aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
1yr ago
You are perfectly capable of living in the old way, simply only use and consume the free stuff. You want to have your cake and eat it too, an understandable desire but not an ethical one. Artists have gotten together and said they are willing to create larger works of art on the condition that you pay them for it. You are reneging on their condition and worse, you're sneering at them for having the gall to even try.
aqouta
1yr ago
Somebody else will hopefully respond with a more detailed breakdown of the actual studies but IQ:
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Is very predictive of success in things people care about
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Cannot be trained
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Is a very well studied and consistent measure
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Varies a lot person to person and has at least a large genetic component
To the degree that some tests meant to measure IQ can be studied for is a flaw in those tests but the ones we have are pretty good at not being gamed.
HBD stands for "Human Bio Diversity" and is the recognition that populations of people vary genetically. Uncontroversially in situations like the Dutch being taller on average than the Spanish. Incredibly controversially in situations like American Jews having a higher IQ on average to American Natives. People here disagree wildly on whether it is true and what it would imply if it were. But we do allow its discussion which brings quite a bit of heat from the sort of people who find the idea dangerous. We originally started out as a weekly thread on slatestarcodex.com run by Scott who now blogs on astralcodexten.substack.com, but he was harassed by people who didn't like the discussion so he asked us to got to his subreddit, then our own subreddit and finally this shiny new offsite. Although it's not just HBD that got us targeted, it's the willingness to entertain dangerous ideas with HBD being the most usually cited example.
aqouta
1yr ago
It's been asked enough times that the answer has gotten quite compact. HBD is a defense against the tendency of Blank slatism to see a disparity and tear all of society apart trying to fill it with the racism of the gaps. The future where HBD understanding in the mainstream is not one where Black people are discriminated against openly, it's one where we become as disinterested in the achievement gap between whites and Asians as we are with the achievement gap between blondes and brunettes. I think this is a better future.
aqouta
1yr ago
I don't even really understand the question. People, at least in wester democratic countries, believe that the legitimacy of rule comes from the consent of the governed. This isn't a perfectly consistent belief as few beliefs are shown in a kind of status quo bias that has them opposing forcible annexation but also opposing many secessions. But the underlying belief is quite simple. It is axiomatically evil to use force to make people join compacts that they do not want to join, Russia is doing this with their invasion and allowing Russia to be reward for breaking this rule sets an unacceptable precedent.
You seem to think they should be operating on some crude non-iterative maximization of total utility in the near term like unthinking animals. But they learned from the Nazi days that appeasement doesn't work and expansionist tyrants can only be adequately answered with absolutely no tolerance.
aqouta
1yr ago
How much money should someone need to spend online to have full access to creator content?
In Freddie daBoer's recent interesting post contrasting the intrusive ad model with paid content model I find myself nodding along mostly but I didn't come away completely convinced. This post is mostly my unorganized thoughts after reading this piece. I understand and am sympathetic to the need of professional writers to earn an actually living if we want them to be able to write full time, and a good one at that given their importance as sense makers. And I do think the ad model is quite toxic.
What I mainly have problems with is the extremeness of each option. If this cnbc report is to be believed online advertisers spend around $140 billion dollars a year, divided naively and entirely among the 250 million American adults gives us the very rough estimate of $560 per year. The number feels intuitively close but I think the point stands even if it is off by quite a bit. So if I decide to pay the rate the advertisers were paying for my access to various sites how far does $560/year get me. We can start at a premium daBoer substack subscription at a seemingly reasonable $50/year, Scott Alexander is asking for $100/year and we're already at nearly a fourth of our budget!
The difference is conversion rate. DaBoer, Scott and the NYT are all aware that the vast majority of their ad based readers are not going to fork over for the premium model, the ones that do seem able to easily make up the difference for many writers and content creators but I'm less convinced than daBoer that this is a sustainable solution. I do subscribe to some writers and content creators that I like but I like far too many such that if each put up a $5/month paywall, even with a generous software engineer salary I'd have to start picking and choosing very quickly.
It's more than reasonable for writers to optimize for the total amount of dollars flowing into their wallet each month but we should be aware that this is actually quite bad for readers and the open internet in general. Some of the magic of the internet is that we're able to plug into a global conversation and as more and more paywalls go up that conversation becomes more fragment and trying to follow a thread can become increasingly frustrating. This probably doesn't matter much for pure entertainment content but for sense makers and political writers who at least purport to trying to educate and persuade the general population this could exacerbate the process of creating echo chambers and keeping good arguments away from who most needs to read them.
