cae_jones
24d ago
Hot take: the unfalsifiable identity anchor thing is behind the evolution of Wokism to Transism. You can argue with citations about the forces of Whiteness™, but when trans ideology comes down to gender as a metaphysical / spiritual thing which someone experiences, rather than physical sex or physically detectable brain or hormonal abnormalities, it enters the realm of unfalsifiable identity anchor. Previous attempts at having Whiteness or The Patriarchy fill the role of unfalsifiable spiritual force are less personal, and more antagonistic, whereas Transism is about personal identity.
cae_jones
1mo ago
Anecdotally, when he gets into the neuroscience of how emotions and motivation and such work, what he has to offer tends to be helpful. I think he relates things to adiction so much in part because that's the specific area he originally focused his practice, and also because it's been studied heavily and appears to have some transferable lessons associated with it.
FWIW, I attribute the amount of stuff I've been getting done over the past two years largely to what I've learned from like two or three of Dr. K's videos. However, it's clear from some videos that this is not as straightforward for everyone in his audience. Charitably, I'd hope the coaching program is both to get a more personalized assist going for those who need it, and to make up for the psychiatry practice he loses by spending so much time on Twitch. More pessimistically, the coaching program reminds me way too much of PUAs and things like that Sales Mentor thing that I just found a mail in my spam folder from that admits they got in trouble with the FTC. But he's way, way less pushy about the coaching ads than those types, so I'm holding out for the charitable version.
cae_jones
2mo ago
<Pedantry> Actually, blind people can feel the heat from the sun, and use it to navigate. A better example would be the moon, stars, or planets.</pedantry>
cae_jones
3mo ago
Anecdotally, I've started therapy and been discharged a few times. First time, college counselor kept asking me if I was suicidal in a way that started to seem like she was encouraging it, then when this led to no changes after several sessions, said to just stop coming. (The South Park script for this one basically writes itself.). The most recent happened because the medication seemed to be working and the therapy side of things was just kinda coasting.
Basically, college counselors suck. Male therapists are more likely to try to problem-solve, if you can find one who wasn't trained specifically not to problem-solve (Dr. K of Healthy Gamer has videos on this, but he puts out so many videos it's a pain to dig up one in particular when commenting from my phone). And a therapist/psychiatrist team is better than either separately. Also, Dr. K's recommendations are better than any therapist I've ever dealt with (the only one that came close, I lost because of losing my insurance for a few months).
cae_jones
3mo ago
For me, the idea of theAlt Right kinda blurred together with NRX via the SSC comments section and the various articles playing 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon with various Rationalists and various flavors of White Supremacism / Nationalism / HBD / whatever. The key difference was established by Richard Spencer doing the Nazi salutes toward Trump, whereas NRX tended to treat Nazis as merely the flavor of totalitarian Leftism that lost the war. So the alt right I guess felt like it was discount Reaction meant to appeal to people less likely to read Moldbug and more likely to hang out on 4chan.
Maybe my memory is faulty, but I remember all this being established before Hillery Clinton and Richard Spencer elevated it to national attention. I distinctly remember posting on Facebook after the Unite the Right incident that I was surprised to learn there were apparently actual Neonazi slogans and styles involved, because of the Boy Who Cried Wolf effect getting me use to "Nazi" basically meaning "someone I hate", and having associated the Alt Right more with the kind of talk from SSC commenters than Richard Spencer.
cae_jones
4mo ago
There's a way to get into your Google profile and view what it thinks of you, and make changes if you wish. I don't remember how, exactly; the last time I tried, I got so annoyed that it thought I only graduated high school that I nearly added my education history, before remembering that I don't actually care for Google knowing everything about me. I think it's something something accounts.google.com, but, it's also Google, so there's probably some encantation that will convince the search box to send you there.
cae_jones
4mo ago
OK, but, Revelation says repeatedly that returned Jesus has a twoedged sword protruding from his mouth (and in the scene with the steed, he also has a rod of iron). So ... what must one do to get this super Saiyan Jesus a mouth-sword?
cae_jones
4mo ago
Re: Kwanzaa, I finally met someone who celebrates it instead of Christmas last year. Otherwise, my only exposure was Nickelodeon ads for the Rugrats Kwanzaa special (which I somehow never managed to catch), and TFS throwing in a mention into one of their holiday videos.
Speaking of Rugrats, that's also the majority of my education on Hanukkah. Never did get the origin of the potato pancakes thing, since potatos are not a crop I'd generally associate with Iron Age Israel. Something to do with a prohibition on leavened bread?
But the Rugrats Hanukkah special did make Hanukkah out to be a bigger deal than Passover, which in hindsight is kinda clearly coming from the present, given that the Passover special focused primarily on the Exodus story, while the Hanukkah special spent more time on the characters, while the backstory got like two short scenes. (But Grandpa Boris's narration on the finale was oddly intense and sincere for a NickToon, IIRC.)
