coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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9hr ago
After Yiddish and Pennsylvania Dutch, the language with the highest TFR in America is Somali. Also, you can probably find a study on urban-dwelling Salafist families in the Middle East who have huge families, ie there are fundamentalist families in Riyadh working oil & gas who will have 5+ kids.
coffee_enjoyer
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10hr ago
The key point of interest IMO is that we funded it and supported it, and so, as the evidence right now points to a lot of children having faced needless starvation for no legible reason, we actually funded and supported a policy of arbitrary mass starvation directed at children. For a lot of Americans that deserved attention in a way that an African civil war typically does not, although I’d note that we cared a lot about the Rwandan Civil War back in the day, and even growing up years after the fact I can recall seeing a lot of ambient social and political interest about it.
coffee_enjoyer
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19hr ago
I remember my surprise at how this forum reacted to the atrocities in Gaza. Not a lot of posts or interest about it; nothing compared to how it gripped political discussion in America at large. I was even mod-warned for posting on the subject too many times. Our empathy can be exceedingly narrow when it is convenient.
coffee_enjoyer
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22hr ago
How would your 2016 self have reacted to the subsequent changes in the discursive landscape? If someone told me, “the wealthiest man in the world bought Twitter and posts photos of ‘MechaHitler’ in a bikini while the President gives Europa soundbytes at Davos and the DHS posts vaporwave Moonman edits”, I would tell them to take their meds.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
I love this topic. We often have the same pet interests. Some thoughts from the angle of psychology:
There is a big difference in what is being conditioned between confession and therapy. In confession, using the ideal subject as illustration, there is the experience of aversive stimuli (or punishment) until confession occurs. He has both the guilt of having caused serious harm, and the fear of a miserable future consequence that has a chance of transpiring at any moment (“like a thief in the night”). The commission of a bad action results in an immediate and strong “intrinsic” punishment in the subject, which is only removed upon confession. This means that confession is reinforced, and also the ambient environmental stimuli on the way to confession is reinforced, namely the Church and all of its unique cues, which takes on further positive valence and increases general “approach behavior”. Some bad action B is punished, and some confession behavior + stimuli C is reinforced. And what is it that comprises C? Approaching the Church, seeing the Church imagery, the scent and sound, engaging in the usual gestures and phrases, all of this will have trace reinforcement. But the strongest reinforcement is saved for examining, humbling, and admitting a fault or offense. This is pretty interesting, because while the commission of the action is punished, the awareness + expressing + forecasting + humbling of ourselves has reinforcement. The result of this is that a person is deterred from committing a fault, but not actually deterred from self-reflection and self-criticism, which will actually increase as it takes on positive valence.
In therapy, well, the conditioning is all muddled. Things aren’t clearly reinforced or punished. Attending therapy is enjoyable for a lot of people, as is talking about their problems. It’s enjoyable to sit in an interesting office and have a smart person hear us talk in a way where we don’t experience much aversion / punishment. The complaining about our predicaments is reinforced, whereas in Christianity too much complaining falls more into “venial sin” territory. It may be that self-exploration is actually punished in therapy, because when the subject does this he is introduced to new aversive stimuli by the therapist. The therapist has the difficult job of somehow making the patient averse to his bad actions without making him averse to therapy or making him averse to self-disclosure. This is hard, because there is no “Hell Belief” that the therapist can work to rescue from. It may be that complaining and bad behavior actually becomes reinforced because it promotes further therapy (an enjoyable activity). I think a therapist can convince a subject on the intrinsic damage of his action and to the relief that comes from corrective action, but this is harder when you’re not dealing with such a simplified and potent worldview as heaven vs hell, as you have to somehow persuade the subject to an objective valuation of human behavior.
In Christendom, confession is one part of an expansive plan to modify you for the better. And one of the modifications is that you pay less attention to social grievances. You should ideally be buffered against social stress because, among other reasons, it is a mark of honor and a rewarded act to receive all kinds of social injustices without complaint, like Christ. This means that when they inevitably happen to you, it’s not so catastrophic, but instead an expected part of one’s ultimately-rewarding journey:
For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly. For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God. Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.