Think of the children! I still remember a time when I was young on the internet with no credit card. It's all good and well to expect adults to pay their way but much like the poor kids don't have income at all, disposable or otherwise. The internet kids are going to come up in under Freddies paradigm is very unlike the open and free internet I grew up with. I think in many ways for the worse.
Freddie only really touches on the phenomenon from the perspective of someone who is also writing a blog,
a complication that some would point to: Compact has a paywall. People couldn’t read the whole argument because they haven’t subscribed to Compact. It should go without saying that this is not really a defense - if you can’t read it, just don’t comment on it!
Makes some sense from the perspective of someone who floats around and comments on things but works less well for communities like this one where we come together and discuss articles. It's one thing to as a writer choose not to comment on something paywalled to save the money but being locked out of these secondary discussions is a larger cost.
And, look, I get it - I get annoyed too sometimes when I want to read a specific piece from a site that I don’t want to pay for in general.
This is perhaps the thing that most frustrates me. I'm the type of person who would rather buy a piece of media I'm only going to consume once than rent it just in case I ever want to return to it. I actually quite dislike the model where I pay someone for temporary access to something.
A potential solution is ads plus a paid membership to remove them, something like how the basic attention token works where you can decide how intrusive to make ads and get paid in the token from the advertiser to be used to forward on to some content creator. You can either endure enough ads to afford access or turn off ads and load your BAT wallet occasionally with real $. Perhaps another option is bundling in the direction the TV networks go. Maybe I should be able to subscribe to the rationalist diaspora a la cart or get them all for $40/month distributed according to how much some central entity thinks they draw new subscribers.
What does the motte think about paywalls and potential alternatives.
aqouta
10mo ago
A woman is one of the two natural categories that humans develop into if they don't have a very rare disorder or spend significant effort to specifically and intentionally to emulate men. Women are the thing that trans women are attempting to emulate. For trans woman to be a meaningful concept at all you must acknowledge that 'women' is not a null pointer and that the subset of people who you define as 'trans women' are some delta away from the core concept of "women", follow the vector of that delta back and you intersect "man".
It's maddening because while the actual concept is simple there is this shell game you can play. Where you pretend to not know about the thing you have to know about in order for transgenderism to even be a meaningful concept and then poo poo any simple definition with the weirdest edge cases imaginable because your strategy is just to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Oh yeah, "who are we to guess at how many limbs a human has?" or "we can't even decide if left handedness is variation or abnormality". As if the fact that no one has to time to write a definition that can cover 8 Billion cases at every possible intersection means we should give up on the entire idea of categories and just use whatever is politically expedient. Oh yeah, and by the way those things you called "women's sports" instead of "unaltered natal female sports" - that linguistic difference that no one ever considered before? We're going to go the direction opposite of what was the original intended purpose.
aqouta
1yr ago
My gym was closed for 2 weeks during the winter and I thought I was going to lose my mind, how can people live like that?
aqouta
4mo ago
Hey actually, to all animals you’re more evil than Hitler. Animal lives matter. Have you considered being not animal Uber-Hitler?
I mean there is a smuggled premise that animals have something like moral equivalence to humans. It's a kind of hack of empathy and personification that we don't like admitting that animals just don't have moral equivalence. It's the same instinct that makes you cringe when a doll's head is ripped off. Hitler was killing people who have moral equivalence to humans, the argument is much simpler.
I definitely agree, and I am also baffled sometimes that more of the smart types with those opinions don't just start hitting the gym. Healthy body, healthy mind and being muscular has all sorts of advantages with practically no drawback besides a couple hours a week during which you can get your motte posting in.
aqouta
1yr ago
The bridge near me used to be suicide capital of Toronto. In North America it was second only to the Golden Gate Bridge as a venue for people to end their lives. So in 2006, the suicide nets went up, and there's only been one death since. I wonder whether if that solution was proposed today if we'd get the same kind of inane pushback: no, first we have to tackle the opioids, or too much screen time, or cyber-bullying, or whatever the root cause of the problem was. The nets are ugly: not only as a reflection of our society's problems, they also get in the way of a good view. But it would've been cowardly inaction to insist the root cause of the problem had to be solved first.
