curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
12d 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
6d ago
The way you say it you'd think Critical Theory was an esoteric subversive cult and not a very popular and influential historical school of thought, whose notable figures rank among the most cited individuals in all of published research everywhere.
curious_straight_ca
6d ago
It seems pretty clear that they have in fact derived a very significant and irreversible political advantage from this tactic
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.
curious_straight_ca
6d 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
6d 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.
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
14d 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
14d 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.
and which can drop non-blinded studies one level in assessed quality, thus preventing many non-blinded studies from qualifying as high quality evidence
Were there even any randomized, non-blinded studies cited? I skimmed the references and didn't see anything. And it'd make sense that there aren't any randomized trials of puberty blockers or hormones given the emotional weight everyone puts on the issue. I'm not sure how this is relevant unless there are specific 'non-blinded studies' that aren't classified as 'high quality'.
Or maybe you're referring to a more sophisticated criticism, that these "critics" are making. What critics? Where? May we have a link?
Why make this particular criticism? How does it tie into the main claims the report makes? Can you at least outline the core of the report, what it wants to tell us and how it attempts to support those claims, before you attempt to undermine it? This is like a twitter swipe - take a thing, point out a "flaw", write like this flaw is a critical flaw, and watch as everyone's satisfied that the bad guys were wrong again, without anyone involved understanding what the thing even is.
It'd be more interesting to explain the context behind the report - the politics and medical practice in youth transgender medicine in the UK for the past few years - and then explain what the report claims, and then go into the reactions it's gotten.
If you want a criticism, I think the best one is just: There are ethical (it's conversion therapy for the control group) and methodological reasons to not do RCTs in trans youth. Given that, we need to use the evidence we have, and a standard requiring RCTs is bad.
(edited because I used the wrong link)
I'd dispute that - there's a reason high quality evidence requires RCTs, it's because history has shown that observational studies are just not reliable. If you disagree, I'd suggest picking a specific study (not review) that this review considered low-quality but you think is good enough to form part of the foundation for a medical guideline, and we can critically examine it and see if it is. I don't think there are ethical reasons to not do RCTs for trans youth that wouldn't also apply to RCTs for treatments for deadly diseases, which we do all the time when it isn't clear if the treatment is beneficial or not. I think the methodological reasons are ... significant, but (guessing) not in fact worse than the problems with observational studies.
curious_straight_ca
20d 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
21d ago
I don't think this is perfect. There are a significant number of people who seem to have developed something like transness, whatever you want to call it (and maybe there are different things that cluster), people who describe themselves getting off to the idea of being a woman and wanting to wear female clothes and only then learning about being trans and really wanting to be that. Here's an example, and this isn't strong cherrypicking, I linked Zack's blog in this thread.
On 6 August 2006 (I was eighteen years old), while browsing Wikipedia (likely the 31 July revision of what is now the "Blanchard's transsexualism typology" article?), I came across the word autogynephilia for the first time, and immediately recognized that this was the word; this was the word for my thing.
I didn't know it was supposed to be controversial, and was actually surprised that it had been coined in the context of a theory of transsexualism; I had never had any reason to come up with any ludicrous rationalizations that I was somehow literally a girl in some unspecified metaphysical sense.
I wrote in my notebook:
THERE'S A WORD FOR IT. There's a word for it. I don't know whether to be happy that there's an adjective for what I have, or sad that other men have it, & that it's not mine, & only mine. Bless Wikipedia for showing me [...] But still, after all emotions have fitted themselves away, there is the word. "Autogynephilia." So simple; I know all the foreign roots; I should have thought of it. "Autogynephilic." That's what I am.
notebook: THERE'S A WORD FOR IT ...
And:
Scarcity is a metaphysical fact, so why am I hurt when my word (which I didn't invent & only discovered a few hours ago) has so many connotations attached to it that I don't like? The dictionary definition is perfect for me, but all the exposition after that has to do with transsexualism, which annoys me, although thinking of it now, I suppose it would seem to be a logical extension to some. I'm autogynephilic without being gender-dysphoric—or am I? If transitioning cheap & fast & painless & perfect—wouldn't I at least be tempted? What I can't stand is transsexuals who want to express the man/woman they "truly are inside"—because I don't think there's any such thing. It has to be about sex—because gender shouldn't exist.
A lot more people have this experience with 'being trans' than 'autogynephilia', and I've read the same thing about 'being trans'. I don't think this is compatible with an exclusively memetic diagnosis, even though I do think most currently trans individuals would desist and forget about everything related to it eventually if they were in a universe with no other (depending on your POV) TruTrans people / people believing in the meme. And I think as a result your ethical grounding has to actually be able to claim 'no, these people who didn't get it memetically shouldn't transition either' if you want to claim that the concept as a whole should go.
curious_straight_ca
14d 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
10d ago
But if you think about a 'criminal underclass', are going to see it as a loss of social status?
curious_straight_ca
14d 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
14d ago
Surely there's somewhere in the code you could just add 'if username in ['guy1', 'guy2']: return'?
curious_straight_ca
14d 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
28d ago
Oh lol, I didn't even click it
curious_straight_ca
29d ago
I specifically mean claiming that existing adults who believe themselves to trans women, do so for multiple years, and most centrally are MtFs who genuinely feel terrible about not being women, shouldn't start taking hormones and socially transition. Within this argument the claim isn't that they're Becoming-Woman, the claim is that trying to mime the social roles and appearances of women and starting hormones appears to make them happier, more content, etc
It is incredibly weird to try to imagine though how so many people who are not, in fact, mentally women, could come to the conclusion that they are mentally women and start mimicking that social role and genuinely enjoy it. And as far as I can tell that is true! It really speaks to how complex and contingent human values and desires are, and how many potential configurations of human beliefs and societies there are.
curious_straight_ca
28d ago
I think the weirdness factor and that it was self-imposed will heavily outweigh that tbh
curious_straight_ca
21d 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
curious_straight_ca
21d ago
I agree that's a reasonable factor but it doesn't seem like a significant one. I'd be more amenable to an argument of the form "people can adapt to anything, and it's just not bad enough to override the confused desires that led them there", but they do not at all seem to be in the state of "would regret it but see as sunk cost", that feels very different.
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"?
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