn't make it in the original courses ("media informatics", for example), and almost universally have very low standards. My wife had to work together on a project with a newly-created "midwife professor", head of the newly created "midwife university course", who is just a practicing midwife that went back to university, did a PhD with a single publication, and instantly got her professorship. She doesn't seem to have any idea how science works whatsoever, and nobody can make her since she has an ultra-safe position as the original arbiter in our university on what "midwife science" even is. And there are multiple new courses like this from which I have not directly heard anything yet, but also no reason to believe it's any different. And both my wife's and others report on existing collaborations that they often try to hide their ignorance behind moralistic grandstanding.
In general, another thing that I have been perceiving myself also is that there is zero pressure to make things harder for students and a lot of pressure to make things easier. If I pass everyone, literally nobody will complain as long as I went through the motions of designing some very easy assignments. On the other hand, if the assignments are too hard and too many fail, firstly it's just extra work for me since I see them again next year, and at some point I have to do an oral exam which is even more work. Then you have the students themselves complain. Then if you fail too many the university admin staff will complain as well. My natural attitude is normally "if they fail, they fail", but even I actively work towards making assignments easier for the students just to spare myself the hassle. It just seems extremely obvious that such a system will only ever get easier over time. And once you have little to no meaningful standards, it's easy to bring in politics, because why not?
RenOS
something is wrong
9mo ago
@gorge talks mostly about the changes to the conception of marriage from the perspective of a religious conservative, at least as I understand him. But I think even from a secular centrist state-based perspective, there are a lot of problems with it. In the old conception, the justification why the state should support marriages is very straightforward: For retirement, but also just the continued existence of the state in the future, children are necessary. Therefore, an institution for the purpose of family-formation is highly beneficial.
On the other hand, in the new framework, if we consider marriage primarily about love, it's pretty hard to argue why two people loving each other means they should get, say, a tax rebates or similar: Nice for them I guess, but why shouldn't two very good friends living together? Why not a lonely single? The latter is arguably most disadvantaged, so maybe he should get the biggest tax rebate? The answer from my left-leaning friends is mostly: No, actually, we care about children, so we should just support children directly. Fine, but now we have lost something! The old system also supported children, in particular if their parents couldn't. But in addition the old system had a clear framework, a path towards becoming parents before actually having children yet, and supported people who made a credible effort in this direction.
The new system offers nothing in its place, if anything it actively discourages people to have kids. It's like as if we said that well obviously we need plumbers in the future, but any training in plumbing needs to be inclusive towards non-plumbers, and actually you are not allowed to even claim that "plumbing training" is in any way related to the profession or task of "plumbing", and no, you're also not allowed to create a new category of "totally not plumbing training" that trains people to be plumbers. It's just that if someone just so happens to be capable of plumbing and performs the task, he is allowed to be paid for this. And everyone acts surprised that plumbing becomes rarer and rarer.
It gets worse! The new system claims to be about "love". But actually, there is no obvious criteria for "love". It's merely a claim people make. And most countries still offer tangible benefits for marriage.
So in the old system, we would support people in family formation, and then once they actually have children, we support them further. The evaluation of this was mostly straightforward, and the incentives line up nicely between what the state wants (children) and what the family was incentived to do (have children).
In the new system, there is, again, nothing like this. As said before, there isn't even a reason why the state should care that these two people "love" each other, and it isn't controlling or setting up incentives anyway. So this also explains why marriage often looks so outdated and pointless nowadays; It literally is, at least the way it is treated by the state. It changed from a system with a clear purpose and clear criteria to one with an unclear purpose and no criteria.
But at the end I still have to disagree on one point. I think the old conception can be rescued while still including some new means of family formation. Adoption, for example, can be set up in a variety of formats that allows homosexual relationships to still take part. Likewise, IVF can even allow them to have (partially) genetic children. While I have absolutely no problem giving heterosexual relationships a special status as the most common, most simple, most robust approach to family formation and which accordingly should be treated as the default, that doesn't mean we need to outright exclude all others.
RenOS
something is wrong
2yr ago
This, so much. This is how it works everywhere. In academia, everyone is broadly leftish but mostly apolitical. A small minority of far-left is not only tolerated & rarely challenged, but is allowed & financed to actively proselytise. Anything remotely right is ostracised or at best tolerated as long as its just talk among colleagues. If you try to point this out, you will be reminded "well, the last inequality retreat was very badly attended, so clearly we need to Do Better". The fact that this inequality retreat was actively financed by the university, mostly peddles extremely shoddy science that wouldn't be tolerated otherwise and that there is absolutely nothing remotely comparable that the average person would consider right does not even occur to them.
