aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
1mo ago
Is there any actual scientific evidence in favor of social contagion playing any part in transgenderism? The pro-trans tribe claims that social contagion plays no role, and to me, it's trivially true that social contagion plays an astounding part, as well as fetishism and abuse, and autism. I have no idea how many kids genuinely become gender dysphoric due to genetics, if there are any at all. And if there are any, I certainly don't think that it's a given that they need puberty blockers. How the hell did that become the default? But anyway, has The Science turned up anything on social contagion
The problem with empirics here is that the whole phenomenon is unfalsifiable. I think that many trans people are indeed experiencing something whether it's sociogenic or a physical ailment because they are doing a lot of costly harm to themselves to a degree that makes no sense if they aren't actually suffering. But there just isn't really a way to tell if a kid is going through a phase or has this more real thing assuming there is a real thing. Even the prospective trans person themselves can't know if what they're experiencing is what other trans people are experiencing. It's all guessing all the way down.
aqouta
1mo ago
I join the chorus of people who don't quite understand what your problem is with LLMs. What kind of code do you write? The tools are at the point where I can give them a picture of a screen I want along with some API endpoints and it reliably spits out immediately functioning react code. I can then ask it to write the middleware code for those endpoints and finally ask it to create a sproc for the database component. It's possible you hover high above us react monkeys and barely even consider that programming but surely you understand that's the level like at least half of all programmers operate on? I had copilot do all these things today, I know that it can do these things. So where is the disconnect? It's truly possible there is some higher plane of coding us uninspired 9-5 paycheck Andy's can only obliquely perceive and this is your standard for being able to program but it'd be nice if you could just say that to resolve the confusion.
aqouta
1mo ago
What does believing the motte cash out to? If it's mere preference, a transhumanist freedom of form where we let people edit their own bodies as much as they want surely this doesn't imply much in terms of trans women in women's sports, endorsing childhood intervention or nearly any other culture war hot point. Consenting adults can do whatever they want is the old truce if people want to return to it then they shouldn't be on the trans rights advocates side of most disputes.
Can you put a little more effort into formulating your point here? This really just seems like a bunch of Russel conjugations. You take issue with the concept of ownership and then go on to describe consequences of this concept in unflattering terms. Ownership is a useful concept for many reasons, principally because it solves tragedy of the commons problems once society scales up enough that free riding becomes a problem. You really need to propose an alternative to ownership as a concept and not just leave it hanging out there if you want this to go anywhere. It's very difficult to actually build any organization without the concept of ownership without it being incredibly brittle. Not just in the case of physical goods but ownership in decision making.
aqouta
3mo ago
Look, I understand finding a topic uninteresting but we're talking about a thing that could upturn the whole world economy. And the reason there is so much uncertainty about it is because the president of the united states is intentionally yoyoing us back and forth across the precipice. It's not a psyop that this is being discussed, some thing are actually genuinely important.
My point at this point, which I think is quite clear, is that ownership is essentially and definitionally the right to deprive others.
This is why proposing an alternative is important. Because I really don't think you can have a system free of deprivation. For any finite item, say my nail gun, its use necessitates depriving someone else of its use at least for the duration of my use. You can certainly create systems that minimize deprivation but its existence is a brute fact of the universe. And I'd go so far as to argue that our systems of free exchange and property rights actually does a pretty good job of minimizing deprivation in practice through enabling growth.
In fact, the alternative is sticking us in the nose, which makes the fact that most people act clueless about it (whether they are or not) all the more ironic. One minute (not 10, JarJarJedi) is all it would take for a relatively intelligent person doing nothing more than looking for the logical compliment to deprivation to realize what a very familiar alternative is.
I'm afraid it is not sticking me in particular in the nose and would appreciate a more explicit spelling it out. If you want to say communism or whatever you can just come out and say it. We entertain much more fringe positions here from time to time even if there are those who jeer rightly or wrongly you'll usually find some interlocutors willing to approach in good faith so long as you're clear and not too unpleasant about it.
I really don't care how thousands of years of use has convinced us that ownership is useful or what "problems" it "solves" -- problems conceived of in the same paradigm where ownership was conceived, characterized by thousands of years of staunch neglect and refusal that it's all about deprivation. "Usefulness" is beside the point. War is universally considered useful, too. How is that relevant to the fact that it's obscene, horrific, and destructive?
