coffee_enjoyer
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No bio...
User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
I actually think images would be a great edition to posts provided: there are rules on relevance (graphs, evidence, demonstrating a point; NOT for humor or emotional effect); they are minimized thumbnails that can be clicked to expand; they are low-res for speed of post loading and max-minning image.
You can even restrict image use to site donators or by age-of-account. If imagery is used in scientific publications then it can add value to themotte and allows us to dunk on Reddit which has poor image implementation features.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
”I have long wanted to make an effortpost justifying political violence”
I think this is a very bad idea. It draws harmful unnecessary attention to the site. It’s one of the few things that can directly lead to the site being taken offline and admins investigated. I’m sure the philosophical underpinnings can be clothed in a different topic, for instance an historical overview of political legitimacy with emphasis on how violent actors gained political legitimacy.
As Doglatine cuwurious_strag_CA (mixed up posts) brought up, the Sarno Method sticks out to me as proving a psychogenic cause for some chronic pain. Whenever it’s mentioned online there are larger than expected people claiming to be cured thanks to it. Geraldo Rivera has video about it on YouTube. It’s vaguely similar to Carr’s Easy Way for smoking cessation, which also relies on a psychological approach.
There’s also neurasthenia, historical neurasthenia which has similar symptoms to contemporary chronic pain. AZC hosted a book review on that. Most treatments had a psychological dimension, involving inherently pleasant places like the seaside or mountain, and a cessation from stressful reading and analysis.
I know Jordan Peterson says he suffered from varied symptoms and fatigue and pain before he went on an all steak diet. But his all steak diet corresponded with his rise to stardom, reduced obligations at work, enjoyable travel, etc. I doubt it was the eating of only steak that cured Peterson’s unusual pains. Instead he was probably suffering from a kind of psychogenic chronic pain, cured from the new (more enjoyable) lifestyle he developed, where instead of thinking up all his ideas he gets to talk about them to supportive people.
The social driver is that it is the attractive ideology. It is the attractive ideology because it is reinforced in media, education, and pop culture. Some of this is due to Democrat campaigns, some due to critical theorists, some due to tropes, some just due to capitalism.
A person doesn’t need to have a well-thought or personal motive for holding an ideology distinct from that it is the most socially attractive (cool, reputable) belief to hold.
It’s arguably still necessary, from the standpoint of obtaining maximal societal health, for more women to become homemakers. Our fertility rate means we trend toward ruin; we increasingly face diseases related to poor homemaking (diabetes, psychiatric disorder) and maternal stress (think of the 3% autism rate in some parts of the US, now remember it’s increasing); and it’s not even obvious that the expenses used to train women in education are of greater total utilitarian value than if they raised great healthy children.
The equality discourse pretty much bans this line of thinking, but women should be out of any stressful occupation for at least three years per birth, due to the additional benefits of breastfeeding and maintaining the mother-child bond. That’s 7 years total for three children (implying you have them one after another). If you’re a woman who has the potential to be a doctor, you’re the exact kind of person who should have 3-5 children (you are healthy and intelligent). Taking a woman who can raise 5 children and teaching her Anesthesiology and she winds up having one child at 35 is a net negative for the longterm good of society. My go-to example of this is Charles Darwin’s wife, who raised like 8 kids and three of them wound up being amazing scientists. And Darwin’s wife was trained to be a homemaker, so when he fell sick and despondent (as he often did) he was taken care of.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Steroids have unpredictable and dangerous longterm consequences not just on testosterone but on mood stability and risk-taking. If you’re a SEAL you’re not going to have “gear” in your gear on deployment. So while a lot of your points are interesting, I’m not persuaded by the main one; the SEALs have a legitimate longterm interest in ensuring applicants are not using steroids, just as they have an internet in ensuring applicants are not using amphetamines, eyeglasses, or pain relievers.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I applaud you! Hope you’re all happy and thriving.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Did the Right lose the terminally online by emphasizing consuming rather than communing?