It's the same on reddit; I'm fairly confident that a) the great majority of the other mods, if not all of them, are still broadly left-leaning b) critically, the non-political mods almost never challenge the political mods, and almost all political mod actions are broadly the left cracking down on the right, never the other way around.
RenOS
something is wrong
1yr ago
Yes, this is the claim that I also encounter most often in medical science, i.e. that the majority of the so-called gender neutral research is actually biased towards men because the majority of consenting subjects is male. And this makes me furious. Yes, medical researchers generally prefer male subjects because having to consider the period, which unfortunately can have a major influence on many medications, is an absolute pain in the ass. But if there was a huge number of female subjects desperately wishing to be included in early phase trials, they'd take them; But women are by and large very risk averse, and in particular when it comes to untested substances that give them no expected benefit. This is well reflected in the data for different phases: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5867082/
Phase I is for testing the safety and distribution of medication. There is no benefit for the subject, and hence the percentage of women in these trials is small, only around 22% in this particular review (but this is pretty consistent).
Phase II and later is for testing whether a drug works for humans, and hence most subject actually have a specific disease that they hope the medication will help with. Hence, the percentage of women suddenly reflects the population very well, usually around 45+%.
So somehow if women refuse to sign up for medical research that doesn't benefit them personally so men take up the slack, who is the primary victim? Obviously, the poor women.
And, just to be clear here, kudos to the minority of women who do sign up for early research. I agree this is an issue, but critically it is an issue that can only be solved by women willingly signing up more. And it also is a somewhat minor issue, since a lack of efficacy or the presence of female-specific side effects will still be caught in the later phases when women are well represented.
One point I haven't seen here is that there imo has been a general move towards always pandering to all groups, all at once in our media, and movies are no exception. There's more indie games, sure, but all media that costs a lot of money to produce and is expected to earn lots of money is generally designed to appeal much more to an average perso than to a small niche. As a very different example, look at the casualization of most traditionally nerdy gaming franchises such as Civ.
You might wonder what this has to do with nudity. Simple, women by and large do not like explicit nudity very much, as you can see even when they consume schlocky stupid porn, they read it, they don't watch it, and sex only happens sparingly. So what happens when you want to make an action movie, but also want to get the guys girlfriend to watch it alongside him to earn double the money? The MCU. You make the guys hot but never nude, they're manly but never rude (except to people who clearly deserve it). You include just enough of love stories for the women to not get bored. You include some female heroes, but they're even more idealized than the already-unrealistic male action heroes. All of this is (and more, such as your already-mentioned example of pandering to non-western audiences) imo just the logical endpoint of a slow march of optimization towards earning maximum money with your media.
Sometimes I feel like living in a different universe.
First, Dorsey twitter absolutely worked together with many agencies in many countries far above what is was required to do, shown trivially by the fact that Musk Twitter refuses to do so and is nevertheless existing. This was shown in the twitter files, but they are hardly necessary; Here in Germany, our local Blockwarte voluntarily complain about nothing but how much better they could "work together with" Dorsey Twitter to combat "misinformation" than with Musk Twitter. This also goes for the UK. Even beyond western countries, where Musk Twitter is far more resistant to censorship efforts and which have far more resources to staff liaison bureaucrats and as such are a much greater threat to open discourse, Dorsey Twitter was also more than happy to go along with censorship in non-western countries as long as it fit with their left-leaning preconceptions, such as in Brazil or South Africa.
Second, the moderation staff of Dorsey Twitter not only was much, much larger and could handle much greater throughput, but pretty much everyone is primarily complaining about who is allowed to continue posting, and voluntarily leaves due to it, as opposed to being banned. I've seen a lot of people and institutes around me make a big show about posting how they're leaving X and going to bluesky. Not a single one of them was banned, and almost none of them complained about any person ban or topics ban whatsoever, either. It's always about how now that this or that category of person is unbanned, they can't in good conscience stay there. At most they point at some nebulous alleged algorithmic boosting which they have no evidence for but are sure has to exist (and which, ironically, provably existed under Dorsey Twitter, it was just going another way). I don't think it's a coincidence that X discourse has moved closer to the notorious chan-style discourse.
