curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Gatekeeping and openness aren't exactly the same, you can be "open" and also high-quality if you're swift, brutal, and arbitrary with moderation, which is the best place to be imo.
That theory is almost certainly not true. There is minimal commercial value to Reddit accounts
... How sure are you of that? I'd buy a few hundred reddit accounts with 10k karma each if they sold at 10c a pop right now (they're easier to have sister-site style fun with), but alas based on both my memory and checking of sites for buying and selling reddit accounts, aged accounts with good karma can sell for tens or hundreds of dollars (and several of the $10-100+ accounts are sold out). There's great breadth and depth in the online advertising market, and there are plenty of ways to use reddit accounts with enough karma and history to get past various automated filters. You don't even necessarily need to sell the accounts if you spam with them yourself.
And bots reposting the exact same content from a year ago is not something exclusive to political subreddits, I see the same thing on every other subreddit very frequently.
I can also say from personal experience that reddit does actively fight vote manipulation with account suspension and removing the involved upvotes.
You'd have to be pretty simple to think that most of the political stuff you read on Reddit or Hacker News isn't deeply manipulated. It doesn't take many votes to sway things in one direction or another. All it takes is a few downvotes to keep dissenting voices from even appearing in front of real users. On the other hand, with a few upvotes, your own content will be featured front and center. It's comically easy to achieve.
So, I don't really think this is true. Certainly there's a lot of attempted manipulation, and some of it works, but mostly I think that good content gets popular and bad content doesn't. Up until reddit directly banned all the wrongthink, it was quite popular, you'd think the hypothesized manipulation would've stopped that.
I don't think there's a difference between a 'sincere' statement and 'signaling' statement - the words emerge from the same processes, the same process that generates 'abortion is a FUNDAMENTAL right', and the same process that 'everyone is beautiful in their own unique way <3'. I wish the average person had a clean separation between signaling beliefs and sincere ones, everything would be so much nicer.
And, of course, if teleported 10 m from a bear with saliva dripping from its canines and 10 m away from a random male, the same woman would run away towards the man, that's a deep instinct one can't deny.
The interesting question here, if any, is whether norms encouraging such long-winded and massive pranks are acceptable or a sign of dysfunction
I think the above belief is closer to just a 'stupid popular belief' than a long-winded prank, and as such is just a universal human phenomena. But long-winded games of social deception are also human universals, small-scale human societies are no more honest and harmonious than we are, and intelligence and self-interest combined necessarily leads to such games.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The DA is generally considered to be much more competent. The Western Cape has been doing the least badly of all the provinces. The DA is fairly centrist, economically, and opposes affirmative action and the radical redistribution programs suggested by more extreme elements within South African politics. Unfortunately, it also has something of a reputation of being the "white people's party." Its base is certainly not entirely white, as it has been getting around 20% of the vote, of late, which is more than double the entire white population, but that is not entirely unfounded.
If you're a bayesian reasoner, you might have a hypothesis - "white people have a higher average IQ than black people for genetic reasons, and this is a large contributor to political stability and economic success". You might have other hypotheses with other explanations for poor political and economic conditions in Africa. And, reasoning about history is hard, there's a lot of contingency and it's hard to determine causation, but if you add up all the small updates it the probability for the first hypothesis seems to steadily move up. So, as a genuine question from someone who isn't confident either way - what are some pieces of evidence against that hypothesis? Not about IQ and genes, that's been done to death , but specifically it as a contributor to political and economic stability. Similar anecdotes to the quote are fine.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
If I wanted to eliminate lab-grown meat, I'd target the organizations that create it. Open investigations into the researchers and funders looking for political extremism. Target the patentability and profitability of the technologies involved. ("You can't patent chicken!") Publicize the process that creates these products. Labeling doesn't go far enough, you want to associate the components of lab-grown with dangerous chemicals and bad health outcomes. (I think when you look into the science of what they're currently doing, and not the glowing press releases, this is basically the truth.) Banning lab-grown just makes it exotic, and does nothing to stop its development in other localities.
What political extremism? "You can't patent chicken" isn't going to work as a slogan when 1) you can, in fact, patent literal breeds of actual chickens and 2) none of the things being patented remotely resemble chickens.
Taste is just an engineering problem, though. We understand enough about how cells grow and divide to intervene in the process, and understand the chemicals that cause things to taste like so pretty well. I think you could get lab grown meat that's reasonably indistinguishable in taste from (average store bought, with implied caveats about taste and nutrition) real meat right now if you were willing to pay absurd prices (edit: like, tens of thousands of dollars per pound).
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I'm confident it's plausible, biotech in general is progressing quickly, and getting something that roughly approximates meat just seems like a series of doable but meaningful technical challenges rather than something daunting like 'solving aging'. Might be a decade or so though.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
A substantial proportion of the US obesity crisis is due to HFCS subsidies for farmers
No evidence, but I honestly doubt this, it's too cute. Americans seem to have a strong desire for unhealthy food in general, I don't think HCFS is more fattening than other sugars, and the amount of sugar in food probably isn't that sensitive to the price given how much Americans seem to like having everything be sweet.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I'm pretty sure you're the guy who's ban evaded ten times. Also, wasn't VDARE in the process of being shut down by the NY AG or something?
