TwiceHuman
4mo ago
I'm not sure if I'm qualified to answer as I'm not familiar, but I'd say that being "Respected" is about social ranking, and that leaning "woke" is basically about valuing social reality higher than actual reality. The very way that "woke" operates is by attacking the reputation of the un-woke and making them out to be immoral. Notice this is about how "good" something is, and barely about how "true" it is. In other words, people who care more about truth than signaling and social hierarchies tend to be closer to the truth, but less respected by society. Here, I belive that the assumption "Respected = Good" is dangerous and misleading, since you'd be buying into political manipulation of reality (that sounds a bit dramatic, but I'm not sure how else to phrase it)
By definition, "non-woke" and "respected" seem separate
TwiceHuman
4mo ago
Psychology is absolutely "real science", at least potentially. That these fields are filled with 110-IQ women with left-wing biases, who wish not to arrive at any conclusions which contradicts modern morality or politics, is an unfortunate fact unrelated to the potential of psychology as a field.
I oppose the idea that all "real science" is objective, since this fuels fields which are inhuman and which promote the inhuman as better than what's human. I'll even claim that most of the modern worlds problems is caused by designing society in a "rational" way which is actually incompatible with human nature. We also tend to compare what's "rational, logical or scientific" to ourselves, and arrive at the conclusion that human beings are flawed and wrong, and that they should change to become more rational, logical and scientific. This is a fallacy in that it tells the territory to approximate the map, rather than building maps which seek to approximate the territory.
The Tao Te Ching is still ahead of the consensus of today in multiple areas. "The prince" likely still holds up today (admittedly I haven't read this one). Buddhist meditation and enlightenment still hold research value today. And this is just older Psychology. There's also value in religion, values, wisdom, culture, rituals, etc.
No science, mathematics, nor logic can deal well with these areas at all. They're mere tools. You need to put humanity in the center in order to benefit humanity.
I almost agree with "The social science is so corrupt that it's almost worthless", but that's the fault of academia, politics and well, corruption. Self-help books are still popular today despite them not being hard science, and the lies society create about gender and sexuality has spawned "red pill" groups online which are closer to the truth than the consensus (thought they aren't perfect). In fact, I love psychology because it can explain why this problem happened in the first place (denial/repression of unpleasant parts of reality)
By the way, you don't need the scientific method to approximate truth in the first place. We're starting to forget this as the scientific method is so popular.
TwiceHuman
4mo ago
The gentle nurse who sets up your IV doesn’t tell you whether each dose of drugs through the IV could set you back hundreds of dollars, but they know.
Why does a single dose of drugs cost hundreds of dollars? Every drug is mass-produced, and pretty much every human in the world needs them, so why the insane markup? I feel like this is the actual upstream issue. I don't think it matters too much if the patient is informed, for if you're in a hospital, you probably need at least half the treatment you're getting, so much so that you don't have a choice.
TwiceHuman
4mo ago
This post confused me when I realized you had written "Liberalism" instead of "libertarianism". I don't see what liberalism has to do with liberty. It seems like a purely a collectivist ideology to me. Only if we replace "liberalism" with "libertarianism" does the post make sense to me, and afterwards it's great reading rather than merely confusing. I will engage as if you wrote libertarianism for this reason (not that you're making a mistake. It's likely me who is confused here)
In reality, people will choose things that bring them temporary pleasure or help them avoid temporary discomfort over things that will bring them greater happiness and peace
This seems like what we'd call "brainrot" or "degeneracy". I started using this latter word almost 10 years ago after reading Nietzsche, and nobody else seemed to use it at the time, so I wouldn't be surprised if I'm the reason the word came back. Anyway, freedom is actually the freedom to command yourself, not the freedom not to be commanded. One should only seek freedom if they don't need being told what to do in order to succeed in life, if they don't use their freedom to destroy themselves.
We're deeply social by nature (and the most oversocialized lean left! They just want to socialize without taking responsibility for anything, which is why they want the government to do everything for them). It seems that being around a lot of other people is bad for you, for the same reason that social media is bad for you. People start competing and aiming for superficial appearances of what people value while neglecting what actually matters.
