RenOS
something is wrong
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User ID: 2051
RenOS
something is wrong
8mo ago
You're assuming the conclusion. See marisuno's answer the last time american elections came up. As another non-american, I 100% agree with it; in my country there is also lots of grumbling about the obviously, hilariously biased way in which the right-wing is treated by state institutions & media, but almost nobody is alleging fraud. Why? Because we have at least basic voting protections.
This reminds me of a story I've once read (or watched?), which indeed ends on the main character achieving immortality, even godhood, as they desired, but sacrificing the world in the process. Then they sit in the never, for eternity, doing nothing. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the story, or much more details. But I always thought that this is the appropriate ending for "main character has limitless ambition and no moral compass whatsoever".
RenOS
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3mo ago
I'd rather advice a trip to Southeast Asia, in that case. If you want to retire anyway, it's a great place to stay for indefinite time as well.
RenOS
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7mo ago
Teen drinking is universal outside the US, near-universal in the US, and lindy.
This. In my town, it was normal to start drinking beer around 12-14, and to start drinking hard alcohol (up to blackout drunk) around 14-16. And I'm not talking about poor white trash, this is a prosperous, unusually high TFR conservative & religious farmer's region in western germany.
RenOS
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9mo ago
On the first point, prison is already quite expensive. Even if a substantial number of prisoners would take advantage of this, it would probably make up less than 1% of the price of prison. And offering violent prisoners better conditions in exchange for castration actually seems like a good deal for everyone involved.
On the second, remember, crime doesn't pay, especially not random murder, so the average murderer is stupid, insane or emotionally disturbed (probably a combination, in fact). So he might be trying to game the system in a stupid way, or he might just be fucked up enough to believe it.
RenOS
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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
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1yr ago
The self-determination in the current mainstream conception is always individual, though. It makes thus sense once you consider that individuals are indeed more free to live their life in the West than in Russia and self determination is supported on those grounds.
RenOS
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1yr ago
I'm currently playing BTA3062, a full overhaul mod for Battletech. It's also in the full murderhobo tradition of games, but ultimately these usually keep my interest longer than story-based games. I liked Cyberpunk 2077's atmosphere quite a lot and it has plenty of interesting characters and sidequests, but in terms of gameplay it's utterly trivial, so in raw hours I have less than BTA on it. More extreme was Disco Elysium, it was fun for a single playthrough (which for DE is very short to boot), but once I get what it's attempting to say it's not really that interesting anymore. In CP2077 even just wandering the city is surprisingly fun though. I was for example very impressed when I stumbled over a museum to a tragic past event by pure accident, it was well made and afaik you would never find it if you just followed the main and larger side quests.
On BTA itself, it's fun, and both the mech bay and the tactics are significantly enhanced. But it also didn't even attempt to fix the issues with the base game, such as an atrocious AI and a really slow and buggy engine. Nevertheless I spend hours over hours designing my team, such as the perfect light mech scout, or heavy mech artillery platform, or a medium mech generalist/brawler, etc. and blowing up teams that on paper are far stronger than me through a strong, consistent tactic with a team deliberately designed for that purpose is very satisfying. Also, the game has enough of an element of getting random stuff that you have to make work so that it stays somewhat fresh.
RenOS
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28d ago
Hmm, I had watched Higurashi, which I enjoyed very much, but then never got around to Umineko, which at that time seemed to me like just more of the same, but as a "normal" murder mystery. Seems I misjudged things. Would recommend the manga or do you have another option? I probably won't play on the PC for some time, though maybe the fanported android version.
RenOS
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7mo ago
The mobile app is also decent. I've been playing it a bit with friends.
RenOS
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9mo ago
Can't really disagree tbh. Though Fullmetal Alchemist:Brotherhood is imo even more consistently good, its only "fault" being that it's slightly less family-friendly.
RenOS
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10mo ago
First, I want to mention that almost all population projections I'm aware of completely ignore even the possibility of evolution and selection. Plenty of them are just simple regressions that implicitly assume a homogenous population. This is, of course, complete bunk. The number of (surviving & procreating) offspring is literally the thing evolution selects on, and no human population ever has been homogenous across traits. So this is almost guaranteed to be a transient phenomenon, unless you deny evolution in general. Given that at least in my home country of germany we're already at a TFR of 1.6 again, population differentials in family size and heritability estimates for most traits being in the ballpark of 50%, it's probably a matter of only a few generations until we worry about too high population growth again instead.
