RenOS
Dadder than dad
No bio...
User ID: 2051
RenOS
Dadder than dad
5mo ago
As someone with lots of personal & professional experience with doctors (working as a postdoc in medical science and helped the father of a close friend navigate his own cancer diagnosis), I have to take the opposite position. Doctors have a very strong tendency to groupthink, to defer to the leading doctor and to generally behave in such a way as to maximize ass-covering as opposed to the best interest of the patient. They can and will manipulate and keep secrets from you for the purpose of their own convenience. Don't misunderstand me, they do so since they're extremely overworked and just try their best to do good with limited time and resources, but they will frequently miss the mark especially in unusual cases.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
6mo ago
In addition, even the UN sheepishly admits that the protestors engaged in "significant violence" but that it doesn't technically constitute a "combat or military campaign". Hamas did what it always does: It deliberately mixes violent, dangerous offenders with children and other sympathetic victims, and when in the chaos the sympathethic victims are hurt, they go complain and pretend it's Israels fault. In comparison, Hamas goes into a village and deliberately executes children.
I agree that actually meeting the other gender is a critical part of dating success. But I disagree that most men aren't trying this.
The extreme examples obviously wouldn't work for the men the same way as for women, because women are much more sensible to possible stalking, for good reason - male stalkers are much more common and far more dangerous. Any men attempting the kind of things you're listing here would risk being branded as an ultra-creep. Even typing out "strategically pursuing a certain type of women" I feel like I'm writing something about a male serial killer.
But the "light" variant of this is done all the time. "Has lots of women" is a top positive criteria for choosing what to study, together with "pays well". I know several men who have told me explicitly that they chose their field because it has lots of women. Same for hobbies. Hell, I would count that as negative attribute of men; They constantly try to find novel ways to pretend to be into something that women like to get laid under false pretences. "I totally care about the environment babe, please tell me more about it while we make love"
My wife studied psychology and both she herself as her female fellow students complained a lot about suspecting that the men in the course only studied it for dating (based on the few male humanities students I know, I concur with her entirely). One in particular had tried to hit on a few too many girls and now struggled to be accepted at all. As you see, even the light version you risk being branded a creep as a man. So unless you already have a decently above-average baseline of social capability, it is a wiser choice to not attempt it as a man and stick to "safe" options like clubs or dating apps where, if you screw up, you don't risk ruining your entire social circle and several years of your life (one of the prime reasons why men flock there despite the abysmal stats). And what you definitely do not do is admit it to any women (and if you want to be really safe, ideally not even to yourself).
I would even go as far as saying that the light version is done much less by women. No women ever studied a field because it has lots of men - no, that is usually one of the top negative criteria, a reason not to go into a field. I have never heard about a women going into a hobby because it has lots of men, either. And women also do lots of gatekeeping of their fields and hobbies, while men often actively try to recruit women into their hobbies. Back when I took advanced dancing lessons as a teen (in my region, basic dancing lessons are a social requirement), the girls would often complain about how many of the boys dropped out after the basics and just a moment later about how many of the boys who didn't are only doing it for dating and how creepy that is. I dropped out since I already was insecure about myself and that didn't help. None of the girls even cared to my knowledge, so it was probably a correct choice.
Looking back, the broad social dynamic is obvious; The already successful (in the broad sense) men do the minimum social requirement and get out, a minority stay in since they like it or as a courtesy for their girlfriends, some of the unsuccessful but socially above-average stay in to increase their chances to get lucky, and finally the great bulk of average and below men get out before they are branded creeps. The women wanted more of the successful men to stay in, and less of the unsuccessful. Being a bit but not terribly socially awkward I stayed in a bit longer than what was considered appropriate for me, but I got the hint after a short while and also got out before it was too late.
On the other hand when doing traditionally nerdy hobbies like LAN parties or pen & paper, even just a single women being part of such a group was treated as a coveted grand prize. Even as I got out of the nerdy circles into more normie ones, the basic dynamic has never changed in my experience. In college our lab (which itself is ~ 50-50 gender split) played football and people were always complaining about the lack of women, and nobody ever complained about the wrong women joining for the wrong reasons. Most of my time at university there have been more women than men at almost everything, and the few times anybody mentioned that at all it is either seen as a positive accomplishment or followed by crickets chirping.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1yr ago
Similarly it now occurs to me that the root cause analysis vs practical problem solving and the resulting failure modes awfully resemble those of traditional psychoanalysis vs CBT. Yes your parents were mean and that is bad, no you will not solve your social anxiety by talking at length with your therapist about how bad it was. Now go out and talk 10x with strangers for at least a minute until next week and report back on how it went, and depending on what you struggled with in particular we will try to develop strategies to make it easier for you.