The advantage of libertarianism is that you can choose which group you want to depend on and have depend on you (living as a hermit for very long is almost impossible). People are only equal in value, that they're actually equal is a stupid idea. I also agree that family values are essential, and throwing them out is basically taunting darwinism to remove you from reality. I also don't see how anyone would disagree with "The best kind of parenting is both loving and strict".
I consider myself pro-freedom, and around my friends I give myself all the freedom that I want, and I give them all the freedom that they want, too. But this only works because we're all reasonable and because we can take responsibility for ourselves. Those who believe "freedom" to be the freedom to indulge in vices (because it seems unpleasant for them to resist unhealthy urges) cannot live like this.
I agree with your conclusion, but you can word it differently. We don't need "authority" but "coherence". The advantage of Christianity is that it gives value to things which are healthier than our random urges/impulses. The disadvantage is that you can lose faith in Christianity (but if you have a preference like vanilla ice cream, you don't care if there's no objective proof that it's good - you still believe in your own preference). We also need Reponsibility (this is one of Jordan Petersons core values too) and you don't have to call this "authoritarianism". Being overly lenient with others only works when they're being too strict on themselves. I feel like this might have something in common with "we praise those who degrade themselves and degrade those who praise themselves". We recognize the need for a balance. As long as internal control + external control > X where X is some threshold, the individual will turn out alright. To the extent that a person is able to control themselves, they've earned the right to be free from external control
TwiceHuman
4mo ago
You were making a categorical error
I do not believe so, but I'm also not sure where you find the error to be, could you elaborate?
Why do you think a banal practice in history is weird
Because, if the same thing occurs many times in isolation, it's because there's a good reason for it. People can do stupid things and influence eachother, but if the same event happens multiple times in different places which are too distant in time or place to give the other the idea, it points at something in reality. If I go to a club and 20 people are rude to me, perhaps I just pissed off an important person, it means nothing. But if I go to another town far away where nobody knows me, and people at that club are rude, then the cause is either something particular to me, or particular to clubs.
Discrimination against homosexuals seems to be of the same category. (Yes, I'm implying that homosexuals are statistically significantly different in a way that human pattern recognition will pick up on)
Of course you do, otherwise you wouldn't know if they are Jewish as a religion, Jewish as a culture, Jewish as an ethnic identity
I can go by name or the "early life" Wikipedia section. I've seen too many jewish people be in a superposition of "white" and "non-white" and choosing exactly the one which brings them the biggest advantage at said time. I'm not nearly stupid enough to fall for that.
You believe 61% of a demographic voted for Joe Biden because they support making your life miserable
That being jewish makes one much more likely to support left-wing positions like mass-immigration would show a positive correlation with the desire to destroy western society (the outcome of mass-immigration). You can judge people on what they deem "good things" to me. But 90% of the population are so stupid that we can only attribute their values to stupidity rather than malice. The same cannot be said for those sufficiently intelligent.
but I am glad you are making it publicly.
You're outing yourself here, not me.
1984 is not only considerably less than 100 years old, but it was also not a warning about Jews.
It's one example out of many books which predict the future. And my main point is that it says "Don't do X, X would be a terrible idea", and then you see powerful people push for X. Now, these powerful people have no excuse, we can attribute their actions to malice rather than stupidity, as the consequences of X are well known. And if you personally hate intelligent people pushing for X, you're justified in your hate.
Why does something so small impress you
Because many spaces have been considered "far left" for supporting freedom of speech until about 10 years ago, where freedom of speech somehow turned into a right-wing value. Classical liberalism and modern liberalism are almost opposites at this point, and most people I've seen mention it will say that it changed 10 or 20 years ago. Even back doing "occupy wall street" I still felt like there was support for the "little people" against the elite by the internet and the media, but now the media is the corrupt elite. And the same Reddit which joined the protest in defense of freedom will now ban you for wrong-think. To notice 30 years prior to this that the media is just pretending to care about freedom as it supports the interests of a wealthy elite is impressive to me. Then again, I'm young and didn't get involed in politics before my video games and internet privacy got attacked.
Conflating all American media as owned by a singular dynamic
Last time I checked, basically all American media (90%) was owned by 6 companies, but even this is outdated knowledge and it implies that these 6 have no influence between eachother (which is false). I stick to facts, I do not care if somebody labels facts as conspiracies, or that some conspiracies exaggerate the facts. You can say "conspiracy!" some more, but I'm immune to pretty social status attacks.
