burkeboi
1d ago
Cluster B, and really colloquially "crazy" women in general, IME and from what I've read anecdotally, seem to have a significantly higher sex drive than normal woman (statistically). Many men are drawn in to stay, despite the issues, partially because the sex is plentiful and often of higher quality/excitement. "Crazy" women tend to also be more promiscuous. I suspect the "crazy" angle is another reason a lot of men go for the "hoes".
Part of it also that having sex with a guy early is a high variance play; you may get a guy who disregards you as a 'slut', but you may also get a guy who appreciates it and stays focused on you. Having sex with a woman early certainly gives an ego boost both that the man is attractive both to her and in general.
burkeboi
2d ago
AAQC. Thank you for that post. I find it interesting how arguments of sourcing for the Canon existed both before the Reformation, and how the policy of treating the Deuterocanonicals changed a lot after. I suppose the drift towards a more "conservative" Canon makes sense from a Sola Scriptura standpoint; if you are unsure of the canonicity of a given book, it's better to list it as relevant but not divinely inspired than accidentally list it as an authoritative book.
burkeboi
2d ago
Everyone is expected to die fighting the Russians, but it's wholly acceptable to make choices whose aggregate consequences ends with Sweden going the way of the Dodo?
Would everybody do it, though? I think it's a very open question if your average Swede would risk his life vs. either leave or accept life under Russian occupation. The Ukrainian experience shows that quite a lot of men would say "no". I can't blame them; as an American I would keep my head down and/or flee were I in their shoes.
burkeboi
2d ago
Does anyone have a simplified explanation of why the Protestant Bible is shorter/different than the Catholic Bible? I know a lot of the difference is Masoretic Text vs. Septuagint, but I've read other facts like Martin Luther considering ditching Revelations. I imagine other early reformers like Calvin had their own opinions of Canon. Was there a point where, at least for least Mainline Protestants, the Canon was stabilized and a justification given for the choice?
burkeboi
2d ago
ChatGPT sycophantically praising me when I ask it for code.
That's the best part of my workday right there. Some hours I use more tokens self-glazing than solving the problem.
burkeboi
2d ago
I have three cats. Being a cat lover is like becoming an Epicurean, or a eunuch; you don't go back.
burkeboi
6d ago
The sort of "The universalist egalitarian HBD denial" you describe has little to no influence on the US Left and is overwhelmingly associated with the religious right and so-called "Moral/Silent Majority".
I think even before we get to questions relating to HBD, we have the fact that the right treats inequality of outcomes differently than the left. Thomas Sowell mentioned how there are tons of arbitrary inequalities. in the modern world such as mountain vs lowland, first vs. later born, birth month, and a bunch of others. Middlemen minorities who succeed despite often being discriminated against are another example of inequality despite there being no discrimination in favor of, of there is discrimination against, the middlemen. The standard American conservative position is 'There are tons of inequalities in the world, and if there is a clear injustice it should be remedied, but we can't rip up society to try the quixotic task of making everyone equal."
If you take that position, instead of the position of trying to remedy all inequalities, whether HBD is true or not doesn't really matter. If you aren't gong to uproot society to try and force equal outcomes, the presence of a gap between two groups being environmental or genetic doesn't really change how society and the people within it should relate to each other.
It is kind of interesting how, even with real atrocities, authority figures sympathetic to the victims almost always publish fiction that is more gruesome than reality. The reign of terror was a tragedy, but many of the stories such as republican weddings were false. Similarly, many Holocaust stories told by survivors were fictitious exaggerations of things such as human skin lampposts. You also have right wingers giving demographically impossible overestimates of Stalinist crimes. Over-exaggerating crimes seems universal.
Is there some Israeli abuse of Palestinian prisoners? Probably. Does Israel have a military department solely dedicated to training dogs to rape prisoners? Only in my AI Generated pornographic novel.
burkeboi
9d ago
I think as a general rule I agree with you; people without intelligence clearance could tell Iraq was a Quagmire after a year for instance. At the same time, I think it's so early in Iran that it's hard to tell the long term impact. Especially since, lacking the intelligence our leaders have, we don't know how real or fake their nuclear accusations are.
