assman
2yr 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
2yr ago
What exactly is your point then? I agree I am a “dog” by whatever definition you’re using. Fair enough, but that was not your point. Your original point was that identifying a dogwhistle means you are the “dog”. You are on here enough that I assume you are at least passively familiar with various dogwhistles like “jogger” or the three parentheses thing. Because you understand that these are dogwhistles, does that mean that racism is an integral part of your worldview? Pick your favorite “real right winger” who doesn’t use the internet. If I told this person that certain people use the term “jogger” instead of black person, and then I show this person a 4chan post saying that joggers commit too much crime and should be sent back to Africa. Is he supposed to say “wow this guy really hates runners huh?” And if he doesn’t say that and correctly parses the 4chan post, does that mean that racism is an integral part of his worldview now?
assman
2yr 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
2yr ago
I agree with you that the poll results for the OK to be white thing are actually a pretty accurate reflection of reality, especially because I’ve never seen anything about “it’s okay to be white” outside of extremely online internet communities and maybe a Tucker Carlson segment so I don’t think the average black poll respondent is recognizing it as a meme/“dogwhistle”. But the normie conservative “all lives matter” is essentially the same thing as the vague jargon about dogwhistles and context that libs use to reject “it’s ok to be white”. The normie con correctly interprets the seemingly agreeable “black lives matter” as a Trojan horse for a much larger set of political demands. I would imagine if you polled republicans about Black Lives Matter they would respond unfavorably despite agreeing with the plain meaning of the phrase.
assman
2yr ago
Everything you said is wrong, I use that example because I am a terminally online right winger and browse racist Twitter/forums where people post about (((bankers))) all the time. My point is that if you are an otherwise upstanding anti-racist progressive citizen who finds their way into dissident-right Twitter or /pol/ you’re not a “dog” for recognizing what people mean when they bring up wooden doors or “joggers” or whatever vague phrase is being used to avoid getting banned from normie internet spaces. Perhaps the confusion is that you wouldn’t consider those examples to be “dogwhistles” because they are so obvious? I agree with you entirely that the term “dogwhistle” 99% of the time is used as a political smear to associate politicians the left doesn’t like with ebil nazis even when it has no basis in reality.
assman
2yr ago
I don’t disagree with you or Hylnka that innocuous statements are called dogwhistles all the time even when they are actually innocuous statements. I agree that when politicians/mainstream media figures are called out for using dogwhistles it’s bad-faith partisan bullshit 99% of the time. My point is just that simply recognizing an obvious dog whistle doesn’t mean you are “the dog” if the statement is in fact a dog whistle. As in if you go on 4chan and see someone refer to (((bankers))) you’re not anti-semitic for recognizing what they are referring to
assman
2yr 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
9mo ago
Couldn’t you say Wall Street kind of works like this? Bonuses are allocated to different desks based on their P&L and are usually a larger % of comp than salaries are for more senior employees. Also professional services like consulting, law, accounting etc. are typically “eat what you kill” at the partner level at least and directly measure employee productivity through billable hours
assman
1yr 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
2yr 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.
assman
2yr ago
Are you familiar with Steve Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism?
“The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter looking”
There’s also Spandrell’s Bioleninism thesis which is that basically all of politics boils down to jockeying for status. So socialism is particularly attractive to High-IQ people who are ill-suited to a capitalist society (intellectuals, journalists, other wordcels, etc.). These people can then recruit various types of resentful underclass people (addicts, generally stupid or lazy people, ethnic and sexual minorities, weirdos of all kinds) who, since they have nothing to lose, are much more loyal and politically active than the people who are content with the system as it is. What makes his thesis “Bio”leninism is that in the 19th-20th century, society was less egalitarian and there were people being oppressed who would have otherwise been successful without these barriers which made socialism/communism attractive to a wider group of people than In current year, when all de jure discrimination is gone. Leftists then have to reach further and further into the dregs of society for loyal enforcers to the point where they draw from people who are biologically incapable of succeeding for genetic/HBD or mental illness reasons.
I’m not sure if I agree entirely, and I probably butchered the summary so it’s worth reading the actual blog. I think it does a good job of explaining why the people most loyal to the party (activist types) and enforcers (antifa types) seem to be fat, ugly, crazy, stupid, mentally ill, or some type of sexual minority.
To answer your question, I don’t think that something went wrong in these people’s development, I think most people’s politics are at least in part “taking a position that would benefit you personally, and then using whatever justification is available to explain why it’s necessary for society”, and the people who seem hilariously non self-aware about this are just in a bubble where nobody they respect has ever called them out on this. Didn’t some of the founding fathers have comically self-serving justifications for why slavery is good actually? I think pre-enlightenment societies had plenty of those type of people but most non-nobility had absolutely no ability to influence politics so probably didn’t worry about it too much, and no one with any power cared about the peasant’s political opinions. On a more local level, the scrawny wordcel who is resentful that he was born a peasant farmer’s only option was to become some kind of monk or something, where he can debate the number of angels dancing on a pin and scratch his itch for subversion (or become Martin Luther). What makes the “subversive” types dangerous now is that in a democracy these people as a whole have power, so harnessing their resentment becomes a viable political strategy.
assman
2yr 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
2yr ago
I don’t understand people making arguments about the inhumanity of all this. They are being sent to Martha’s Vineyard where people pay lots of money to go to, and apparently these people wanted to go to Massachusetts. Many (most?) countries would send you to jail for illegally crossing their border, in which case you have no input on where you get sent at all. I’m not some monster who is unable to sympathize with children who are completely innocent in all of this but it’s not like they are being sent to the gulags
assman
4mo ago
That makes sense but what went differently in the late 90s/early 2000s in Russia compared to other post-soviet countries that did integrate around that time (Poland, Hungary, Romania etc.)? All started out as ramshackle and corrupt but around that time went in a different direction. Was the resistance to integrate more from the Russian elite/Putin not wanting to? Or was the resistance more on the western side?
assman
1yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr 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
2yr ago
I get what you mean but isn’t this obviously not true? Maybe I’m misunderstanding what a dogwhistle is but if I wrote on here “the rootless cosmopolitan bankers are conspiring against white christians” everyone would understand it’s an antisemitic dogwhistle. If I said “no I’m just referring to the literal bankers guys, YOU’RE the antisemite for thinking bankers = jews!” nobody would/should believe that
assman
3mo ago
I think you misread the second part. How do we deport you if you were NOT apprehended at the border and fingerprinted? If you’re caught at the border we have proof you illegally entered and biometric proof of your identity. But if you were never apprehended or fingerprinted- what is stopping you from claiming you’re a citizen? ICE can detain you but they have to prove you’re NOT a citizen to deport you. I don’t see how this is possible without significant investigation time given we don’t have any mandatory national photo ID system.
What does everyone think Trump’s IQ is? I feel like you need to be pretty smart to be a billionaire/POTUS even if he had rich parents but speaking as someone who loves the guy he is so inarticulate and has such weird speech patterns that it’s really hard to gauge what’s going on under the hood so to speak. I think probably like 125 with +3 sigma charisma & will-to-power
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