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
1yr ago
I always preferred dolls to cars, thought it was cool that one time someone gave me a hot pink t-shirt, and was amused when that first letter my parents received about disability benefits kept calling me "she" ... But none of that made me a girl. And if we're talking gendered stereotypes, I preferred action figures and rough-housing and swords most of all, and was conspicuously annoyed when people intentionally misgendered me (unintentionally was / is kinda neat).
When I was 8-9-ish, my grandpa tried to hide a doll I'd sleep with. This was quite upsetting. Were I 8-9-ish today, and anyone at school found out about these things, would I get the opposite treatment? ... And it's hard to imagine how I'd'veresponded. I think I was both aware enough of the absence of seriousgender identity concerns, and stubborn enough to say so bluntly, but I'm only, like, 75% ish confident in that. And that mostly because I haven't heard anyone who would be doing said hypothetical convincing sound like they'd have any idea how to be convincing to 8-9-ish me.
The especially frustrating part about this whole mess is that I've always wished I'd somehow dodged puberty ever since puberty. But I had to experience a good deal before I could really make that decision, after which it was far too late to do much about it. What's more, I get the sinking feeling that the neurological effects of puberty were relevant to my figuring this out, and to certain ... positive character development? things, and this was never just a physiological dysphoria. Negative character development throughout elementary school also hurt a lot when I became aware of it. As much as I deeply loath what has become of my body, I was at peak a-hole in the couple years before puberty. I like to think I could be reasoned into realizing this and trying to improve, even without getting mindflayed by hormones, but it doesn't seem at all likely that such would actually happen if all this were taking place today. Someone would say "Are you sure you're not a girl? Here: let's put off puberty while you think about it." And that would be it, and I'd probably be even more emotionally incontinent for lack of the trace amounts of prepubescent testosterone or whatever that enabled me to train resistance to crying over minor things.
This whole situation is just so frustrating! Even if I had a mental time-machine, it's not like I could go back to the 90s, chop off my testes, then hand them off to someone who could science up viable gametes just in case I found someone willing to be artificially insemenated by a permachild for some reason other than that I obviously brought the winning lotto numbers back with me. I can't Detective Conan myself smaller now and take advantage of The System™ without contributing to its misuse against children, the majority of whom I'd be quite shocked to discover are any better at resolving this stuff in time than I was. Oh, and the trans activists probably would hate me because it being age-related instead of gender-related pattern-matches to trolls who claim age dysphoria as an excuse for active paedophilia to tarnish trans people by association. (FWIW, I denounce said trolls.)
There really should be more options for helping children with dysphoria, whatever the type. There really should not be a creepy movement to sterilize children based on a short conversation. The information necessary to make a decision like that is not available to humans with our current level of knowledge and technology. As much as I might wish I'd accidentally sat on some dry ice when I was 10, I can't in good conscience support the policies that would have given me what I want when it would have been viable. When we get Medical Omega, maybe things could be different, but for now, I'm not sure there's anything to do for kids like me besides support after it's too late.
(Attempts to prove me wrong are very, very welcome.)
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
1yr ago
It helps, I think, that misplaced nostalgia for the 50s was getting sneered at around the time I got inseparably attached to nostalgia for the 90s. But really, I have no illusions about the overall societal situation or whatever. I was 2-11 years old and living in a city/town that still can't decide if it's rural or suburban or a college town or what. My exposure to the outside world was basically TV and movies, wherein NYC was a city of perpetual nighttime muggings and superheros, everyone in high school was indistinguishable from jock/nerd/cheerleader stereotypes played by conspicuous adults, and drugs were bad, 'mkay?
9/11 might have functionally ended the 90s from the perspective of the West having won history, but history was basically mythology even while I was watching it unfold. 9/11 for me was mainly testing my attitudes Vs the mainstream on matters of justice / vengeance / mercy / whatever. Using 9/11 as a Jedi Mind Trick to get people to support Operation Iraqi Freedom was America failing the test, and teenaged-me getting an inflated ego for feeling like the only one who saw it that way who wasn't on MSNBC. Then I slowly got better at something resembling theory of mind, discovered that being insulated in a school-sized sandbox with "peer pressure is bad, 'mkay?" discouraging socialization, and never actually learning how to try, left me woefully unprepared for anything beyond high school, and oh, look, the "reasons this decade is worse than the last" list got longer, and it still has nothing to do with the general quality of said decades for civilization in general.
