Tomato
11mo ago
I’ve had the same shift and it’s coincided with me becoming, in chronological order, someone with a hard but well-paid job, a homeowner, a husband, and a father. None of that is easy, and it takes takes basically all of my time and mental energy to keep the whole thing standing up. Of course it is very satisfying and rewarding too.
In little breaks I have in my otherwise full schedule of carefully tending my garden, I notice that most people around me are just like me, showing up, working hard, earnestly trying to do their best. They’re all types, from the banker to the software engineer to the plumber to the Mexican immigrant lining up outside Home Depot looking for work while his wife works in the nail salon. Life is hard but most people show up and do their best, and end up doing okay.
And then you see the few people who at best just don’t give a fuck and can’t be bothered, or at worst actively make things worse for everybody else. In any sane society, these are the Bad Guys and would be treated like the Bad Guys. We’d be taking these people off the streets, we’d be keeping them away from our communities, and we’d be screaming at them for their absurd anti-social behavior.
But instead, especially in coastal big blue cities like where I live, society and government is entirely, 100% engaged in excusing and enabling them, while me and the banker and the plumber and the immigrant day laborer pay for it and told to smile while we do it. The only time we can get law enforcement to do anything is when their anti-social behavior is bad enough that it could hypothetically harm them (they don’t have any property, so property crime isn’t punishable).
Everybody else is out there busting their ass and it feels like the government always takes the other guy’s side. It’s so frustrating and absurd.
I teach at a big university. Class compositions are always like: 15% of students are awesome and are thrilled to be there and go above and beyond. 70% are good and do the work. 15% don’t give a shit. It’s hard to strike a balance between giving the best students more challenging and enriching material and keeping the worst students on track with the basics. In particular, you’re worried about leaving behind an earnest try-hard who just happens to kind of suck or be behind for reasons beyond his control.
My senior colleagues gave me the following advice which I’ve realized is absolutely right: conduct the class 100% for the benefit of the best students. They want to be in the class. They’ll benefit the most. And guess what, there are basically zero earnest try-hards who land in the bottom 15%.
I don’t know why we can run society in the same way. Run society for the benefit of the people who choose to participate productively in society. I know there’s this mythical class of people who would love to participate in productive society but their circumstances have done them wrong; if only they got the right social worker they could turn things around. But more and more I become convinced that almost all people who are out there shitting on other people’s lawns are just going to be lawn shitters no matter what we do and we need to get them as far away from our lawns, and my family, as possible.
Tomato
1yr ago
I ask this earnestly and seriously: I’m about to have a son. What specific things should I do to protect him from what seems to me like an obviously predatory movement. I’m not really interested in hashing out whether this is predatory or how to fix it on a social level. I want to know what specific things I, as a soon to be parent, can do.
An interview in the New Yorker with settler/activist Daniella Weiss, The Extreme Ambitions of West Bank Settlers, is making the rounds on Twitter.
Tl;dr:
- The purpose of West Bank settlements is to make a two-state solution impossible.
- Palestinians can remain in the West Bank if they agree to be second class citizens without political rights.
- Israel’s rightful land extends from the Euphrates to the Nile.
- I don’t care about Palestinian children, only my own children.
I like the interview and I respect how honest she is. She doesn’t pretend this is about Hamas or terrorism or anything; it’s her tribe versus someone else’s tribe and her tribe should do whatever it takes to win.
Some thoughts/questions:
- How mainstream is her view? My impression is that a lot of Israelis/Israel supporters implicitly think that ultimately there’s no long-term solution other than the killing/displacing all the Palestinians, but aren’t willing to bite the bullet and explicitly advocate for genocide (or know they should be more circumspect about it.)
- The Netanyahu government seems like it’s on her side at least through benign neglect. Why does her cause have so much political power?
- Does a settler/activist like her count as an enemy combatant? On one hand she operates under the colors of being a civilian. On the other hand it seems a little unfair for someone who is actively working to conquer your land to declare rules like “no sorry you’re only allowed to shoot at the guys who have rifles and body armor otherwise you’re a terrorist.”