This is a really unsatisfying answer to people who have to actually live in any of these proposed worlds. It actually matters quite a bit if you don't have an alternative because we rely on ownership as a foundation to this very complex world full of wonders that we have built.
Have you ever considered the fact that ownership is the right to deprive? You might spend a little time ruminating on that.
Yes, I have thought quite a bit about this kind of thing. My conclusion is that the ability to deprive is probably necessary for any social system that scales past around the Dunbar number and depending on how you operationalize "deprive" maybe far below that number.
Oh, really? No, not at all. How does the fact that there aren't enough lifeboats on the Titanic we're sailing, or the fact that I can't tell you where there's one with room for you, have any bearing on the fact that the ship is going under? No one owes you a solution. Are you just going to stand there until someone gives you directions or leads you by the hand? It's up to you if you want to use that as an excuse to refuse considering facts that are right all our faces.
I don't see us to be sinking in any meaningful way. Society is more prosperous than any time in history. So yes, I will need some kind of assurance that your plan to meddle with these fundamental axioms of society isn't going to be really really terrible before I sign on. It could be like slavery where we really are better off without it. Or it could be like the need to consume calories and expel waste that we really just need to make peace with.
What could possibly be an alternative to predicating entire societies on the principle of deprivation? No idea?
Genuinely just coming up with childish noble savage myths about how native Americans live in 90s era cartoons. Why are you so resistant to actually describing what you're after?
If America gets to "let's stay out of it" Israel is doomed.
I don't think this is actually the case. If America wasn't involved and Israel didn't care about appeasing western sensibilities at all they'd just behave like the other powers in the region and genocide their troublesome minorities.
aqouta
2mo ago
Speaking of work, what is/was your line of work? It may just be an engineers mindset but when I hear a critique of some fundamental part or tool I'm using I have two concerns.
- is this critique true
- if it is true what is the alternative and is it better than the downside being put forward.
Part 2 is pretty important because if no alternative is actually better than the tool itself then it makes step 1 pointless. If there is not an actual alternative to ownership then why should I care about your critique of it? It's like putting forward a critique of how much trouble it causes that humans must excrete waste. You can say tons of bad things about our need to excrete waste, it smells, we must do it at inopportune times and it's processing requires much effort. But as this practice cannot be eliminated we must make peace with it and the infrastructure and sewers must be built, damn the cost.
Ownership means people must be deprived of some things. It's not alone in that downside. The need to breathe oxygen and inability to survive at extreme levels of pressure deprive every human of a safe tour of the Titanic wreckage. As humans being deprived of things is just something we have to accept unless we can find a better alternative. We will probably never overcome deprivation on our ability to walk on the surface of the sun, whatever one might call the surface of a giant nuclear explosion.
I think a lot of the frustration you're seeing in response here is that the ball seems to be in your court on this topic but you refuse to acknowledge that and instead insist that the ball is in our court. You're proposing some pretty radical interpretations of society and then refusing to elaborate in anything but vagueness.
That you and I mean the same thing by "ownership".
I'm perfectly willing to accept your definition of ownership for sake of conversation. It's just a word. If we come to somewhere I don't think you're using it in a consistent way or trying to garner strength from a connotation ownership has that isn't present in your definition I'll let it be known that we differ.
That in a world where ownership has been abolished, there will still be factories and factory workers.
Sure, this is a pretty important thing. If you're proposing we collapse all of society and return to monkey or whatever I'd like to say straight up that I have no interest in giving up modern conveniences. I think society as a whole is pretty great and produces many wonders. If this is what you are proposing it would save us all a lot of time if you came out and said it. Then you could defend that position and maybe say something interesting. But it's pretty unsatisfying to have to guess at what you're even talking about.
You're welcome to list the assumptions I'm making.
I would greatly prefer you to list these. That I don't actually know what assumptions you're making is the problem here. You seem to think it's some kind of virtue that you're minimally engaging. It's not. It makes discussion practically impossible. The totality of what I know about your position is that you believe ownership to be unjust and that now that you also think work is bad.
You should read Bob Black's awesome little book, The Abolition of Work to stretch your mind a bit, if you haven't already read it.
