cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
1yr ago
Lets cut the back and forth. Make your point, and I'll respond one last time. This is an old and very dead thread, and its not like I haven't heard a similar line of argument before.
cjet79
1yr ago
- Yes definitely. As long as membership is voluntary.
- It could theoretically exist. Getting voluntary joining from that massive number of people seems a bit prohibitive.
cjet79
1yr ago
@curious_straight_ca this may also be of interest to you, since you said you wanted Tyre_inflator to stick around.
tyre_inflator's main point was that the conversation that happens here is useless.
People with this viewpoint often don't last very long on themotte. If you think this place is useless then the mods enforcing the rules trying to preserve it are just pointless acts of aggression.
The mods' ability to "reform" these types of posters is often limited and doomed to failure, because we only have one stick (banning), and one carrot (AAQC, or recognition for being a good poster). But being banned from a place you consider useless is a mercy and a favor rather than a punishment. And being recognized as a useful contributor to a place you consider useless is an insult.
In general, if you think a place is useless and a waste of time, my suggestion is to not go there and waste your time. If you can't hold yourself to this the mods will happily ban you for any length of time at your request. Its not like TheMotte is in your face in any way. You literally have to know where to go on the internet to be here. We have a minimal presence on reddit that is easily ignored, and otherwise generally aren't on social media.
I think Tyre_inflator's original post was culture warry, and definitely not talking as if everyone was listening. If they were a user with no past history of bans or warnings I'd just give them a warning and move on probably. But:
- They are a user with a past history of warnings and bans.
- The basic idea behind the post of "TheMotte is useless" tends to have a high correlation with people that we permaban for good reasons.
My preferred course of action is that @Tyre_Inflator requests a permaban from a place they ostensibly think is pointless. Me saying that probably makes it less likely to happen. The likely course of action is we do some token ban time ~7 days for them being bad here, and we double double promise to permaban them next time. And within a few weeks of them coming back from the ban they will trigger the permaban.
@Chrisprattalpharaptr's response was a problem of saying something that is ok: "can you say this in a polite way so we can actually talk about it, instead of just waging culture war towards me?" But saying it in a way that is not ok: 'go touch grass, stop whining, etc'. And they have gotten warnings in the past for sort of taking the bait and getting into shit flinging with others users. But they've also had quality contributions, and the length of times between warnings is pretty large. So mostly they are a good user and they misbehaved this one time. I think we can tell them to knock it off and be better, and they will listen because they actually want to be here and our mod incentive structure of carrot (AAQC) and stick (bans) actually works properly on them. But I'm still in favor of using the stick, because its not ok to antagonize other users, even if that user seems to hate it here and might be on their way out soon via bans.
cjet79
1yr ago
This is a discussion forum for people with sometimes drastically different views. It feels like a fragile thing somedays. We are asking people to talk politely with one another when they may disagree with each other's entire existence. Most of the internet is filled with people pointing out that politeness in those circumstances is absurd. And thus most of the internet has descended into a bit of a hell hole that I cannot personally tolerate for any topic much less the topics where people might actually have a reason to hate each other.
@Tyre_Inflator and @Chrisprattalpharaptr I don't like seeing how this discussion happened between you two. Its a severe violation of the ethos we are hoping for here. 1 day ban for both of you for now. Mods will discuss this further. Those bans might be rescinded, extended, or left alone.
cjet79
1yr ago
Any "normie" topic can be turned into an "intellectual" topic. Just think of how the culture war infects everything, and imagine its not people doing it maliciously, but just doing it to have some relevance to topics they otherwise would know nothing about.
Some people are amenable to these conversational turns, others are very much not amenable. But your options in those cases are limited to: suffer, eject from the convo, or change topics and make them eject.
Respect your own time. Don't waste it in conversations you find boring. Though a boring conversation requires two to tango, you are always partly at fault if a conversation is boring. Start taking responsibility by ejecting or trying to alter the conversation to something more interesting.
cjet79
1yr ago
cjet79
1yr ago
Agreed. My only caveat, which I think you would agree with (?) but is worth pointing out in the context of OP's post, is that I'm allergic to people using the sparse/inconclusive evidence of this stuff as a bludgeon in some larger political/cultural/social argument. I definitely want at least a few scientifically-minded folks looking for new evidence in case we suddenly need to go take these things seriously, I just don't want that level of respect paid to the ideas to make people think they can be used in predicates for other arguments about how the world actually is.
