ace
18d ago
triggered by Trump
Yea, it's this. I've been listening to NPR daily for 2 decades, and I can't back it up with citations, but I know this shift happened in 2016. They went from giving a left-leaning viewpoint that still had some contact with reality to a fully cultural Marxist worldview where they would tell outrageously one-sided stories, lie by omission, and on occasion lie outright. Maybe they thought they were doing the right thing by aligning against Trump? I think Trump broke their principles. It's been a downhill slide ever since.
China covid policy is (was?) an immense success unfortunately the rest of the world is too inept and criminal to react efficiently to covid entry points and therefore millions of humans die ...
You're rewriting history. China locked down intra-Chinese travel in January 2020 but left open foreign travel until March(!). A reasonable inference is that the Chinese leadership knew how bad it was in January and dissembled and misled for months and either wanted the virus to spread internationally or displayed callous disregard for that entirely predictable outcome.
There is lots of data on efficacy of the different COVID vaccines, and Sinovac is mostly evaluated as among the worst.
reddit.com/r/sino is a cesspool of pro-CCP propaganda, and I am now skeptical of you for using it as an authoritative reference.
ace
11mo ago
My friend, your words are wasted over there. Those are Motte-style arguments, and there’s a reason the Motte is no longer on reddit.
ace
1yr ago
I also don't remember the name of the article, or where I saw it, but it was about how most newspaper articles get written. That there is a marketing agency or PR firm behind so much of the news that we see.
I don't know where you heard it, but Paul Graham's essay on submarine advertising is considered a classic.
ace
1yr ago
low-probability really horrible things---tyrannical government
Yes, this is the standard conservative argument -- private ownership of guns is a check against government tyranny, and this is the original reasoning behind the second amendment. But conservatives would take issue with characterizing this as "low-probability". A common thread through modern history is governments turning against their citizens, and a goodly fraction of the world is currently suffering under totalitarian dictatorships.
The government is the last entity you'd want enforcing gun control or deciding who can legally carry. And no other entity has the power.
ace
9mo ago
After Ken reaches Kenlightenment, he immediately uses Facts and Logic to convince everyone in Barbieland that patriarchy is superior to all other forms of government. All of the Barbies agree to live under this system, but Ken worries that they may change their minds. And so, after the Kens are put in charge, they schedule a vote to change the constitution so that no woman can ever hold a position of power again.
Is this absolute insanity actually a part of the movie? You write as if it’s a plot summary, but no studio could actually film this, right?
ace
10mo ago
Maybe I'm really out of touch, but would one route be to not bring up Juneteenth at all?
ace
4mo ago
More than that, it's aligned interests. The places I've lived where I was renting and planning on only living there a few years, you better believe I didn't give two shits about the future of the place. Owning a home really changes the incentive structure.
I think people forget that democracy is a technology that improves upon what came previously -- violence. Instead of fighting and some dying, we can just count the fighters on each side and declare a probable winner without bloodshed. If the counting is a proxy for potential fighting power, whom should be counted? Men (because men do almost all the fighting) and landowners (because non-landowners have no incentive to stay and fight). Women's suffrage was a turning point in the republic, because it turns out you can just vote yourself other people's wealth.
ace
6mo ago
I think you're wildly misinformed and ignorant.
You need to work on yourself until you're attractive to women. Get into a long-term committed, monogamous relationship with a woman who can stand being in the same room as you. Your mindset will improve.
Separately, I don't say this to many people, but you would benefit from advice from the pickup artist community. There's a lot to be said against that community, but the one thing PUAs get massively, overwhelmingly right is internal-vs-external locus of control. In the same sense that "the customer is always right", women are right about their preferences, and if you don't meet that standard, that's a you-problem, not a them-problem, or a society-problem. Those communities will have better, specific advice for your circumstances. This forum is not equipped to help you.
I come here for intellectual discussion, not [gestures wildly at all your writing] whatever self-indulgent pity party this is.
At some point I want to set up better incentives for long-time volunteers
Please don't. I janny because this is a one-of-a-kind place on the Internet and it needs support if it's to survive. I'm sure other jannies feel the same way. The people who would janny for external validation are exactly the people you don't want doing the job.
Are you having a hard time recruiting jannies? That's the only scenerio where I think any kind of incentives might be a good idea. Are you willing to share numbers?
On a related issue, you mentioned that you are tracking how closely the jannies' ratings match the mods'. Would it be possible to give the jannies periodic feedback on how good of a job they're doing, such as when a moderator rates the same post? Personally, I want to become better at it, and the surest way is with frequent feedback.
ace
5mo ago
80% of the members of the cult were women, and there weren't enough men to go around. But the cult leader had a fantastic idea.
I really thought this was headed somewhere else.
ace
5mo ago
mails everyone a ballot every election
I hate to beat a dead horse about this after 2020, but does vote coercion or payment worry you at all? It worries me. Having a secret ballot is one of the last bulwarks against the mob (or your spouse). It's better if mail-in ballots are rare, with individually justified (and verified) reasons.
ace
1yr ago
Sexual attraction to post-pubescent, sexually-mature minors is not a disorder and doesn’t need a name like ‘ephebophilia’. Up until extremely recently, it’s just what people called ‘normal’. No one in a professional setting would dare talk about it, but for evolutionary reasons, I wager that kind of attraction is dramatically more common than its absence.
Just don’t stare or be creepy, and no one will be able to tell whom you’re attracted to. On the off chance someone can tell, big whoop: every other male is also attracted. It’s not actually illegal or against any school policy to experience attraction, so long as you don’t act on it.