Leftists (especially LGBT-focused) congregate in highly socialized communities where every small action toward The Cause is socially reinforced. You find this on Twitter and Discord. While there’s a fair amount of complaining typical of online spaces, leftist spaces are unique in saturating their mutuals in compliments and praise. There’s an oversaturation of positive feedback, and negative feedback is seen with suspicion. Anything from an uncreative tweet, a poorly conceived thought, an unlikely empowering experience, whatever is usually met with pats on the back snaps (sensory issues!) and good boys persons. While this oversaturation leads to an over-sensitivity, not to mention some bad behaviors and creations, it also means that the online community forms strong bonds and is only associated with positive emotions.
In contrast, Right-oriented spaces are less keen on compliments and engage in more stressful catastrophization. They consume too much news and complain too much about the news. Culturally right online spaces are more socially stressful and have less bonding. They are critical of the liberal-coded heaping of compliments and empathy, and consequently miss out on a lot of the power and energy that’s present in Leftist spaces. There’s also an optimism deferential, with Leftist spaces generally more optimistic despite performative lamentation, and Right spaces more pessimistic, at least since ~2018.
This is a poor example, but imagine watching Contrapoints versus Jordan Peterson. This is a poor example by necessity — the Right does not have any counterpart to Contrapoints. You can watch Contrapoints and come away without any argument or evidence — but then you would be missing the point; the point is that you’re having an endearing and charming parasocial relationship with the person, and the outfit changes and odd social contextual changes simply work to increase the emotional affect, like a dozen playdates in video format.
There’s a phenomenon online where hobby spaces get “taken over” by more progressive mod teams in a variety of domains but especially terminally online spaces (video game modding, illustrations, speedrunning, etc). We see this on Reddit too. One possible reason for this is the uniquely reinforcing culture of online Leftist spaces. Someone becoming a mod on an otherwise unknown speedrunning discord community is something that would be praised in these communities and an earnest mark of reputation. And maybe they are right to do so — in any case the effect is that these small positional advancements can be a source of continual reward for the Leftist enjoying their quasi-lovebombing, while at the same time advancing the cause day after day.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Q is a stressful, antisocial phenomena and was from the get-go IMO. It didn’t promote bonding, praise, or positive emotion. It promoted rabbit holes, paranoia, and subscriptions to Q analysis. I actually considered some years ago that it was an Intel-job specifically to neuter the activism of the Right, because it prevented pretty much anything but conspiratorial rabbit-holling and conjecture. I suppose there is something to be said about the belief that you’re one of the chosen supporters who knows the real truth, but this is of modest benefit compared to the alternatives of community participation.
I don’t think winning or losing factors in to this so much, I mean you have MAPs trying to make the same community as Transgenders, and MAPs are going to lose no matter what. I also don’t think the Christian Right has communities as vehemently positive as Leftist communities, at least I haven’t heard of them.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I’ve check out these spaces, as well as the IRL parallel to the spaces (leftist Unitarian churches in college towns). They switched to snapping from clapping and they would take umbrage with any gendered speech, so they said y’all instead of you guys. A pat on the back would be a no-go especially male to other-gendered. The LGBT-oriented leftist spaces on Twitter and Discord are really this hypersensitive about language, and the point explains how hyper-sensitivity is a corollary to hyper-positivity.
Contrary to being “leftist places” suck, I was concerned I was too hard on right wing places! The leftist places have thriving activism, which for the sake of ideology propagation, means they don’t suck.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Hopefully we will get rigorous discussions on race and behavior/IQ. With western demographics changing quickly and equity being promoted, it’s important to understand the consequences of racial diversity.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
It’s worth noting this over-representation simply to defend the large population of basic white people who do not have the same privileges but are continually smeared in newspapers as being privileged and over-represented. That’s really the most important bit for me and why I care about it. It is the easiest and most efficient argumentative tool for deconstructing affirmative action / privilege discourse. I do not think that I would actually want any form of affirmative action that reduces Jewish percentage in institutions, except perhaps national security positions related to the Middle East.