If Christian modification is successful, there’s just not a lot to complain about, except to complain about one’s own evilness for the purposes of deterring us from said evilness. In its ideal form (which hardly exists today) every Christian has a solid Brotherhood within which they exult in stressful trials (Romans 5:3) and encourage each other’s endurance (James 1:9). This is optimal, because the social joys of conversation are a reward for stress-buffering behaviors and beliefs. When your focus is on enduring and improving and spiritual war and the spiritual “climb”, there shouldn’t be a lot of room for catastrophizing over stuff. I remember watching that Alex Honnold documentary — the guy who just climbed a skyscraper in Tapei to like millions of people yesterday, I guess, because why not — and he said that climbing eliminated the rumination he had over the death of his father. This is due to adrenaline and life-or-death stakes, but it’s also due to the Flow State which is proven to reduce rumination. Well the optimal flow state isn’t climbing skyscrapers, but somehow blending reward pursuit with righteousness, which I think the Christians of antiquity and the Middle Ages really tried to do for its gains in stress reduction.
Maybe my understanding of therapy is woefully off, but like, we’re at 11% of population going to therapy and increasing, I imagine for young urban professional liberals it’s maybe 25% (?), and there are 200,000 therapists in America? Doesn’t seem sustainable whatsoever. Seems like we had to find a more expedient solution here.
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
My view is as follows: mass migration poses a greater threat to America than any 20th century war we participated in. As a consequence, I’m fine with the same amount of casualties if it promotes a sealed border. Total WWII American casualties were ~1 million, so I would be fine with 1 million casualties if it seals the border. The military is fine with a certain number of deaths during training, which I think comes to around 400 training deaths annually, and the whole purpose of the military is so that foreigners do not invade us and replace us. I file these police shootings as akin to training deaths, in that they are operation accidents which are entirely expected and which deserve a brief “ah, unfortunate” before we move on to greater concerns like improving civilization and maximizing wellbeing. If what we want is a safe country, or a beautiful country, or a developed country, then in my opinion we don’t want endless migration from people who perform worse according to a variety of metrics. If you can’t accept deaths in the pursuit of deporting those who are statistically guaranteed to replace you (current trends continuing), then I don’t know how you can justify any war whatsoever. You might as well just disband the military completely at that point.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
I like to imagine somewhere in the world is an avid reader who carries a 30x pocket magnifier in one pocket, and a small library of 1/30th-sized books in another pocket.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
There is a natural desire to not be duped, trapped, enslaved, or subordinate, and there is also a desire to be aware of one’s surroundings. The decision-maker does not wish to place himself in this condition even if he knows that his future self would forget about these negative features, because in the present he feels a primal aversion to doing these things to himself. The thought experiment might only prove that we have certain hedonic concerns (eg safety from threats = aware of surroundings) which override our ability to envision pursuing other hedonic interests, that in certain contexts we are averse to forecasting future pleasures because of an urgent concern. An animal that doesn’t desire to sleep (and pleasantly dream) because a predator is nearby is still expressing hedonic interest. Or if you tell someone, “eat this [disgusting waste product] and when you’re done eating it you’ll receive 100 free meals” — our hedonic primitive aversion supercedes any thought of entertaining rational cost-benefit analysis (insofar as we have an intact disgust instinct). So perhaps Nozik has only proven that, not only are we hedonic, but we are also instinct-oriented about our hedonic concerns.
An alternative to the experience machine would be the following: God has given humanity the opportunity to enter a perfectly hedonic realm. All of humanity has a vote in this, majority rule. No one is left behind on earth — an essential clause to mitigate any status concern about who gets to inherit the earth. No one will be subordinate and all will be in bliss. What will we choose? We will choose the hedonic realm, certainly. There’s no residue of “dastardly scientist harvesting us” as is found unconsciously in the machine experiment. And religions speak in similar terms precisely because we love the hedonic realm. It was blissful in Eden and it will be blissful in Heaven. The traditional vision of Heaven is maximally hedonic. Anselm articulates it as not unlike a heroin user’s description of his first high:
The pleasures we will possess in heaven are of such a kind that the more they are experienced, the more fervently shall one desire them. For, since they are perfect in nature, they shall bring satisfaction and yet never give rise to any boredom or tedium. I believe that there is no one living, or no one who has ever lived, who would not prefer the taste and experience of these perfect heavenly delights than any earthly pleasure whatsoever!
in the future life of heaven, ineffable pleasure shall completely inebriate and saturate those who are saved. An unimaginable outflowing of delight shall fill them and all their senses with the most indescribable sweetness. The eyes, the ears, the nostrils, the mouth, the hands, the feet, the throat, the heart, the loins, the lungs, the bones, and even the very marrow of the bones shall all experience the plentitude of ecstasy. Each of the senses and parts of the body shall enjoy this plenitude individually, and also all of the senses and the whole body will enjoy it in its supreme totality. This delight of the senses shall be of a miraculous sweetness and marvelous delight, such that the entire human being will drink deeply from the crystalline stream of celestial pleasure and be utterly and gloriously inebriated by its all-surpassing fullness!