I also get the impression that both psychoanalysis and root cause thinking for social problems are popular with the same crowd for the same reasons.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3d ago
I think at the core it's surprisingly a variation of "might makes right", but updated for a modern audience. It vaguely sounds moralistic at first glance, but it can also be used as a simple "your objections don't matter, you will die and we will prevail". It's also an important part of the progressive message as a counter to the natalist objection: Progressive ideologies generally have terrible TFR, and as such are liable to simply be replaced. So they adopted a self-conception as a vanguard that lives on in the ideals of the future society, even if they may not have biological offspring.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1mo ago
"Pornography: Harmless Enjoyment That Prevents Rape, or Degradation of Women And Should Be Banned"
For some reason I read this as ""Pornography: Harmless Enjoyment That Prevents Rape or Degradation of Women - And Should Be Banned".
On the main point, hasn't it been pointed out that the lower classes generally tend to have more real sex in general, while the higher classes are too busy studying for the real thing, so they cope through porn? Also, as usual I see no way to properly control for the direction of causality with this kind of study, and almost any negative claim here can just be turned around - of course someone who is unhappier and has poorer wellbeing (maybe due to lack of sex?) is more likely to use porn. They don't even argue chronologically ("Men who have used pornography in the past now are X"), they argue concurrently ("Men who use pornography have higher X"). The former has at least a little bit of a claim for causality in the direction of chronologicity (is that a word in english? I guess you get what I mean), the latter not so much.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
2mo ago
I agree with this perspective. Imo, the core problem is that there is no positive vision people can agree on that isn't the SJW/woke worldview, and part of the reason for this is that there is no good public forum where we can hash out our differences, only "secret" places like this. The GMU should offer courses like this, but with a much more explicitly open-minded focus than the average university course. Just ceding the entire concept of talking about how to make a just society to SJWs is merely a different flavour of rolling over and dying. Though admittedly a big problem is that you simply can't trust the current faculty (and the administration even less) at most universities to not just turn these classes into loyalty tests no matter how much explicit directions to the opposite you give them, or good ol' malicious compliance. Similar to the problems many states have with their teachers.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3mo ago
Not OP, but personal experience as a scientist has thoroughly convinced me that the great majority of science is done with a consistent bias in favor of center-to-far left mainstream beliefs (depending on the field). I've been told multiple times by older scientist that if I want to write a paper with a conclusion that goes against modern progressive sensibilities(I don't even mean deliberately, just that the data turned out that way), I will need to bring better evidence and will be scrutinized much more closely than the opposite. And worse, the main difference between scientists was the emphasis - a minority sees this as a regrettable reality, a majority is neutrally pragmatic, and a second much more influential minority outright sees this as a good thing. Of course biological differences between men and women would be a bad thing and we should be careful to even insinuate the possibility!
RenOS
Dadder than dad
9mo ago
One reason I suspect engagement is low is that the "depth" per country per post is pretty low so unless I already know something apart from what you write here, I'll not really be able to engage. Maybe it will increase as people who are following it every week become more familiar. There are also relatively little "hooks" in the post that drive engagement, it's almost entirely descriptive so again there is little to argue about. Btw I don't think that's a bad thing, I enjoyed these posts so far.
I’m hoping for this not to really be a thing I lead
Ha, I'm sorry to say that this is in my experience not how it works.
Tbh after reading your other comments, this just reads to me like "Why is [thing I like] so much better than [thing I don't like]?". I hate the new LotR series just as much as anyone else, but I've never heard about the Dune video nor board games and even the current movie, while certainly not bad, is not even near the LotR film trilogy. Looking at review aggregators, wikipedia, etc., both the public and critics seem to agree with that as well. The board game has a small fandom with no larger impact. The Dune 2 RTS seems to be the only objectively culturally impactful piece of media following the Dune books themselves.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1yr ago
It's not saying a somewhat neutral "could be true, could not be, there is no scientific consensus". It's doing the weasely negative formulation "not supported by science/biology", which is technically not a strict a denial but also clearly implies a direction. Likewise, the "more differences within than between" is a distraction - it's almost always used to imply there being no differences, even if it technically only makes a point about the relative importance of the difference (which I even agree with).