But yeah, the absence of noting has damaged some conversations. Weinstein and Epstein and Maxwell were not just basic white people, they had strange relationships with well-connected AIPAC lobbyists and Israeli politicians and at least one victim testified to anti-gentile comments. But no one noted this. Basic white people are under-represented at Ivy leagues and have been for a while, but no one notes this (except for on themotte, by like, me and two others), and this is important to note when discussions on Ivy League representation is had. It’s actually important; not edgy, to note this in certain discussions.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
How about Favorites, Engaging, and Rulebreaking? This would be <3, 💡, and a judge’s gavel as symbols.
Voting a post as engaging pushes it higher in the default comment hierarchy, but we can keep the score hidden, and the default effect will be to increase the position in the comment hierarchy. For instance if a post gets 30 direct child comments, the engaging+ will boost the position of the most engaging comment. “Engaging” is the right way to think about it, because it could be low effort but still very engaging, and high effort but not very engaging. The most engaging three comments in the chain could have a unique identifier so that a casual reader with limited time can quickly read through “generally good” comments. To make up for new comments not being defaulted, maybe each post can have a New: X toggle, so you can only see New or only see Engaging. I read most comment, but busier users certainly do not, and there’s no reason to make it so difficult for busy users to find the most engaging comments.
Favoriting a comment will give the user a notification that it has been favorited. This is positive reinforcement without positive punishment, and the science shows that positive punishment reduces engagement. Downvotes are a form of punishment. For added benefit, the user can get a notification that they received +10 or +25 favorites in intervals, along with “milestone” imagery and so on. This is simply to encourage participation, nothing else.
For comments that truly ought to be punished, this seems to overlap with comments that ought to be modded. In which case there should be a unique button for that distinct from Engaging/Favorites, maybe the button looks like a judge’s gavel. This would be hidden from users but seen by mods. This makes sense because most of us are probably reading bad comments anyway, so the downvote system doesn’t really do its intended thing of orienting the best comments. Instead of something obviously punishing like being at -80 (like when I made fun of Magnus Carlsen on the chess subreddit yesterday), it’s sufficient to leave the comment at the bottom of the comment hierarchy, and if it should be modded there’s a mechanism for that.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Their social sphere (access to important members of Jewish community, Israeli politicians and spy agencies) were elements of how they gained influence and went unpunished. Both had connections to a former Israeli PM, Epstein’s original financial backing was from a heavily pro-Jewish billionaire (Wexler), and Weinstein had an Israeli spy agency he used to spy on victims. We’re not talking about religion here but an affiliative culture.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I think you are downvoted for referring to people as retards and spergs. The substance of your post is otherwise not bad (Rick & Morty was meant to illustrate bad people and bad behavior, this was lost on the public, which in turn illustrates badness of public).
I’m going to hijack your post make an unrelated one on television. I was watching LOTR and the racial diversity stuck out to me in a negative way. Is this because I’m racist? No, I don’t think my racism has anything to do with it. See, humans can naturally tell apart members of one tribe from another by appearance. I can tell French phenotype from Icelandic, Irish from Italian, Baltic from Russian. When people mate together in insularity over hundreds of years, then barring a caste system they generally begin to look the same. So when I see a whole bunch of dwarves living in a rock together, and then a token black dwarf is highlighted by camera, this throws off the believability of story. Because if the dwarves were one community, you wouldn’t have such variability in phenotype. I would prefer all the dwarves to be black, or all of them mulatto, then this weird hodgepodge of different phenotypes. If the dwarves are one people living together over thousands of years, then you really ought to cast them as one people, whatever shade of humanity you want.