Third, the kind of topics that could get you banned on Dorsey Twitter was incredibly broad, and frequently included taking even milquetoast center right opinions ("there are only two genders") or very basic common-sense observations ("the covid vaccine, just like many other vaccines, has a heightened likelihood of complications for people with autoimmune diseases and as such may not be worth it especially for young people with an autoimmune disease"). People went to other places since they either already were banned or felt they would get banned if they openly discussed the topics they care about.
I'm certainly not happy about how trigger-happy Musk is about criticism of himself or how he runs his company, but in practice it's not only an incredibly limited topic, it also would have gotten you banned on Dorsey Twitter as well, even labelling it similarly as "misinformation" or "conspiracy theories". On doxxing I'm also more split, since this was weaponized pretty hard on Dorsey Twitter.
Also on the Vance talk, I'm an academic who has lived his entire life in Europe (mostly Germany and a few years UK), and I think he's just objectively correct about his statements, not just directionally but also literally, so there's that I guess. It was very moving to see that if we want to have a course-correction, we will have some allies in foreign governments that will help us and stand by us. That's a fairly straightforward foreign policy strategy. The norm-breaking criticism is also pretty hilarious to me, since visiting american democratic politicians love talking about right-wing dangers in Europe which is totally OK, but once it's american republican politicians talking about left-wing dangers it's suddenly a dangerous break with norms.
Normie is in the eye of the beholder, but here an amalgation of my male friends and coworkers:
A portrait of a male normie blue triber
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works in a highly credentialed field, probably went to university
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But it's "something useful" (as judged by himself)
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Could earn more, but took a pay cut to work somewhere he believes in
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Has a gf who is much further left than him, and studied something that he normally has a low opinion of (but she's different, obviously)
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(mostly) vegetarian when cooking for himself, but might eat meat when going out
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Is really into some solo sport like rock climbing or long distance running which he does with a group of friend, is well in shape
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Strongly disagrees with the far left on most practical policies, but believes them often when they scream Nazi/Misogynist/etc
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Very conscientious, agreeable & reliable
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Materialist Atheist, but it's important for him not being an ass about it
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every immigrant he knows well is also credentialed and similarly conscientious, so he has a strongly positive opinion about them
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Thinks we need to do something about immigration, but in practice is against all policies except cracking down on proven criminals or more support for integration
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Thinks BG3 is the pinnacle of gaming
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Goes on lots of vacations, all over the world; He really likes talking about the three months he spent backpacking through India
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Really liked GoT, Dark, House of Cards, Inception ...
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Plays board games once a week with the same group of friends
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Thinks he is not elitist, but will always default to expert opinion (and doesn't see any contradiction here)
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Used to be against it, but is now in favor of nuclear energy
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Has at most 2 kids, shares obligations 50/50 with the wife on the first kid but not the second
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Felt insulted by the bear question and thinks women who answered bear are stupid and/or crazy
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Often struggles with the concept of some people just not giving a shit
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Isn't blank-slatist, but thinks that group differences are vaguely problematic
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Knows that women and men are different, but thinks that the differences are overstated and still substantially influenced by culture
I can do the same for a modal normie female blue triber if you're interested, she is quite different.
RenOS
something is wrong
2yr ago
No, I do not think that the average women high-five each other every time they get pumped & dumped by a high status man and I find the insinuation rather insulting.
What I do claim however is that the average woman who struggles to find a long-term partner (note that this is already not the average woman) often has already been asked out by perfectly respectable similar-status men but rejected them for flimsy reasons. If you confront them and ask, well, among the people you know, who would you be willing to date, they'll frequently mention a single, maybe two or three, high-status married men (or, to take an extreme example, the aforementioned non-existent Prof. Brad Pitt). Depending on their taste, they might instead be into a flaky artist they've been having an on-off relationship/affair with for years, their boss, or their most popular co-worker, but the principle stays the same. Their obvious main issue is that among their peers, they simply deem no men worthy of being in a relationship with them, except the ones that clearly have other options. The moment they actually want to settle down and have a family, they'll often find someone in an instant. It's just they're still hoping for a better deal.
On the other hand the average man who struggles to find a long-term partner has already asked out similar or slightly below status women than themselves and been rejected. If you confront them and ask, well, among the people you know, who would you be willing to date, they'll give you a long list of all their female friends, as well as most their female co-workers except the batshit crazy or disfigured, and the same for female acquaintances that may even be significantly below their own status. Their obvious main issue is that among their peers, they simply are not deemed worthy of being in a relationship by almost all women (no, a women telling other women to date him bc he's so "nice" doesn't count). If they wanted to reliably find a girl, they would have to go to great and unusual lengths that may even cause their peers to lose respect for them, like going to Thailand and hitting on every non-prostitute they can find. Otherwise their main options are a) waiting until the women among their peers become sufficiently desperate with age or b) work harder to become higher-status. But unfortunately the latter is a zero-sum approach that will mostly kick down other men even further.