Generally agree, but I'm sure we disagree on a lot of specifics. For example, I am generally in favor of letting the market do its thing. But sometimes people have an "eww yuck markets" reaction, and its impossible to get through with any level of arguments or evidence. Prostitution and organ markets are two examples. Maybe I am the hard hearted "scientist" that can't see the spiritual damage from prostitution or from selling your organs.
I also recognize that I might be illogical and not follow the evidence on some things because I have a set of beliefs in "liberty" and "individual freedom". Allowing guns to be sold does seem to make suicide easier and on the margin likely leads to more deaths by suicide. Also screw the government, I have the right to own a gun. The CIA and NSA can probably find terrorists easier if they have unrestricted access to all of our communications. Also screw the government, I have a right to privacy and not being spied on all the time.
I don't really have a solution here. But I think in general I care more about protecting some of my "illogical" beliefs, and I'm willing to let others have theirs too if we can find some mutually agreeable compromises.
cjet79
1yr ago
If I said that affirmative action isn't supposed to be opposed to any of that, it's supposed to counteract known disequities of opportunity in order to end at true meritocracy, like adjusting to the left because you know the sites on your gun are off a bit to the right, would you believe me?
I do believe that people sincerely believe that. My general impression having talked with some of these people, is that they are unconcerned with the problem swinging in reverse by overdoing a correction. I also feel that a correction of such things should take a single generation, but affirmative action has been going on longer than a single generation, and there is no suggested end to it.
If someone else said that all of our laws are already equal and all our bigotry is already ended, so all you have to do to get true meritocracy is get out of the way and let the market work, the invisible hand will take care of it all, would you believe them?
I think fewer people believe both parts of this at the same time. Our current set of laws is not just "letting the market work". There are some people that think we should just let the market work (I count myself among them). And there is another group of people that believe recent laws have been sufficient (though many of them actually seem to think laws in the 1990s were at the perfect spot).
Unfortunately, it's all part of the culture war now, and which one of us someone believes typically has more to do with which side they're on than a careful consideration of all the mountains of evidence. Which gets back to the basic problem of epistemic learned helplessness, and trusting your own experts and ingroup testimonials.
Yeah, I agree its mostly explained by conflict theory and fighting over resources rather then by mistaken beliefs on the part of one group or another.
I still think I'm confused about where HlynkaCG falls on all of this. He sometimes says things that make me think he disagree with me strongly, and other times says things that makes me think we actually agree.
cjet79
1yr ago
GuessWho had a better defense for "free will" and what it means. I mostly consider determinism irrelevant to my belief that "free will" is a thing that matters.
cjet79
1yr ago
I am sometimes surprised that we have been on the same forum for nearly a decade now, and some of the experiences and things you references are always new and confusing to me.
ASVABs
I had to look this up "Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery"
I am deeply skeptical of educational attainment as a proxy for raw intelligence. If anything it strikes me as a case of affirming the consequent. Simple truth is that I've met too many 60th percentile ASVABs who were demonstrably capable of organizing/supervising complex evolutions involving hundreds of people and dozens of moving parts, just as I've met too many post-grads from prestigious institutions who I wouldn't trust to boil water, to take such claims at face value.
I've not had the same life experiences as you. I've been around many academics, still work around some. I think a car comparison would help here. Some academics are like drag racers. They are built to go very very fast in a straight line. Ask them to take a turn and they'll crash into a thousand pieces. The Hondas I like driving tend to last and last and last. Without much need of maintenance or for me to worry about the machine itself. They aren't exceptional in any way, but they are reliable and do what you need. I know some people that just seem to be workhorses at life, and they can wade through the shit that gets thrown at them without breaking down. They adapt and fit in where needed.
Comparing via IQ seems a bit like comparing via horsepower. Not the whole story, but still kinda accurate for what you are measuring.
While Thomas Sowell does not address HBD directly I find it hard not to read his "vision of the anointed" in to pretty much everything HBDers post here.
I read Thomas Sowell's Race and Culture, but have not read his other stuff. I'm not familiar with this "vision of the anointed".