On timeless issues
The 1984 take (which has nothing to do with Nietzsches work, I know) goes "Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right". Perhaps every tyrannical power has a tendency to rewrite history ("history is written by the victors" after all). It could also just be a psychological thing - that every era and culture considers itself to be correct in a timeless manner. In any case, I remain undeceived by said illusion.
It was certainly not advocating for racial stereotyping and grievances of political opponents.
I'm aware. And I don't think it matters what exactly it's criticizing? Do you know those "Fascism checklists" that you can find online? One of the points is "Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy". I'm not one of those people who go "Fascism is right-wing by design, so anything not right-wing must have nothing in common with fascism". No matter where it manifests, I'm critical of that "You're either with us or against us" kind of thinking. I recognize the abstract pattern anywhere it occurs, in any form in which it can appear. It's the same with the warnings found in 1984. It doesn't matter to me which political party says something deceptive, I recognize it as deceptive. I'm against everything which acts like totalitarianism, and my mathematical intuition makes it easy to tell if two things act the same. Generalizing above words and labels helps avoiding accidental hypocrisy. If you're an intellectual which leans verbal it's possible that this doesn't make sense to you.
Your views come off less coherent
Yes, and that's despite dumbing down what I'm trying to communicate. If you are having any difficulty with any of my writing, then there's no way you can evaluate Nietzsche. He deals with much higher levels of abstraction than I do here.
There's only so much energy to be had
That's why heuristics are necessary. Statistics are also real despite being unfair. If you go to a bad neighbourhood known for high rates of theft, then you should hold on to your belongings. You have no reason to think that any individual there is a criminal, but it would be silly to let yourself be stolen from enough times that you singlehandedly have enough statistics to prove that the area is unsafe. That would require like 100 different people stealing from you in that area of the city. And you'd have to start over again in the next city, as it's filled with different people!
My almost 4SD pattern recognition has been a great help to me. How can you live without such a thing? Are you one of those upper-class people who can preach left-wing garbage because you live in a gated community where discrimination has much less value for survival? I do recognize that there's a trade-off between psychological health and guarding against negative elements of life, and I don't take it too far and become bitter like Incels tends to do, so there's no need to worry.
TwiceHuman
4mo ago
Whites on the right might, but I think it's less than other races tend to. Left-leaning whites seem to have a negative bias towards themselves. I found a picture which seems to reveal this: https://tablet-mag-images.b-cdn.net/production/883104fdaad1810c8dbbb2a6df5a4b6ed7d5036f-2560x1138.jpg
HBD
I'm not sure thats an explain all of it, but Jordan Peterson did write a good argument towards this. However, given not only who is in power, but how it's used, I think it's fairly certain to say that whoever is in power finds some sort of joy in the destruction of Christianity, white people, masculinity, family values, identity, and so on. While there's a lot of psychopaths in power, I can't see why other white people would destroy their own, unless they're brainwashed (which makes them a separate group from those doing the brainwashing, who are also more intelligent).
I also don't think intelligence necessarily correlates with evil in white people. Nikola Tesla was good to a fault, and died poor and alone. Unlikely highly intelligent non-jews, which tend autistic, intelligent jews seem to be wordcels with good social skills and communication abilities. And if the success of jews is genetic, then couldn't a desire for money or power be stronger in jewish genetics as well?
TwiceHuman
4mo ago
Feminine: Using indirect methods, using cunning and deception, appealing to feelings and morality rather than logic, hypocritical. Masculine: Bold, simple, direct, not afraid of direct conflict because it's stronger and thus able to win while playing fair. Uses logic or power. Will say the truth even when its unpleasant. Admits its own faults without shame.
But what I mean by "feminism" clusters with oversocialization (Ted's criticism of left-wing mentality), moralization (Robert Greene), mental weakness (used in comparisons like "good times result in weak men" and insults like "snowflake". It's to my understanding that progrssive beliefs correlate with mental illness, including depression and anxiety, so I don't think this criticism is entirely unfair), and "Slave morality" (Nietzsche).
If you compare how women and men compete for social power, there should be some overlap with what I wrote above.