Then there’s the question of the black elves, but I’m not sure if Middle Earth is ready for this discussion. The elves were always depicted as very Northern European, with a sort of pacified and peaceful temperament. The inclusion of even Southern Europeans sort of violates our intuition here, and yes I know Orlando Bloom is Southern European but that’s why they changed his hair color and skin tone and such. Speaking as someone with Southern European blood/family there are real differences in temperament.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Should threads be bump-able by new comments, like in a traditional forum? The benefit to this is that it keeps conversations going throughout the week, instead of dying out after a day. The detriment is that it de-prioritizes novelty. But there could be a good formula for balancing the two: novel threads always stay first for some hours, and older threads require increasingly more participation to be bumped to the top.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
That might actually be an enjoyable read. Like a true male power fantasy revved up to 100, just for fun. What books count? Closest I can think of is James Bond and Poldark.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I think this is pessimistic. You can easily get tens of thousands of members for a more quality-based fantasy award. You’ll be shit on, yes, but not deplatformed.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Pretty bad I think, unless it’s a very small dose. My experiences with a moderate-small dose was overwhelming and I required supervision.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
The influential community is far more influential, has far more social connections, and a relationship to a sovereign ethnostate that has a reputation for foulplay
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Do Brontë, Woolf and Austen usually have female protagonists that follow the hero’s journey, or the heroine’s journey? I’m trying to think back to what I remember about Gossip Girls… it may be that there’s a gendered difference in what men and women want to consume. The new heroine’s journey might be building upon an earlier form, as a new variation of the damsel in distress motif. She’s saved not from a charming ideal man but from her own self-actuallyization and capitalist-individualist empowerment. I’m really not familiar enough with female protagonists in women’s literature, but lots of the Disney protagonists have the old motif.
Chess World Controversy
After rising player Hans Niemann defeated world champion Magnus Carlsen as black (when wins are unusual), Magnus insinuated that Hans cheated and quit the ongoing tournament. Internet detectives and Magnus fanboys leapt at the opportunity to discover the truth and/or administer mob justice. Chess commentators, lead by popular Twitch streamer and top player Hikaru, analyzed Han’s post-game interview looking for clues. Lots of unsubstantiated claims followed: that he showed signs of guilt, that he made up a past game position in his analysis to hide that he cheated (later proven wrong), that Hans was faking his accent, that Hans was unable to justify his chess positions, and so on. The stronger evidence is that Hans claimed to have looked at the chess variation that Magnus chose as white, which is improbable (like 0.01%). However, Hans has a strategy of getting in opponents’ heads, and claiming to be able to predict the opponents’ preparations is a great way to do that.
The controversy goes on, and is made up of many parts.
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That Magnus insinuated and withdrew has led to many now saying “he is kind of a dick”, as chess teacher Ben Finegold put it. Magnus had a pure reputation before, but it was known he handled losses poorly. Magnus’ withdrawal, due to a technicality in the tournament rules, means that he keeps his high FIDE rating, while Hans’ win is somewhat discounted. Magnus’ silence since his tweet is blameworthy.
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Hans cheated online at chess.com when he was 12, and again when he was 17. He is now 19. The cheating two years ago was not in a competitive setting and was allegedly to increase his online rating to entice stream viewers. There has been no claim that he has cheated except in these two instances, and he has never cheated in a competition.
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Chess.com has allowed him to continue playing since his 2017 cheating incident. But after this week’s (unevidenced) cheating claim against Hans, chess.com banned him from future tournaments, costing him significsnt career opportunities and prize moneys. What’s curious about this is that chess.com is buying out Play Magnus, a separate company that Magnus has a relationship with. Did Magnus apply pressure on Chess.com to ban Hans? This would be more serious than other parts of the controversy, as it would mean that Magnus is one of the worst sore losers in chess history, not just hurting an opponent’s reputation but using backroom influence to take away his opportunities.
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Some chess players, like Hikaru and Naroditsky, leapt at the opportunity to accuse Hans, while others with greater reputation (eg Kasparov) defended him. There is now a stable opinion online that Hans did not cheat and that Magnus is in the wrong, but this took three days post-allegation to develop. Interestingly, it seemed like the chess players who were competitors to Hans were the ones eager to take him down, while the older greats defended him and pleaded for measured opinions.
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It should be noted they Hans’ had a meteoric rise in rating over the past year, one of the greatest in history. At 19, he has years left of improvement. So we’re dealing with potential world champion material, not just a random contender.