Oh, and in college one year, a Jewish student taught his friend group how to play Dreidel, and we also watched the original Godzilla Vs Mothra, so that was fun I guess.
cae_jones
4mo ago
Fair. I do think there is a preferable middleground between Communism and law of the Jungle, but finding it without painting the planet red has proven challenging.
cae_jones
4mo ago
[citation needed]
I did just learn that it only takes one sentence and a slight amount of context to make me utterly despise a total stranger, so that's ... worrying.
... You're the "you hate it because it's true" type, aren't you?
I hate it because it's evil. True things can be evil, in which case, reallity and we fight until something changes. Reallity has a rather stronger W/L ratio than hunans in general, much less this particular human, and yet, somehow, I'm still not surrendering.
And now I need to find a way to express why I said it's evil. While I generally prefer equality to status hierarchies, I'm not so sure I find hierarchies in general evil. So somewhere between amoral hierarchies and dick-up-your-ass, the problem manifests.
cae_jones
4mo ago
Hyperbolic use of "literally" when the context doesn't make it obvious leaves me feeling like I must correct the record, lest someone take it exactly as literally as written.
When I was 12, 13, and 3/4 of 14, I:
- Had gone through puberty.
- Had gone through (pathetic and nearly useless) sex ed.
- Had never encountered, searched for, or meaningfully considered searching for porn.
- To the extent that I had any awareness of shame/pride cultures surrounding sexuality, it was less about signalling experience, and more about signalling heterosexuality, under threat of being called gay. I hated this and refused to participate as expected, and thus perished my social life (what little there was, anyway).
- Was annoyed by how much my peers (many of whom seemed to get to puberty 2 or 3 years later than me) took to making everything about sex.
- Did not masturbate. TBH, I misunderstood what the word meant, and thought it was specifically referring to autofelatio. (Yes, the physical functionality was there. First nocturnal emission was around 2.5-3 months after 12th birthday. I remember when, event-wise, but not the precise date.)
- Actually obtaining sex or sexual release was not actually on my mind much? I'm not sure if I can clerify this one without getting more detailed than I'd like.
- To be clear, no, my lack of masturbating at this time did not fall into the exceptions listed in the OP. I wasn't "resisting"; it just straight-up wasn't something in possibility space, so far as "things to do when bored and alone" were concerned.
I can see how that "have I mentioned I'm heterosexual today, and that y're totally a gay skank?" culture seems explanation enough for why middle school boys would over-report sexual experience, "literally all of them"? Did I misinterpret this?
cae_jones
5mo ago
I'm having a hard time deciding what a reasonable ban duration for drunkposting on a holiday should be. I keep defaulting to 1 day, but that only functions like throwing someone in the drunktank until they're sober, and that only works if you catch them in time. OTOH, more than 3d feels excessive, unless there's an existing pattern. But in this case, 4d would keep them in the drunktank until the next thread... Ugh, it's good I'm not a mod.
cae_jones
5mo ago
Would it be reasonable to summarize as "Deontology is consequentialism in advance"? It seems like the point is that, come time for decision-making, rationalizing a suboptimal decision is easier than you'd expect, so it's better to have the decision already set. The downside being that genuinely out-of-context problems might return garbage when put through Deontological checks, but it's also easy to convince yourself something is an OOCP when it isn't, too...
cae_jones
5mo ago
As I recall, you rather dislike HPMoR, but this discussion reminds me of the one time it did make an argument in favor of deontology. ... in chapter 108, and I'm not sure if we have spoiler tags, here?
It's much easier to make a convincing-sounding argument to violate a rule, than to find a genuinely good and acceptable reason to violate the rule. Even profoundly intelligent people are vulnerable to deception, biases, temptations, etc, and that makes deontological injunctions a valid defense against those failure modes.
In my experience, the downside is that, when breaking a rule fails to have any noticeable negative consequences, it becomes easier to break the rule in the future. One might argue that this is a sign that said rule wasn't worth having in the first place, to which I must point out that the way the brain associates actions with outcomes can only predict so far ahead on incomplete information. See also: the crack and opioid epidemics, small lies that turn into a house of cards you're forced to live in, how the whole free love and hookup culture things turned out...
cae_jones
5mo ago
I had no idea it was changing. I got up somewhere between 1 and 2, hopped on my computer at what I thought was 2:00AM, then the next I checked the time, it was nearly 2:00AM again. No notifications or anything; it was all done so quietly, I had to check the default calendar to confirm it was for DST.
Had I slept through the first 1:00AM entirely, I'd probably have completely failed to notice anything until someone said something.
cae_jones
6mo ago
This. When 9/11 happened, it was abundantly clear to me that the hijackers were villains, fullstop. But it bothered me more when the Bush administration used every excuse in the book afterward to justify invading not one, but two countries, though neither seemed to hold up under scrutiny. Evil people doing evil is bad and tragic, but not that weird. The alleged good-guys turning into trigger-happy invaders, though, is almost like betrayal.