Just read it. just seems like more unworkable fancy. His view on pre-industrial society is rose tinted and his proposal for an alternative, which I'll at least credit him with putting forth, is pure fantasy. I understand it's satisfying to say you don't like having to work for a living and this kind of thing can feel cathartic to imagine, ideally with friends while passing around a joint in your early twenties, but it's just nonsense. No, we are not going to be able to spontaneously organize society such that the waste gets handled joyously by small children by awarding them medals for doing a good job. No, we are not going to leave it up to people's whims to accomplish necessary jobs like providing us with food or maintaining our buildings and infrastructure. No, war will not be abolished because of this slick new idea where we all just chill out, war over resources is older than humanity, the monkeys and apes do it.
if your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.
Beyond even the unfeasibility of his solutions I find something spiritually dismal about them. This yearning for a dead past and uninterest in further progress. I find it frankly pathetic. It is the attitude of a stoner with arrested development. A society of Bob Blacks would never explore the stars, wouldn't not have sent a contingent to the moon, would not have even ever come down from the trees. I welcome him and those who think like him to find their fellows and move into some still remaining stretch of wilderness and live life as they wish.
aqouta
1mo ago
I haven't worked at very many firms but it has not been my experience that any of the office jobs in my department are perfunctory. Around 200 of us move billions of dollars in investments, originating and underwriting new construction investments, managing those investments over their lifecycle, inspecting them and eventually exiting them. As one of the tech guys that builds and maintains the tools used by the teams doing these various tasks I have a decent idea of what each group does and I just don't really think it's the case that any of the job categories are bullshit. How big each group is does have some politics to it, maybe originations could be run leaner and our tech team could run at either a lower headcount and need to focus on keeping things working or a higher headcount and build more tools in our backlog but ultimately that isn't arbitrary and the marginal employee will add more value even if it's not clear if the marginal value exceeds the marginal cost.
Some of our employees are very much doing email jobs, they interface with outside syndicators who hunt for deals for us to evaluate and then enter the deal information into our system. We even build tooling and imports to make this process smoother but someone actually does need to be the person to ask the syndicators what's going on when things aren't perfectly normal and build up the case for or against an individual investment.
I'm not sure what exactly people are imagining when they think about bullshit jobs, it's always some vagueness or pointing out that a lot of time is spent waiting around rather than hammering nails for the whole shift or whatever. But it actually is genuinely important that when the email comes in you have someone to evaluate what it's saying and pull the right levers in response. The act of coordinating these people is also itself a pretty complicated job and I can attest that automating these tasks is tricky and full of difficult process questions.
aqouta
1mo ago
My point is that believing in the motte version excludes them from the group under discussion. They believe something entirely different. It'd be like a libertarian responding with of course we care about the deficit when discussing whether the people supporting the big beautiful bill care about the deficit. Great that you care but the actual party passing the actual bill isn't listening to you and thinks your concerns are stupid and wrong.
aqouta
1mo ago
Falluja was fought against insurgents in Iraq. While 60% or more of the buildings in Gaza are destroyed, after this battle (the worst of the urban combat in Iraq) only 20% max were destroyed.
The battle of falluja was less than 2 months long and there weren't extensive tunnel networks dug out specifically to prevent the forces from being effectively routed. This is the type of war Hamas specifically prepared to fight and provoke. You need to deal with there being two agentic sides to this conflict.
even the comically worst enemy of history weren’t despised with genocidal intent as Israelis despise Palestinians.
This has a lot to do with holocaust justification for the war being post hoc and Americans just not really caring a much about a conflict half the world away as evidenced by the long resistance to entering it.
They launched an attack on American soil that killed twice the number as Oct 7. We went after Al Qaeda and Baathists as a result. We didn’t aim to starve them to death. This is the closest thing to a 1-to-1 comparison.
Afghanistan just isn't in any way comparable to Gaza.
This is unfalsifiable.
A call for an alternative strategy is definitely falsifiable although it's a weird term to use. The relevant question is what do you actually do if you're Israel and recognize that your neighbor is lead by a death cult that legitimately will go to whatever ends are within their ability to kill as many of your people as possible and have extensive tunnel networks that make actually rooting them out nearly impossible. Your options are basically extreme violence, as we see now, or just enduring regular attacks.
aqouta
1mo ago
I think that is evidence but not proof. "I'm the opposite sex actually" is not so conceptually foreign to normal experience that I wouldn't expect it to come about as a normal error spontaneously occasionally. "the position of the stars mean something to or ordinary lives" is a false conclusion arrived at by multiple civilizations.
