daezor
4d ago
Charity provides no answers here, only a political preference for one sex or the other does.
Correct; I just omitted "towards her" to avoid repeating it 3 extra times.
No. Rashomon is misleading; there is an objective truth and objective reality, even if inaccessible.
You can choose how you want to spend your time, but I think it's valuable to try and get inside people's heads, because the world is full of shitty people, and we need to figure out how to navigate around them.
Not to go too deep into it, but: Notice how both explanations consist almost entirely of ought-statements and not is-statements. If one is a thoroughgoing moral nihilist*, then the distinction between the two collapses.
*Not just a moral relativist, since a relativist could still say "There is no absolute moral truth, but the norm we have adopted in our society is...", whereas a nihilist would also deny the existence of "our society".
daezor
4d ago
The invention of the computer literally automated almost all white collar labor as it existed in, say, 1920, and yet instead of an unemployment crisis we just gave ourselves fake titles and decided to spend all day having meetings and making PowerPoint slides.
Wouldn't we expect competition to have optimized this away? This is at the heart of the worldview disagreement between "capitalism is just the invisible hand in action" versus "capitalism is a conspiracy by the powerful to remain in power."
daezor
4d ago
Wired (the onetime home of Kevin Kelly!) has decided to cover the most momentous day in mathematical history with "OpenAI is pissing off mathematicians".
The article:
The group, she tells WIRED, asked the firm not to just publish them in a blog or tweet, like they had done with 10 problems earlier that month. Instead, it would be important for OpenAI to publish papers explaining the work so that mathematicians could absorb, digest, and use the results, according to Kra. “Apparently, that input was ignored,” she says.
But the GitHub repo contains hundreds of papers. Will this satisfy the mathematicians? Somehow I doubt it.
daezor
5d ago
but when the imbalance is "immature frat dudes with local social clout" and not "literal Hollywood magnate with the ability to nuke ones' career path" I suspect the average onlooker isn't as sympathetic.
This is certainly true from an objective standpoint, but I think women are a lot more attuned to "local status" than global status, and men act accordingly. E.g. when we look at the typical "male cult leader who's banging all his female followers", it's easy for us on the outside to say "lmao, this guy isn't even attractive or high-status, he's just some random schlub, you can just walk away and nothing bad would happen to you." But what the cult leader has done is construct a tiny snowglobe world of which he is king, and this world is what the cult followers live and breathe every day. The idea that there is some broader context in which the cult and its leader are considered low-status is at best just an abstract concept that doesn't register emotionally, much like the abstract knowledge that there are starving children in some random African village.
daezor
5d ago
Within the last few months, Reddit is no longer usable without an account, and I can't even consistently make Google searches in incognito mode.
This has been my experience also, and it's funny, because it's directly the opposite of OP's. I have been "censored" from mainstream platforms not because of politics, but because they think I look like a bot, and the hoops I'd need to jump through to prove otherwise are too onerous to be worth the trouble (if it'd even work at all). I've been spending more time on TheMotte lately because all the other places I'd go to waste time on the internet are now closed off. But on this site I can only talk about politics. I no longer have any place where I can talk about anodyne, nonpolitical topics.
daezor
5d ago
This apparently reached a tipping point after the men's fraternity's president disinvited the woman from a Halloween party, at which point she started accusing them of rape. What are we to make of this?
I've started to notice a recurring pattern:
- Man and Woman have sexual encounter
- Man and Woman continue on cordial terms for some time afterward
- Something happens such that it becomes clear that there is no longer anything to be gained by associating with Man
- Woman accuses Man of sexual impropriety, including the encounter in #1
The first example that comes to mind is Harvey Weinstein. The second example, smaller-scale but closer to home, is the MeToo moment that Effective Altruism went through in late 2022, weeks after the FTX scandal broke. (It's not that Sam Bankman-Fried and the other FTX magnates were themselves accused of sexual impropriety, but rather other figures prominent in EA, who had previously served as indirect conduits to that juicy billion-dollar slush fund, but then that was no longer on the table.)
Skeptical eyebrows will immediately crook. "If Jane Doe was really raped at the frat house, why would she want to go back there for their Halloween party, much less be offended at not being invited?" - to which we can offer one of two explanations, one uncharitable towards her, one charitable:
Explanation A (uncharitable): There was no rape; Jane Doe is maliciously accusing them of rape as vastly disproportionate payback for being disinvited from Halloween. She should be laughed out of the room; nobody is entitled to a party invitation, after all, much less entitled to weaponize the justice system in the name of securing one.
