assman
1yr ago
His wokeness=civil rights law and some of his articles about the “real” difference between liberals and conservatives, whether you agree or not, are definitely novel arguments presented seriously.
assman
1yr ago
You may be right in this case, and there are certainly plenty of cases where people work backwards from aesthetic or moral preferences and even the god of True Data presenting them with absolute proof that their opinion is wrong wouldn’t change their minds. But in real life culture war flashpoints where it’s extremely difficult to determine what’s Empirically Good, how do you tell the difference between this type of pure motivated reasoning, and a more considered opinion that due to Molochian forces (competition, coordination problems, preference cascades, defect-defect equilibria, negative feedback loops etc.) we are stuck in a local minima, where the data may show that X thing is better than not-X in our current circumstances, when if we changed other circumstances we’d see that not-X is actually much better. So in this sense I have a lot of opinions that I believe are empirically true even if they lack data or the data contradicts this belief, because I think we would need to run civilization-level RCTs to “empirically” prove them. I’m unsure how to tell even within myself whether this is just an elaborate cope I tell myself so that I can never be proven wrong “real communism hasn’t been tried!”, or if it is actually a principled and well reasoned belief.
I don’t want to argue the object level but just to give an example of the type of reasoning I’m referring to: I believe for many of the fuzzier mental illnesses that the data will show subjective improvement in response to therapy/drugs, but that completely banning psychiatric treatment for anything but schizophrenia, and a culture of mocking, shaming and overall not taking fuzzy mental illnesses seriously would result in much better outcomes as a whole. There’s not really any data showing that bullying increases depression or that destigmatizing mental illness decreases anxiety or whatever that could move me off of this position, because the idea of taking these conditions seriously at all is what I see as the primary cause of their existence. And unless we could coordinate all of society to not reward claims of mental illness with sympathy, each individual is better off “going to therapy” and punishing those who mock them.
Is this just regular motivated reasoning with extra steps?
assman
1yr ago
Great post. I’d go further and say that even in the Big City the general attitudes and worldview of the tradcon can be applied to daily life, there’s enough self-sorting that within your “Dunbar number” you can mostly interact with great, kind people who are enjoyable to be around regardless of their racial, religious, whatever identity. It’s not necessary to know or care about the average IQ or murder rate of different groups of people at all. But when you are talking about governments they are by necessity only dealing in population-level abstractions when they do anything. The “dissident right” (DR) view is that when you are dealing in population-level abstractions, there are natural differences in the way groups of people who are not genetically similar will behave and perform, ON AVERAGE. So depending on what your society is optimizing for, different groups will have different outcomes on average, and there’s almost nothing that can be done to change this.
So in response to this the government can do what Hylnka and FC and other trad-cons would like, which is pretty much nothing. Don’t discriminate based on immutable characteristics, arrest people if they commit crimes, have a pure meritocracy without thumbs on the scales like affirmative action, and don’t worry about how the race/gender/etc. distributions of doctors or prisoners may end up. Encourage and incentivize strong family values to everyone to give them the best possible chance to give a good life. This is the idealized view of the 90s to a certain extent. I think everyone in the DR would view this as a massive improvement to what we have now.
The problem is in the DR view that this is inherently unstable. People notice how different groups act on average, this creates collateral damage against good people who come from lower-performing groups. People form natural ingroups based not only on shared culture but on shared “superficial” identities like skin color. So, in a democracy, this creates coalitions of people who will advocate for their group’s interests, which by necessity takes the form of legal discrimination, framed negatively as Jim Crow, or framed positively as civil rights laws or affirmative action. I ask the Hylnka’s of the world, what can be done about this? In the progressive view there are all sorts of social engineering projects that aim to fix these problems. I think Hylnka would agree they have only made everything worse. So if you could be handed the keys to a country as multi-cultural as the US is, with a similar form of government and completely race/sex/ethnicity-blind policies, what would you do to prevent it becoming exactly what we have now?
assman
1yr ago
I think there’s a difference between being interested in the sport one degree removed from the object level (knowing players, following trades/injuries/coach changes etc.) and the reality TV/drama aspect. The former is similar to any media-consumption type of hobby, even more highbrow ones. You are [viewing art/listening to music/reading a book/watching a movie] and if you are really interested you might read about the [artist/musician/author/actor] and read reviews or analysis of the [book/song/movie]. I don’t know what you would call this but I wouldn’t exactly call it drama.