I'm pretty sure that if the AI made any statement whatsoever that is actually neutral towards HBD, it would be pilloried by the mainstream while this forum would probably not mind.
On the other thing I agree with the other poster, HBD is probably a majority view at this point. Though more the "there are differences in mental attributes between groups just like we already know in physical attributes, get over it, no it doesn't mean we should discriminate based on skin color, yes individual differences will frequently be large enough to overpower the group differences" than the "blacks are subhuman, I always knew it!" variety.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1yr ago
This is imo mostly nonsense if applied to genetic enhancements, for a number of reasons.
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Both sequencing and IVF are already very accessible for the middle class. It's probably not far off from becoming accessible for the poor. The only way to make it exclusive to the uber-rich is, ironically, by outlawing it. CRISPRing people isn't really prohibitively expensive, either, and becoming cheaper as well.
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Better selection has pretty much zero marginal cost per person. It's 100% developmental cost, and once we know which genes matter, it's widely usable.
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This hasn't happened even when it made sense. For example, the same argument could have been applied to all technological advancements that have significant marginal cost per person. Cars, better healthcare/hygiene, education, electricity, etc. all of those are much more plausible to cause a runaway effect with the rich getting disproportionate ROI and everyone else falling behind since they have nothing to invest, but it didn't. Currently, AI is much more plausible to cause a runaway effect, and human enhancements are if anything one of the more plausible ways of competing with them.
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My main objection: What do we want to select for, and how do we do it plausibly? We want to select for generalised success (which includes IQ, health, social success, educational attainment, etc), and we find the genes associated with those by comparing the successful with the not-so-successful. As such, genetic selection uniquely disproportionally benefits the downtrodden, since the successful will already hold a decent chunk of the genetic enhancements we want to select for.
As a concrete example, we know that specific genetic variants are almost mandatory to become a top-tier runner. Making targeted genetic enhancements accessible does not benefit the top-tier runners, since they already have these. It does benefit everyone else, though. The same principle applies to all attributes, even complex ones that are associated with thousands of variants. There is also both significant evidence in favor of diminishing returns for many attributes, as well as strong theoretic arguments (for example, there is a physical limit to how fast a carbon-based, two-legged lifeform can run. As you approach that limit, "better" genes do less and less, meaning that improvements are largest for the relatively genetically cursed).
The only plausible objection here is that in the lab, we can find even better variants - which nobody holds - so that the top-tier can benefit again. However, to my knowledge we have no consistent approach to do this, and since trial runs on animals only get you so far, the first generation humans trying them will still have excessive risks. I personally wouldn't try such a variant even if I could. Much better to use variants that already plenty of successful people have, so at worst it's something marginally negative that isn't holding them back much and on average it should benefit them.
It bears repeating that disproportionate returns for the rich is something I'm always worried about with most new technologies, but gene editing/selection is uniquely implausible to cause that. On the other hand I'm very worried about AI, since factories and companies purely or overwhelmingly staffed by AI can make the elite independent of the plebes in a way they have never been before.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3d ago
And boy the stories I have of what happens when they actually meet foreign men!
You can't write this and then not give us anything!
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1mo ago
It's a fairly unusual post in many ways. If you really don't know Hlynka, "just ignore & minimize" honestly seems like the best advice. For those of us who've been here literal years, he was like part of the furniture; It's a nice courtesy of the mods to let us know and start a dedicated thread on his ban.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
2mo ago
You have already successfully inoculated him. If he had found Nihilism on his own, it might have intrigued him. But now it's just 'that boring movie my uncle made me watch'.
On a more serious note, the hero's journey is inherently life-affirming, so there's plenty of media to go around. Most Shounen, for example. Lord of the Rings also manages to be quite dark and somber at times while still fundamentally being about hope and progress.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
6mo ago
I probably should make an effort post about (not so) useful fictions, but in the meantime you get this: "Retirement" without a greater support structure has two critical components: 1. Provide for your own parents once they can't anymore 2. Have kids that can then provide for you once you can't anymore.
