curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I feel like this is just a haze of unrelated grievances rather than an actual cause of PUA dying.
general decline in the human quality of Western women
By any metrics you're claiming, compared to the early 2000s, there hasn't been that much decline, it's been a slow downtrend since the 1960s at least.
rising rates of alcoholism and prescription pill addiction, the normalization of fat acceptance and mental illness etc
Alcoholism hasn't really risen since the 1990s, pill addiction is present in a small minority of the population, 'fat acceptance' has little to do with the actual rise in obesity caused by diet which, itself, was already quite high in 2000, 'mental illness' is rising more as a consequence of greater prominence of diagnosis and therapy than anything else.
the combined effect of stringent laws around "enthusiastic consent"
Ehhh. The laws around enthusiastic consent govern university campus standards for sexual assault, and are (as far as I can tell) not actually enforced enough to entirely change the culture.
note that I didn't address your points about #metoo or the smartphone and internet, which may or may not be true
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
There is still the loss of assets, as the division of assets is different alimony
His "Women tend to wind up significantly poorer after divorce, not richer" claim covers this too. This study seems to agree, finding 'Third, the key domain in which large and persistent gender differences emerged were women’s disproportionate losses in household income and associated increases in their risk of poverty and single parenting', and it checks out anecdotally too.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Perfect example of how a truly abysmal top-level post brought out a great post as a reply that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
You can't seem to conceive of independent states voluntarily joining a union, and then deciding to withdraw from that very same union
Fourth and finally, the biggest mistake of US statecraft was stopping at Berlin in 1945, instead of pushing to Moscow
Right, so the law of nations is determined more by military might than mutual consent. If you can invade one sovereign nation because it's in your eyes immoral, why not another? (to be clear, i'm not defending OP's claims)
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
This post needs a lot more elaboration. Many mottizens are straightforwardly conservatives, so 'degenerate tendencies in Con politics', conservatives coming from 'lost causers', 'proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion' aren't going to land as anything other than insults. And even if we were all on your team, it's still better to explain why something is true than just state it. As someone who disagrees - I don't love 'conservatism' either but just don't see the strong connections to the South - why should this persuade me?
This is a somewhat popular opinion on 'the left' though, I've seen it on twitter a bunch.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Am I just imagining it, or were SSC open threads way more interesting a few years back?
Well, you can check, the old threads are still right there. From the last time I had this thought and checked, they were significantly better back then, but most of the comments were still meh. There are still some good comments on today's regular ACX posts, as seen in occasional 'highlights from the comments' posts.
I doubt the hidden ones are much better.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
no babies killed
I think a few babies were killed? This article says "Partial data by Hebrew media covering the civilians — killed by thousands of invading terrorists and by some of the thousands of rockets fired that day at Israeli cities — reveals that they include two infants, 12 other children under the age of 10, 36 civilians aged 10-19, and 25 elderly people over the age of 80, accounting for 75 of the 764 civilians.". It's true that no babies were 'beheaded' though, afaik.
Israel turned most of the water back on a while ago.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
When the real names are that easy to find, the ethics of enforcing a prohibition on 'doxxing' get a bit weird. What, exactly, are you protecting?
Probably, most people are just lazy and won't look anyway, so it still has a significant effect on the number of peripheral people who know. But I think people feel like they're really protecting alice/chloe's names more than they are.
It's also somehow funny that he only got a 1 week ban from the forum. It feels very short.
(note: I only quickly crosschecked with your descriptions, not with the nonlinear post content)
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Probability already inherently indicates uncertainty though! You can just say you're combining the different 'levels' of uncertainty (what that means is debatable), and the average of [10..30] is 20.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I don't think this is a good objection. Numbers are often approximate. 20% means 'somewhere between 10% and 30%' as much as 'around a hundred pounds' might mean '75-125 pounds'. On the other hand, I usually think it's better to actually say what ideas and conditionals inform your judgement rather than just saying a number, and I'm not sure what the number adds to the former.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Here's the rationalist theory:
Let's say you do this ten thousand times over the course of a few years. Make a list of every prediction, and count how many predictions in the '40%' category were true. If it ends up as '40%', you're making good predictions. Or, take all your predictions and score them according to a brier score or another scoring rule, and if you have a low score you're making good predictions.
The theory is that you can take statements and make predictions, and often the best you can do is '60%' or '20%' while maintaining a good score, and that this says something about the structure of decisionmaking.
I don't like it personally. I think the complexities you need to explore are mostly unrelated to the exact numbers. But you probably can, after the fact, in most scenarios say 'yeah, her relationship was harmed' or 'no, it wasn't', and then score your prediction, and if your calibration is reasonable and you're not manipulating them then it might mean something!
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The vast majority of that space of events is definitely not sexual harassment.
I agree. As I said in reply to someone on the other side, I think these discussions would instantly 100x in usefulness and connecting-of-disagreeing-ideas if people simply chose specific, detailed examples of scenarios where they think the standard for sexual harassment is too low or whatever, and then analyzed those.
I don't think the laws against sexual harassment are actually dangerous in the way these comments imply
It can both be true that most instances that are actually prosecuted are egregious, and that the law on paper criminalizes a wide variety of benign behavior and thus significantly discourages it. I also am not sure how important it actually is though.
I wasn't intending that comment to push a specific view, just highlight a tension.
If the OP led to an interesting discussion, who cares how insane it was
(iirc) The mod team disagreed with that line of thought the last time it was brought up.
