Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
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User ID: 2188
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
I'm with AOC on it making fascism look benign
This part really threw me when she said it, and since you seem to agree I'd like to ask: What? How? Is Christianity fascism now?
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
4mo ago
Speaking of trigger warnings, I can think of a few (admittedly not well thought out) reasons why I may not want trigger warnings that are different from the strawman he used at the start of his video.
Spitballing here (and also I don't care) but given that we're talking about digital content, maybe someone could write a bot that uses AI to review the item and add some reasonable (low-hundreds) list of triggers as metadata, and then the consumer can set their pertinent triggers and automatically receive a warning that they want, whereas everyone else is unaffected.
Again I don't have a horse in this race but this seems workable pretty soon.
In fact, though, I side with those who argue that it's on the consumer to decide what they wish to consume. If there's a market for trigger warnings, well, the market will provide solutions.
I also side with those who suggest that avoiding things which make one uncomfortable (or 'open up' 'past trauma') is a major impediment to the healing process. Trauma-as-identity is a failure mode for human existence and getting over it as quickly as is healthy is imperative. And yes, fwiw I say this as someone with some hard things in my past.
Much is made of intelligence and for good reason.
But I'd like to add:
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Parental investment
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Impulse control
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Self-confidence
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Time preference
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General aggressiveness
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Hormonal balances (e.g. testosterone)
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Industriousness
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Sexual fidelity
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Instinct toward hygiene
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Propensity to certain diseases
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Aesthetic preferences
And so many more!
Yes culture matters, but we have only to look to the animal kingdom for the obvious genetic underpinnings of all of the above.
My current working metaphor is something like, "Culture is a house built upon a genetic foundation. If the foundation, the capacity, is there then the culture can take hold. But for any individual, cultural constructs will collapse to their point of sound genetic foundation."
(And if you don't believe me, try teaching good financial habits to someone with a nasty FOXP2 mutation. Or for that matter a sturgeon.)
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
8mo ago
There's a reason most parenting guides say "don't beat your kids". It really screws them up
Do you have any sources on this which attempt to control for the causation possibly running in the other direction? I.e. low-quality children simply more likely to be beaten.
This could be fine with some commentary. As Incanto said below it would be good to enumerate some examples that occur to you, and ideally offer some additional insight beyond the quote itself.
Personally I think there's some truth to it. Arcane language certainly is handy for bamboozling the peasants. It even works on the managerial class, since they're often a particular combination of embarrassed to call the speaker out, thus admitting that they're ignorant of the subject, and unwilling or unable to go to the effort of educating themselves on the particulars. C.f. how few people have any idea regarding the basics of how the financial system works. It's just something for the professionals to handle, I guess. Hope they're competent, honest, selfless public servants!
One of my favorite words to hear in normie discourse is "the economy". It's fascinating to imagine what internal understandings people are referencing when they say that. Got particularly interesting during the covid crisis, which imo revealed some of the enormous gaps in popular understanding of such matters. Particularly frustrating to me was the notion that we need to prioritize "lives" over "the economy". One wonders what they imagine is responsible for producing things like modern healthcare.
So I guess the insight I want to add here is that higher-ups will throw such words around to keep their inferiors convinced that smart people are in control, sure, but also that those inferiors will do their best to bluff by mimicking what they've heard so as to bolster their arguments, all the while swallowing the fear that someone will call them out and force them to explain precisely what those words mean.
Try asking someone who complains about 'capitalism' exactly what that is, sometime.
Probably a much earlier antecedent would be religions, which were often founded on a model where the people in charge had access to special knowledge which justified their position and which would explicitly not be shared with the followers. Many exceptions, of course.
(EDIT to continue) Occurs to me that this dynamic is particularly troublesome in the sort of democracy-ish model most modern nations seem to be pursuing. How can an electorate be expected to make good decisions when the key to securing votes is a confident smile and the ability to plausibly throw out a bunch of power-words in pleasant-sounding ways?
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
9mo ago
Gaston is by any measure the hero of the movie. He's a paragon, the absolute image, of his people, and they adore him. He is the bringer of benefit, the one who is capable of moving them to action as a body.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
Definitely not the case. This is a chance for you to ask where you heard that, why they're lying to you, and what else you might have believed from them.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
I'm a white Christian from the Midwest US, so Ramy and his family are about as outgroup as it gets.