Pensions are a useful fiction that, similar to money, fulfill the same function while reducing friction and risks. But unlike money, which has a single requirement to be useful - other people taking money in exchange for goods & services - and a single result - YOU being willing to take money in exchange for goods & services - which incidentally are perfectly aligned by incentives, pensions actually still have both requirements - people still need to now provide for the current pensioners, and someone still needs to have kids so that someone is around to provide for us - while only having one result - people providing for the current pensioners through the pension system. The second requirement is just left hanging, at best handled with a blasé "well we can't force people to have kids" or at worst with a stonewalling reality denial "but I paid into the pension so I deserve to get my care!".
The incentives are totally fucked up; I've recently talked with a friend about it who isn't sure whether he wants kids, and one of the main counterarguments for him was (retirement) money. If he has no kids, he can work more, save up more, and also has to spend less, so he will have waaay more money than in the alternative reality with kids, where he has to work less and also has to spend more. So the incentives are aligned so that the people are outright punished for actually fulfilling the second basic requirement for retirement to work at all. In fact you get double punished; I still also get punished for other people not having kids, since my pension later on will be worth much less since we lack the manpower to provide it to the degree we'd like. Useful fictions aren't magic, the things that need to be done still need to be done, it's only about setting up the incentives right as well as reducing friction and risks. Letting the market handle it may clear up some inefficiencies but doesn't really change the fundamental issue, while increasing taxes one way or another may fix issues now but doesn't unfuck the incentives.
Immigration can stuff some holes, but ultimately you're just putting it off on other countries and the realities of immigration in most western countries is a thoroughly mixed bag.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
8mo ago
I find it utterly bizarre how you managed to write such a long post without mentioning the key reason why spouses need to be employed close to each other, which als blows up all your examples and which was the justification in all actual cases of spousal hiring I personally know about(not too many, admittedly): Children.
You can easily have a ldr without kids, me and my wife did phds in different countries, but you can't look after kids that way. If we want academics to be able to have children, we need to give them a way to live in the same place. None of your examples include looking after children, so none of them make sense to me.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
22d ago
It seems you haven't been here for very long. This forum had this problem a bunch of times and has banned multiple people over it, with different offending topics. Holocaust denial is certainly an all-time-favorite, but there's been a pedo who would constantly top-level-post about age of consent, another who invented a new "scientific" theory of power and would write multiple absurdly long, barely readable screeds about it, and Skookum was quite recent. It's a rule only a certain kind of obsessive tends to run into, but it's important imo.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
2mo ago
If they're already doing IVF I strongly advice it. The cost and risks of the IVF itself are a much higher barrier, so I generally don't advice healthy couples to do IVF just for the genetic testing, but the tests themselves are basically all upside with almost no risk.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3mo ago
Dunno, I really hate relying on technology that doesn't actually yet exist. I agree that it seems likely enough, but fusion or hydrogen or ... also seemed likely to revolutionize society at different time points. Computers and the internet, for example, were one of the revolutions that DID pan out, but I'm still undecided whether that revolution was really so net-positive. Any gain in efficiency seems to have been more than swallowed by cheaper and more accessible distracting entertainment. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if for one reason or another AI-guided robots in particular just stubbornly refuse to become economically efficient for many tasks. I'd also not be surprised if LLMs turn out to be extremely good at entertainment-related activities - it arguably already is - while its helpfulness for practical purposes is good enough to be widely used, but never reaches a point where it can outright take over critical productive jobs.
Even worse, assuming it should eventually pan out, we still need to get through the intermediate time. Germany doesn't have asian levels of terrible birth rates and also has a decent level of "good" immigration from eastern europe and other places that can paper over some difficulties, but the crunch as the boomers are retiring is quite noticeable. Though admittedly I think some of this is self-inflicted - the lack of teachers, for example, would be almost trivial to solve by better conditions for "Quereinsteiger".
RenOS
Dadder than dad
4mo ago
In principle I'm open to almost all kinds of taxation - I was in favor of georgism before it was cool, for example (though I'm tentatively against it now that it is cool, so I guess you may call me a tax code hipster?).