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There is rigorous cheating detection at this tournament (Sinquefeld Cup, St Louis), TSA-like security. Since the accusation they implemented even more security measures. The theories on how he cheated are truly bizarre, from Hans having an antenna in his hair, to having swallowed a chip that vibrated in morse code, to having inserted a vibrating ”device” sublingually to alert him on tactics, to Godfather-esque hidden bathroom devices. I’m not joking.
If I can don my conspiracy hat for a moment, Hans is opened his remarks after his Magnus win by talking about how he doesn’t want to be canceled for misspeaking (about Magnus having “tics”, when the PC term would be mannerisms). A keen eye would sense that Hans is not so progressive. Chess is political, with former champion Kasparov constantly in the news with his anti-Russian, Russian players banned from playing in certain tournaments, former leading chess players criticized (but not more) for claiming women cannot be as good as male players due to biology, etc. I wonder whether there are interests behind the scenes that do not want to see a Fischer-esque personality rise in popularity.
Links:
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Hans post-win analysis: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DCeJrItfQqw
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Hikaru insinuation: https://youtube.com/watch?v=5qTs-eFgLqc
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Hans post-insinuation defense (a strong defense, as blackened reputation, Hans-variation), which earned him much respect online: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CJZuT-_kij0
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Hans beating Hikaru, just for fun: https://youtube.com/watch?v=EJTg-emEAjQ
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Hans being beaten by Naroditsky, just for fun: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ddc-C3SqidI
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The funniest chess teacher, Ben Finegold: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DMxJbJGGKgQ
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If you want to play chess, use Lichess.com. Chess.com appears as a link because that’s the name of the company.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
This obscure album from 1972 has weirdly modern instrumentation and production
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
I don’t get how making up this accusation isn’t as bad as if it happened. It’s the same sum total public anxiety, needless investigating, and social discomfort.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
The elongated string/horn notes, especially when they overlay each other and the vocal track. And the elongated moaned vocals. And the way the strings comes in for brief seconds at higher and lower registers just to insinuate a scale, especially the screechy high notes. And then the texture of the background female vocalists voices being purposely soft and at a low volume.
In the second song, when the female vocalists come in for that “we’re gonna make a little music”, it strikes me as something I’d hear from an indie band. And that kind of melody is weird for 70s.
I think this site has a real chance to be greater than the subreddit. Just a few thoughts/concerns —
There should be good security involving user IPs given the content of posts published. Bad actors will try to steal user IP histories if the site gains in popularity. We should go so far as to crowdsource funding for a 3rd party IP-related security assessment ( I do not know personal security experience of admins). This has added benefit of being a marketable tag on, “you can feel safe regarding your IP address”, etc.
Pages instead of “view more comments”. This is easier to see how many top-level posts in the thread have been missed, as well as navigating to old threads. (Also, is there a way to “favorite” threads and receive notifications when it has been updated?)
It might be a good idea to label this site a beta version with a later official launch date in six months, as they do with video game releases. Why? It gives new users a feeling of exclusivity while excusing new site mishaps and beginning retention problems.
The weekly threads should be every other weekly, to boost the number of “total comments” counts, to retain and increase user retention. Reddit did this by increasing upvote counts artificially. In facts, giving each user a +5 points per upvote (and perhaps one daily +10 ability for well-liked comments), while difficult to implement, is a great way to increase engagement subconsciously. We should not shy away from using the full weight of psychology to make his site better than Reddit, for many utilitarian reasons, not the least of which is fuck reddit.
TheMotte on Reddit should advertise the new site with daily posts, maybe “best ofs”, not threads, with screenshots of the new site, to remind and entice subscribers on Reddit to move to the new location. Emphasize ease of signing up (20 second sign up).
If this site eventually develops a filter mechanism for new users, ie we want 100 people to try the site and 20 to stay, there are lots of ways to attract new members. The problem with, say, subtly talking about this forum on a philosophy forum to attract new members is that you don’t want to be overrun by bad posters. So, while it’s not best to do this now, in the future if we want site to grow in popularity, a kind of “new user filter” would be great. Something like “one allotted post per day” for new users until sufficiently upvoted over the course of a week. Just an idea to think about later on, when site is fully colonized by original users.
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