TwiceHuman
4mo ago
Your question had the premise that jews don't exist, so I just decided to refute that (and to refute the idea that you need to be harmed directly and in person)
And I'm no good at history, I don't know of many of the instances in which jews were "kicked out", but you can't kick out what isn't there, and if a country has built resentment towards a certain group of people, then it would be weird if said group hadn't been involved in something controversial in the country at the time. It would be even weirder if this had happened over 100 times, in many countries, across more than 1000 years of history.
why do you believe you know who they are well enough to determine their relative ethnic distribution?
I don't need to know people personally to know their religion. I also don't need to meet every jew to know what ratio of the population is jewish?
to believe that the jews as a collective are actively making life worse for you?
I don't know if regular jews, outside of elite institutions and rich families, fit known stereotypes. I don't know if they support the plans of powerful people who make life worse for me. I don't even know if they tend left-wing. Lets ask Google: "The AJC survey found that 61 percent of American Jews said they would vote for Joe Biden, while 23 percent said they would vote for Donald Trump". Seems that they do. I also don't know what ratio of these people support feminism and its nonsense.
I don't even know if I've ever met any jews in person. I don't ask people about their religion or race.
On the other hand, there are countless old books filled with nonsense, including conspiracy theories I meant books like 1984. It warned against something that we could see happening in real time.
What do you think about this quote? "Media: lords of public opinion The American media is a willing recipient of Soviet subversion. I know this, because I worked with American journalists and correspondents in Moscow while on the Soviet side, and after my defection to the West. People habitually refer to the American media as ‘free’, ignoring the obvious and commonly known fact that most of the most powerful media in the USA, is already monopolized both financially and ideologically by what are referred to as ‘liberals’. American media ‘chains’ belong to fewer and fewer owners, who, do not seem to mind that the media is being almost totally ‘liberalized’. Liberalism, in its old classical sense, means above all, respect to individual opinion and tolerance to opposing views."
It was published 40 years ago. The idea that American media is left-learning, that it's owned by a few elites, and that modern "liberty" is different from classic liberty (that is, becoming pretty much it's opposite) is not exactly new, but to call it obvious as long as 40 years ago is impressive to me.
What about this one? "Everywhere in the West there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population. One should not, however, overestimate the thickness of this stratum. It varies from country to country in accordance with national temperament. Also, it is regionally dependent on public education and is subject to the influence of acutely disturbing factors of a political and economic nature. Taking plebiscites as a criterion, one could on an optimistic estimate put its upper limit at about 40 per cent of the electorate. A rather more pessimistic view would not be unjustified either, since the gift of reason and critical reflection is not one of man’s outstanding peculiarities, and even where it exists it proves to be wavering and inconstant, the more so, as a rule, the bigger the political groups are. The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional State should succumb to a fit of weakness. Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish-fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic." Written by Jung in 1957
I don't think it would be right to dismiss these warnings as conspiracy theories since the consequences they warned about have manifested themselves almost as predicted, and since the idea that these predictions are "mere conspiracy theories" is much newer idea (it seems like the attempt to discredit ideas retroactively and to establish the current consensus as correct in a timeless sense)
And we were warned about this, too, in 1883: "‘Formerly the whole world was insane’ – the finest ones say, blinking." This describes how anti-traditionalists speak about the past. They essentially go "Everyone was evil, the past is immoral and wrong, but now we're enlightened by science and know what's good and proper!" and then they try to rewrite history exactly how "1984" said they would.
I don't dislike Jews because of Nietzsche, and while he has written many things about them (including my claims here, that they subverted values and made them more feminine), his overall description of jews seems positive to me. I'm aware that this reply doesn't respond to what you meant by your statement, but I feel like I'd explain my views better.
Finally - is there no group that you think badly about, that you haven't met in person? And isn't your life influenced by a lot of powerful people who your voice is hopeless to ever reach?