On the other hand, you are right that there is a reality tv aspect that has become a lot more popular in the Twitter era, particular among the NBA fandom. Discussing what players tweeted, or discussing what media figures said about the players tweets. things like that are 100% reality TV for men and I can’t stand it.
assman
1yr ago
I actually have no idea, I always thought it was the head of some mecha/gundam type of thing but haven’t really looked closely at it
assman
1yr ago
My instinctive thought is to agree with you that it’s none of their damn business, and I find the whole reasoning about “power imbalances” in these situations to be shaky at best. So I wish it wasn’t this way, but from the perspective of the organization, it is much better to strictly prohibit employee relationships for a number of reasons.
People have been using the phrase “don’t shit where you eat” for a long time before MeToo or anything in that same vein. There’s obvious conflicts of interest and bad situations that can come about from coworker relationships.
But aside from the normal drama of breakups and stuff, there’s major legal liability to the organization, especially in something as public as an NBA team. If the woman wanted to come out and say that she felt pressured to hook up with the head coach of the team, and the organization found out about it and didn’t do anything, it would 100% cause a massive media shitstorm. There’s no amount of evidence you could show about the relationship being consensual that would matter.
assman
1yr ago
Not exactly related to your point but have you thought about adding the slur filter that rdrama uses? I think it’d be a good idea to have it on for logged-out viewers, at least for certain words
assman
3mo ago
Don’t you think it’s more likely that for the jobs that AI appears to be capable of automating right now (a lot of things, but basically any job where you sit at a computer all day) we’ll increasingly just turn our jobs into makework? Email and excel have already made us 100x more productive at white collar work, but that’s only created more of it, and people often point out that there are tons of e-mail jobs where nobody is really sure exactly what these people are doing, right now. I don’t see why that trend won’t continue, we’ll create project managers who oversee the AI’s work output, we’ll need people to interpret what’s needed and figure out how to ask the AI for it. We’ll have AI audits and compliance. We’ll create professional licenses to use certain AIs. We’ll have companies employing a bunch of people to have meetings all day about nothing. I think you work in high finance?, if so you’d be well aware there are boomer MDs who don’t know how to use excel and dick around on phone calls all day making million dollar salaries. There are people who work from home for 5 hours a week making 200k in tech. Theres millions of people in low level admin roles making $50k who do approximately nothing all day.
Until we see really impressive AI robotics which automate manual labor (it’s fair to extrapolate capabilities, but we’re not there yet), I don’t think it will fundamentally alter our economy that much. There will be various disruptions, but ultimately I think there is way too much status and people’s self worth tied up in their jobs to fully do away with them. The market is competitive and in theory incentivizes companies to automate away as many employees as possible, but we’ve all seen with our own eyes that lots of companies are very bad at this and employ thousands of people who don’t help the business at all (see Elon firings at Twitter). Plus already a substantial number of white collar employees work for government or non-profits.
assman
3mo ago
In some sense yes, I think “libertarianism” is not a viable political program in a democracy (or maybe at all). But for something like drug legalization which you mentioned below, a lot of the more mainstream arguments for this are that it actually reduces drug use, or makes it safer, or the cost-benefit of enforcement isn’t worth it etc. There’s plenty of arguments that even with our current political program it would be beneficial for various reasons, whether they are correct or not.
But for open borders- I don’t understand what is even meant by this when it is put forth as a policy. If the US were to pass a law tomorrow that literally anyone who wants to live here can show up and be entitled to the benefits of citizenship, we would immediately see millions of immigrants from poor countries around the world show up who are now entitled to welfare, food stamps, healthcare, housing and minimum wage which would become unsustainable immediately. We’re able to mostly handle high levels of illegal immigration now because these people are not entitled to government benefits or subject to minimum wage laws or other labor protections. When people argue for open borders as a policy- do they mean we maintain de jure immigration laws but just completely stop border enforcement and allow anyone who shows up to remain here as illegal immigrants not eligible for our entitlement programs?