The scales falling from my eyes moment was when the Wonderlic "Race Norming" scandal came to light in 2019, and a significant portion of users here defended it. To be clear, The NFL had been collecting Wonderlic score on players since the late 70s, and what they got caught doing was artificially adjusting the scores of high-performing black players downward to change the racial distribution of disability payouts.
I'm unfamiliar with this incident. And your description doesn't totally clear up to me what was happening...
Once you've gone on the record in defense of lying or manipulating data to defend your preferred narrative or achieve your preferred policy outcomes, what reason does anyone else have to trust you?
Very well said, highly agree with you. Was one of my big frustrations with Fauci during covid. Stopped trusting him after the mask switcheroo.
Who benefits from Id Pol, HBD Awareness, and Intersectionality? Who benefits from the dismantlement of Anglo/American norms about equality of opportunity and equality before the law? I can tell you who does not benefit in anyway. Those who possess genuine individual merit.
I'm generally against Id Pol. I feel like I am aware of HBD. I am not interested in handing off control of society or government to people who claim to know how to judge intersectionality. I like the norms of equality of opportunity and equality before the law. I'd rather live in a society that has benefits for those with genuine individual merit, but mostly contingent on them sharing those merits with society. If you are capable for being a brain surgeon, you should only get paid as a brain surgeon if you actually do brain surgery.
Jobs are tasks to be done, not rewards to be won.
I think maybe we agree, but also sometimes I feel like you are yelling at me, and I'm not sure why?
cjet79
1yr ago
It doesn't matter whether you pursue your goals and act in accordance to your nature in a deterministic fashion or in a stochastic fashion.
As long as your own nature is guiding your actions, you have free will.
As long as your actions are constrained and determined by outside forces making you do things you don't like and wouldn't choose in the absence of those forces, your free will is violated.
That matches my intuitions about what it feels like to exercise my free will vs. have it violated. And it's a definition by which free will definitely exists, but can be abrogated and must be actively defended. Which I like.
I think I also generally like that definition, and that most definitions of "free will" focus too much on the deterministic stuff. Whether the universe is deterministic or not seems inconsequential to me. We will almost certainly never know, and it has little bearing on how we treat the world. I'd only add that people or entities with "free will" have responsibility and ownership of the things they choose through their free will as well. If it is in your nature to go murder people, then I think we should treat you like a murderer, even if the universe conspired to create a person with a murderous nature.
I definitely think that our human scientific models are missing a lot of important stuff on this topic, and that a lot of it is so complex and contingent and hard to measure that it will stay beyond our ability to directly model for a very long time, and approaches that draw on intuition and metaphor may do a better job modelling them for now.
But after I admit that, I don't feel like there's any need for a nonmaterial/supernatural factor in addition to that.
"Supernatural" is kind of a strange word and concept. Something that is outside the bounds of the natural world. But we have natural senses, and instruments that only measure the natural world, so these things are by definition unobservable to us.
I guess I am more wondering if there is something "natural" about the universe that we do not understand and have not observed. Like the famous sci-fi saying "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". I think there might be a mysticism corollary "any sufficiently misunderstood phenomenon is indistinguishable from background noise".
A bunch of ESP studies keep turning up something. Dreams that see glimpses of the future (like the Twain example above) seem to abound throughout recorded history (and I've experienced the phenomenon myself a few times). People on hallucinogenic drugs seem to access the same spaces/entities.
I'm a bit of a lifelong skeptic about these things. I lean very heavily towards "its all nothing". But not so heavily that I think its a complete waste of time for people to look into this stuff and try and figure it out.
cjet79
1yr ago
Everything was always going to happen the way it did
You are assuming the whole point up for debate.
cjet79
1yr ago
Despite being atheist I do think I hold some anti-materialist views.
The first one is a sort of mind over body or spiritual health outlook. I'm finding it hard to articulate, without dismissing some important things. I just have some sense that material reality is missing something about health, and my best way to point at this phenomenon is to look at the placebo effect.
where every conscious mind's inherent beliefs to affect material reality
This is also something I accept, but only in some of the less controversial instances. The stock market is the main example i can think of. Enough investors believing in a market process can kind of will that process into working by lending the process money and time.
I also think there seems to be some sensitivity from politicians to a collective will. They can overcome the Will, but it takes effort. Otherwise they fall into the game of politics and can only take prescribed actions. People who routinely and easily violate this are rare. Andrew Jackson, Coolidge, and Trump come to mind as flagrant violators of the will.