For reference, I'm talking about upper-middle class behaviour here (i.e. the group of people we hear the most complaining from & about). So, well-mannered people with decent hygiene, good work ethic and enough income that any reasonable family can be provided for. I'm a research postdoc at a decent western university, and the number of women with frankly delusional expectations and a surprising amount of sneering disgust towards even slightly below their status men that try to hit on them is downright frightening. Single female professors with bitter attitudes towards the male professors who dared to marry a non-professor are basically a running joke. Plenty of my wife's female acquaintances and friends, who are mostly also researchers, therapists, or I/O psychologists at companies show exactly the behaviour described above, and my wife, who has also become a bit sick of their attitudes, occasionally digs a little deeper into who would actually be good enough for them, and it's reliably exactly who you'd expect.
And to repeat myself, I'm specifically talking about the women who claim to struggle to find a partner, not those that are in stable long-term relationships (I do think women in general are hypergamous, but for most women that preference is weak enough to not lead to this obvious failure mode). And also to be clear, I have plenty of gripes with male mate-finding behaviour as well and do not consider women's behaviour worse overall. But the topic here is the existence of female hypergamy, and the specific issue of a seeming pandemic of unhappy single people is in my opinion mainly caused by female hypergamy, and not by men playing too much video games or similar claims in mainstream journalism.
As an aside, I'm also quite frustrated how reliably every time one complains about how much men suck as a group in some way (they're more violent & criminal, they constantly try sleeping around if given the chance, they flake on family duties, they're less reliable in general, etc. are all things I genuinely think are true on average), it's just everyone nodding along, but if one mentions a single way in which women might not be so great, they get these ridiculous assertions thrown at them.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Zeit, two of the most respected mainstream-left german newspaper just released back-to-back articles on the BND (german foreign intelligence) internal evidence pointing to the lab-leak theory being correct with 90%+. Not surprising, you think, and old news too boot? Well, as it turns out, they concluded this ... in 2020. And given the risk of bioweapon development this implies, they'd have been near-required to tell then-chancellor Merkel. And health ministry Jens Spahn. When the administration changed in 2021 to Scholz, he was also told with overwhelming likelihood. According to the two papers, all of them were in fact told personally by then-and-current BND president Bruno Kahl.
Similar to the US establishment, the german establishment at the time went on what can only be described as a hunt against even mentioning the possibility of a lab leak. To quote the top german establishment expert of the time, Christian Drosten: "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. [...] Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus. We support the call from the Director-General of WHO to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture."
The source here matters a lot, since both of these are consistently pro-establishment in general and especially so during the Corona crisis. There is very little reason for them to publish this spuriously, and frankly it's a surprise they're willing to publish it even now.
Whether you believe the BNDs internal evidence or not doesn't matter. Whether you personally think that the lab-leak theory is correct doesn't matter (FWIW, I think most foreign intelligence service have an obvious bias towards conspiratorial thinking, so if they say 90%+, it's probably more in the 60%+ range). What does matter, however, is that our own government secretly concluded that the lab-leak theory is correct or at the very least highly plausible, but instead of supporting what they viewed as the truth or at least the open discourse on a key question, they actively supported slander and misinformation.
Tbh, I'm still kind of reeling about what to conclude after Corona. Due to some personal experiences, but also the generally repressive climate of the time combined with the information coming out now that most mainstream talking points were wrong, it was a major step in my own worldview realignment. In particular, I used to have the naive anti-conspiracy view that it's almost impossible to keep an important one going due to a single defection blowing everything up, even if smaller and/or more specific ones may happen. Nowadays I think through a smart combination of only telling people as much as they need to know while also making clear what they're supposed to think through scare tactics, slander and repression, arbitrarily large-scale conspiracies can keep going as long as enough people can be convinced it's important. A single defector isn't a problem, because it's trivial to present them as just an evil person spreading misinformation for personal gain.