My soul can live in the 90s, and my personal Utopia can be "the 90s, but better," and post-9/11 America can have revealed ugliness that I was previously unaware of (what with being an isolated child prior), and none of that adds up to the 90s being better (or worse) than neighboring decades from a broader perspective. If our AI overlords can create multiple Utopias and justify giving me access to 90stopia, that'd be nice, I suppose, but I'm not going to evangelize it, or suggest that everyone be forced to join me there. Objectivity when judging decades you lived through isn't exactly easy.
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
I'm not sure I was ever involved deeply enough to give a meaningful response, but to the best of my recollection...
I was most active around 2008-2012. At the time, there was a very sharp divide between the different sections of the forums (and there were quite a lot of sections, organized into categories). It seemed like most of the active participants in the sections I visited were middle-aged men/eunuchs, with a smattering of 18-50s filling things out. User motivations ranged from fettishistic and body modification (I recall a frequent poster whose username was "splitdick"), to gender identity and BIID, to medical issues requiring castration (prostate/testicular cancer or injury, etc), to autistic or religious people citing a desire to remove the distraction/temptation of sexuality to focus on what they really cared about. There were lots of personal anecdotes, and Jesus et al (but mostly Jesus) provided academic references when appropriate.
The general pattern was to always, always discourage rushing into castration, even though there was frequent lamenting the lack of support from the medical community. One young, fit christian poster kinda scared most of the active members by confidently skipping the recommended preparation and getting surgically castrated very quickly after opening discussion. On the other hand, there was a middle-aged autist who spent many years trying to convince doctors to help, and wound up bringing an elastrator to an appointment to demonstrate the ability to castrate himself if no surgeon would do it in a safer way (this was apparently when the doctor in question was utterly terrified of anyone discovering that he gave in to the threat).
There were threads about castration of minors, and the mods seemed to watch those closely and take action if anyone seemed too supportive of castrating minors IRL. I think there were also serious concerns about doxxing (one poster apparently had direct experience with at least one-three teenagers who were castrated in the Netherlands for non-trans medical reasons, and had a habit of revealing more detail than was necessary, and got modded for it). One of the admins not mentioned here (Palo, IIRC) had plenty of stories about boys expressing interest in castration prior to puberty, then changing their minds almost immediately afterward.
And as I recall, there were lots and lots of origin stories involving boys observing the castration of livestock.
Now that I'm trying to remember everything I can, I do recall a discussion that got uncomfortably positive toward sexual experiences for boys, particularly between 10 and 14. I recall someone (I forget who) posting large chunks of an article about various men's experiences when they were underaged, to which some posters replied with fond recollections of being 10-14 and getting molested by older teenagers.
Ultimately, what I got out of it was a lot of medical information, and a confusing mix of support for wanting to escape sexuality and also so much explicit sexuality, that I really couldn't say much about what was really going on. In the bits of the forums I read, Jesus generally posted in a very dry, academic manner, and Kristof came across as a grumpy old vet who was getting too old for this shit and really just wanted to be a nun. I kinda got the impression that some accounts, like Kristof and Palo, were often held by older people in the community, and might have changed hands when the original user died, but I never confirmed that. Palo came across as both the top mod and the one who took moderating for safety most seriously (though, there are mods I don't remember so well, so take that with some salt).
Oh, and the pushing for a male-to-eunuch identity thing was always there. Jesus was pretty open about trying to publish research to encourage medical recognition of such an identity. I'm more surprised that the others got involved in the publications and such, since they always struck me as more oriented toward the community than being involved as researchers directly.
I feel like I have not answered the question. :(
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
In my experience, diet matters a lot. Dairy and onions in particular. And a good antiperspirant goes a long way. By "good antiperspirant," I mean the creamy kind, not the solid bars, applied in detail to all the relevant areas. The difference is stark.
Milk, butter, cheese, bacon, and onions, with nothing beyond cheap bar deodorant? Stank regenerates quicker than I can get thoroughly dried after bathing. Minimal dairy and good antiperspirant, and I can forget entirely until my hair gets intolerable. I pretty much never even have to re-apply antiperspirant without bathing first.
Disclaimer: Still bathe in the tripple digits annually. Mostly because I prefer shaving and bathing in one sitting, and the former must be done at least weekly. *Grumbles about useless lasers and the lack of electrolysis within several hundred miles*
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
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
1yr ago
IIRC, Penpractice posted a lot of HBD stuff, in a way that eventually started to come across as hiding his power level sort of way. TP0 was sufficiently researched and eloquent as to not be suppressing much, power level wise, but had this bad habit of losing his cool after backs-and-forths with opponents, and after that got him banned he just kinda never came back.