Now, maybe having that error and it getting ingrained deeply enough just is gender dysphoria and star believer would also spontaneously appear at some base rate and further the best thing to do about this is let them buy crystals and get gaudy piercing to their heart's content. But if that's the case then it does sound like something we ought to be able to talk a rational person out of, and should probably try pretty hard to given the severity of the costs associated with transitioning. Finally granting all of that falls on the side of letting them transition anyways being the best for them, this being a disorder caused by an idea it would be exactly the kind of thing we'd worry about social contagion on. It becoming a fixation may be a much lower bar than it being spontaneously arrived at and then affirming it as a normal thing widely seems like a pretty big mistake.
Then there is the other possible conclusion. If It's caused by some kind of physical thing and would show up not only separated from the concept of transgenderism but in some kind of Truman show style total separation from the opposite sex. This would be very strong evidence indeed and some kind of model where we can do a brain scan and very accurately predict transgendered identification would be strong evidence. But then I'd want the transition gate kept on those grounds.
My wife is a psychiatrist at a public hospital that deals with some of Chicago's sickest and poorest mental cases. I get a pretty good cross section of the stories. It's just not really the case that the kind of politics she's dealing with from her patients are mondain red vs blue tribe stuff. The craziest red tribe anti-vax position you can imagine would not phase her and would sound strange in its groundedness compared to the actual involuntary cases she deals with, which are almost always about refusal to take medication that stops them from like painting the walls with their feces. Psychiatrists are certainly like 400% more lgbt than the general population but they just aren't taking the politics of their patients seriously enough for discrimination to really be a thing, they're fighting tooth and nail just to get the feces smeerers to take their meds.
aqouta
1mo ago
I understand the catharsis in cheating to win the Kobayashi Maru challenge but it really is the cop out answer. Oh, so you're guarded and cynical and don't want to discuss sacred values? That's fine, you can use this maneuver to get out of it when it's an inappropriate time to have the discussion but are you genuinely just committed to never exploring which of your values plays master to the others? Too afraid of judgement for making a call?
Fighting the hypothetical is small talk, it's a dodge. It exchanges a kind of low grade cleverness to avoid substance.
aqouta
1mo ago
how do skeptics of "endogenous" transgender feelings explain historical cases?
It's not that hard really, flipping any binary identity is a pretty natural operation. It's not that far away in mind space. One can imagine what it's like to be the opposite sex, idealize it and then fixate on it. Once something like that cements itself as an identity it's hard to shake. People convince themselves of all sorts of nonsense through this pathway. It's much much more likely to happen through social contagion than ex nilo but it's always the kind of thing that might happen.
You can stop blockading the Gaza Strip What do you mean by
blockading? Do you mean controlling what goes in to the territory where the governimg body uses the pipes meant for water supplies to make rockets? Yeah, no country is going to allow supplies in unexamined in that situation.
stealing land in the West Bank and illegally imprisoning
I agree, the settlements should not happen, but the Palestinians should have by now come up with state borders which would have prevented this rather than clinging to the delusion that they're going to retake Israel. We should have two people negotiate proper borders but the Palestinians are uninterested in this.
You can not use the Hannibal Directive, which killed some unspecified % of the hostages and civilians (it’s crazy we still don’t know the extent of this)
What percentage of the deaths on October 7th do you think died to Hannibal directive? The policy rescinded in 2016.
You can implement the most asinine security measures to prevent any future attack, starting with a common sense “don’t throw raves right next to Gaza”
Do you attribute any agency at all to Gazans? Are they just animals incapable of higher reasoning in your estimation? They can't be expected to differentiate right from wrong?
You can pursue diplomacy based on returning encroached land in the West Bank
Would hamas accept a two state solution on these borders?
aqouta
1mo ago
Apologies if I came on too hard, it's just you've been expressing this opinion for a while and had gone down several reply chains without bringing the thing to the object level. It's emblematic of the whole question, AI is "spikey", as in it's very good at some things and inexplicably bad at some other things. I don't think a lot of people would take so much offense if you just said it still seems bad at some tasks, that's broadly a consensus. But when you just say it "sucks at code" it's perplexing to the people watching it effortlessly do wide swaths of what used to be core programming work.
I could definitely see it struggle with highly context dependent config files but something seems strange about it not producing at least a valid file, did you try different prompts and giving it different contexts? I find giving it an example of valid output helps but I'm not familiar with fluentd and it's possible giving it enough context is unreasonable.
aqouta
1mo ago
The newest being deep research, which according to some estimates, costs a thousand USD per query.