Law and institutions are passed down as the patrimony of a specific people, and work only for that people
I really doubt that different races have different tendencies towards specific kinds of political or legal institutions. Asians and Jews seem to adapt perfectly fine (as well as anyone else) to liberalism in the US, and whites have presided over a vast design space of political entities over the past few thousand years. And, not confident, I'd expect the non-IQ differences that you'd find between populations to, even if somehow they're important enough to care about race mixing, not look like differences in grand concepts like 'freedom vs authoritarianism'. Because the political thought and organizational complexity involved in such grand concepts is just large, and there's a huge space in between that and the low-level psychological differences you might see between populations. (Compare to, for instance, the hypothetical nebulous tendency among Jews to intellectually or morally subvert their host countries - that's rather questionable for object-level reasons, but you could see differences in psychological instincts leading to that in a way that it wouldn't lead to "asians cant do freedom and democracy"). Individuals that are intelligent enough will, whatever their instincts, try to understand and work within the environment around them, and that together with really basic human instincts is most of what you need to exist within capitalism, or liberalism, or whatever else. As an analogy, in the history of every human population you can find things that clearly resemble religion, and despite whatever differences exist today the smartest people of every race find their way to atheism.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Keep in mind bipolar disorder is treated with medication and therapy, not just therapy. It isn't like depression, where we can debate if medications are effective and if the cause is societal - bipolar severely impacts the lives of those with it, the medications have obvious and dramatic impact and are the difference between living functional lives and just not, the main tradeoff is the crippling side effects. Freddie DeBoer talks about his experience with medication for bipolar here.
It turned out he had taken a bunch of adderal that made him borderline insane and used that therapy speak to deny reality
It's much simpler to blame this on the Adderall or the bipolar disorder than therapy-speak, someone who's tweaked out can deny reality with whatever conceptual framework they want to.
Yet she found a therapist that told her this is true. This clearly isn't a scientific field.
I do not think 'enabling someone to accuse a 5 year old of sexual harassment' is a problem the median therapist has. This is like - accusing medicine of being unscientific because John Campbell and Pierre Kory support it (they are a nurse and a doctor!).
And then, yeah, DEI and wokeness is bad, yep.
All these people that have sued our company for "discrimination" have used bullshit therapy speak to justify their insane claims
It'd improve the post if you provided characterization for this claim - what sorts of insane claims, what therapy-speak, what does an interaction with these people look like?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
But if you think about a 'criminal underclass', are going to see it as a loss of social status?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I strongly disagree with arjin - you should find someone who's in a similar IQ / competence percentile that you are and I doubt the arranged marriage will be.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
You've given us a picture of poverty. Is this painting social realism, a realistic and detailed study, or is it a cartoon collage of unrepresentative impressions?
Jumping straight from two YouTube videos to a diagnosis of social ills is, you'd think, a bad sign. What blows up on YouTube selects hard for being interesting, surprising, and generally stimulating. Youths stealing cars and livestreaming it, that's interesting! People who make decent money but waste it all embarrass themselves, pass the popcorn, not representative.
Rather, it is the culmination of various American policies which have created an underclass which sucks endless resources and only returns crime.
Evidence? What policies, which people? The second youtube channel certainly isn't an example (the guests seem to make about average income and just spend poorly, hardly 'sucking endless resources'), and the former are just a particularly newsworthy example of teenage criminals.
Unfettered illegal immigration further strangles poverty-stricken America ... Of course it helps the government are subsidizing migrants to the tune of $350 per day, or $127,750 per year per migrant which would launch them almost into the top 10% of earners in the United States.
$350/day is not at all representative of the money the govt spends on illegal immigrants per day, you know about it specifically because it's shockingly high (and that's money spent on "services", not money transferred to them), so it's not really a useful way to understand how unfettered illegal immigration is "strangling poverty-stricken America", considering it's specifically in NYC.
So the question remains, what can be done? It's quite possible liberal policy is somewhat correct but doesn't go far enough. Instead of social security checks, benefits should be more tied between work programs and corporations
This is the idea behind things like the EITC and work incentives!
There's something to the idea that a strong state should directly attempt to change the culture in the culture of the criminal underclass, but there's little in the way of good diagnosis or treatment here, "make them go work at amazon" isn't enough, the youth already have plenty of financial incentive to do so.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Thanks for posting, I liked reading it.
Social stratification seems unlikely, analogous to predicting only the rich will have advanced computing technology, meanwhile they use iphones and gpt4-turbo just like we do.
