ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
3hr ago
Her good poll numbers among Democrats is just name recognition: Trump bad, she anti-Trump, therefore Harris good. But, in practice, she has been an incredibly weak candidate in every election she's run in, for two decades. Whatever advantages she does have are matched and exceeded by Newsom in particular.
ThenElection
4hr ago
Unfalsifiable seems a bit strong, here: we just don't have the data collected to falsify the hypothesis. But that data isn't in principle uncollectible.
Though, it's an interesting question from a philosophy of science point of view: if data that no one will collect anytime soon is necessary to falsify a hypothesis, is that hypothesis unscientific?
ThenElection
4hr ago
Why should I pay attention to something that I have literally zero power over, as opposed to focusing on building a rich, fulfilling personal life? Does that make me stupid?
Men are expected to construct romance. It's a labor of love, but labor nonetheless. And part of that construction is hiding the labor, making it seem effortless and even magical.
To share that breaks the illusion. This reveals character traits about the man: either he is socially incompetent enough to not understand his role, or he understands it but resents it enough that he's nevertheless going to throw it in women's face. Both of those possibilities are unattractive, for different but very good reasons.
A third possibility is that he's just a deep systemizer and is looking for another deep systemizer and wants to fly his freaky systemizer flag wildly to filter out nonsystemizers. This is more sympathetic, but women who reject him for it are doing him a favor: they're incompatible, and he doesn't want to date a nonsystemizer anyway, so everyone wins.
And it's easy not to discuss it: it's a shared understanding of reality similar to "the sky is blue." If I'm dating a woman, obviously she already knows that e.g. women in general strongly prefer height. Bringing it up isn't going to lead to enlightenment on anyone's part, and that makes it come off as more begging for sympathy or validation than an interesting topic of conversation, which is obviously unattractive in a man.
ThenElection
6hr ago
I know some couples that qualify, but it tends to be an above average in attractiveness Indian guy who is reasonably professionally successful. That doesn't seem to be the case here.
ThenElection
6hr ago
I don't think the Motte is excluded. People here have done truesight tests with recent frontier models, and they're able to identify their handles.
ThenElection
13hr ago
The people who need to hear women are attracted to dominance aren't the ones beating their girlfriends. Typically, they are very passive and milquetoast in their interactions with women, leading to their failures in dating.
Hypothetically, you might imagine one of them wildly overshooting, but in practice that's not an issue: "dominance" isn't close to their default state, and even minimal movements in that direction are very uncomfortable.
ThenElection
3d ago
Make life socially a lot tougher for male children. This will result in 45th trimester self-abortions, concentrated among the bottom quintile of men.
ThenElection
4d ago
I would guess that Aboriginal Australians have a high percentage of genes from whatever hominid species was in Australia when Homo Sapiens showed up
Denisovans. IIRC the Denisovans were never actually in Australia, but Aboriginal Australians (along with Melanesians) picked up their genes in transit.
ThenElection
9d ago
You left out the "borderline retarded 16 year old guy looking for a friend."
ThenElection
10d ago
"A lot of money" here is probably $500: https://www.thecut.com/article/how-to-pitch-the-cut.html .
It's more frustrating to me that thecut.com can parade a mental illness around for engagement (and I'm indeed engaged) and make five to six figures in revenue from a single viral article/carnival act.
ThenElection
10d ago
Selection effects are likely significant here. If high income people are disproportionately likely to get married, it could simply be a case of "the top 1% of the top 50% has a higher average than the top 1% of the whole."
Probably it's a combination of both.
ThenElection
10d ago
Even in San Francisco, I would bet that the average male nurse would get more opposite sex matches online than the average male SWE, which is as good a proxy for status as any. The only place that wouldn't hold is if you work for a number of prestige companies you could count on one hand (and, no, Meta and Google aren't there).
ThenElection
10d ago
if your recovery requires other people to orient their bodies around your triggers, your recovery is not going well
Ortega's recovery clearly isn't going well, but the essay raises a question for me: has anyone investigated GLP-1s and their effects on disordered eating? A WeGovy Rx might genuinely be what Ortega needs (since she broke the dam of getting overly involved in others' medical decisions). It silences exactly the kind of compulsive addiction patterns that might be involved in eating disorders. If it helps with alcohol, nicotine, and gambling addiction, why not eating disorders too?
ThenElection
15d ago
Americans get access to ridiculously opulent luxuries, like air conditioning and closets.
ThenElection
16d ago
Beneficial alleles might not coincide with the values or goals someone has for Homo sapiens. You could very well see e.g. rule following and neuroticism as good (either in themselves or in what function they perform in society), but they make carriers susceptible enough to behavioral defects to pull them out of the gene pool.
That article is great reporting; I feel like every line had a gem.