Did this have any actual impact on the total suicide numbers or did some people just get a less scenic last few moments? This is why root cause analysis is important, because you very much may have just ended with uglier bridges and uglier suicides for all your effort and expenditures.
aqouta
1yr ago
I find poly evangelicals just as annoying as the next guy and don't think it's a good lifestyle for most but what movement exactly do these people think they're joining? Yes, it's mostly weirdos, quite a bit of whom are on the spectrum who are interested in weird ideas. Where are these advertisements where it's pretending to be something else? All of the rest of society follows your moral beliefs. Yes, EA has control over some funding and useful roles, but they created them and it's theirs you have no right to it without putting up with the weird community that made it possible.
Leftist inclined people want to create racial equality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the achievability and justification of such equality.
And they've had the reins and got to be the null hypothesis for decades. All of their interventions failed. We can play the snipe down studies game all day but in the end one story is backed up by observed reality and the other is backed up by blind dogma.
But I honestly don't even care if this ridiculous debate is settled, all I want is for the blank slatists to actually have to justify their interventions and pay some cost when the inevitably fail. That all the costs of their failures are dumped on their outgroup is unacceptable.
aqouta
1yr ago
This post continues Scotts tradition of having jarringly different Ideas about what relationship categories have to truth than me. Scott is of the opinion that categories are just word games and that technocrats should be able to shift their borders are any time to maximize public utility. Being rhetorically gifted as he is he describes this position well. There is no natural force that decides whether whales are fish or some other category so we ought to define fish however this best serves us. It's a difficult position to assail. And yet...
I think firstly that there is such a thing as a natural category. These are things people can intuit about the territory, like canyons etched by the simple combined implications of gravity causing water to flow down hill and precipitation taking that water back uphill. This forms natural borders between things. Creatures capable of flight are an intuitively useful category, people use it for things like determining if a wall is going to keep that creature out. This kind of category cannot and will not bend to our word games. We may call it something different or create new categories that mostly but don't exactly match this category(maybe you'd like to include or exclude insects based on some further need) but the natural category remains.
What people want out of things like the DSM is for it to have as its first goal to reflect a natural category. And there are a few options here, I think whether we pick a natural category that includes or excludes homosexuality is an important debate that could go either way. But it should be about which category to pick, not whether we should shift between different categorical systems from line to line. Because if you're switching up the justifying for inclusion from one definition to the next the actually underlying category is just "Whatever I find expedient" which is a maximally bad fit for a document meant to describe reality. It makes a farse of the whole project and in the end it turns the DSM into just another locus of power in the culture war with no more legitimacy than a piece of paper that says "I do what I want".
Of course, in reality there are millions of Jews, and only a very tiny percentage of them have any sociopolitical clout at all, and the possibility that even a large number of those are colluding on such matters is infinitesimal.
Is there a good way to describe a group like this? All ethnics are certainly not culpable for advocacy done on the behalf by people they didn't elect, much like whites as a group aren't responsible for white supremacist violence and blacks as a group are not responsible for violence committed by black criminals. But describing Jewish advocates like this feels strange and the ADL does seem to enjoy support from many more Jewish people than take active roles in it.
Ethnic descrimination does still happen and the optimal number of anti-discrimination groups is probably nonzero but it does seem wrong that anti-discrimination frequently turns into general advocacy for the group. Perhaps what is needed is some generic anti-discrimination group that handles all cases in a standard manner and rogue advocacy groups should be seen like the KKK as nakedly defecting on the social contract.
Failing that I find it hard to see why I shouldn't interpret an organization that actively advocates discrimination against my group in favor of their own, often more privileged group, as anything but a hostile threat worthy of nothing but disdain.
aqouta
1yr ago
To the point of advocates, I was cajoled into seeing the recent spiderman movie and I remember there was a cameo of some black superhero, and all of the black kids in the audience went nuts over it. And it was clear in that moment that there's a compelling need, to some extent, for more representation of x demographic, because, for instance, it can't be positive to grow up watching superhero movies and none of them look like you.
I reject this sentiment entirely, there is no reason that people can't identify with people who have other skin colors than themselves. Representation as an end is in fact not important. Now, there are stories worth telling form the black community and I'm more than happy for people to tell those stories. I also have no problem with a black actor playing a character like 007 that has no connect to race. But the idea that we need certain genres of characters to have racial diversity is divisive and ridiculous.