It just so happens that wealth is absolutely horrible to tax in practical terms. The state can only meaningfully tax anything for which it has easily accessible bookkeeping. We already expect companies to have accounting software & books anyway, which means income & sales are easy to tax. For wealth, only investment & bank accounts are easily accessible. So in practice we have two extreme outcomes of a wealth tax (and a spectrum of combinations inbetween):
a) only bank accounts and investments are taxed, maybe in addition to some reasonably easy to estimate forms of wealth such as land ownership. This will strongly incentivise, as you put it, lazy bum money, and other difficult to access forms of wealth.
b) Every individual will have to do extensive bookkeeping of all their belongings, and the state will regularly need to check homes (in fact, any place where valuable assets might be hidden) to make sure that these books are accurate. Aside from the extreme inefficiency of forcing people to keep books of their belongings, this is utterly impractical for the state as well. In practice there will probably be arbitrary limits on both individuals and goods - you only need to keep book about your belongings which are worth >X / only individuals who have a net-worth >Y need to keep books. But this will again strongly encourage people to move their wealth into assets that are below these lines / to get themselves below the line.
Either way, even if a wealth tax might be efficient in a world with a theoretic omniscient tax AI, I have yet to see an actual implementation that isn't horribly distortive AND impractical.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
7mo ago
Despite hardly being a fan of junkie street-shitters, I wouldn't be surprised if drug-use among normally high-functioning individuals is a higher net-negative problem. SBF & co is another example in which "drug use made them increasingly unhinged & risk-prone" is a fair explanation of how they managed to paint themselves into a corner so badly.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
7mo ago
Do you have any summary for this power struggle that happened after Yasser died? It sounds interesting, and I can't find anything that is presenting it concisely in one place after cursory googling, just bits and pieces.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
4mo ago
I'm usually a fan of this viewpoint, but in this case I'm not entirely sure if it's true. If you have a scientist and a christian, for example, and both subscribe to the sentences you picked for them, but they are also both fine with letting the other one be then you don't have a culture war on your hand; you merely have a disagreement.
A culture war happens if at least one side decides that the other side is so wrong/dangerous that it needs to be converted. In which case @satirizedoor's dichotomy holds. Though you may argue that often enough both sides actually want to control the other side, so it's rarely a conflict between pure freedom and pure control and instead a conflict with different preferences for what to control and what should be free. But the basic fact would remain that culture wars may be about any topics in the first order, but they are always ultimately about controlling people with other viewpoints.
I think there is a simple explanation for this dynamic. Imagine you're big media conglomerate such as Disney, and you own an innumerable number of IPs. If you try to do a "full revival" of a reasonably old show with not only all/most of the cast but also all/most of the original creative team, you'll run into the problem that media has not only a particularly extreme rate of turnover and both mobility and stickiness at different points in the career. Some people will not even be in Showbiz anymore and you will have to hunt them down, some will have become so sucessful that they're exceptionally well-paid, some will have carved out a comfortable main role in a mediocre but long-running TV show that they flat-out refuse to join the revival no matter what. It's tedious, it's expensive, and you might still just end up with a few anyway since the others refuse. So you ONLY attempt this if you're really, really confident about its success.
Now imagine you want to do a fully new IP. It has no old fans that you can appeal to, it has no basic structure that you know to work. So it's inherently risky.
On the other hand, a "lazy revival" is easy & cheap . It's basically all the upsides of a new IP, but much safer; You're almost guaranteed to have a lucrative first season, and if the viewer numbers are visibly crashing on the later episodes than you just discontinue it right there. And it costs you nothing extra as you're already owning the old IP anyway. You just send a call out to a small number of original cast members that seem likely to join and add to the recognisability. You hire a bunch of cheap, new creative members who get a chance to show their chops or get the cut. And the woke/SJW worldview lends itself very well to replacing most of the cast, so you use that as the cover ("we're just updating this old, beloved western classic to be more in-line with modern global viewer preferences"). Not that people don't believe that worldview, but the other way around, people tend to believe worldviews that are convenient for them.
Obviously, there is always some cases where it seems to be just dumb; Buying an expensive IP and then ruining it with a bad new cast & creative team. But I think it has become an almost industry-standard because of the former. And in some cases, such as Star Wars, they arguably did put in a lot of work; They got decent parts of the original cast, J.J. Abrams, whatever your opinion of him, is a sucessful movie director and they clearly tried to replicate the structure of the old movies (and too much so, in my opinion).
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