Take:
Anna has a boyfriend, whom she described as “a fucking Labrador”. “He’s reading books about how climate change isn’t actually that big a deal, and it’s hard to separate that from the fact that he’s not really faced much adversity in his life as a straight white man who was privately educated,” she said. “I’m probably the adversity in his life.”
Or:
Israel struck a Palestinian camp in Tel al-Sultan in the southern Gaza Strip. The attack caused a blaze that set tents alight and killed 45 people. Ash remembered watching videos of the attack, feeling cold and hopeless. Several women began openly weeping. The male students, meanwhile, were preoccupied with planning the next day’s protest. “I feel like sometimes men don’t feel the gravity of the thousands of people that have died,” Ash told me.
Wow.
But, my takeaway: you're imagining things. I direct this at both you and the interview subjects.
It's important to remember that this is a particular, peculiar subculture/mental illness being reported on. It gets a whole lot of attention, because many members of the media class are also afflicted with it. But it's not at all representative: we're being presented with a deeply warped carnival mirror style representation of reality. One that's optimized toward creating an emotional reaction and us-vs-them dynamic, which is ideal for engagement.
And so are they:
Evelyn was concerned about what the men she knew were watching online. “The stuff that’s being said about women is crazy,” she said. “They’re getting all these reels, talking about, like, bad stuff about women. And I get reels of women saying bad stuff about men. I try to think, not all men are like this, but…”
This is a typical pattern: a man whispers Andrew Tate's name once, and it echoes a million times.
Her friend group can almost certainly be assumed to be nearly entirely college educated men. And a reasonable bet for the modal number of times they had engaged with a misogynistic reel is 0. Men absolutely have their electronic follies, but few suffer from social media addiction (the more usual error path is video game addiction or porn addiction). Men are on social media much less than women, and they spend much less time on it when they do.
It's a extremely weird gap in understanding of reality to me, akin to a man worrying that women were learning to hate and murder men by playing too many first person shooters.
ThenElection
16d ago
She was confirmed to have had sexual relationships with two Midwestern mayors, although there isn't anything credible I've seen saying the same was true of Swalwell. Probably comes down more to his ability to control himself and taste in women than Fang's boundaries.
ThenElection
16d ago
Castration also has a place.
ThenElection
16d ago
Values that demand they be treated as zero-sum outcompete those that don't demand an unlimited scope.
ThenElection
18d ago
You could imagine a world where working people are allowed to make agreements with each other to collaborate in their work. Then, if someone stops fulfilling their end, the other person is allowed to stop working with them and find a replacement. The co-ops could then develop specialized roles for handling these agreements, allowing workers in the co-op to focus on the tasks they are best at.
You'd build on top of that: some co-ops would work better than others. So, then, by the same principle the co-ops can choose which co-ops they want to do business with, to provide an incentive for co-ops to work efficiently on socially valuable goods and services.
You could even have some kind of meta co-op, which exchanges frozen labor value to nascent co-ops that want to try something new and risky, in exchange for some of the value to compensate them for the risk and reward them for the labor involved in picking out the most promising co-ops.
ThenElection
18d ago
There's a wrinkle you leave out. There is not a desire for everyone to be joined alike in tough, dignified labor to be followed by a communal dinner served out of a big iron pot. Instead, the idea is that the right kind of person, once certified (invariably including whatever their own certifications are), should have access to the highest luxuries and social status modern society has on offer, with all the drudgery to maintain that world being performed by the lessers.
It's not a revolt against the idea of hierarchy in general, but instead a rejection of the particular hierarchy we have, because it does not adequately reward them. I can sympathize a fair bit with the radical leveler point of view (logistics and feasibility aside), but there's no one even really pretending to argue for it.
ThenElection
18d ago
A formula that I've seen says LSAT = (0.048 * SAT) + 100, which would suggest a 1400 SAT corresponds to roughly a 167 LSAT. Probably not enough AFAIK to get you into a top 20 program, but I think you could find a law school willing to take you.
Though I'd guess you're likely to end up on the unfortunate end of the bimodal distribution.
ThenElection
18d ago
One difference is that the government intermediates the creation of value and the distribution of value. Humans evolved for personalist politics; tracking where the revenues come from that the government redistributes is beyond the majority of people. Instead, if something the government is doing helps you out, it's because of the Big Man (be it Obama or Trump), not the material organization of the economy.
I like this variation: same exact framing, but if you press blue, a random person dies, unless 50% or more press blue.
Morally, it seems like it has most of the same forces involved: there will be idiots or psychopaths who press blue, but if society can coordinate to get to 50%, no one dies. It adds some skin in the game for red: voting red doesn't give you safety, though it increases your chances of survival infinitesimally.
But I think this would drive more people to choose red, because it makes the sacrifice of voting blue not yourself but instead another person (extremely likely).
This is weird too me: if all lives are equally valuable, then which of the two scenarios shouldn't change whether you choose red or blue.
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