I found that graph very funny. "Sensuality" listed as a fetish stunned me for a second.
There is apparently a continuum of tabooness from white to Asian to black...
aqouta
1yr ago
But see how you're performing root cause analysis here? You really don't do this any other way. Op's argument is not against root cause analysis or an effective critique of it. It's just against wrong root cause analysis which... is hardly a unique or interesting position.
aqouta
1yr ago
Can you link the studies?
According to privilege theory, this is impossible. ADHD medications are disproportionately given to white boys, the most privileged cohort on the planet.
Not being a proponent of privilege theory myself this doesn't sound like a steel man. I don't think that people who support privilege theory think that whites being helped is a fundamental force of the universe, it's believe to be sourced from human bias, which is known to be fallible.
Pharma executives -- most of them white males -- are not going to shield white males outside old boy networks. Hence dementia-inducing medication given to white boys, and highly addictive opioids given to white men. Theorized general connection between white elite and all the other whites is just not there. There is only shareholder satisfaction.
This I do think is true and under appreciated by the identitarian based theories. Liberal white men do not have much of an in group bias and where they hold the reins the power is rarely used to help whites or men as a class because whites and men don't really have class consciousness. And I think the people trying to awaken this class consciousness might discover why that particular hatchet was buried to all of our losses.
So much ink spilt and do much of it in volleys denying sexist motives while accusing the other side of sexist motives. Is anyone here even against something like a really strongly socially enforced monogamy? Just sure the other gender wouldn't go for it? Is there not some common ground at can find?
aqouta
1yr ago
The issue of course, and I'm broadly on the YIMBY side, is that the moment that slughterhouse gets plopped down it imposes economic costs on some with diffuse benefits for all. The people who paid not cheap prices for their houses are out a significant portion of their largest asset and the diffuse beneficiaries will not compensate them.
Responding to a late response from last week's culture War.
I'm aware of this the various accounts of AGPs and I think back to Scott's musings on the anorexia and other culture bound illnesses. His conclusion didn't seem quite right either.
I think what's going on is that the human mind is capable of innumerable states. The uncharted territory of the mind shifts with great plasticity, but once examined begins to harden and harden in response to the type of examination. Like shining a bright on a photopolymer, call this the photopolymeme theory of identity.
The type of examination is dependent on the environment, which is not random. In a trans naive environment you are still exposed to gendered binaries constantly and there is plenty of plausible cause to start that hardening process in a peculiar direction, maybe you made a friend of the opposite gender in kindergarten and when the care takers separate out their charges by gender the nubile mind recoils in being split from your friend and some part of the identity hardens in that you belong on that side of the divide. Maybe a million other things.
When you introduce the trans meme into the environment suddenly you go from identities lightly hardened by stray beams of light to precision directed lazers etching the face of the meme on kids at industrial scale.
It's generally accepted that reading webmd had a normal effect of convincing many people that they have whatever obscure disease they're currently looking at. Symptoms tend to be vague and our senses have difficulty differentiating between imagining symptoms and having symptoms. I'm convinced that when you ask every kid Ina generation to carefully examine whether they're really trans with a laundry list of symptoms that could just be normal cisgender experience you're going to be hardening a lot of plastic minds.
I like this theory because I don't think self described trans people are usually lying. I think they've examined themselves and found these features. I think trying to reshape that hardened plastic might be difficult, painful or impossible. I think adults are probably entitled to shape their identities as they please so long as they don't harm others in the process.
I also think that as @TracingWoodgrains has described before, when talking about frames and cages has some validity. Can we be sure that the Chesterton's gendered cages we're ripping down weren't vital frames that kids need to provide structure for their identity?
aqouta
4mo ago
Is it possible anyone could actually believe that anyone would go through the extreme risk and effort to abduct a child and transport them for 4 figures? It doesn't even pass the smell test.
That it happened to humans after a billion years of evolution is no proof it will happen in machines even if we could iterate them billions of times per day.
Perhaps it is just not as intuitive to you as it is to some of us that the blind retarded god that is evolution optimizing only on reproduction doing something in a mere billions of years with tons of noise is proof that this problem isn't actually as hard as it seems. As we're doing something pretty comparable to evolution iterated more times more directedly it doesn't really seem likely that there is any secret sauce to human cognition which your theory necessarily requires.
I understand not wanting to read all the comments but if you aren't going to please refrain from commenting on their contents.
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