I think the hormone balancing part is very confused, intelligent people adapt their behavior to circumstances in complicated ways and hormones don't just generically modify behavior because it has to coexist / interact with the former
In general, concern about this sort of thing past a few generations is kind of obviated by AGI I think.
There is simply no way that most people would prefer years of incarceration to caning or similar physical punishments.
Sure, but anyone who's getting a sentence of a year is unlikely to be deterred by a single physical punishment. The tradeoff is more caning vs weeks. I'm not actually sure it's on the pareto frontier. Time in jail sucks in a way you can't shrug off, it's burning time you never get back, whereas pain is just pain, it goes away.I think a most people would just shrug off the pain and do it again, unless the pain was bad enough it corresponded to a lasting injury. (And then you get into things that aren't just 'not-progressive' they're just 'obviously evil' from the usual perspective like using medical science to create a drug that causes extreme pain without permanent damage!)
I think swiftness and consistency of enforcement is much more important than the kind of enforcement, anyway. Even if organized retail theft had no punishment at all, cops just grabbed you, returned the stuff, and dropped you off an hour away, it'd quickly stop because there'd be no benefit.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The fact that American fails at empire is a good thing, both for us and for the world
Is it? It it good, for the millions of hungry and displaced Sudanese, that it's not administered by a western government? It's worth thinking carefully about. Sure, re-education camps and censorship are not great. But you named empire, more generally. Even given the authoritarianism, you'd probably rather live in China than in Sudan. It's easy to say you value freedom, but how many lives should be sacrificed on that altar? Africans would probably be closer to freedom, in a positive sense, if the transition to self-rule had happened in a more orderly fashion, or not happened at all. And those with power in Western countries like you do not find re-education camps appealing, and so probably wouldn't implement them.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Surely there's somewhere in the code you could just add 'if username in ['guy1', 'guy2']: return'?
Likewise, I think this is why the Sexual Revolution and the rest of the works of the Enlightenment are not going to last much longer. The lie only works when it hasn't been tested or when the results of the test can be concealed. We've been running the test for decades now, and the systems that work to hide the results are breaking down. Once our society completes its current trajectory, the ideological precursors that created and maintained the Sexual Revolution will no longer be capable of sustaining any degree of credibility.
Really? I think that a bunch of people will feel vaguely burned by the SR as adults and retreat towards conservatism, but this won't lead to lasting change and the youth will be even more progressive and sex-positive and weird, and the cycle will repeat just like it did the past two generations.
The question remains whether there is a coherent cluster of behavior that is naturally shameful to humans, which can be altered through significant effort, or if it's all just a random walk. I think it's the former.
Nature changes with time, though, for some people at points in history it was natural and healthy that it was shameful to not own a proper number of livestock. Now, that's not true anymore. People look at their situation and try to judge what should and shouldn't be shameful. Instincts in our genes are evolved, too, and as the environment changes the value of an instinct changes. Better to justify the kind of shame you want than just say it emerges naturally.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Perhaps government actions are often arbitrary? Maybe the person who did the former has different values, and has a different job, than the person who did the latter?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Please explain to me how the existence of a single "government affiliated kids BDSM club" is evidence they don't want people "making and distributing porn independently of party control"? Homemade, freely available porn gets billions of views every day on reddit and twitter, and of course there are many dedicated porn sites.
To be explicit, your reasoning is deeply flawed and your conclusions are nonsensical, it's like a rdrama comment. It's the 'one single coherent actor is behind every single news headline that annoys me and that thing is the PedoNazis' theory of politics
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Obviously something else happened! Industry, newspaper, modernity, computer. And yet. Is it so implausible that the prophet that spoke to the poor, the sick, and the downtrodden with love has something to do with progressivism? And is a break with "savagery"?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
They're saying that ideas latent in Christianity, deeper currents that Christianity just represents an early emanation of - caring more for the downtrodden, poor, and weak than the strong, caring more about peace and salvation than greatness and power - are to blame for 'cucking Whites'. And that returning to Christianity won't solve that core problem. So this doesn't rebut their argument at all.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
No. The claim that lifting and combat sports make you politically right wing is just untrue in my experience. It seems true in online communities with beliefs that encourage both lifting weights and right-wing political beliefs, but if I exclude that from the anecdotal sample of people I know and control for background there's not much correlation.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
What is your theory here? Why do you think you'd be able to entirely stop trans stuff, but not be able to accomplish a half-measure of 'only adults can transition after a year of psych evals'? The former seems easier, unless you want to go full nrx
Progressivism is currently winning against conservatism/reaction because it won over the elite, not because of illegal immigrants. Fewer hispanics would move the median voter slightly to the right, and thus R and D policies slightly to the right, and that'd still be way to the left of what you want.
Anyway, I don't think any such decentralization will happen, economic systems are deeply intertwined with regulation and the law and that'll make a true decoupling too painful to countenance. And if it was attempted anyway, it'd just be a "man corners dog, dog bites man, man shoots dog" scenario, the state would lose hard.
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