This is where I think we have to fall back to our priors. I don't trust Trump, Neocons, or the Israeli right on having a foreign policy that benefits the US or the world so I'm naturally predisposed to dislike this war. I also don't trust their truthfulness regarding foreign policy facts, such as how advanced the nuclear program is, so I'm skeptical that Iran was aiming for building a bomb right now rather than aiming for the ability to build a bomb quickly. I also don't buy 'seriously not literally' as a communication strategy, so how this war has been communicated makes me skeptical of the enterprise as well. As a result of the above, the war seems like a bad idea to me and I don't trust any promises of victory. The epistemic uncertainty for me comes in that I don't know a lot of the relevant data, and I suppose it's possible in a year data could come out that shows this war was necessary and/or it actually worked out well for the world. I wouldn't bet on it though.,
Above sums of my opinion of the war. If you look at it, almost all of it is just flowing from my priors. It hasn't been updated in the past month; I don't think the events could've moved it. The flip side is if someone was predisposed to trusting the authorities I mentioned above, then their priors would make them like the war. My main point is that one's opinion of the war is more based on priors than anything else, so I think discussing priors is actually more fruitful than discussing the facts in this case.
burkeboi
10d ago
I think an issue with the immigration discourse, much like the abortion discourse, is that it's dominated by philosophical extremes, partially because that's who puts the most effort into the issue, when most people tend to be somewhere in the mushy middle. Abortion is dominated by people who either think life begins at conception, or close to it, and everything after it is unjustifiable homicide or people who believe in basically absolute bodily autonomy for the woman and that the fetus has no interests we should take into account at any stage. Most people tend to thing there are some abortions that are morally permissible, life of the mother being the least controversial example, others that are morally gray or not really a public issue, like an early stage abortion for lifestyle, and some that are outright wrong, such as Kermit Gosnell's abortions.
I think immigration has a similar structure; you have people who are either outright for open borders, or are de facto pro open borders, on one side and philosophical nativists who view immigration as bad in itself, which the bad only sometimes being outweighed by the virtues of the individual immigrant in certain cases, on the other side. Most people instead balance a lot of different factors, such as cultural assimilation, economic benefits, economic detriments, crime, and other factors when debating if immigration is good or not. Compare Ukrainian refugees/immigrants vs. Syrians; the Ukrainians tend to be benefits to the host societies, while the Syrians tend to be detriments. You can see Europeans react to this fact by one being far more controversial than the other.
A lot of political behavior on both Abortion and Immigration, really the rest of the culture war too, is describable by individual issues often being a ratchet. Red states and blue states on issues like guns and abortion are able to add up individual decisions which on their own aren't necessarily too objectionable into de facto banning certain actions, or at least making them incredibly difficult. Immigration is often the same way; letting in immigrants our economy needs is generally popular when you phrase it like that, but once you start fiddling with the definition of 'what our economy needs' or 'genius' or the help they get when they are here things get contentious quite quickly.
burkeboi
10d ago
I think looking at this from a meta perspective is interesting. It seems that to evaluate the wisdom Iran war comprehensively, we need three things:
- What are the overall costs of the war.
- What are the eventual benefits of the war.
- What is the truth of the justificiations for the war that were initially given.
The first two are by definition not known not right now. The last one seems to be only factually resolvable by classified information, but since we don't have that we have to rely on the dual heuristics of 'What figures do we trust?' and 'Do we trust the structure of the arguments made for/against the war?'. The answers to the indirect questions seem to rely on tribalism, especially the first. You have officials with similar arguing for both sides of this war, and for other security issues like everything surrounding Russia, and which officials general you give credence too tends to rely on which officials either match general your 'tribe' or best match/flatter general your personal ideology.