That means, aside from having to deal with short-term issues such as a terrible working vs dependent/unemployed ratio for the next decade, the primary question should be: Who do we currently select for and who ought we select for? And there is some negative, but also some positive views on this front. On the negative side, we definitely select for unemployed and low time preference people who fail to take the necessary precautions to not become pregnant. On the positive side, we select for people who want to have children and are as such likely to treat them better and likely to prepare themselves better in general. We select to some degree against both hedonism and doomerism, since both inclinitations straightforwardly lead towards being childless, and instead in favor of certain kinds of optimistic long-termism, which includes in particular religiosity. We select somewhat against education in general, but also more specifically for pragmatic people that don't waste an endless amount of time getting stuck in dead-end endeavours (which includes certain educations) throughout their early adulthood. And so on.
Overall, I'm not entirely sure whether we really need to change anything. There are a few horror stories such as drug addicts with almost one heavily disabled kid per year (a colleague of mine works with such cases in a non-profit), but these are basically rounding errors in practice. Poor/unemployed people have slightly more kids, but not by a crazy amount, and these are still mostly pretty normal people. Down syndrome is a good example of positive development: In theory, the modern world enables heavily disabled people to have arbitrary numbers of children whereas they couldn't provide for them before. In practice, not only do the great majority of people with Down's have no children at all, we also massively reduced the number of de novo cases by screening, since even the people who want to have children don't want a heavily disabled kid.
That said, I think the current issues boil down to a few factors:
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We didn't evolve to actually want kids before we have them. We evolved to want partnership and sex, and then to nurture and protect any child that might arise from the union. Furthermore, men and women have very different want profiles on this topic. Unless we force people to have kids against their will, easily accessible, reliable contraceptives will always mean a substantially reduced TFR until we have had time to select in favor of wanting kids directly.
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Culturally, we spend an inordinate amount of time and pressure teaching kids to not get pregnant too early, but there often is no conception of having them too late or having too few children. My parents always told me that I should wait (when they heard about our first, their first words were literally "so soon?" I was 27!). TV showed me unhappy teen pregnancies on one side, and endless fun adventure for the childless on the other. Even doctors will misinform women that they can have kids whenever they want, in spite of the data clearly showing that even at only 35 there already is a substantial chance for pregnancies to fail, and an even higher chance for disability. School and university made clear that I ought to postpone children until after I'm finished. And finally, friends and acquaintances treat having children as just one lifestyle choice among many.
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We have seen an inversion in the economics of having children thanks to retirement. In the past, children were your retirement, the childless depending on the kindness of strangers or at best their neighbours and friends. Kids could help on the farm as early as the late single digits, and could be gainfully employed by 14. Today, having kids means earning much less money in the first place due to not being able to work as much and due to missing promotions, then of that reduced amount you have to spend substantial money to care for them, and then due to earning less you also have a reduced retirement. Child money across the west is peanuts compared to all this, in particular considering that all retirement systems absolutely require a sufficient number of new humans to function at all.
We can't do much about the first except wait, but for the second and third we can. We should inform people adequately about the biological risks of late pregnancies. Programs supporting grandparents to take time off work to help out with child rearing would also be quite positive, since they usually are in stable employment, will not miss promotions anymore and many have already passed their most productive years anyway. Education needs to be shortened and focus on things that are useful. Likewise wasting more than one or two years in early adulthood should be frowned upon much more. There should be less TV and media, and more activities like outdoors summer camps, since the former will always idealize childless adventuring, while the latter is almost intrinsically family-friendly. Retirement probably needs to be rehauled entirely so that that having kids - be it biologically or adopted - is similarly net-positive for your retirement prospects as earning decent money. We need to get rid of many "child protection" laws that sound good in theory but mean in practice that they can't do any paid work whatsoever. Lastly, I've found that a mentality of "hobbies and most fun activities are for kids" coupled with "adults are primarily allowed to engage in these as long as they do so for the benefit of kids" leads too a much more happy and family-oriented life, since on one side without this it's easy to oversaturate yourself with "fun" at the expense of long-term happiness, while on the other you look forward to having kids so that you can do these things more again. Doesn't mean that the childless aren't allowed to have any fun at all, but just that overindulgence in these things should be socially frowned upon.
RenOS
something is wrong
4d ago
He is explicitly saying that it did happen as commonly understood in the broad strokes, though, and the he is jewish himself. He just thinks it was more work camps were starving to death is considered a bonus, and less industrialized killing. Which is still something I disagree with - we have some evidence of the Nazis putting in much more resources into killing than would be reasonable in a war, especially towards the end - but it's hardly comparable to outright Holocaust denial.
RenOS
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3mo ago
What kind of anime do you have in mind? "Classic anime" is extremely broad, while Dean's post is specifically about internet-related 2000s anime, which is also late enough that many wouldn't consider it "classic" to begin with.