I sort of agree. On the other hand, I think we could have more posts that aren't huge effortposts but aren't 'insane', and since we don't we reply to the insane ones. IMO (maybe) there should be a general space (like the BLR) where it's within norms for people to post thoughts, links, etc about generic topics (as opposed to the weekly threads, which are scoped to questions / fun / etc) that can start discussions. I'm guessing there's a lot more supply of posts that are shorter and lighter, but still decent quality, than 20 paragraph effortposts, posts similar to the good replies to this post. But currently only people who for whatever reason ("I'm feeling rather insane right now so I'll post a screed") are willing to break the norms a bit end up making the toplevel posts.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Nybbler expressed it in sneer-adjacent form, but I think he's right.
Why - from first principles, you're an alien looking down at the world - is it sexual harassment to make comments about the amount of clothing a woman is wearing? Especially if the clothing is deliberately designed to be sexually attractive.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
For example, in the current system, men are harmed by an anti-male education system which rewards female traits and punishes male ones. As a result of this anti-maleness, 60% of college students are women.
How would you make the current education system more pro-male?
IMO the reason most college students are women is women more strongly follow ideas they see others holding, and education is the thing everyone thinks you're supposed to do.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
have to "justify" behaviors that women get to just do with no consequence
Please, please, when you make this argument explicitly name a specific example of a behavior women can do that men can't. It'd help the conversation so much, and prevent it from getting bogged down in each side repeatedly stating their beliefs without coming into contact with the other side.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
There's clearly something wrong with the standard for toplevel posts. Either posts like this should be promptly deleted, or higher-quality regulars should be making a lot more lower-effort toplevels. Or both!
And look: a few perfectly interesting discussions were spawned in the comments, despite this being an "insane" "screed".
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I still disagree with 'authoritarian', mostly because I think this scale of societal intervention in itself is inevitable, both for good and for ill (consider prohibition, drafts in existentially threatening wars, etc). But it's much closer to what you seem to be arguing than fascist.
yeah the 1st amendment doesn't apply anymore, no religious services or protests (except the state-sanctioned ones)"
Do you think the "state" had a genuine desire to harm religion by closing religious services? That's what this seems to imply. Yet it makes much more sense to me that religious services were shut down along with similar kinds of businesses.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Fascism is when you exalt strength, might, and glory, and Will, when you devote yourself to the State, when greatness takes priority over weakness and the lie of equality is laid bare, when the noble races are given their due, when the parasite of judeo-bolshevism is purged from the blood of the nation.
And so on. Or at least it claims to be that, but if it doesn't sound like that, it's probably not fascism. Moldbug? BAP? Sure, clearly similarities there. Lockdowns may be state overreach, but they aren't fascism.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Tbh I think you're partially correct in the first part. But 'asking manipulative questions' and 'pressuring people to lie in politics' isn't an exclusively jewish thing.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
If tyranny is necessary to prevent half of a nation from dying, the tyranny is of course justified? You wouldn't let your wife and children die just because it'd be tyranny to prevent it. You might be claiming tyranny isn't actually useful in those cases, but that isn't the same thing.
(although as I noted the lockdowns weren't particularly useful)
As for Carlson, this picture does some heavy lifting. What we have came via Dominion who had Carlson fired as part of their settlement, they're untrustworthy. If the full communications are available in raw I'd read them to see what he actually said, and if what Dominion released was fair enough it'd ratchet up "Carlson's a grifter." But first, the Trump circle still looks highly on him so they clearly don't consider the communications meaningful, and second, he's the most effective individual political commentator in the US, if this is his "grift", be afraid of when he plays the game for real.
I don't think this makes sense. Carlson didn't deny the texts or provide a meaningful clarification, something he could've easily done. The "trump circle" is a hot mess anyway, and would keep him around because of how popular he is however disloyal he was. Your last sentence is just ... not even denying the claim, I'm not a left-winger and am not afraid of him, I'm not sure what you intended that to mean.
As to their superiors, the politicians, just about all of them are moral mutants. Bernie Sanders probably not, Thomas Massie probably not. Exceptions otherwise few and prove the rule.
If this is equally true of Rs and Ds, or of all politicians in history, is it really evidence of election fraud or that someone will or won't be convicted? Like there do seem to have been not-particularly-rigged elections in US history and often politicians or people of influence get convicted of crimes and sometime go to jail.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
That's possible, but I could also see that not being true for a variety of reasons (maybe the aerosol has a slightly different path through space than air, so a well designed mask can 'catch' the aerosol or something? i dunno). Anyway, that's what the rapid RCT challenge trials on a variety of different mechanisms are for.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I wouldn't say I liked it as a post - I'm happy it was posted if only because there just aren't enough toplevel posts in general - but if it was the right-wing equivalent, it'd be at the minimum +10.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
... and wasn't a full-face powered respirator, yes
I find this bizzare. If you're having a conversation with someone across dozens of threads and months, how is it anything but helpful to cross-check what they were saying in the past with what they're saying now? If someone's being slippery or careless with their arguments, how else can you demonstrate that?
Reading the context, it looks like the report claimed "selective quoting/misrepresentation of another users post history to try to argue some kind of dishonesty or inconsistency, apparently motivated simply by not liking what that user had to say". So maybe they'd only moderate for doing that in a dishonest way? But I mean, you can just moderate for "misrepresentation" and "motivated by not liking" directly (except, well, you have to distinguish disliking for bad personal reasons and disliking because it's incorrect).
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