The-WideningGyre
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User ID: 1859
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
I think the bigger difference is willing to engage with what makes good or bad science. Scientism, as you call it, just get religious again "believe the Science" (with a capital 'S') but only if it's things I agree with and a study I support, not if it's, e.g. personality differences between men and women, or ... just about anything to do with Covid...
The-WideningGyre
8mo ago
I think this is a matter of degree, and also that while talent is important, luck is also.
So I think most would be okay with Musk / Gates / Bezos having 100x the median wealth, maybe even 1000x, there is a problem with them having 100000x the median wealth. They may be talented, but they aren't that talented.
I may just be projecting -- I'm generally a big fan of capitalism, but I think the differences between the 0.01% and the 70% in the US are just too big -- and it's hurting overall society. I'm generally for fairly mild adjustments to redistribution (small bumps to, e.g., income tax, inheritance tax, maybe capital gains) to reduce the skew at the extreme edges.
The-WideningGyre
8mo ago
Also, the corruption. Putting in so many completely inexperienced family members, and extracting money (e.g. via forced use of your hotels) is banana republic stuff that weakens all kinds of good things.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
Well stated! I'm quite deeply shocked that someone wouldn't consider Putin's Russia quite antithetical to the West. The fundamental one is "invading another country in Europe". All the rest was kind of generic and shitty dictatorship stuff, but that one crosses a rather literal line.
Also 'provides strong support' is a fairly "strong" statement. I would have expected "provides some support" or "adds some weight to".
I'm personally not very convinced by the 'cycle of poverty' argument, having seen rich families fail, and having come from a fairly poor one myself (and seeing others of my friends improve their lot as well). Culture & genes seem much more significant factors, and I think both are passed down through generations much more effectively and directly than wealth.
The difference in crime rates between the poor Amish (or Vietnamese refugees) and the not-as-poor in Detroit seem to support this.
I think poverty does encourage crime to some degree (less to lose!) as does disparity of wealth, but I think it's a much smaller factor than the idpol folks make it out to be.
Oh, I just remembered another nice counter-example given on the original motte site -- Catholics and Protestants in (Northern?) Ireland. The Catholics were systemically literally discriminated against (couldn't hold certain jobs, etc). Once that legal discrimination was removed, they had essentially equalized in ~2 generations. Sorry for the vague recollection, but I found it a really interesting and relevant data point for all of these "cycle of poverty" and reparation claims.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
I found the fakes of Gandalf reviewing the Rings of Power pretty funny.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
At what point would you consider it a credible threat? You seem to be setting the bar incredibly (and unfairly) high.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
This just seems wrong to me. Admittedly I'm older, married, and long out of the dating pool. I'd say most guys realize in early high-school they aren't going to be dating the head of the cheerleading squad, aka the hot influencer types. Things actually get better for them as they get older, as other things get valued comparatively more.
Opposite to your claim, I could believe Tinder is enabling more women to sleep with 'surface-level' hot guys (I really like /u/ThenElections post above about the prevalence of lemons on Tinder. I also think mass media has gotten somewhat worse, with crappy romance setting ever-more-unrealistic expectations. And I'm going to guess it's something of an interplay between the two with a large dollop of men being worse because they have the distraction of gaming and porn.
Women think they are entitled to a better match than they 'actually' are, but can get a one night-stand with a hot guy, because Tinder enables that, so they never revisit their expectations. That hot guy is a dick (which is why he's still dating and not in a committed relationship), so they double-down on 'guys suck'.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
I think the more present danger is it reinforces the echo chambers and denial of truth science. People will point to chatGPT answers, just like they do censored wikipedia articles.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
I watched it, it's fairly short and enjoyable, but it's almost entirely preaching to the choir, I find. There wasn't really any support for helping de-program the other side. (The factoid about prison rape was new and interesting for me though).
Most interesting was the very first slide, where he says the dictionary definition of a feminist ("wanting to men and women to be treated equally") is wrong, in that almost all men agree with this, but only 1/3 of men consider themselves feminists. He instead proposes (paraphrasing) feminists think that "men are treated unfairly better than women" and notes that essentially all feminists would agree with it, but most non-feminists (including ones who agree with the dictionary definition) would disagree.