RenOS
something is wrong
9mo ago
This is what I was told, and, being born into a solid middle class environment, I believed it. But tbh after living for a while in cheap urban neighbourhoods (I'm very glad I do not anymore!), it seems much less obvious. Not literally everyone, but the majority of my neighbours really was trash reality tv-tier in behaviour. A minority was worse. Very few were better. Afaik reality tv nowadays selects in both directions; Yes they look for trashy people, but not too trashy bc middle class and higher who have no contact with these people will stop watching since it's too much for them.
RenOS
something is wrong
9mo ago
I don't think we disagree as much as you think; I also care very little about making prisoner's life nicer. I'm not really in favor of this policy so much as thinking that among the crazy stupid stuff we're doing, this one is pretty low on my list of priorities, and might even have some unintended benefits.
Gender-affirming care for inmates meets neither criterion: it only "benefits" the inmate. At a push there's an ancillary benefit in that an inmate who undergoes a vaginoplasty can no longer rape taxpayers with the penis he no longer has, but not every inmate who requests gender-affirming care has a history of sexual violence: if Bob already was at zero risk of committing a sex crime after release and requests a vaginoplasty, we've just spent $75k of the taxpayer's money and gotten nothing back to show for it.
This is what we disagree on, I guess. Testosterone is the primary driver of violence in general, not just of sexual nature. And castration is by far the most reliable way of reducing T-levels. Even historically it was regularly noted how tepid and submissive eunuchs tended to be; But you don't need to take their word for it, modern studies on this topic consistently find a very strong relationship between violence and T-levels as well. It's not super advertised since it leads to some conclusions that most people don't like thinking about, but in a field were many things don't replicate, this one does reliably.
RenOS
something is wrong
1yr ago
Generally, very low voter turnout is considered a signal that people become disillusioned and that a change of course is needed.
Marking you ballot in any way except the accepted one on the other hand is usually considered a simple mistake and counted as such. So currently the message you are sending the politicians, as seen from their pov, is that you're happy with the system as-is, but you just failed to follow very simple and easy to understand instructions.
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
1yr ago
You sound real fucking depressed. Normally I'd say try to be more active, but as far as I understand you, you're already not terribly inactive. I'm a big proponent of building a family, but you specifically mentioned this is off the list (though I'd strongly urge you to reconsider).
Next on the list is imo leaving Alaska - northern regions are notorious for causing depression, try living in the south for an extended time span, at least several months, and spent as much time outside as possible while there. This is not easy depending on your monetary situation, but as a single guy you can almost certainly make it work.
If that doesn't work, try meds. I know it sounds stupid, depression always feels like a true fact of life when you're in it, but imo it's primarily a chemical imbalance. Problem is that most meds have serious side effects, so I'd try to avoid this if there's other options.
Your post is indeed incredibly ironic; In the beginning of the post you try to obfuscate an unfavored finding by claiming it's just too complex to understand, and then in the last paragraph you reduce everything to a single incredibly convenient theory, namely that it's all just stress levels and if we just fix that, everything else will fix itself as well! Very nice, if true.
Stress levels probably have some minor effect, but most of the research in this field doesn't even attempt to control for genetics or causality in the other direction. I happen to be a postdoc in biomedical research, so I just took a glance at the study your article is referring to (which wasn't even linked in the article, lol), for anyone interested: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/1761544
It's... not good. Or to be more specific, it's designed to be incapable of resolving the question you want it to resolve. They test a single theory, namely that income directionally causes everything. They don't even attempt to test the alternative, they only test against the null hypothesis, that income is unrelated to everything. Something nobody thinks anyway. Not that I'm surprised, this is just par for the course of the field.
Your other paper is well-known, but mostly very misleading. It's pretty much on the same level as the paper that found that men and women don't differ significantly if you take a list of 100 random biomedical traits, and therefore men and women are mostly the same; Sure, the former is obviously true, but nobody disputes that and the latter is just a complete non-sequitor. It's misleading on three levels:
First, his investigated measure ω merely tells us that two population are somewhat overlapping. It tells us very little about difference in means, which is what we're usually interested in. In fact, his finding of ω = 0.2 for Sub-Saharan vs European is absolutely compatible with large average differences between the groups.
Second, it's again just an assortment of random genes, but we usually care about specific sets of genes relating to known phenotypic traits. For a particularly simple example, you can't counter "they have phenotypically different skin colors, and we can show that these relate to differences in genes A and B" with "well we can show that over all genes in aggregate the differences are pretty small, so DEBUNKED". But obviously this is only ever applied if people dislike a particular gene/phenotype interaction.
Third, the most damning by far, and I'll just quote the paper itself:
To assess claim c, we define ω as the frequency with which a pair of individuals from different populations is genetically more similar than a pair from the same population. We show that claim c, the observation of high ω, holds with small collections of loci. It holds even with hundreds of loci, especially if the populations sampled have not been isolated from each other for long. It breaks down, however, with data sets comprising thousands of loci genotyped in geographically distinct populations: In such cases, ω becomes zero.