I would bet fairly good odds that this is not true.
aqouta
1mo ago
You should turn on your turn signal every time you switch lanes or otherwise would be expected to use it, even if nobody is around.
You should do it as a habit but not doing so when no one is looking isn't a major infraction. Not doing so when there are other people around that could benefit from the knowledge is shitty behavior.
Stop signs and red lights need to be fully stopped at, even if nobody is around and you know there isn't a red light camera.
Stop every time, if there's literally no one around you can maybe not come to a total complete stop.
Speed limits should be followed to the letter when possible.
Depends heavily on the location. It's fine to speed like 5-10+ on highways. In neighborhoods much less.
The left lane is for passing only, and also, if you are in that lane and not passing and someone cuts you off or rides your bumper, that is fine.
Left lane is for passing but tailgating is also stupid and dangerous.
If someone does not make room for you and you need to come over (and properly signaled) you can cut them off guilt free.
Depends heavily on circumstance, if it's a zipper merge and you're in the right place then you should be going over. If you're trying to skip the line then no.
Any other possible driving scissor statements?
You should go when it's your turn at a stop light and not hesitate to cross as a pedestrian at a crosswalk. The half starts are dumb. If everyone just consistently took their right of way everyone would get where they're going faster.
aqouta
5mo ago
This is the natural outcome of weaponizing moralism. The pictures of crying refugees being turned away to shame anyone who would deny a sympathetic person entrance leaves the person who demands a border of any kind to either harden their hearts or concede. Because concessions would dissolve the nation hearts have been hardened, it could never have been any other way. I think this is the bedrock of Cthulhu swimming left, there is no actual solid ground between hard hearted conservatism and ruin but every step towards ruin is rose scented, every resistance to it mired in cruelty. Left leaning people will say that of course we can still have a border and laws but they can't believe it because every argument they make to move one step left has no limiting principle, it will take us all the way to borderlessness and lawlessness. They rely on the pull back from conservatives to keep them from the abyss and resent the pullback at the same time.
aqouta
2mo ago
[1] https://www.umass.edu/political-science/about/reports/2025-8
[4] https://www.umass.edu/political-science/about/reports/january-16-2024
> Be me
> Load entire thread into a text to speech app
> Surely no one would just dump incredibly long naked links into the motte dot org.
> go upstairs to fold laundry
> oh a naked link, that's fine, how long can it be
> literal minutes later go downstairs to make this comment.
aqouta
1mo ago
The point with the pipes is that obviously hamas is trying to make rockets and bombs using any material they can get their hands on. We're in agreement that they've dug up water pipes and made rockets out of them.This is the justification for blockading and inspecting things thing into Gaza.
It’s not unhinged to know, as a fact, the facts of the day: that many houses were destroyed by tanks, that a survivor testified to tanks firing at their house and killing their family, that many cars were destroyed which were on their way into Gaza, that there were instances of friendly fire. It’s unhinged to have any opinion on the conflict without knowing this, unhinged to hide from it because you find it uncomfortable to acknowledge.
Your claim is that you wouldn't be surprised if only military aged men were killed by Hamas. We have videos of the indiscriminate killing. Not that killing military aged festival goers is somehow justified. You're out of your mind here.
And while it’s not unhinged to distrust “footage” that came out weeks after the attack, I find it inadvisable, because every developed nation has the ability to fabricate footage
You're trusting hearsay about tanks but not video footage? For real? There is plenty of testimony of indiscriminate killing as well, do you trust that testimony or only the rumors spread by pro hamas accounts?
aqouta
1mo ago
And it remains a silly thing to believe while also demanding resources and concessions from the rest of society. If there is nothing to the claim but a preference, an extreme form of self crippling tattoo, then we are certainly not giving minors access to it, we are certainly not bending over backwards to allow people with a sports league preference, we are certainly not paying for this tattoo with a substantial amount of my tax dollars. I believe enough in freedom of form that people should be allowed to whatever they want to their own bodies but if what they're doing is for preference they owe it to the rest of us not to do harm in their pursuits.
A lot of words are abused in modern discourse but "arbitrary" is certainly one of the most abused words. Citizenship and borders are not arbitrary. They could be otherwise of course, but that isn't what arbitrary means. The modern world order would fall apart if we did away with borders and citizenships, one can imagine a different world order but we don't live under that world order.
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