My main anti materialist viewpoint is that I have a sense that there is free will. No amount of evidence or talking has ever been able to dislodge this belief in the slightest. When I first encountered challenges to the concept of free will I tried to argue against them or find alternatives that preserved it. I mostly gave up on those endeavors. Free will exists, and it's not up for debate with me. In the same way that I think the material world exists and my brain isn't just hooked up to a machine feeding it sensations and nutrients.
cjet79
1yr ago
I see mine get in a similar zone when coloring or playing with stickers. Do any kids have good attention spans?
We just took them to the Natural History Museum today, and they were fascinated and running off towards all kinds of exhibits. Thought they tended to think that every screen was a touch screen, and were extra interested in even the slightest "interactive" feature.
I guess that would be short attention spans but I remember being the same way when I was a young child.
Screens don't even work to consistently keep them entertained. We try and save their tablets for long car rides since they tend to burn out on them and get bored after a few hours (doesn't have to be concurrent time).
cjet79
1yr ago
Depends on the mood of my kids. I can definitely get them to not be loud at that age. Sitting still? No chance.
Problem is that discipline leads to loud crying so teaching them to behave in a new environment is going to require a few instances where they make a huge scene. We take our daughters out to eat pretty often, so we sort of got through the rough moments when they were 3yo.
Distraction is often necessary. We bring our own toys and sometimes snacks if the restaurant food isn't something they'll go for.
cjet79
1yr ago
Maybe you're just looking for more of a PvP style camping trip.
Not really, as i said, core gameplay is pointing and clicking at a specific spot on a screen. Being prevented from doing that pointing and clicking is a side mechanic in my mind. And often a very unwelcome side mechanic in my opinion. I generally prefer singleplayer. PvE is a somewhat close second. PvP is something I usually dislike.
cjet79
1yr ago
I don't understand @Cjet 's objection that the guns aren't satisfying to shoot. They're chunky, with intricate mechanics (they simulate rocket backblast! You can adjust the rate of fire on the MMGs!) and they provide visceral feedback, enemies have detailed damage models and aren't just bullet sponges, you can blow off limbs and see bugs limp, perforate them enough and they'll bleed to death.
I understand how the game can be fun. I think I'm in the minority in not preferring guns that blast enemies apart at short ranges.
The three maps I played didn't really allow for long range engagements. There were terrain obstacles that severely limited line of sight. Maybe I just didn't play enough maps.
Ammo felt frustratingly limited for the main guns. And it all came back to "throw a [grenade]". Ammo is out, throw a grenade for new ammo crate. Big baddy is around, throw a grenade for artillery strike. Or throw a grenade to call down a big rocket launcher.
I think the cape signified my movement issues with the game. Commanders wear capes. I like playing a recon/scout/sniper build in most shooting games, and wearing a cape while playing any of those rolls would be downright stupid. Its slow, conspicuous, and does not allow easy movement.
I am also starting to become a shooting game elitist. The base mechanic of a shooting game in my mind is clicking on tiny things on the screen. Doing it quickly and accurately represents skill. Doing it quickly and accurately while also doing a bunch of other things (like managing resources, moving around a 3d environment, and coordinating with others) represents mastery of the base skill. A bunch of "shooters" these days tend to focus on the "other things" and the base "shooter" mechanic is nerfed down to nothing. And I understand and get that. I don't just like playing shooters, there are many other genres I like. But whenever I play something vaguely with "shooter" mechanics I inevitably enjoy the base shooter stuff a bunch and just want more of that.
If hell divers at some point supports a more shooting focused playstyle, I'd be happy to jump back in. Just doesn't seem like that is the game's strength right now, and probably also why its popular.
As of this time @HlynkaCG has been permabanned. I'm posting this message at the top of the thread, because its not really for Hlynka, its for the community to know. There were a few different posts I could have chosen in the modqueue, and many of them were too buried to be visible. The mod team has given him repeated warnings and bans. And I personally reached out to him last ban to warn him that a permaban was likely coming if this behavior continued.
I mostly do not feel this is a good thing, but it is a necessary thing. Hlynka had quite a few quality contributions, and I don't think I was alone in appreciating his often unique (for themotte) perspective. But he repeatedly did it in a way that just wasn't acceptable for the rules around here.
I would like people to have a few takeaways:
Please keep any discussion civil.
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