RenOS
something is wrong
1yr ago
Unfortunately, the opposite effect exists as well. Normal high-functioning law-abiding citizens who technically break a law will often get it enforced on them over low-functioning criminals because it's less risky and/or an easy way to make numbers look good. And this especially happens on people whom the police is biased again in the first place, which is the entire point of anarcho-tyranny. A typical example is that honest & otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants will often get into more trouble with the state than criminal immigrants, because the former will naively seek out directions from the state, while the latter will just actively avoid the state entirely. Independent on whether you think the former should be here, this is often a misallocation of resources & attention away from the difficult but truly important towards the easy but overall meaningless (aside from also setting up terrible incentives).
RenOS
something is wrong
5mo ago
Nowadays I'm writing my own grants for my research and talk enough with the other side to understand their reasoning and tbh the entire grant-based funding scheme has horrible, horrible structural incentives. To begin with, both sides have a strong incentive to bloat. You know what is more prestigious than managing 50k grants? It's managing 100k grants. On the grant writer side, if a grant is offering 25k but we only have a small project that needs 10k for some extra consumables, what do you think we'll do? Exactly, I say a pilot single cell RNAseq experiment for 4 of the samples adding up to 12k is totally a great idea and make the grant sound as if this was the plan from the start (and it sounds really prestigious since scRNA-seq is a reasonably new tech that the committee deciding the grant is likely to be impressed). This is most obvious in the fact that you're not just not rewarded for saving money, you're actively punished (if you didn't spend all the money you were granted, this makes people angry - they don't want it back - and it's significantly less likely to get your next grant). Second, as already alluded, it's all strongly optimized to sound new, exceptional and fancy. If people handle their own money, they want boring, reliable and necessary (which is imo severely missing in current science). Third, behind closed doors the money often gets shuffled around for other purposes, so the text of the project proposal does not even necessarily reflect the project on-the-ground very well anyway (this is worst for very large projects in which an easy overview of point-by-point financing for every little consumable, staff or outsourced services is just not feasible).
And I'm quite sure that I'm in a comparatively functional field - at least in principle we're investigating stuff like new treatments for cancer, which particular variants cause genetic diseases and similar. I have a colleague working with humanities people and not only are they explicitly identifying as activists fighting for disabled rights as opposed to, you know, scientists, they also try to bully her into stopping her research since investigating severe inborn disabilities is ableist. But the official projects they're part of all sound really nice and positive at first glance.
Also, the problem on cutting the other way around - looking for the X most-stupid-sounding projects - has been tried multiple times, in multiple countries, by different libertarian-inclined parties and it just doesn't work. If you try to go through all funding one-by-one and cut the most stupid sounding, you will first have to fight and justify a lot "but why this", then you're likely getting hit with a lawsuit that tries to prove that you did cut funding in some discriminatory way (which isn't unlikely because there's probably some equally stupid project that you didn't hit since you tried to be more targeted), and then after all the fighting you maybe saved 0.1% of the budget and might not even have hit the actually worst and most useless programs, because the descriptions are optimized to sound nice and the structures behind it are optimized to hide wasteful spending.
At this point I'm willing to turn it on the head: Cut as much as possible, then reinstitute only the absolutely necessary (ideally now not even grant-dependent anymore - if it's necessary it shouldn't be grant-dependent!), and then everyone has to prove again that whatever they're doing is actually a good ROI for society. If my research gets cut, that's probably worth it & I just go into industry.
This is exactly what I'm talking about tbh. The spin in that article makes my head hurt.
I'm a german parent, I know german abortion law, I've talked with german doctors about the issue. By american conception, our abortion laws - both by law and in practice - would be considered at best center if not far-right, and is quite similar to what moderate GOP politicians are proposing. Abortion is strictly illegal here, punished with prison, except for four cases:
- The abortion happened in the first 12 weeks and was done after thorough consultation with a certified professional
- There is a life-threatening medical emergency
- The pregnancy is the product of a rape
- Seriously debilitating exceptional circumstances (also only done after an even more thorough consultation)
As a side note, I quote the purpose of the consultation by the literal text of the law: "Die Beratung dient dem Schutz des ungeborenen Lebens. Sie hat sich von dem Bemühen leiten zu lassen, die Frau zur Fortsetzung der Schwangerschaft zu ermutigen und ihr Perspektiven für ein Leben mit dem Kind zu eröffnen" (rough english translation: The consultation has the purpose of protecting the life of the unborn. It should strive to encourage the woman to continue the pregnancy and give her a perspective of life with a child.)
