cae_jones
4mo 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
1yr ago
It occurs to me that reading dating-related content here makes me feel a sense of despair I wouldn't normally feel around the subject. I'm not sure why that is, exactly, since normally if it comes up, I can more or less shrug it off with close enough to apathy. What sorcery are y'all performing that it suddenly feels desperately important when I read discussions here, and pretty much only here?
I want to now go off into a lengthy tangent about my general feelings/history on the subject, but that seems pointless and narcissistic. (But if I should go ahead and post validation-seaking narcissistic ramblings, say so? 😟)
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
9mo ago
FTR, my reaction to the idea of medically altering the identity bits is something like "Could you kill me in a less horrifying way, please?"
That said, my issues are more age than gender, and the mental aspect is a significant part of that (which only grows more ... perplexing... over time). The trouble though is that it's hard to define what fixing that would look like. If I'm imagining a magical mind-alteration solution, I like to include a daily "revert the alterations, reflect on how they work" period, because that crap is scary and I expect easier to get wrong than not. I have no idea how this could be accomplished in reallity, other than simulations. But I'm not sure much of mine could be resolved outside of simulations. Ugh. Reallity is better than not existing, but I still complain.
All of which is to say, I get the vicious reactions you get for suggesting altering it mentally rather than bodily. I'd prefer people not be so vicious about it (I'm here and not there for reasons), fwiw.
cae_jones
27d ago
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.
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
1yr ago
My first thought when you said "UFOs attracted to nuclear" was "Oh, they're going to point out that nuclear crap can screw with instruments and human eyes, and the underwater stuff gets a lot easier to explain away." But you went in the complete opposite direction.
It's not about hard belief in screwing with physics being impossible. It's the complexity of it all. Aliens exist and casually interstellar travel and visit Earth regularly and are content to just troll rather than any of them just dropping the charade. ... Or people are seeing weird lights and our instruments are under a century old and dealing with novel stuff like nukes and weird sky crap. One's way, way simpler than the other. Both are possible, but why do trolly aliens seem more probable?
cae_jones
1yr ago
You know who else under performs? Southern white proles. One might go so far as to invoke cultural contamination from the poorest, mostviolent subculture in the US. It's less black culture that's the problem, and low-class borderer culture, which black Americans had thrust upon them.
You could say, "of course Asians in California do well; they assimilated to the culture of California." And "Of course Jews do well; they assimilated to the cultures of New York and European intelligencia." And "Of course Black Americans do poorly; they assimilated to poor Southerner culture."
You'd think, being that it's acceptable to bash Southern culture, this would be an acceptable path. It sounds like blaming racism, but it's really blaming The South, which is even better to some. Jazz, Blues, Rap, Hiphop, etc are distinctly Black in origin, but drug-addled criminality, low test scores, under-aged polyamory, and parents in and out of prison are not.
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
5mo 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
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
1yr ago
The question of whether or not it's alive, can think, has a soul, etc, is kinda beside the point. The point is, it's going to cause big, world-changing things to happen. Eliezer mentioned many years ago a debate he got in with some random guy at some random dinner party, which ended with them agreeing that it would be impossible to create something with a soul. Whether or not the AI is conscious is not so important when it's changing your life to the point of unrecognizability, and the alignment crowd worries about whether that's a good unrecognizable, or something more dystopic.
cae_jones
1yr ago
I was familiar with the EA and the mentioned posters back when they enforced the rules about not supporting this stuff on minors. Honestly, I participated in some of Jesus's research threads (never knew he posted in the stories section. The others don't surprise me.) Seeing them going from careful and professional to doing cartwheels down the slippery slope is ... disappointing, to put it mildly. I remember when people got modded for seeming too enthusiastic about the new policy recommendations. Heck, mods there provided plenty of information in agreement with the prevalence of both desisting after puberty and fettish-driven fixation on castration. And that's just what I got from the handful of boards I bothered reading (Eunuch Central, the general health board, and occasionally the surgical/chemical castration boards. I once poked my head into the stories section, read the titles, and noped the f out of there.)
cae_jones
1yr ago
As I recall, both "Woke" and "Social Justice Warrior" originated as indonyms, and were dropped as soon as the Memedom realized their adversaries were using them as insults. The same could well be the case with these various disillusioned young male counterparts.
cae_jones
1mo 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
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
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
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
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
9mo ago
IIUC, "Lala" is Chinese slang for gay, from what my Chinese teacher said 14 years ago. So we're 3 for 4 on the forced queer-coding.
cae_jones
1yr ago
This. The generational progression has been rather pronounced, from my local observations. I should add that it also tracks with the availability of entertainment. My grandparents and my dad's older siblings grew up when electricity and airconditioning were novel. My dad grew up with Saturday Morning Cartoons, Bruice Lee, and Star Wars, with video games requiring a trip to an arcade. I remember not having video games and the Disney Channel being a temporary luxury, but by the time I was in school, cable and VHS copies of everything were plentiful, and whether or not I had access to a NES was entirely dependent on which cousin needed to pawn one for drug money this month... right up until my parents could swing for our own, after which point I spent way too much time on cartoons and video games. And also I was obsessed with toys and wanted just about everything I saw on TV.
My GenZ cousins had even more plentiful video games, and if they hadn't been hit with time limits during early school ages, would have stayed glued to them for hours at a time. My 7yo nephew was given a tablet with Youtube access before he could talk, and still demands to have it when eating or traveling. I feel obliged to add that I often wanted to keep watching TV at mealtimes, but back then my parents actually refused. These days, they put the table across from a 70in smart TV and they have to have something going most of the time.
Safetyism is a completely separate topic, I suppose. The conspicuous correlation between the availability of entertainment, and how absorbed people are by it, is easily observed. Have we made any progress toward safeguarding against superstimuli?
cae_jones
1yr ago
Yeah, I'm wanting to agree, here. Still anecdotal, but of my 6 grandparents (my parents remarried,), 5 died between the ages of 58 and 71 (most of them around 60), and 1 died at 88 when COVID19 and COPD got him simultaneously. The latter was the only one who did not smoke, and was all the only one not to die a slow and painful death drowning in his own fluids. There could be some other confounding factor, but the smoking is the one difference that sticks out. So the more statistically literate hereabouts will I hope understand my vehement doubt of Sky's claim.
Of course, between this and the climate change post, it feels like someone opened a portal to 1999 and summoned the right wing equivalent to the IFLS SJWs of the past decad", so the combination might have me more biased than usual.
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?
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