TwiceHuman
4mo ago
They have never had a Jew apply feminine power against them
Not directly, but indirectly. If you see some powerful people do some terrible things, and these people just happen by sheer coincidence, to be jewish about half the time (despite only 2% of the population being jewish), who could blame you for associating the two? Many people have hated "old white men" because most powerful people in the world have been old white men. But at least you can explain this by "well, the country was like 99% white when these people started solidifying their power". And that it's men, rather than women, who are powerful, can be explained by the statistical distribution of personality traits. Some groups also hate "The rich", "The government" or "The elite", so it seems that most people just agree that the top is rotten and filled with terrible people, and that we merely disagree on which trait to identify them by (money, gender, religion, race). You're correct that I have never met any of the powerful people who are actively making life worse for me. They're just jewish at surprisingly high ratios. And the non-jews which I hate still have a distinct feminine way of thinking and acting. It may be that society has lost enough good taste that what I'm calling feminine is simply the dominant strategy.
And it makes sense to distrust the elite, and even to hate them, for they know the consequences of their actions. Countless books (some dating back over 100 years) warn against what's currently happening in society.
TwiceHuman
4mo ago
I'd like to point out that your example is misleading. Math has advanced over time, and all inhuman things advance over time. But all human things simply do not. This is why the Tao Te Ching and Meditations by Marcus Aurelius still hold up today. Most wisdom does not seem to advance over time.
Some truths are universal. "For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away". This is still true today. Feedback loops makes it easier to get more the more of something you have. If you are intelligent enough, you can see truths like this, even if they won't be named or made into concrete concepts for another 500 years.
Now, I haven't read Marx, and while I don't know if his ideas were wrong, I think he was wrong as a person. His work is a reflection of who he is, and the attempt to legitimize his own values and ideals. But even if his theory is largely correct, one cannot prove values. There's one more factor which complicates matters further, it's that at the high ends of intelligence, a slight difference in beliefs can lead to vastly different conclusions. Jordan Peterson, Nietzsche, and Jung agreed on a lot of things, but their takes on religion and human life are very different.
TwiceHuman
4mo ago
That "Interference" is likely no different from how European politics is influenced by American media. Politics has become global, things simply influence eachother. And I'm sure no left-wing victory will be cancelled because of outside influence. This merely seems like the attempt to make anything sufficiently right-wing illegal, with the argument "Their politics overlap with what some people bad people of the past believed".
TwiceHuman
4mo ago
Do you really believe that? Isn't the huge over-representation of jews in positions of power due to an in-group bias? This in-group bias doesn't even surprise me, Indians have it too. I actually think it's weird that only whites (particularly on the left) seem so negatively biased towards their own. The idea that jews can't cooperate in general doesn't seem to coexist well with this observation.
If you're disliked everywhere you go, by the way, I'd say that would call for self-reflection.
This doesn't seem like an unfair take to have, and keep in mind that I'm not like other people you've seen talk negatively about the jews. I barely know any history, it doesn't interest me. I don't know much about WW2, and I'm not using any information relating to WW2 in my conclusions. If I must say what I dislike about jews, and why I think others might dislike them, it's that they use feminine methods of obtaining power. Women can usually get away with methods like this (the victim mentality, for instance) because they're good at making things look appealing. Grabbing power through social manipulation without having the skills to make it look appealing, will frankly make people hate you over time.
I wouldn't even say I dislike jews in general, but many things that I dislike, because they're dishonest (like the media) has a very large ratio of jews working there, at the very least. But I will dislike anyone who I think uses dirty means to achieve things.
TwiceHuman
4mo ago
I see it happening too. I started noticing it 10 years ago, actually, and it just got worse since.
I do not know any words for it, but I can describe the phenomenon a bit more:
People used to ignore things they didn't like, and engage with what they liked.
Then they started sharing some of the worst stuff they found, to "spread awareness" of it.
Then they started sharing things which made them sad or angry, because they wanted to share their feelings.
Then people started sharings things that they didn't like, in order to signal hate for it: "Look how stupid this is!"
Then people started engaging with content that they hate, but "ironically". This ties into things like "Shitposting", "Cringe compilations", Lolcows, and other things that seem to correlate with traits that I dislike (nihilism, vulgarity, apathy, mockery, shock humor). If you see somebody "ironically" listening to the National Anthem of the USSR, or "ironically" modding Shrek into videogames, you will recognize these tendencies in them.