That's it. I don't doubt that there are some doctors somewhere who wink wink nod nod and spuriously claim medical emergencies and/or exceptional circumstances, but the average doctor takes this quite seriously. By the text of the law, the purpose of the fourth criteria is strictly to be used if the fetus shows signs of serious developmental issues that would preclude a fully realized adult life. Afaik it is also occasionally used for people who are not of sound mind, i.e. pregnant children and the mentally disabled. But strictly speaking this is not supported by the text of the law.
In both our pregnancies our doctor made very clear that she would not support late-term (in germany, late-term generally means the second trimester) abortions unless this criteria has been fulfilled beyond reasonable doubt ( which was actually a point of contention since we would have liked less strict criteria). A rough translation of a quote from her, concerning us asking for the more modern genetic testing for trisomy, as opposed to the traditional, more strict ultrasound testing: "If you can't see the trisomy (down syndrome) in the ultrasound, it usually is less bad. And even the disabled can lead a happy life."
I know enough people from other european countries - and have lived in one other for a while - to know that they generally have very similar laws, some slightly more strict, some slightly less.
RenOS
something is wrong
1yr ago
In fact, if you look at @EverythingIsFine's post, you're not sufficiently cynical. If you take the hosting cost, and double it for overhead, it's still less than 5% of the yearly donations.
RenOS
something is wrong
2mo ago
I'll just copy part of a very recent post which mostly encapsulates my view of polyamory (contrasting it with other alternatives to monogamy):
Ironically, this is also why polyamory is imo by far the worst for a functioning society; It's basically expanding the dating period of many young people's life to the entirety, with all the anxieties, drama and labor it entails. If you have work & kids, you just don't have time for that. Since work is usually necessary for all but the richest, that means you skip the kids. Communes often have similar problems but to a lesser degree, and as long as they're not too large and have clear boundaries to everything else, can be made to work. I don't like the intrinsic inequality stemming from Harems, but from a practical PoV they work just as well as traditional couples since the boundaries and expectations are simple and clear.
Listening to some of the stories, that may even be to charitable to polyamory; Even the regular dating period for most young people had clearer expectations and less drama.
On respect
Recently, my wife attended an online lecture organised by her professor and held by an acclaimed researcher, on the topic of augmented and virtual reality. She is part of the (social) psychology department. The lecture was late in the day - 18:00 - so we all listened to it at home while at the dinner table (though we eventually turned on the TV for our daughter so she doesn't get bored).
Fellow academics might already guess were this is leading - we thought the topic was something interesting about how AR/VR can be used, unexpected challenges, etc.. It featured a small part of this, but a large part was about gender norms and how totally inexplicably people continue to behave the same way in VR as they do in RL, down to minute details such as the way they move, despite now finally having the freedom to shed their skin!
Clearly, this is evidence of the insidiousness of their oppression: They have internalised it so much that they can't even process the possibilities. It ended on a hopeful note however, that when we educate people better, all differences may eventually stop existing and people can be free in the VR.
But this is also just background for what I want to talk about: What struck me was the experience. In my field, genomics, genetic disease risk factors, etc., if I make a talk only about possible biological explanations, you can be sure that someone in the audience will ask "did you control for [social/environmental risk factor]?" If I'm advising a PhD student on a study design with a big data set like UKBB, I'll tell them to control for a long list of social/environmental risk factors. If the database has sparse information on this account, I mention it as a limitation. Even internally, I think this is important, this isn't something I only do because I'm challenged.
In other words, I genuinely respect social explanations.
Contrast this talk: The possibility of biological differences between sexes/genders isn't even mentioned. Nobody in the audience challenges that glaring oversight. My wife agreed that this is how it works in the department in general; If her colleagues talk about their social research, and my wife mentions the possibility of biological explanations, people look at her as if she just pissed on the ground. At most a hushed agreement, sure, maybe, it's a possibility, to get it over with. Needless to say, since she worked in the neurology department beforehand, she has to hold her breath quite often. She wanted to make a comment on it during the talk, but there are smarter ways to make enemies. She asked something anodyne instead, to show interest, make a good impression.
There is this idea that social sciences are not well respected among other scientists. I claim it is the other way around: The social scientists actively try to ignore other fields, insulate themselves and include non-social explanations only if pressed (which they are rarely), and grudgingly.
They do not respect any science except their own.
Also, assume I wrote some boring hedging about "not all social scientists" etc. I guess you could claim that this is just "boo outgroup", and I admit part of the reason this was written is me venting, but I think it might be an important observation: What does respect for a field mean? People may talk shit about social scientists, but in general they agree that the field is important to study. They're just unhappy with the way it is done.
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