assman
3mo ago
What I was trying to say is in an ideal libertarian state, where the government is just law/contract enforcement and a military or whatever, and does not otherwise redistribute money or interfere in much else - de jure open borders would at least be a possibility. Having actual, de jure, open borders in 2024 America would collapse the government relatively quickly if millions and millions of immigrants showed up and were given welfare, healthcare and other entitlements.
assman
9mo ago
Yeah it always shocks me how many people seem to sincerely believe in blank slateism despite 1. Recognizing heredity in individual families and 2. Noticing racial stereotypes being so evidently true in real life. When I was a kid and all the adults said that the reason Asians were smart and blacks weren’t as smart was “poverty” or whatever I always assumed it was just being polite. Like it registered the same to me as when little league coaches would tell kids they were batting last to “balance the lineup” or something. I always just assumed everyone privately believed in innate group differences but didn’t like talking about it, but tons of people insist it’s a crazy idea even on anonymous forums so I tend to believe they sincerely think that
assman
9mo ago
Ah I misunderstood the paragraph, but now I’m left wondering what makes the MtFs far more problematic than mere weirdos or perverts. Is it just something like what Sailer says about the AGP types?
assman
10mo ago
I actually think I have a pretty good idea of how the discrimination against Asians worked in practice. I went to a public high school (not a magnet or charter, just a regular public high school) of about 1500 kids, which was around 50% Asian split pretty evenly between East and South Asians, which placed around 20 kids into Ivy League schools every year out of the ~400 person graduating classes, and many more into the next tier of schools. My 1500 SAT was like 80th percentile in my graduating class iirc. I’d say there were about 100 kids who were the stereotypical children of Tiger Mom’s. They were obviously very smart, but they weren’t geniuses- they studied really hard to get high scores on their APs and to do well in their classes. When they weren’t studying they were doing some sort of resume box-ticking like playing in the orchestra despite not seeming to be passionate about music, playing a sport they weren’t really trying to compete in like cross country, or joining one of the random schools clubs that didn’t really do much. Many of these kids really did seem to fit the exact stereotype of Asian kids with “bad personalities” that seemed to be joylessly going through the motions of trying to get into an elite school, and their résumés and test scores were certainly good enough for any of the ivies. These kids mostly seemed to end up on a large scholarship at local public school, or at one of non-Ivy elites. I’m sure most of them will be very successful in tech or engineering or whatever, but I doubt any of them will be remarkable. The kids who did make it to an Ivy League were the 10-20 who were either: 1. Extremely nerdy, but legitimate geniuses. The kids who took the AP calc exam in their freshman year, and were winning Olympiad competitions and such and 2. The Asian kids who fit all the Tiger Mom criteria, but were also social butterflies involved in student government, seriously competed in sports, etc. The type 1s I expect to be impressive academics in whichever field they study, and the type 2s will fit perfectly in the “elite fields” which require more soft skills like finance, law, consulting or whatever.
I don’t agree this is a fair system at all, but I will say in my experience it seems like the Ivies were quite good at spotting the “future elite” types out of the dozens of qualified Asian resumes they received every year from my school
assman
1yr ago
I’m not really trying to argue for the merits of these ideas- but that they are major issues the various factions of the online right care about, mostly agree on, and are theoretically possible through normal politics.