So yea, don’t let this issue keep you from being a teacher if that’s the best move for you. Just lie about whom you’re attracted to like everyone else. Judging by your username, are you autistic? This is the kind of unwritten, unspoken rule I’d expect a person on the spectrum to have an issue with.
ace
1yr ago
The Motte does not need salacious gossip about real people or accusations without the thinnest shred of evidence. Though, I honestly can't figure out if your post breaks any rules.
ace
1yr ago
So I’ve now been banned on all of Reddit’s neutral subs. This might not belong here but perhaps we should go back to Reddit?
Sounds akin to spousal abuse.
ace
5mo ago
keep out of Palestinian territory.
This is disconnected from reality. Americans can fuck off and run half a world away. But Palestinian territory equals all of Israel, according to the Palestinians. And the various ne'erdowells in Gaza were regularly lobbing missiles, no matter the situation with the Israel settlers in the margins of the West Bank. Their issue is the existence of the state of Israel, not some rounding-error settlements. And Israel isn't going anywhere.
ace
1yr ago
Lex is also a fucking moron throughout the whole conversation,
Yea, this is par for the course with a Lex Fridman podcast. Practically everything he says is a non-sequitur, shallow, or saccharinely optimistic (love, beauty, barf). He gets some absolutely GREAT guests (how?), so I listen occasionally, but it's still a coin flip whether the whole 3 hours is a waste of breath. (Mostly it comes down to whether the guest has the strength guide the conversation to whatever they wanted to talk about.)
I'm waiting for the transformer model that can cut Lex's voice from his podcast.
ace
6mo ago
Are you trying to make my point for me? Israel admits attacking the USS Liberty, but there's some dispute over the circumstances ... exactly what I claim would happen if Israel did in fact attack the hospital.
ace
8mo ago
Let's not casually talk of violence when a writer hasn't thought as deeply about an issue as you.
For a few days now, I've been volunteering for the Motte by rating comments, and I have no idea if I'm any good at it, but I realize the rating effort is changing how I read comments on the site. Where is the line between a crass joke and mean-spirited comments that don't belong here? Does that well-written effort post faithfully report the current state of knowledge and research? Or is it just a bad take that wears the skin of well-reasoned argument? Before, I would occasionally upvote or downvote, but the vast, vast majority of the time I would do neither, so I wasn't forced to have an opinion, I'd just chuckle at a joke even if it's bad without caring if it belongs here or note a novel idea without deciding if it's well-reasoned. Now, I find myself reading more carefully, even when I'm not rating.
I have a new respect for the moderators and admin. It's a tough job.
ace
3mo ago
I'd like to recommend a recent Lex Fridman podcast interviewing a real estate/banking conman, Matthew Cox. The recording is 6 hours long(!), but it didn't feel like it. It was a gripping tale from start to finish, though it took me a few days to get through it. As per usual, Lex is the worst thing about the Lex Fridman podcast, but in this one he mostly just shuts up and lets Matthew talk, and wow does Matthew spin a good story.
https://lexfridman.com/matthew-cox
I think you might like it.
ace
10mo ago
I think you're way off base in the motives you impute to the lawn-lovers. It's not the lawn itself, or the conspicuous consumption it implies -- it's not being forced to live literally and figuratively on top of other people like the teeming masses of humanity in other countries. I've lived like that in the past. It's oppressive and not the way humans were meant to live. You need to have some distance from other people.
I just got done listening to Eliezer Yudkowski on EconTalk (https://www.econtalk.org/eliezer-yudkowsky-on-the-dangers-of-ai/).
I say this as someone who's mostly convinced of Big Yud's doomerism: Good lord, what a train wreck of a conversation. I'll save you the bother of listening to it -- Russ Roberts starts by asking a fairly softball question of (paraphrasing) "Why do you think the AIs will kill all of humanity?" And Yudkowski responds by asking Roberts "Explain why you think they won't, and I'll poke your argument until it falls apart." Russ didn't really give strong arguments, and the rest of the interview repeated this pattern a couple times. THIS IS NOT THE WAY HUMANS HAVE CONVERSATIONS! Your goal was not logically demolish Russ Roberts' faulty thinking, but to use Roberts as a sounding board to get your ideas to his huge audience, and you completely failed. Roberts wasn't convinced by the end, and I'm sure EY came off as a crank to anyone who was new to him.
I hope EY lurks here, or maybe someone close to him does. Here's my advice: if you want to convince people who are not already steeped in your philosophy you need to have a short explanation of your thesis that you can rattle off in about 5 minutes that doesn't use any jargon the median congresscritter doesn't already know. You should workshop it on people who don't know who you are, don't know any math or computer programming and who haven't read the Sequences, and when the next podcast host asks you why AIs will kill us all, you should be able to give a tight, logical-ish argument that gets the conversation going in a way that an audience can find interesting. 5 minutes can't cover everything so different people will poke and prod your argument in various ways, and that's when you fill in the gaps and poke holes in their thinking, something you did to great effect with Dwarkesh Patel (https://youtube.com/watch?v=41SUp-TRVlg&pp=ygUJeXVka293c2tp). That was a much better interview, mostly because Patel came in with much more knowledge and asked much better questions. I know you're probably tired of going over the same points ad nauseam, but every host will have audience members who've never heard of you or your jargon, and you have about 5 minutes to hold their interest or they'll press "next".
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