Explanation B (charitable): There was in fact rape, but Jane Doe felt trapped because she was dealing with powerful men, men who could make or break her fortunes on a whim. Staying in their good graces was a matter of existential importance for her - it's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and you need high-status patronage just to survive. So after the rape, she put on a happy face and pretended to be excited about the Halloween party. But then when she was disinvited, she realized it had all been for nothing. If she was going to be socially ruined anyway, there was no reason to keep quiet any more. Finally the truth could come out, and justice could be done.
(Replace "Halloween" with "acting gigs" "FTX Futures grants" etc. as appropriate.)
But now the theory-of-mind challenge I'll pose is this: Can you put yourself in a headspace where A and B are literally the same scenario? Not just that the distinction rests on facts which are epistemically inaccessible, but where it is not even a meaningful question to ask which scenario we're in. (Superposition, not hidden variables.)
This is difficult for me, because my default background assumption is that everyone is acting freely, not under duress, and are therefore responsible for behaving morally and speaking truthfully. If a situation of coercion exists, such that someone is compelled into immorality/dishonesty, then this is an alarming abnormality that should be remedied, but once it is, we can all go back to being virtuous again.
I have come to realize that many people (especially women) live in a very different world.
daezor
8d ago
much, much whiter than Russia.
Is this really an apples-to-apples comparison though? The Russian Federation has semi-autonomous republics where much of the non-ethnic-Russian population lives. Arguably these people shouldn't count towards the total if the crux of the matter is "how coherent is the Russian ethnic identity?" - it'd be like counting the entire population of the Philippines as "non-white Americans" during the time when it was an American colony.
daezor
16d ago
All right, I'll bite: What makes you think this? In particular, what objective are the Feds accomplishing by running Patriot Front? And how does a hypothetical non-Fed version of Patriot Front differ from what we actually observe?
daezor
16d ago
I do agree that Buddhist dualism is problematic. Unfortunately the vast majority of Christians nowadays accept dualism implicitly anyway, so I think this is a sort of tilting at windmills type thing.
Okay, maybe you can explain this because I've never really understood what the Christian position on mind-body dualism/monism is. If one is a monist, then it seems that one has to accept that the dead are well-and-truly dead until the final resurrection, and that nobody goes to heaven or hell until the Last Judgement. But I don't think any Christians accept this. But also, many Christians insist that they are not dualists.
daezor
17d ago
There's plenty of outgroup-homogeneity-bias to go around. I realize that I may have been committing some of that myself in my comments here, in framing "accusing people of being government operatives" as the central example of organizational dysfunction, when in fact it is a peculiarly right-wing tendency, just as "oppression Olympics" is a peculiarly left-wing form. Each side can look at the other, see the lack of the particular type of dysfunction they're most familiar with, and assume the grass is greener.
But still, we can step back and look at concrete results. Whatever's going on behind the scenes in left-wing groups, that's not preventing them from opening up scores of retail shops in every city nationwide, whereas the right wing has a lot of catching up to do.
daezor
17d ago
An example of a fairly small, low-cost-to-entry organization is an indie game studio. These can be so small, in fact, that they can be done as one-man-bands, but then can scale up from there. Why don't we see more right-wing indies?
Strangely, harassment, death threats and literal home invasions of a popular celebrity did not draw support for that celebrity, nor condemnation of such tactics, nor broad discourse that online toxicity was a serious problem. The Dev did not receive wall-to-wall coverage portraying him as a saintly victim from a sympathetic press, who oddly failed to coordinate broad-spectrum condemnation for the internet trolls and other deplorables engaging in this horrifying behavior. The Dev was not invited to speak at the UN.
Being slightly cheeky, what this story shows is that it is not, in fact, possible for a one-man indie studio to make a game. In addition to 1 developer, you also need a legion of supporters ready to condemn harassment / death threats / home invasions directed against the developer, a bunch of sympathetic press outlets, and 193 state-level actors. The left has this organizational apparatus and so they are able to make indie video games; the right doesn't, so they don't.
In other words, Why did you force me to do this? I just wanted to play video games.
In the years since Gamergate, has the right made any progress on this front? Maybe, but it seems like most initiatives in that direction are continually stymied by lack of interest (or outright condemnation) from other right-wingers.
daezor
17d ago
I don't think you should get to say things that are flatly untrue as you making your broader point.