- For moderate pro-Israel people, is “kick all the settlers out of the West Bank” something you’d be willing to accept as part of a broader peace deal?
Tomato
7mo ago
An important missing element in your description is that you need to be doing things that are hard but that you can actually succeed in. The "work hard" --> "achieve something you couldn't have without the hard work" cycle is important. Whether it's for literal basic survival or for some "surrogate" activity as he calls them seems a little bit less important to me.
A lot of the ennui plaguing people in modern society seems like it stems from everything either being trivially easy to get or completely unobtainable regardless of effort, so there's not much left that can fit into the power process. Technology has moved a lot of the "you have to work hard for it" things like food and shelter into the "trivially easy" category. We're left with "become a celebrity," "become a billionaire," etc., which require a ton of luck and grinding will only get you so far.
The world is ending and society is collapsing; by the way, you and your armed horde of refugees can’t come over here because of this piece of paper I have.
Dorks like this will rightfully be the first ones killed in any real apocalypse. How did anyone take these guys seriously?
Or more fitting:
sorry, the blockchain says this is my bunker. You see, it’s a decentralized, indelible, trustless system for recording ownersh—ACK!
Tomato
9mo ago
Aella-simping blogspam aside,
But when Aella asks Meghan “What kind of data would make you update your mind?” Meghan responds “No data”
While I’m sure this makes Aella Twitter poll takers gasp, it’s important to understand there’s a difference between something being falsifiable and something being testable with the data we have at our disposal. There’s a test you could theoretically run to tell whether porn is bad: a society-wide RCT where people are randomly assigned from birth into the porn society or into the no porn society and then we measure outcomes years later. In contrast there’s probably no observational data at present that would be very useful in answering the question well. (Silly Aella surveys are unhelpful and probably worse than nothing.) That doesn’t mean that Murphy’s belief is any more unfalsifiable than the particle physicist who needs a bigger particle accelerator’s theory is.
That whole exchange just tells me that Murphy has much better intuition than Aella for why causal inference with observational social science data is hard, even if she doesn’t have the language to exactly explain why.
I (35M) just got married to a woman I met on hinge. She’s awesome and I brag about her to anyone who’ll listen. Before that, though, I was an extremely active dater and hooker-upper. I probably went on dates with a couple hundred women and slept with about a hundred. Here are some thoughts:
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Dating can be extremely fun!! You should be excited to get out and do this. Chasing girls is fun. Banter is fun. Flirting is fun. Leaning in for the first kiss or knee touch or any small escalation is fun. Slightly risky behavior is super fun. Try to have fun, don’t just obsess about the destination. I racked up quite a body count and have great memories about a lot of these girls and experiences still. So do they. I love my wife more than dating but I loved the process of dating and sleeping with hot women a lot too.
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Location matters, a lot. I was dating mostly in the Bay Area (but would also go on lots of one-offs while traveling for work in other cities). There are just way more people to date in a city and even though there’s also more competition a deep market is good for everybody. If you are not in a big city and are really serious about dating, you should move to one. New York is the best in the US, by a lot, but most big cities are good.
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Take 3 months and improve all the low hanging things you can about yourself. These are mostly physical. Lose weight if you’re even a little overweight. Go to the gym. Run, do cardio. Take care of your skin. Learn how to dress well. Get a good haircut. Switch to contacts if you have glasses. If you have bad teeth, get them fixed. Old me resented that I had to change something so shallow about myself, but I did it, and it vastly expanded my dating options and dating success. I personally wouldn’t go this far, but if you really have a big physical flaw on your face, consider cosmetic surgery. Also, these improvements will benefit you in your non-dating life as well.
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Get over any ego/insecurity you feel. You just need to ask lots of people out and you’ll get rejected a lot at various stages. That’s fine. You’ll get much much better with practice, and also learning to persevere in the face of rejection is a good skill.
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Most of my dates came from apps, with one-off random things materializing from in person encounters. Tinder sucks, bumble and hinge are good, and Raya is the best.