"Claim c" is, for the understanding of the interested reader:
(c) pairs of individuals from different populations are often more similar than pairs from the same population.
So he finds that this core claim, the claim why you're quoting the entire paper in the first place, only holds for closely related populations (duh) or if you wilfully ignore the majority of the genome. His example of ω = 0.2 for Sub-Saharan vs European, do you want to take a guess how many loci he used? 10.000? 1000? Nope, it's, wait for it, ... 50! I guess he himself is excused bc this was 2007, he probably would have wanted to do 100 loci but his Prof told him they only have money for 50, hah.
RenOS
something is wrong
2yr ago
I'm recommending people to read the first book, but nothing else. It presents a really interesting and unique setting and through focusing on and exploring that setting it manages to be good. By his second book, the novelty wears off and you begin to see more and more how silly his character writing is, the story writing is mediocre but salvageable, as is the prose.
RenOS
something is wrong
25d ago
I've always interpreted the djinn concept in a slightly different way; Even if you wish for something mostly benign, or which at least can be trivially granted in a desirable way, such as getting lots of gold, they will frequently fuck you over anyway, by actively contriving the wish in such a way that it becomes undesirable. The lesson, to me, was thus more about how a servant who is genuinely, fundamentally more powerful than you - even if the master-servant relationship is magically enforced! - is never truly just subservient. Especially if they are also smarter than you and can thus find loopholes in almost any wish you formulate, no matter how carefully.
However, as you point out, having limitless ambition and no moral compass means there is simply no pleasant natural ending state. It's just a permanent struggle until you're dead, or everyone else is. So even without a malicious spirit, the latter is the most straightforward consequence of getting your wish granted.
"The Rats in the Walls" "Shadow over Innsmouth", "The Shadow Out of Time" and "At the Mountains of Madness" are probably among the most widely acclaimed. I own & really enjoyed the Necronomicon, nice hardcover and quite comprehensive collection of tales, so as a completionist that might be your thing.
Edit: Also, dunno how much you already know that, but the SCP Foundation is in many ways the modern equivalent of part-weird part-(eldritch)-horror of lovecraftian stories. Also definitely worth checking out.
Let’s assume you’re a car mechanic. You love your job, even though it is dirty, hot and physically straining. You go through a bookshop, and stumble over one book in particular: “Why being a car mechanic is great”. It explains the importance of the job for society, it talks about the perks, and so on. You look up the guy who wrote it and yep, he runs a car shop. You buy the book and recommend it to many of your friends, maybe even some teens who might consider the path.
Fast forward, the writer is on some talkshow. Somebody asks him how he handles all the grease. He reacts, uh no, of course he doesn’t get greasy, that’s his staff. He just really likes talking with customers. Maybe he does one car once in a while, if the work isn’t too hard and the car is really nice.
I can’t help but think this after reading Scott’s latest book review of “Selfish reasons to have more kids”. No, we don’t have nannies and housekeepers. In fact, almost nobody we know has them. Some have a cleaning lady coming … once per week, for an hour or so. Tbh, this significantly lowered my opinion of both Scott and Caplan. If you want a vision of a more fertile, sustainable future for the general population, it should not involve having your own personal staff. Two hours is nothing.
And I find this especially frustrating since I think it’s really not necessary; Yes having small kids is really exhausting - after putting the kids to bed around 8-9, my personal routine is to clean the house for two hours until 10-11 every day, and then directly go to bed with maybe an audiobook on (but often I’m too tired for even that, and enjoy falling to sleep directly) - but it’s doable, and the older the kids are, the less work they are, at least in terms of man-hours. The worst is usually over after around 3 yo. And the time before that in the afternoon can be a lot of fun.
At least for me, one of the biggest draws of kids is that it’s, to use poetic terms, “a glimpse of the infinite” that is available for everyone. Everyone wants to leave something behind, political activism is sold on making a change, careers are sold on becoming a (girl-)boss managing others. Yet, the perceptive (or, less charitably, those capable of basic arithmetic) will notice that only a tiny sliver of the population can ever cause the kind of innovation that really changes culture, or who can come into positions of substantial power over others.
Kids, however, everyone can have them. And they really are their own little person (especially my stubborn little bastards). And they will have kids as well, who will also carry forward some part of yourself. I’m not just talking genetics here, though that is a large part, the same will go for how you raise them. Unless you leave that to the nannies, I guess, but that’s your own fault.
I wouldn’t have written this since it’s mostly venting tbh, but I’ve seen some here mentioning wanting to discuss it, so I thought may as well start. What do you think?
Which ones do you mean with "later" ? At least for the N64 ones I didn't get this impression - though I admittedly don't mind open plains much.
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