And this shouldn’t be surprising given the social role of religion. You want a maximally appetitive state to direct behavior, and the most appetitive states for humans is obvious when looking at what humans do when they’ve relinquished the primal instincts of social obligation: endless desiring (MMORPGs, meth, nicotine, x, tik tok), endless pacifying (alcoholism), endless wonder, endless pleasure (heroin). Similar to what you wrote about status, the original vision of Heaven is described to satisfy our need for status: the inheriting of a Kingdom, the ruling over of your tribes, room in a heavenly mansion, the sitting on thrones.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
If Europe wanted Americans to feel a sense of extrapolitical obligation toward European interests, then it should have allocated $__,000,000,000 toward the funding of European-ancestry cultural and religious social movements. Israel is a testament to the efficacy of this strategy. As is India with its strong lobbyists in Canada and America. It failed to do this, and while it’s not too late it is running out of time to catch up.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
IMO algorithms have changed dating in recent years, as feeds will present women with highly attractive men outside of their extended social network at a considerably higher rate than in previous half-decades. In the past, a highly desirable man within one’s extended social network would be vetted to see whether he is dating half the town; if you are now being shown men outside of your network, there is no vetting possible outside of dedicated apps (which most women will never use). So an attractive man who goes viral on algorithmic feed social media can easily find 100 or 1000 dates across his state. If you are 18-25, very healthy, irreligious, why wouldn’t you do this? And for a woman, the idea of dating a man who is both attractive and famous (and with whom she can obtain fame herself) is as irresistible proposition. I think this explains why more young adult men than young adult women describe themselves as single:
63% of men under 30 describe themselves as single, compared with 34% of women in the same age group
This doesn’t apply in reverse. A highly attractive woman does not typically have an interest in dating more than two or three men at the same time. Affluent women where prostitution is legal do not typically pay for whores, but many men would enjoy meeting hundreds or even thousands of women. A man’s fantasy novel may involve dozens of partners, whereas a woman’s involves only 1 or 2 high quality partners. This is one of the strictly-biological asymmetries at play in our brave new decidedly-non-paternalistic world. A similar asymmetry is that women have higher standards for men in online dating than men do for women, and that political polarization will mathematically prevent lots of progressive women from ever finding a husband.
There is no quick solution to this problem. The solution requires bringing back the cultural technology that we lost, the rules that shame promiscuity and teach women to be humble and teach men to settle down early and not date half the town. The women who have been misled into thinking that they deserve the hottest man in the world will be miserable at the realization that their destined match is Literally Just Some Normal Guy With a Bad Haircut. For men who have exhausted their dating prospects, the best solution is probably just to look at different countries, where “American” adds extra points in dating. It is no more abnormal for a foreign woman to fall for an American man as it is for an American woman to fall for a Frenchman or British aristocrat, or a Midwestern girl who watched too many K-Dramas to fall for a Korean. There was a funny tweet that went viral the other day about American GIs finding European women more agreeable than American women, so much so that American women had to launch organizations and campaigns to stop all the marriages. But ultimately I think that should be a last option, and imho you should pick a woman from Europe or the Middle East or whatever your culture is, over anywhere else.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
China is good if you are typically Chinese, with instincts toward emotional suppression, conformity, lower novelty-seeking, in-group cohesion, etc. I imagine the rigidity in work and school would drive the typical European into neurosis. There’s no reason to think that a state can ever be designed such that it maximizes the happiness of two distinct cognitive / temperament types.
For Yiddish-speaking households: https://www.niussp.org/fertility-and-reproduction/fertility-and-nuptiality-of-ultra-orthodox-jews-in-the-united-states/
In the American Community Survey 2021, looking at spoken language at home, Somali sits at 5.2 https://x.com/BirthGauge/status/1583095374654283776
https://data.census.gov/app/mdat/ACSPUMS1Y2024
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