I bet if you took each personal who isn't directly involved in this conflict, and you had a list of that person's ideology and personal 'tribal' affiliation, you could 99% guess what their take on this war is and who they consider credible. Once everyone states their priors, there really isn't that much discussion to be had about Iran right now.
burkeboi
14d ago
In the mixed-sex PMC circles I've been in, if a guy articulates that while he is personally dominant and works best with a partner that gives him deference but states he doesn't think this applies to all men or women, he generally doesn't get messed with much. Part of it was probably the guys who I've heard articulate this were pretty socially adroit/attractive, but framing things as "this is a me thing" vs. "this is a sex thing in general" seems to be pretty effective in avoiding criticism.
This is speculation, but I think a guy saying "this is a me thing" lets feminists who may be insecure about what type of relationship they like keep distance from it, while them saying "this is a sex thing" makes them feel a need to dispute it since by definition, "sex things" have to do with all members of a sex.
burkeboi
16d ago
I like the Mexico/Latin American comparison. Those nations are a mix of clearly western populations, criollos mestizos, and pardos, and non-western populations, the unassimilated indios.
burkeboi
16d ago
Do you consider Israel culturally part of the West? Partially part of the West?
I've been thinking about this, and I think it's an interesting and not necessarily straight forwards question. I think secular Jews and those in the Reform tradition are undeniably Western; one of the core points of the Reform tradition was to integrate Judaism into Western Traditions and vice versa. The Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox I think are their own distinct, more ancient civilization. My answer to the above question is I think Israel is mostly Western, given the cultural roots of the Reform/Seculars, but not entirely.
burkeboi
20d ago
This may be my understanding of biology being limited, but while the biological tendency for the 1:1 sex ratio is well understood my understanding is that there are a lot of genes involved in actually causing the human roughly 50/50 sex ratio. My concern is more that messing with the genes could cause unintended side effects due to their, and their interactions, complexity.
burkeboi
21d ago
Law being like math I believe should definitely apply to judges. Legal theory can be useful for a lawyer who works for a Senator who is writing legislation. Then legal theory has a purpose of designing the equations to get a law that does what you want.
I don't think our law system was ever meant to be mathematics or purely procedural. The point of trial by jury is that, instead of an agent of the state (judge) judging you at best by the letter of the law or at worst by his personal whims, you get a jury of your peers judging you by local common sense/prejudice. Les Mes gives the theatrical argument for this. The benefit of Common Law is that, instead of the application of the law solely being dictated from above, you get precedent of how the law was applied in reality and hopefully that contact with reality makes the application of the law better and more sensible.
The above system works great ... when you share most values with your countrymen. If you think your neighbors lack common sense and/or their prejudices are wrong and/or harmful, then their influence will move both juries directly, and precedent indirectly via the judges their representatives vote in, in directions you don't like. A cliché example of this would be being judged by an ethnic outgroup. I'll note European countries which don't have common law also have the problem of internal values conflict and the problem of sharing a state with people you fundamentally disagree with is a perennial human issue, so common law and trial by jury are not the issue.
Once I realized the law as practiced is not mathematics I switched my judicial philosophy from some form of originalism to Ketanji Brown theory.
I think a lot of the Constitution worship you see among boomercons is cargo culting. I think the constitution, and it actually sticking, is one of the greatest social achievements in human history. Ask the French or Latinos how easy keeping a constitution is. At the same time, the founders consciously knew that the Constitution was a tool and agreement to promote values they cared about and create an agreement that would let the states function together. Treating following it as an end in itself, like it was the 10 Commandments, was never how they viewed it. Most leaders of the early republic, including later ones like Andrew Jackson, recognized that keeping the social constructs that the 'union is perpetual' and 'the constitution is supreme' were foundational to the functioning of society, but the end-goal was always securing people's wellbeing and liberty rather than following the constitution for its own sake.