I think this change correlates to what we all "brainrot". More psychologically healthy people seem better at ignoring or avoiding that which is unpleasant and to threat it as if it does not exist, rather than to engage with it (and thus fuel it!) or even feel an urge to do so. Healthy people also seem to have a lower tolerance for disgusting things, and to find things disgusting more easily.
And algorithms of the past tended to fulfill positive needs (humor, curiousity, cuteness, awe, creation, community), but now many negative things are included as well, for instance material which makes ones enemies look bad, material which affirms ones beliefs, all kinds of "relatable" content, and even content in which something successful is borrowed in order to promote something which has failed (for instance, modifying a video of a famous person to talk as if he shared your frustrations, or drawing a high-status girl saying something vulgar and low-status. People who cannot create something of value tend to take other peoples creations and to modify them). Two more related ideas are "don't feel the troll" (an old warning against engaging) and "drama" (the result of engaging in troublesome matters, rather than ignoring, or blocking/muting that or those which annoy you)
Whatever the origins of reality TV and celebrity gossip and other "trashy" instances of social dynamics are, I'm fairly sure they're mechanically related to this phenomenon.
TwiceHuman
5mo ago
So it's basically the idea that, if your criminal actions are effectively undone with zero benefits, then you learn not to engage in them. In a mathematical sense, I suppose you're right, but people need to get caught in like 99% of cases, and all the benefits will need to be fully reversible in order for it to work. If I steal a cake and eat it, you cannot make me uneat it, for instance. I think it's difficult to get real-life benefits from this thought experiment. A best case scenarios requires surveillance worse than what China has, so I regard it as an expensive solution for that alone
Absent everyone having a camera and audio recorder on them at all times
I think one of the dangers of low punishments is that, even with the punishment, the actions may still worth worth it. Even if you punish rape and murder, the crime is not undone and the victim still suffers. Two wrongs balance out in a sense, but not in a way which cancels the wrong. I think large companies break a lot of laws because the fines they get are smaller than what they gain doing it. Large companies generally do whatever is the most profitable, so it's quite important that we make crime not worth it financially (companies are amoral after all)
TwiceHuman
5mo ago
Prison sentences are capped at a week, max. But, within a minute of attempting to shoplift or steal a car, the police arrest you, take back the stuff you stole, and send you to jail. What do you think would happen to crime?
A huge explosion. It's basically a slap on the wrist, and only when you're caught. It generalizes very poorly to other crime as well. Want to murder somebody? If you're caught, you're looking at one week. Rape? One week. Million-dollar fraud? One week. I don't think a solution exist which doesn't contain punishment which is highly unpleasant for the punished.
I think bringing back violence might actually be an improvement here. I personally dislike it, but if it works on animals, it probably works wonders on really stupid people as well (unlike more abstract punishments). It seems to work for Singapore (Singapore doesn't have a lot of stupid people, though).
And most of what's wrong with society now is not handled effectively by the government or the police as its social issues. Minor crime and inappropriate behaviour is handled through social norms, social pressure, culture, etc. The government should go after corruption and bigger issues plaguing society rather than wasting time harassing individuals for minor things (inappropirate jokes, building shreds in their gardens, not reporting birthday money to taxes, and things of this nature)
TwiceHuman
5mo ago
Controlling who gets access to the game (and therefore reviews) immediately devaluates reviews. I don't feel like this is an unintuitive exploit that we should guard against, but something so obvious that it goes without saying.
I wonder if text-only review would help the next problem. Instead of saying "this game is good/bad", you'd have to give information about the game. So if a game has 10 hours of gameplay, you'd write "I don't like that it's so short, only 10 hours!" but any reader who prefers shorter games would see it as a positive. Reviews like this would describe how the game was, and allow readers to judge the description, rather than merely access the judgement of the previous person.
what has been released very recently
Isn't this only if a new product gets a single positive review, putting it at 100% (perfect score)?