This would be fargroup.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
I believe this was most lucidly established in the Hulu documentary "The Handmaid's Tale".
Didn't find it especially persuasive, myself, but have no shortage of female friends and relations who whisper about it in hushed tones with many significant glances.
Then again, I could possibly be described as a Christian theocrat.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
Disagree. If not here, where? I'm in my mid-30s and still occasionally pick up on some new optimization for routines like this. This is precisely the community, and precisely the thread, I'd expect to find such insights.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
4mo ago
Can't find it but there was a SSC or LessWrong piece about how the optimal number of motoring deaths is not zero unless we decide it's worth banning motoring altogether.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
7mo ago
I remember being astonished to learn that Vietnamese tourists will generally bring their own dried food to eat during their travels. Asia really is a foreign country.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
8mo ago
The Chinese government isn't sufficiently based or red-pilled to do that, hence the imprisonment of the scientist who used CRISPR on humans.
If dystopian sci-fi has taught me anything, his "imprisonment" involved working on a similar program at some kind of black site. Show us you can cooperate, and someday you'll be able to go back to your normal life. Or, maybe not.
the Chinese are mostly happy to follow western norms in these matters.
Well, they're happy to do so in Western-public-facing matters. I believe they still have organ theft vans rolling around, yeah?
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
11mo ago
Nothing is wrong with salt or (saturated) fat though.
And actually another major reason they taste better is the incorporation of acid, which most home cooks ignore.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
I'll let you know on the day I start feeling satisfied with my character/intellect/overall decision making.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
I believe he is referencing this thread from Kulak.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
1yr ago
I wouldn't call a woman 'he' just because she looks like a dude, though.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
3mo ago
I think mapping personality/behavior to race/ethnicity is iffy . This is entering into 'big 5' levels of vagueness here.
I don't. I think it's obvious on the face of it. Genes and culture co-evolve. The question isn't if there are differences, the question is how significant they are on average.
Traits like aggression, impulse control, parental investment, fidelity, industriousness, cleanliness, and aesthetic preferences are all present in animal species, vary among subspecies, and are clearly genetic in origin -- especially in species without culture to speak of. Can branches of humanity, having been split off for hundreds if not thousands of generations, which evolved in very different environments (and very different cultures), possibly not have some substantial drift here?
A common sentiment around here is how silly those are who imagine that evolution stopped at the neck. Sure, (specific subspecies of) black people can run faster or have more fast-twitch muscle fibers, and that's because of genetic divergence, but no way could they be less intelligent!
But one of the weirdest things to me about many of the people on this board is that they will then go on to do the exact same thing with neural architecture. Sure, different populations have vastly disparate levels of intelligence, but no way could the same factors which cause that have substantial differences upon personality!
Let a collie be raised by cats, and it will try to herd things.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
4mo ago
Not the person you're asking, but, I don't think normal people think that way in general, and especially not when the facts are so nebulous to begin with. Leaked tapes and memos about lying to the American people about casus belli are one thing, but here, who's to say that people weren't just sincerely mistaken? After all, that will be the fallback position for those who bought what they were selling, and it's much psychologically easier to write the whole thing off as an honest mistake, since for the followers it was, rather than admitting that anyone was fleeced. No one wants to believe that about themselves and we will go to great lengths to invent and propagate narratives which do not paint ourselves as dupes.
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
7mo ago
I like my rpgs to be as Tolkienesque and possible and have collected about all of the relevant systems, but I find that it's difficult to get a group together which shares that aesthetic taste. By and large, people really do seem to prefer pop-fantasy. Damn millennials. They ruined the millennium!
Unsaying
Lord, have mercy.
7mo ago
Idk about good but it certainly was eye-opening. Did you catch the username? I was confused about how cocaine comes from scorpions and wanted to follow up via PM.
At the same time, we can see how 'tax people with good traits to subsidize the reproduction of people with bad traits' might get us into real trouble. It's the humane thing to do right up until the whole system collapses under its weight and we're back to third-world levels of wealth without the social cohesion which allowed us to climb out of that in the first place.
I like the metaphor of an oared galley. At first all the rowers are strong men. But over time, as the rowers tire out, they begin to be replaced by statues of rowers. This can go on for a while, even as it increases the load on the extant rowers. There comes a tipping point, though, where the boat is dead in the water.
And if it could see me in fewer than four hours spent in the company of diseased individuals with a blank check of damocles hanging over my head.
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