To that end, everyone agreeing to treat the constitution and union as inviolable while still manipulating procedural outcomes seems to have been the dominant trend/strategy in our history across the strong majority of factions.
burkeboi
21d ago
It does seem obviously wrong but I can't pinpoint any specific moral principle it might violate.
Chesterton's Fence is the obvious one: the sex ratio, and the genes that cause it, affect so many things that its impossible to predict the effects. Doing such a big change without being able to predict the effects is imprudent.
Even so, I don't really think Inceldom is a problem big enough to justify 'removing' men. If Incels lives really were so bad, they are fully capable of killing themselves. Given that most haven't killed themselves, I think it shows that even for them the issue of being an Incel isn't a life-or-death one. There are counterarguments, such as suicide != never existing, but at that point we are going into Schopenhauer anti-natalist territory and that is a bigger question.
It seems fine from an purely utalitarian perspective.
Two very common issues with utilitarianism as practiced is the issue of calculating utilions, it's very non-trivial and I'd argue practically impossible at scale, and the fact that the world is so complex that calculating n-th order effects quickly becomes practically impossible for tons of activities, especially the more granular you get. I think those two issues are often why utilitarianism, where is a very good heuristic to use when pair with others, often morphs into horror and/or 'I wanted to do this anyway and I can fabricate a post-hoc justification for it using utilitarianism" when it's the sole "guide" or morality or action.
burkeboi
21d ago
Are there any functional religious subcultures among the AADoS? Not a church, but maybe Nation of Islam is an example? I know there are quite a few among the Caribbean peoples. You can't top down grow Church membership, people just pantomime the behavior and live as they otherwise would in the shadows, but it seems to me that the only global solution to family breakdown is those subgroups growing. Policy can fiddle around the margins, but actually turning a 'poorly behaving' demographic group into a 'well behaving' only comes from gradual, bottom up change.
burkeboi
22d ago
That makes me think of how subculture based this change is. In the media and public PMC culture open expressions of racism against protected groups are socially radioactive. At the same time, almost all boomers, including the PMC ones, I have met and most younger men either are casually racist or don't consider it a huge negative in a person. The culture of the younger men I suspect is partially an oppositional culture against PMC culture. I bet different subcultures have different values and different dates for when this became a value of them.
burkeboi
22d ago
It's difficult to square these attitudes with anything other than anti-Semitism. The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that a lot of these people are simply NPC's repeating Leftist talking points -- they are a vehicle for other peoples' hatred of Jews, the equivalent of low level concentration camp guards.
That doesn't have to be specifically anti-semitism; I think most of it is just garden variety anti-westernism. In general, the same leftists who condemn Israel for its military actions are the ones who condemn the US Military for similar actions. This attitude often extends to other domains, such as criminal justice.
burkeboi
22d ago
What failure modes can you foresee if insurers start paying their patients for choosing cheaper healthcare services?
I think the core issue would be determining what is an 'equivalent' healthcare treatment. To use the above example, "Why is the $20k C-section cheaper?". If it's just location arbitrage that's one thing, but if the doctors are actually giving different services, such as using different anesthetics or having fewer staff on call, that's another. To stay on the birth example, a birth with an epidural is a different experience than a birth without one. How should that be handled? Additionally, the differences for a lot of things likely are only legible to doctors so any patient choosing them would be at an information asymmetry, which defeats the purpose of letting them pick since in many cases they won't be able to make an informed decision.
All of the above wouldn't kill the project, but I think you need additional scaffolding to both ensure that patients can make informed decisions and that the choices they are given are all viable/equivalent. You also need tort reform, so the patient can't come crying to the courts when picking cheaper option B causes issues.
This right here really is the core of many 'man vs. woman' sex 'conflicts' in relationships. Many men often project their spontaneous sexuality onto women, and many women their reactive sexuality onto men, and treat their partner as defective for just working different. I do think more people understanding how those two types of sexuality work would lead to people finding a middle ground and working with each other in relationships more.
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