aqouta
No bio...
Friends:
User ID: 75
aqouta
3d ago
The Bailey is that the existence of such differences makes racial background the "scientifically correct" means of organizing a society and a key peice of information to be considered when evaluating the individual performance or value of any given person within it.
People who question the Bailey are routinely downvoted to hell and back while being derided as "blank slatists" "denying reality" and having "crippled thinking", yet even if "the motte" is true, its not clear to me that "the baily" follows naturally from this unless someone is already drowning in the woke kool-aid.
We must be reading totally different threads. Every time the topic comes up it's people defending what you're calling the motte from blank slatists. Not to consensus build, as I'm sure we have people who cynically want to live in the bailey, but it really seems like the modal motte opinion on the topic is that HBD is obviously real is a large part of various outcome gaps and what should be done about it is to stop trying to overturn every inch of society for a racism of the gaps. It's an end to affirmative action, not establishing a racial caste system.
aqouta
3d ago
I dunno dude, the idea of thinking of a wife as like some kind of utility calculation around chore maxxing or whatever seems like the kind of thing that deranges radical feminists. Our society is structured around you picking one person who is closer to you than anyone else, that swears to you a mutual pact of loyalty and confidence. They aren't like your butler who can quit at any moment and you're expected to congratulate them on getting a better offer. We've added some escape clause but the basic idea is still to death do us part. You pick them and then get to turn off the part of your brain worried about mate selection and the two of your focus on the more important things, the two of you against the world. You can't pay and assistant to have undying loyalty through sickness and in health. Maybe Bezos isn't getting that from his wife, I wouldn't know, but I'm providing that to one person and she's providing it to me.
aqouta
19d ago
We live in a 600sqft 1+1 apartment. It's pretty affordable at this point (thanks rent control)
It's kind of funny how you thank rent control and then describe all the predictable downstream consequences of rent control like high market rate rents and difficulty in relocating. There are grandparents with an empty nest facing the exact reverse scenario an rent control prevents this from being remedied.
aqouta
8d ago
I like this model for some things but I actually think bimbofication is a different pathway. The appeal is silencing neuroticism. It's ignorance is bliss and fetishizing not just a lack but a total incapacity for responsibility. Same reason a lot of this stuff is involuntary. Lots of people feel responsibility as an unbearable burden. But maybe you're wrapping all that into the sub role.
aqouta
8d ago
So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."
There's two sides to this tango, they've not been proven right, but neither have they been proven wrong. The pathway between genes and outcomes is very complicated. It would have been nice if there ended up being some really simple way to map everything out but we can't even do that for height, let alone something as difficult to nail down as intelligence. The question is nurture vs nature and the twin studies convincingly argue that nature is a very large share. Scott convincingly points out that educational attainment may itself have some problems as a proxy for intelligence.
aqouta
17d ago
The boomers didn't just shaft the whole next generations coming up, they implemented tons of policies meant to rebalance the racial makeup of the party. Because they weren't going to give up their positions the only way for this to work out is to aggressively discriminate against white up and comers. So they mercilessly culled them and made it clear that they wanted the next generation of the democratic party to be anything but straight white men.
aqouta
18d ago
I think the major difference is people who have monosexual friend groups vs mixed friend groups. If all your friends are nerdy guys you're probably not going to the kinds of parties where there are lots of single ladies to hook up with and you're relegated mostly to cold opens. People have been making less friends now than ever before so it's pretty common to not have one member of the opposite sex that you see regularly and platonically, and if you meet your friends through mostly male hobbies then, lets just say monosexual friend groups aren't rare.
aqouta
19d ago
I'd never fault someone for behaving rationally in the imperfect system. I just found it funny that you cheered on rent control then listed like the most central downsides. I see the cheering was sarcastic.
aqouta
17d ago
As evidence that your outgroup is acting in bad faith, you bring up legislation from 40 years ago. 2/3rds of those voters are probably dead, while the majority of voters today (myself included) weren't alive or were far too young to vote for your compromise. Your imagined voter who supported amnesty in the 80s knowing that we'd be in the situation we are today as part of some dastardly bad-faith plan to bring in more illegal immigrants is nonexistent.
If the offer is the same offer that empirically failed to hold 40 years ago offered by the party that has been continuously failing to uphold it this whole time then offering it unamended is bad faith or the people offering it are either stupid or think the people they're offering it to are stupid. I actually do think that an amnesty with safeguards to ensure enforcement is our only real option. But the deal is effectively the amnesty side gets amnesty and the immigration hawks get nothing they weren't already entitled to from the previous agreement. You need to pass like an amendment level of tying future governments to the mast to credibly offer this solution.
aqouta
29d ago
Yeah, when you realize something like half the federal budget goes to elderly people who had a whole lifetime to save up it's kind of black pilling.
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
27d ago
The problem with this position taking is that the popular messaging and what most activists actually say is against you. So they're either cynically lying or you very transparently are on the outside.
aqouta
22d ago
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.
aqouta
26d 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
I agree and have for some time agreed that Trump is an abomination and embarrassment to conservatives. The problem for actual conservatives is what is there to actually do here? Join the Democrats? There are some rational positions where that is the greater of the two evils. Perhaps this abundance agenda is the invitation they need to throw behind a Democrat side of the aisle that disavows a lot of the leftie fringe that the rest of the Democrats have been a little too beholden to.
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
27d 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
2mo 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.
aqouta
27d 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
8d ago
This is perhaps analogous in some ways to AGPs and transwomen more generally who are bullied or ostracized for femininity and come to believe that they really are a sissy loser who can't be a man and might as well embrace the only gendered path that seems possible for them.
I don't think this is actually the correct reading of AGPs. Is there actually any reason to think that AGPs are more feminine than baseline?
aqouta
22d 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.
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.
I mean we won huge battles in the fight against affirmative action and knocked the woke racial identarians off their game in a lot of areas. It being discussed less fits squarely in the hypothesis that most of us HBD people weren't actually white nationalists but simply what we've been telling you we are, people who prefer race blindness if they're allowed to have it. Yes, white nationalists continue to exist and they will continue to make white nationalist noises, not really sure why that should matter when discussing HBD.
More options
Context Copy link