The rest is kind of the classic stuff -- men die on the job more, are affected by violent crime more, commit suicide more, the pay gap is BS, the "women are wonderful" effect etc. He notes how no one sees anything wrong with the Ukraine not letting any men between 16-60 out, which is a powerful contemporary datapoint.
It's also nice that he notes he wrote this book for his daughter, because he sees the feminist ideology leading to self-pity, antipathy, and injustice, which he sees as bad, and also that he briefly explores why he thinks it so popular, which he sympathetically phrases as "If so many people disagree with me, why do I think I'm right?"
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
Jack Reacher was fairly good, I thought. Not woke at all, and pretty good action.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
I would offer an and/or for (2): get competent at something useful / popular / impressive.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
Callous treatment of tech employees, especially politically active ones -- I'm sure there were a bunch in the SF audience.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
If you have enough money to make friends with the right Gulf royal family, I think you are pretty safe too.
E.g. see Ruja Ignatova, another crypto scammer, who disappeared, and arranged a diplomatic passport to Dubai a while before her disappearance. The report I watched claimed Dubai didn't extradite foreigners, but I haven't looked deeper.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
I'm going to also not read other comments yet.
I would guess that the editor endorsed comments will consider AA to still be a regrettable necessity. And trot out some disparity stats as to why. I would guess the reader picks would be mixed, overall less supportive, but still with some of the 'regrettable necessity' getting votes, but also some "don't fix discrimination with more discrimination also doing well".
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
It does, and it will endlessly remind you of it. At a AirBNB place we stayed at, they had Alexa, and you could sort of trick (play channel X, or play a different song, which it then tells you it can't, and plays something close). Super-obnoxious, further turned me off assistants.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
According to German news, it was two, so likely a married couple, which means their house got hit (edit: or tractor apparently), so not particularly strange from that aspect.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
You sound like a 'character', is that right?
While I'd heard similar groups had gotten caught, I'd heard mixed things about performance. It would actually be encouraging if it were more performance based, and less random-seeming, as it does from the other side of the Atlantic, where the cuts aren't all through yet.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
Yes, I think when it's distributed / public there are interesting ethical questions, but inside people's heads it seems entirely their business, and no moral issues whatsoever. (The only hints of moral issues are that it increases the chances of it making it outside of their heads).
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
As a minor point, I think the poverty line is set relative to the population (that is, it's set as an amount of money, but that amount is set by percentiles). So the change could be significant if, e.g. the poverty line was set at 25%, so you've effectively chopped 7% over to 2% over.
I don't think anything this big is happening, but it does make the change slightly more significant, in the sense that the baseline isn't zero.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
Because that one can easily be mapped to "(white) men bad"
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
I think that will be a healthy shift, but I'm not too optimistic about it. It doesn't seem impossible though, especially if high-status people start pushing it. Unfortunately, many of them love to be on-line -- fame seems tied to on-line presence for many these days.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
Oh I realized you also think he is right.
My (apparently not well expressed) point was that because he's right, calm, and backed with facts, he's extremely hard to attack for his opponents, so they are better off ignoring and hoping he goes away. (If any of the three things were missing, they would have a way to attack...)
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
It's not just "network effects, more capital, more talent".
I'll just speak for Germany, which I know fairly well. It's fairly anti-tech -- suspicious of digital technology. It limits, with laws, the ability to innovate or create. Agreed that the pay is much below the US (for top folks) and even fairly far below Switzerland. Start-ups are also harder (for (at least) the reasons you give).
Germany has things like the GDPR, it resists hire & fire (which I think is mostly good, but has economic costs), it requires annoying things like putting email signatures with your company owners in your mails, putting Impressums on your websites listing how to reach, getting double confirmation before being able to send a mail, or even remind you about an upcoming doctor's appointment.
I think mainly it's the lack of payoff, and lack of startup culture.
FWIW, I think that says more about your world than the larger cultural one. I'm kind of involved in that sector and burning man is barely on the radar.
We're not in the US, which perhaps plays something of a role, but BM seems more known for drugs, garage creative, and rich folk cosplaying as creative.
I agree there's a lot of creativity there, but I don't think it's made it out much into the larger world.
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