Please notice that I have not expressed any opinions on Israel Vs Palestine, here. Just citing an example of the explanation for disproportionate judgment.
cae_jones
7mo ago
Did I miss a comment somewhere, or is that article about removing a scene of two gay men forceably abducting a teenager,? That, ah, seems a bit more than horny gay guys mistaking straight guy for gay. I think the child abduction and presumed rape is the immoral part?
Apologies if I missed some comment somewhere that zooms out to what you said instead.
cae_jones
7mo ago
Re: energy, I've become fond of interorbital kinetic exchanges, partly because they make the otherwise stupidly costly outer planets potentially profitable, but also because you're basically taking natural flywheels and converting them into power / propulsion / etc. Is it still hydroelectric if the water is contained in Uranian plastic dropped from an altitude of 20AU?
Luna tends to get treated as the stepping stone, and Mars the destination, but it seems more likely that Luna becomes a major center for industry/population, and Mars is the stepping stone to the rest of the system. At least Luna is close enough for a meaningful relationship with Earth.
If I may digress briefly, latest models of the history of the Solar System seem to find a significant role for most planets in the backstory to habitable Earth. The complex dance of the giants shaped the inner system in detail, and Venus dropped Theia onto the Earth to create the Moon. Conspicuously missing from all this, though, is Mercury, which also conspicuously is often relegated to an enormous materials depot in speculations on futurism. Now, the anthropic principal doesn't require that everything we see be an important aspect of our prolonged ability to see it, but if there were a simpler way, it would seem more likely that we'd be in that simpler system, so I can't but wonder at the anthropic implications of Solar System architecture that we've yet to discover.
cae_jones
8mo ago
Come to think of it, might this be a viable strategy? Trump energizes the base, but is in prison, so his VP has to do most of the actual president stuff. So, they can run Trump for the devout Trumpists, knowing that they're practically running his VP candidate (presumably DeSantez).
cae_jones
8mo ago
So, when the US has bad cops caught doing bad things, we get tons of counterexamples of good cops doing their jobs correctly and professionally. When the British police get caught doing bad things, are their any popular counterexamples of the British police doing their jobs correctly and professionally?
Could easily be a bias thing based around my getting most of my good-cop-bad-cop news from themotte. Since American police code as red, and British police code as blue, that kinda makes sense, though even these days, we seem to have enough lefties around to point out when confirmation bias is painting a misleading picture. But I can't recall any instance of someone being positive toward the British police. Where are their defenders?
cae_jones
8mo ago
So, I'm working on a game where an NPC is probably trans. I say probably, because I had the character's design and the mission they're part of and other interactions mostly worked out before realizing that it kinda made sense in context.
The context is a sort of pastoralist style Utopia sponsored by fully automated luxury space communism. Clarketech abounds, but the exact limits are only defined in so much as they are plot/gameplay-relevant. The antagonist is a bio-engineer who thinks that this civilization has gotten stuck in a local maximum, and is way more transhumanist than most people in the setting (most people the player interacts with, anyway). Oh, and he thinks that whole capitalism thing isn't quite so out-dated as everyone else, but he keeps his shady dealings with extragalactic warlords to himself.
The original idea for this sidestory was based around the idea that the boss's bio-engineered minions were scowering the region for the player's party, and this NPC happened to be the local misfit who first notices disturbances the local miniboss causes. As I expanded way more on the worldbuilding and backstories for other characters, it occurred to me that the boss would totally have offered body modification services to the people with the rarest issues, especially if he could learn how to improve on longevity-extending treatments in the process, and some of the other miniboss encounters fit perfectly with said minions keeping tabs on the boss's most unique clients. Since this NPC was established as having an unsure time fitting in locally, and just happens to live within sidequest distance of one of the miniboss encounters...
Actually, what made me realize it was when I noticed that the local species had sexual dimorphic qualities, and I accidentally hinted at a mismatch with this character, and all of the above pointed toward their being trans as an explanation. FWIW, the people of this world have feathers, with males having bigger, more flamboyant plumage. This NPC was supposed to be female, but I gave her a rooster-esque red streak without considering the implications (I was aiming for evoking the image of a ponytail). So, I figure her comb must be reduced, else it'd be dysphoria-triggering, but could still have distinct coloration, and she could still have the habit of compulsively smoothing it, especially when stressed. The clarketech is very likely strong enough to enable her to pass perfectly otherwise, but after the player finds the boss's former clients/victims near all the other minibosses, and the only things that stick out about this character is her awkward relations to her community and her nervous tick, people wanting to read into it could probably draw the conclusion.
... Maybe. If that can be improved, I'd love to hear suggestions as to how. I'm not super confident about it. But it accidentally fit perfectly, so eh.
I am at least down with giving the Sun something of a lipectemy (heliectemy?) to extend its life. Would prefer it never be completely dismantled, for sentimental reasons. Maybe convert it into a constellation of red dwarves.
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