I wasn't intending to make any claim with the word "supposed" about the underlying truth of the supposition, only that there are some people who are supposing. If that word is unclear, you can substitute "alleged" or "claimed".
daezor
17d ago
No, the very real, and not at all supposed hoax, was that Trump called white supremacists "very fine people" by saying there are some on both sides of the Charlottesville controversy. You're trying to rewrite history.
The point I'm making is independent of the truth-of-the-matter of what Trump actually said about Charlottesville. The point is that the way the narrative played out shows that there is no united right-wing movement equivalent to that on the left. If there were, you would've found that the dominant right-wing narrative was one of the following:
- President Trump actually does secretly support us; he just can't come out and say it just yet. But I have contacts on the inside who know what Trump really thinks. Trust the plan, eyes on the prize.
- How dare President Trump say that there were "very fine people" on the pro-statue-removal side? We call upon President Trump to unequivocally condemn all the subversive anarchist elements bent on destroying our proud heritage and civilization.
- We are disappointed that President Trump has not full-throatedly endorsed our movement. We will not support him until he does.
(In fact, a handful of people did say this, but they were relegated to the fringe on the right.)
contributions to science, art, philosophy, or culture generally, which is what comes to my mind when someone brings up "creating things"
Where are the right-wing institutions for these things? All academic faculties (with the possible exception of economics) are left-dominated. Same with art museums and film festivals. Maybe if you're right-leaning you'd denounce such things as "not real art" - maybe so, but then, who is preserving the "classical" cultural heritage? Where are the right-wing symphony orchestras and Shakespearean theater companies?
daezor
17d ago
From where I stand, almost every leftist space inevitably ends up doing witch hunts, cancelling people for benign shit (recently DHH and Ed Sheeran, and I can imagine a gorillion other examples), essentially harming their own in the name of the greater good. There's a danger that is, to me, more urgent than COVID: a large portion of people in the West have a culture that incentivizes and perpetuates the same pattern, the outcome of which will inevitably be that no one finds it worthwhile to try to create anything.
The idea that this is a "left-wing phenomenon" is wildly at odds with my experience. I can go to any US city (big or small) and find a virtually bottomless supply of left-wing bars, coffee shops, and bookstores just like the one featured in this exposé. Meanwhile, when was the last time you've come across any such establishment that is as right-wing as this place is left-wing?
(Maybe you'll point to shooting/hunting clubs as the right-wing equivalent, which I'll grant, but still, there's a strange asymmetry here. Gun stuff is right-coded because that reflects the demographics of the people who own guns and use them regularly; but meanwhile, there is no particular political tilt in the demand for coffee, alcohol, or books. So where are the right-wing social spaces for those products?)
What about churches? Yes, there are right-wing churches, but there are left-wing churches as well, rainbow flags and all. Maybe not the majority, but enough to show that the "church" as a form of social organization is not the exclusive purview of right-wingers.
But political organizing is where the rubber meets the road. Any attempt to stand up something like the right-wing equivalent of the DSA or Antifa is immediately torn apart by infighting and ideological purity-spiraling. What ever happened to the "Unite the Right" movement? Last I checked, ~every organization involved in that event has fallen apart. In fact, the dominant narrative on the right is to deny that any such organization is even possible. Right-wingers talk about the "Charlottesville hoax"[1] and denounce Patriot Front and January 6 as "fed ops" or lately "SPLC infiltrators". Meanwhile I walk out my door and find no shortage of Pride parades and anti-ICE protests, all seeming to go off like clockwork, with no subsequent chorus of left-wing influencers asserting that these events are "false flags" or whatever.
[1] ICYMI: The supposed "hoax" is the claim that Trump supported the Charlottesville protesters. But if the Right were actually United, you would not find right-wingers saying this; if anything, they'd be motivated to manufacture the opposite hoax, i.e. claim that Trump supports them even if he didn't really.
Sure wet markets an all that, but now we're chaining together multiple things that have to "go right" to create Covid. The lab leak theory on the other hand seems quite straightforward.
I think this is a statistical fallacy of the same sort as "John Q Public just won the lottery! But the odds of that happening without him cheating were only 1 in a billion. Therefore we know with p<10^-9 that John Q Public must have cheated." This only makes sense if we had some prior reason to focus on John Q Public; but if he was just the person that happened to win the lottery of the millions who played, then this cancels out the p-value, leaving us with no particular reason to believe that he cheated.