assman
1yr ago
I saw that, surprised nobody has made a post here about it. I think I had almost everyone on there about 10 pts higher than the average except for Spencer, varg, Kanye, Fuentes and Tate, which maybe is a point against my ability to estimate IQ
assman
1yr ago
Thanks, that pretty much answers it, seems like they bank will arrange the cash order with the government for you but it’s your responsibility to take delivery
assman
1yr ago
There definitely seems to be some bipartisan China-hawk rhetoric that picked up around then and hasn’t stopped. To steelman? the idea that it’s not a top-down propaganda campaign though, I think around then is when it became clear that China was no longer just a “developing country” that would inevitably become a liberal democracy as it got richer and become a client of the US through trade dependency, but an actual illiberal near-peer who wasn’t going to just fall in line with the US
assman
1yr ago
See my answer below. The gist of my question is basically- is it possible for an individual to actually turn his $50m bank deposit into $50m worth of 100 dollar bills to keep in a vault at his house (or under his mattress or whatever), and how would it logistically work if someone wanted to do that
assman
1yr ago
How do you ultimately get the cash out though when the t-bill matures without interacting with the banking system again? By IOU I meant like can the bank just give you some certificate that says you are owed $50m in cash from the Fed/treasury (idk which), and then make it your problem to try and get the actual cash from them? Since I assume the bank would need to order the $50m in 100 dollar bills from the government anyway
assman
1yr ago
Good write up but I feel like you kind of glossed over that he’s not really proven as a pocket-passer at all. People point to the injury concerns for a running QB, and Lamar has a bit of an injury history now, but I think the main problem is simply that we’ve only seen him succeed in a sort-of gimmicky offense tailored to his running ability. He had one incredible season, plus a couple more good ones, and he is certainly a good QB. But the reality is that he has thrown for over 3000 yards only once in 5 years and has played terribly in the playoffs. There’ve been plenty of examples of guys who are great runners, and just okay passers having great seasons and then flaming out, and we haven’t seen any QBs who aren’t primarily passers win any Super Bowls.
Regarding the public reaction, I think you’re also ignoring that tons of people have been claiming it’s the owners colluding to not give out guaranteed contracts. I agree though that the reaction at least on Reddit is a little more sane than I would expect. I think that can be explained by the fact that 1) the ravens offered him a mega-deal that just wasn’t quite big enough for him, 2) many fans are skeptical of giving him a long-term deal due to either injury concerns or (like me) thinking he’s unproven as a passer, 3) the player who received the gigantic ill-advised contract he is asking for is black so it makes it hard to argue the racial angle, and 4) the media has had this weird paternalistic relationship towards him since before he was drafted a few teams wanted him to work out as a running back which many media people considered to be racist. So when they see him making a stupid decision like acting as his own agent and essentially asking his team to cripple their future, they can’t condemn him for being stupid and go with the “oh what a pity” reaction instead
assman
1yr ago
I think part of the reason (which you seem to understand) that people immediately resort to extremely sketchy thinking in culture war debates is that often the debate is really more about inherently unfalsifiable, aesthetic, ethical or metaphysical claims that aren’t arrived at through logic or reason. But trying to argue my personal aesthetic or ethical preferences are the best is very unconvincing to anyone, so these debates turn into the battle of who has more studies they can toss out there to prove their preferences are objectively better for everyone.
Often this turns out to a tennis match of who’s studies are more methodologically flawed or faked or whatever. But I think another part of the problem with Data and Studies is that most people have certain opinions where they think they know what’s good for other people, better than those other people know for themselves. And I think in those cases, how can you possibly use data to change someone’s mind?
You could come up with the most methodologically sound study in the world which proves that everyone is happier when they do XYZ. But if my belief is that, sure, I think those people think they are happier when they do XYZ, but it actually makes everything worse in some difficult to quantify way, then there’s basically no amount of data showing that people are subjectively better off doing XYZ that can convince you otherwise. And I don’t think that’s an irrational position to hold, or the same thing as assuming the conclusion and arguing backwards from there. I think most people feel something close to this about drugs or junk food. But it’s very difficult to argue this convincingly to anyone who doesn’t already agree in some sense, especially in a short debate format and on a topic where it’s near impossible to quantitatively prove the causality for XYZ being a net harm.
assman
1yr ago
I think they were back then and they are now. The idea is that in the absence of any discrimination at all, and the incredible living standards for even the most poor people, you need to search even lower on the totem pole to find the same kind of resentful people to form the most loyal members of the party.
I feel like it’s pretty clear by now that he’s not playing a character, which is what makes him so interesting to me. I might’ve internalized the IQ-supremacy point of view where “street smart vs book smart” isn’t a real distinction of intelligence (just high IQ applied differently) too much, which is why I’m overestimating him. It just seems like you have to be pretty high IQ to take “street smarts” as far as he has despite coming across as not very intelligent. I also would be interested to know how difficult it was to get into UPenn back then even assuming a lot of nepotism involved, as that would be a good data point to try and estimate a floor for his IQ
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