I do agree with the "niche" thing, but the opposite problem (niches being labeled bad because they don't appeal to a large amount of people) seems harmful as well, because it selects for watered-down content which is inoffensive and all-around unremarkable. If this sounds confusing, think about spicy foods: Those who love what is spicy wants the most spicy food available, but it's necessarily a small minority which enjoys this food, so any global rating would judge this food to be unappealing. If you place games (or other works) in a thousand-dimensional space, then all the edges and corners are maximums, and gives people who enjoy X the most X available. But across all people who judge the contents of this space, the highest scores will be biased towards the middle or possible the surface-area of the shape within the space. Less than 1% of music being listened to is Jazz, does this mean that it's universally hated, or that it should be banned? But that's the argumentation being used against controversial which has less than majority-support, for its removal is justified with the word "democracy". This is a bit of a rant, but I want to challenge the assumption that popularity is a measure of quality, and I think that rating systems may be inherently limited by the wrong assumption that there's one objective measure of good. I'm just theorycrafting, don't feel pressured to engage if it doesn't interest you!
TwiceHuman
5mo ago
Reviews don't always need text and deep through, you can sometimes just click Like or Dislike or give it an amount of stars out of 5 or 10. I would suggest that only people who brought a product could review it, but didn't as I noticed that would drop the amount of reviews low enough that you could harm a million dollar game by buying 5 copies and making bad reviews.
Twitter cancellers can easily destroy things because they can disconnect with reality. They can accuse of things which aren't true, and they can get people involed which don't actually care about the product in question nor knows anything about it. Remember in 2016 when Hillary was predicted to win at 99% certaincy? The polling existing in a biased bubble which wanted to make people believe that he would lose, while the actual physical voting was the "reality" which corrected the delusion afterwards. When people contol the narrative they control how reality appears, but they cannot control reality, so any method we can use to ground a thing firmly in reality will make it harder for deceptive people.
Anyway, your point is valid and I'm a little less certain of ratios now. I think absolute votes are worse, though. 500 up and 400 down is a net karma of 100. 80 up and 2 down is a net karma of 78. And 100 karma in 24 hours will appear above something which gets 50 karma in 2 hours. Finally, even money is not a valid signal anymore. Many DEI games lose money, but they win the war by losing the battle. Some even suggest that companies are being subverted so that they can be made to fail and then bought cheaply by competitors
TwiceHuman
5mo ago
Does that actually happen, though? It seems like it's just an excuse that companies make when their games fail. Many negative reviews come quickly whenever a company does something people don't like and posts about it go viral.
Anyway, your point is valid, bbut if a million newish accounts with a low amount of money spent just starts reviewing games negatively, that's quite easy to spot. My steam account has spent more than 1000$ on games and is more than 10 years old and it's an active account. You can't fake that. You can even collect stats about how many reviews are made by "certainly legit" accounts, and if one game suddenly has a lower ratio than many other games, where it previously didn't, you know somebody used bots. I made it easy for myself by choosing Steam as an example, but the problem doesn't sound very difficult in general
TwiceHuman
5mo ago
I don't see how it's easily gamed, but it does select for niche things. If these niche things are high quality to those that it appears to, isn't that fine? If less than 20% enjoy jazz, the better conclusion is "Of people who like Jazz, this one album is really good", rather than "Only 19% of all people like this album". Everything with a wider appeal has less depth, there's a sort of trade-off. I'd go as far as saying that everything good is niche. There's more people towards the middle of every standard distribution, but the best things (which are still popular enough to survive) are a few standard deviations to the right. And, if you allow those outside the niche to change what's inside of it, through the power of numbers, they will just destroy it or turn it into what they already like (which is plentiful everywhere). Hence why communities (like this one!) protect themselves with gatekeeping and rules and try to stay under the radar of outside political pressure.
I think the reason that votes aren't visible for a while on here is exactly to avoid starting a feedback loop (this one is the social one where people are influenced by other peoples votes). I also think that comments are sorted by "new" by default rather than by "best" (but I could be wrong), and that the "controversial" rating exists because the alternative is that the first decent comment to be made on a thread ends up being #1 simply because it started its exponential growth earlier.
Would your proposed weighting account for these things? (I don't know much about bayesian weighting)
TwiceHuman
5mo ago
I see, this feedback loop is to blame again. Viral content gets more viral, and less viral content disappears. This is because popularity is made out to be a metric of quality. All modern algorithms generally work like this, but it's a huge mistake. Merely changing the way the rating works from "Most plays" to "Best ratio of postive and negative reviews" should balance it better.
I actually want to make a game of my own. Guess I'll have to jump into a moral and social dilemma. Thanks for the answer by the way!