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It’s important to not come across like a loser. Nobody wants to date a loser. You need to project confidence, happiness, and can’t seem desperate. That said, earnestness (not obsessiveness) is generally attractive, so don’t bother playing games like “only one text in a row” or “don’t text right away after the first date.” If you like the girl it’s fine to say so. That said, don’t write ridiculous walls of text if she’s not reciprocating.
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You need to move from app convo to text to date planning to date quickly. Like 10 on app texts is plenty to ask for her number and suggest meeting up. It’s impossible to overstate how many matches a typical woman will have, and however witty or special you think you are over text you have no hope of standing out. You need to meet up in person, quickly. If you don’t meet up within a week of matching you probably won’t meet up.
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Things get way easier with age. I was hooking up with way more hot 21 year olds when I was 30 than when I was 21.
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Don’t get too invested in any one person, especially early on. As a man, you will typically be the one pushing for dates/sex initially, but the natural dynamics is that the woman will be pushing for the more serious things later on. Don’t bother getting invested until this point.
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The advice for hooking up is exactly the same as the advice for a serious relationship. You need to get your foot in the door first and foremost. That’s the hardest part as a guy. In my experience the conversion rate from “she wants to have sex” to “she wants something serious” is nearly 100%.
Good luck; have fun.
You know how the evil super-intelligent AI (ESIAI) is going to manipulate us in sneaky ways that we can’t perceive? What if the ESIAI elevated an embarassing figurehead/terrible communicator to the forefront of the anti-ESIAI movement to suck up all the air and convince the normies in charge that this is all made up bullshit?
I’m sort of kidding. But isn’t part of the premise that we won’t know when the adversarial AI starts making moves, and part of its moves will be to discredit—in subtle ways so that we don’t realize it’s acting—efforts to curtail it? What might these actions actually look like?
Tomato
1yr ago
This was definitely my experience being on the other side of this (women paying for a high-end matchmaker getting matched with me). The women doing this were definitely successful and had impressive resumes (but not any more so than that top 5% or so of women on normal dating apps in the Bay Area.) They all made the classic woman mistake of thinking that men will care about the same traits in women that they care about in men, and so on the basis of being a successful doctor or professor or VC or whatever were shooting way out of their league. I think the matchmaker's main job was basically to get them to be realistic and aim lower.
Tomato
1yr ago
A lot of the examples you mention, besides the “you hear about it and then convince yourself you have it,” mechanism, seem to go further and have communities dedicated to actively spreading the condition and making sure people who have the condition keep having it. This often seems to be exacerbated by the architecture of modern social discourse: Victims of the disease congregate online and can wall themselves off from opposing viewpoints, meanwhile there’s kind of a “recruiting” community (e.g., /r/egg_irl) which sources new members. Illnesses whose communities build these recruiting hubs are more successful in spreading. Some are even so successful that the hijack public institutions.
These are literal meme (in the old sense of a self-replicating idea) mental viruses that compete and thrive in the 21st century social lattice. Put that way it seems like no surprise whatsoever that societies with less developed communication infrastructure have a lower prevalence of these diseases.
I guess the question is how to minimize the effect of these on a population. Is there some kind of immunizing treatment? Alternatively does the same mechanism that tends to make “real” illnesses become less severe also exist here?
I wonder if a society with much more restrictive communication like China has less of this. I would support “internet mask wearing” to combat this but at least in the west I’m pretty sure the people in control of making these decisions already have the disease.
Tomato
7mo ago
Pretty much everyone who works in quant finance occupies enough legal gray area to worry that they could all be shut down at any time and end up in court.
Can you elaborate on this? I know a bunch of people who work in quant finance and while it seems completely socially useless it also seems perfectly legally legitimate.
If Uber had failed their founder would have definitely gone to jail.
For what?
Poor fool tried to play the game of changing the world and got burned.
No, he stole a bunch of money and got caught.
Tomato
1yr ago
criticize her surveys as less than rigorous
They’re comically unrigorous. Barely internally valid and definitely not externally valid. We learn less than nothing about the world from them. I have no idea why people pay so much attention to her (just kidding, I do). The whole community’s obsession with her is really embarassing tbh.