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
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
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
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
8mo 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
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
1yr ago
It's hard to tell/decide if I qualify to answer... but I have been alive for long enough and have the corresponding equipment, so:
I never felt like casual sex was something worth desiring. Even at peak teen hormones when my brain once or twice said "hey, what if this imaginary person we just made up from the ether randomly walked up to you and was very explicitly wanting some?", I couldn't go on without them having actual character and it turning into an actual relationship. Heck, during the two years when I was getting (mostly but not exclusively disturbing) vivid sex dreams, there was one with this imaginary LTR candidate in which we were both naked and deliberately keeping it non-sexual, and that actually worked for the whole thing.
But I've generally been way less interested in general than it seems like most people (male or female) are. There've only been two incidents ever where I was superficially attracted to someone almost immediately (once literally the first day at the Math and Science HS, and once literally the last day of college before a 2.5 year sebatical). There's been one person I was ever more than superficially attracted to, and I resisted those feelings for a while, because it seemed like we would not be long-term compatible (and that was when I'd been alive for 28 years).
I've been hit on far more than that. There was a period in HS / early college when people would tell me when they thought girls were conspicuously interested, but I think my "So what?" reaction put a stop to that. For some reason, men of all ages who have the opportunity seem to go through a phase where they try to convince me to get a girlfriend (as though that's something you can just do after graduating). Then most of them give up because I'm clearly not playing along.
Online dating sucks, because it's just names, ages, and locations, without incentive to click one in particular for the possibility of a meaningful profile. Every few years, I give one of these a look, realize there's nothing there whatsoever to interest me in anyone, and move on. People for people's sake doesn't really motivate me, sex or no. Likewise sex for sex's sake is not terribly interesting.
But I'm weird, so YMMV.
cae_jones
1yr ago
I kinda feel like "adulting" looks suspiciously like the genesis of such terminology. And if I'm being pedantic, my high school health textbook in 2002 divided age into things like chronological age and social age, but those feel more like "biological sex" and "gender roles" rather than "sex" Vs "gender", so IDK.
cae_jones
8d ago
I don't know anything anymore. One of the 19 year olds who stood next to me as the first tents were going up a few days ago, James, asked me what "encampment" meant. I thought he was joking, or at least asking what it meant in this specific context. No, actually. He, a sophomore at Penn, genuinely has never heard the word before. These are our best and brightest.
Was he ESL? Otherwise, wtf you don't even need to have heard the word if you're familiar with English. Camp with a prefix that means to be in or engage in, and the suffix ment makes it a noun. I've only ever heard the word in stories about protesters and combattants, and never heard the definition. I'm basing this on context clues and being fluent in English. Is there some nuance I've been missing this entire time?
Because, uh, it feels like the only way lacking that level of English comprehension should be possible while still becoming a Sophomore at any college that fancies itself prestigious is if the sophomore in question is ESL. I guess they could be there for athletics or similar?
cae_jones
5mo 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
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
You say this as though my life isn't a series of realizations that what I've been doing is stupid. I've basically spent the past 15ish years contemplating just about every combination of time-travel + past self conversation imaginable, and my conclusion is something like "Maybe I could explain what past-me is doing wrong in a way that past-me will understand and improve upon?" but with a big questionmark.
Like, I cringe at decisions I made yesterday. I can, at least, look to age 12 as when I started reflecting enough to realize things needed fixing, but that still takes time and I'm really not sure I could establish a divider between what passes for current wis levels and then. And I remember a few decision-making processes from when I was 2-5 that were clearly wrong in hindsight, for specific reasons I couldn't intuitively understand but might somewhat be able to simulate understanding if someone who gets my pre-school psychology well enough can communicate it well enough.
Like, maximum cringe is ages 5-13, with a peak at 10-11. But I think I've cringed at my memories and recordings enough that, at this point, I'd just wind up cringing after a transchronal conversation for all the important things I chickened out of trying to teach past-me. Maybe cringe/hour is a better comparison, but it would take a lot of time and revision to chart that over time.
cae_jones
1yr ago
I'm told my grandmother gave me Dr. Pepper in a bottle long after I was otherwise done with bottles. This was blamed for the wretched state of my teeth when I started Kindergarten, though I've personally believed that the part where nobody told me that rensing your mouth with Dr. Pepper immediately after brushing your teeth is a bad idea had something to do with it.
(I feel obligated to defend myself by pointing out that I quit sodas when I was 13 and haven't looked back since. It's just that, when I was 5, I started school with no upper incisors and silver canines making me look like a sleepy robot vampire.)
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.)
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