TwiceHuman
5mo ago
There used to be no moderation. I thought the world had gone insane first time I heard of a police visit due to an online threat (I think this was Runescape, 2016). Calling people faggot is nothing, you could SYN flood a stupid kids server and demand 20$ for him to stop. You could sexually harass children. You could doxx people. I remember a guy who tried to get himself temp-banned on Runescape, and the things he wrote would get him arrested today, and he only got a warning after a day of harassment efforts (this was 08 or 09). I don't remember meeting power-tripping moderators (with rare exceptions) before like 2014, and not before 2016 did I meet people who supported attacks on freedom.
We complained about monetization since DLCs started, and DLCs aren't even considered predatory anymore. I'm partly immune to the "burning frog" thing, so you may imagine how I feel about gaming now. Anyway, they might not care about a little wokeness, but the characters aren't attractive anymore, and some people are getting banned for just playing normally (Writing GG in the chat, picking specific characters in Overwatch, Japanese players yelling "Nigeru" in Apex). Many MTG cards are also being removed, disrupting gameplay. Even naive friends of mine who are not into politics and who still thinks that LGBTQ is about accepting people for who they are, are frequently confused or annoyed by down-stream consequences of wokeness (and the more abstract tendency of companies taking control away from users). Tekken-like games are being toned down to be less bloody and less sexy too. Some people notice this. There's also the "You can't hurt children in Skyrim" thing. Game lore, characters, textures, etc. are being changed/censored/removed retroactively to comply with the current moral norm, and many people are upset when they notice.
I guess that current children, who grew up with what we have now, have much lower standards, and that they don't care very much. I'd say that people older than perhaps 25 generally dislikes DEI and its consequences.
TwiceHuman
5mo ago
That's a strong argument, I will give you that. We can only hope for something better if either of these are true:
1: We're more intelligent now
2: The ancients stopped progressing because they were content with what they achieved
3: Modern technology or circumstances makes it possible to go further (biofeedback and such?)
4: Having access to all of these different schools of knowledge thanks to the internet, and being able to combine them or pick the best parts of each, allows us to go further in some sense.
That being said, it's not an uncommon idea (and I discovered it myself independently) that we are god, and that we had to make ourselves forget that we were, in order to be able to live. If you wrote a book, and you were to enter the story you had written, then you'd need to forget that you were the author in order to enjoy it and immerse yourself in it. Being god is empty. "Against boredom even the gods struggle in vain". Even people who reach the peak in video games tend to get the urge to start over. Besides, limitation is important. Writers block is a result of having too many choices. "Everything" and "Nothing" have many things in common. I think they might be the same thing, actually. Things can only exist with limitations (Language can only exist because some combinations of letters and punctuation aren't allowed)
TwiceHuman
5mo ago
This isn't exactly true. People are getting banned in these games for writing "faggot" or even "gg" because of wokeism. The political pressure leads to censorship, self-censoring, the dilution of art, the decrease of player freedom, and even competitive games modes (since hierarchies are seen as evil in leftist morality). I'm not sure how much the average console player understands these dynamics, though.
TwiceHuman
5mo ago
You just named 5 Japanese products and one indie title? That's almost an argument in favor of the DEI-ification of western media. Japan hasn't become woke yet.
On the Motte, and many similar sites, materialistic view of life are starting to dominate. I've been told many times now on similar websites that well-being is improving "because the GDP is increasing". They believe that an increase in wealth is a direct increase in well-being, and that the two are basically the same thing. They then use this as an argument for "progress" and to dismiss any values, customs and ideals of the past.
I think this is a direct consequence of being an intellectual and liking nerdy things like mathematics. You start thinking "logically" and "scientifically", and eventually you become materialistic as you confuse the map and territory (theory and reality). For instance by thinking that the truth values of logic ('true' and 'false') has anything to do with truth (meaning as 'existing in reality').
I agree with this, but it's difficult to be an intelligent person interested in things like well-being, without encountering material which has been poisoned by the priestly class or somebody who is influenced by them, and if one practices actual psychology, they will find not only the truth but they will also understand why some people avoid the truth. If you have recommendations of works written by highly intelligent people who dare to think for themselves (they can be arrogant, a little bit of mania usually only makes for better writing), I'm all ears!
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