Tomato
8mo ago
There’s still bullying, it’s just that it’s backed up by the teacher and they don’t call it bullying.
I think the main thing is that kids need practice growing up in a social environment where there isn’t an outside authority figure you can ask to intervene. They need to learn that they have agency to alter both themselves and their social environment. A lot of online discourse, both from the left and increasingly from the right, has this flavor of learned helplessness, which ends up making people depressed and also craving some authority figure to fix things for them.
Then the problem is the only people willing to step up and be authority figures are the psychos who were immune to the learned helplessness training anyway.
Tomato
5mo ago
Americans really don’t appreciate how good we have it in terms of our pool of immigrants. Immigrants in America are awesome. Low crime, hard workers, values that mesh well with the native population. Even our “bad” immigrants commit crimes at the same rate as native whites and are much better behaved after adjusting for income.
https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/mythical-tie-between-immigration-and-crime
Some thoughts:
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There are probably many factors specific to the US (and probably Canada too) that make this true, but the big ones are probably (a) geography and (b) extremely positive selection caused by various policies and reputation.
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It’s hard to understand how badly informed most Americans are about our immigrants. Besides the data linked above my anecdotal interactions with blue collar Hispanic immigrants is unbelievably positive. My experience with white collar immigrants is that they’re just like me but with an accent. The most anti immigrant people seem to have had no interactions with immigrants as far as I can tell.
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Besides the obvious “they’re taking our jobs” economic fallacy (immigration creates more demand for labor too), the whole “elites don’t mind immigration because immigrants don’t compete with them economically” is prima facie absurd. Have you seen the composition of google’s workforce? Other elite institutions?
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US immigration is freaking awesome but Europeans should be careful about generalizing because everything in Europe seems set up to attract a much much worse pool of immigrants, from an ultra generous welfare state (real or imagined) to geographical proximity to regions with lot of emigrating bad hombres.
Tomato
6mo ago
That’s really a wild assertion about what anti-zionists want especially considering how many of them are liberal Jews. Having spent an unusually high amount of time on college campuses, 99% of anti-Zionism there falls somewhere between “the Israeli state should stop allowing settlements in the West Bank” and “Israel shouldn’t be an explicitly ethno-religious Jewish state.” If you want to call things on that spectrum “anti-semitism,” fine, but it means you’re going to dramatically over-worry about the number of “anti-semites.”
Tomato
6mo ago
Colleges have always been super anti-Zionist. You don’t have to be a Ben Shapiro weirdo to know that.
The only thing that seems different now is that the Nikki Haleys of the world are explicitly saying that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism, so the activist college students are saying “ok guess I’m anti-Semitic too.”
It’s the same phenomenon that people talk about here re: racism. You call everything racist and eventually people start saying “ok guess I’m racist.”
Tomato
6mo ago
It really is incredible that this is has widespread buy-in among serious people living in the west. Apparently an explicit ethnostate is something we should be aiming for and defending. Their ultimate aim is to establish explicit rules around this:
- Establish "the right to exercise national self-determination" in Australia is "unique to the Aboriginal people."
- Establish Aboriginal languages as Australia's official languages and downgrade English to a "special status."
- Establish "Aboriginal settlement as a national value" and mandate that the Australian state "will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development."
You can read more here. Imagine if something like this actually became law in a nation purporting to be a liberal democracy.
Tomato
1yr ago
"Why have you been unsuccessful in finding someone for so long?"
This is exactly the key question. It's a combination of (1) doesn't seriously want to make the sacrifices that a serious relationship entails, (2) standards are too high, and (3) has some undisclosed issues that people don't like.
I spent my first 4 years in the Bay Area being incredibly slutty and pretty much constantly sleeping with a rotation of many "high value" women concurrently, basically up to my time capacity to do it. I would express to people that I wanted to settle down into a serious relationship, but until I met my fiancee, I stayed in my slutty phase way past when I started saying I wanted to have a serious relationship.
As I got and older, women asking the question "why are you still single" became less and less of a flirty compliment and more and more of an actual question. The answer for me and for almost all cases like this was some combination of the above, and I know it when I see it in other people.
Fortunately for men, their dating market value takes a long time to start seriously declining, and they can get out of the slut phase while their value is still increasing. In consequence, they can "settle down" with a partner who is near or above the upper envelope of the women they've been with. For women the decline tends to start much sooner and so the slut phase can become a slut trap, where their realistic options for settling down are worse in expectation than the guys they've been hooking up, which discourages settling.
Tomato
4mo ago
Mortgage credit in the US in particular is very weird became almost all loans are insured by quasi-governmental agencies, and they have a very simple cut and dry rule for the insurance fee. You have FICO, you have LTV, you find where you are on this prescribed grid and that’s how much it costs. It’s already subsidized, it’s already not a market price, it already doesn’t accurately reflect the underlying risk, and this is all sort of on purpose because it’s one way the government wants to encourage homeownership. Messing around with this stuff on the margin is sort of second order compared to the fact that this entire edifice occupies 80% of the mortgage market.
Tomato
5mo ago
Why does every guy on Twitter with “e/acc” in his bio run an incredibly boring b2b productivity software startup whose only customers are other identical startups?
Tomato
6mo ago
the Palestinians have no good plan for how they would materially improve the lives of their citizens of Israel suddenly disappeared
They want the dignity of not living under the heel of an entity they view as an evil oppressor. So what if that oppressor can give them more porn and plastic doo-dads to play with?
I think you’re completely missing the point here, and also of the Milton quotation. If Lucifer doesn’t strike you as intensely relatable in that quotation I don’t think you’re going to understand.
Tomato
4mo ago
Are modern women just that impulsive when feeling unhappy in a marriage? Or misled? Do they have illusions about singlehood?
Why isn’t the most direct explanation—that many women are unhappy in their marriages and leave because of that—on the table?
Everyone who bothered to chime in seemed to agree with the notion that divorce is usually a net negative for the wife, both romantically and economically
I don’t really understand how one can objectively rule out that they were really unhappy in the marriage and are happier outside of it, even though they’re poorer or have fewer partners or whatever afterwards.
Tbh this kind of sounds like an MRA revenge fantasy. I’m sure that women (and men) probably overestimate their out-of-marriage prospects a bit, which would lead to “too many” divorces, but most people also have a really strong “make it work” determination that probably counterbalances this somewhat.
Tomato
4mo ago
Yeah. And beyond that the whole “tech revolution” didn’t show up dramatically in any aggregate economic stats like GDP or productivity growth. My model for what happened is basically, we used to do a bunch of tasks using a red widget. Someone invented a blue widget that does those tasks 5% better (but they’re super annoying to use). As a society we switched en masse from red to blue widgets. The way people do their tasks is now very different and so it feels like there must have been some dramatic upgrade, but in reality:
- we do essentially the same tasks
- we use blue widgets instead of red widgets
- economic output is a tiny bit higher because the blue widget is a tiny bit better
- were all stuck living in blue widget world where everything is more annoying but anyone who uses a red widget gets outcompeted
- the guys who invented blue widgets got incredibly rich in the (in aggregate, marginal) transition from red to blue widgets and now they’re on Twitter peddling some exhausting reskin of Ayn Rand.
Tomato
5mo ago
they’ve never been interested in meta level principles
Almost nobody is interested in meta level principles. Tons of the same right-adjacent people who were advocating for free speech and against cancelling were instantly on the front lines of trying to cancel pro Palestinian college students in the wake of the Hamas attack.
Some are self-conscious enough to justify it with slogans like “my rules > your rules applied fairly > your rules applied unfairly” but ultimately a good model of public debate is that people advocate for their side on the object level using whatever weapons they can.
When there are more men writers it’s prima facie evidence of discrimination; when there are more women writers it’s because men suck.
This type of asymmetry is everywhere and it is always completely predictable how it will go from relative positions on the oppression hierarchy.
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