Similarly, if we assume natural origin, whatever sequence of events ends up creating a successful virus is going to seem fantastically unlikely, but we also have to consider all the plasmids that didn't go viral (i.e. the losing lottery tickets). We had no prior reason to focus on any particular combination of human/animal interactions; that was just the ticket that happened to win.
(I don't actually know where the idea that pangolins were involved came from. Maybe they weren't. But if the reason for the scarcity of pangolins is because they're all being hunted for sale at the Wuhan wet market, well...)
But then, naively, wouldn't we expect diseases to form almost exclusively in places like India or Africa where density is high and medical treatment is poor? Why haven't we seen more diseases?
Off the top of my head, Africa gave us HIV and Ebola. Can't think of any from India - maybe it's because people in India are vegetarians and so they don't have markets where hundreds of different animal species are all concentrated in close proximity? (I'm really just spitballing here to be honest.) But China has very high population and density as well, with mediocre health and sanitation, so a virus coming from there is no big surprise.
daezor
20d ago
Disclaimer, I haven't looked into this topic at all. I just think there's a point that's often missed in these discussions:
When we're thinking about the likelihood of a novel virus emerging, we need to be anchored on a distribution according to population, not time, because each new human being is a new opportunity for a virus to take form. The relevant figure is: What percentage of the people who have ever lived are alive today? Seems like it's about 7%. So, the number of novel human viruses we should expect to see arise in our lifetime is about 7% of however many have arisen in all of history. Those are some good odds, if you're a virus!
But (more speculatively) it's worse than that, because viruses emerge from the interaction of more than one organism, not necessarily of the same species. A plasmid might emerge from a bat, land in a pangolin, then later escape with a mixture of bat and pangolin DNA, etc. Therefore, depending on how many steps it takes, the number of opportunities for viruses to arise will increase as the Nth power of population, with an extra bonus for the density of humans and animals all crammed into one small place. I would venture to say that the amount of genetic material being shuffled around nowadays in places like Wuhan is a situation without precedent in the whole history of life on Earth.
daezor
20d ago
We're all stuck in a maze of ideological contradictions with no escape. That's why I'm somewhat more sympathetic to Nikole Hannah-Jones than most of the people here. She is someone who took Steve Bannon's words to heart:
When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think ... A country is more than an economy. We're a civic society.
In other words, a group recruited from the top N% highest-IQ people from all over the world is not really a nation (society, community, etc.). They may be economically successful, but they'd be missing something important of non-monetary value. At least, Steve Bannon seemed to think so. And recall, it's the immigration hardliners on the right (including Bannon, and those further to the right) who say: "Citizenship is not a question of merit. If you're a Talented-Tenth individual from a 3rd-world country, then your responsibility is to stay there and help lead your country. You abandoning your people to come here will just make both our country and yours worse off."
This is precisely what Nikole Hannah-Jones wanted.
But of course, all of this is living in a fantasy world that either never existed, or at least hasn't existed for a long time. Unilaterally "cooperating" while everyone else around you is shamelessly "defecting" will just bring misery upon yourself without achieving any benefit in the end.
daezor
27d ago
I think people are misunderstanding my point. It's not clear to me that the 19th-century European immigrants ever did assimilate, at least in the way that matters. @Opt-out says we "will be stuck with poorer governance forever" - I consider the possibility that this has already happened, that we have been stuck with poorer governance for this whole time, and that it's far too late to do anything about it. The only reason why people assume that the Irish/Italians/etc. did successfully assimilate is because nobody alive today remembers a time before they showed up. Those of us who live in big cities have just come to accept a constant background noise of graft, corruption, and gangsterism which (I believe) would never have been accepted in a supermajority-Anglo society.
daezor
27d ago
Once you have permanent groups that are not assimilating you can not unring that bell and will be stuck with poorer governance forever.
The question is, didn't this already happen 100+ years ago with the aforementioned "Greeks, Italians, Slavs, Irishmen"? The Jeffersonian ideal gave way to Tammany Hall, the Mafia, union politics, etc. - so we see that that assimilation project was not successful either. Perhaps, the immigrants assimilated America to themselves, and not the other way around.
daezor
27d ago
If the Indians comprise 0.1% of the crowd but they just so happen to all be concentrated in one corner of the stadium, then this by itself is proof positive that they are unassimilated. What "assimilation" looks like is for each subgroup to be evenly spread throughout the population in proportion to its numbers, which is evidently not what's happening here.
I'm not saying that this even dispersal is what causes assimilation; rather, someone who is culturally assimilated will naturally find that their circle of acquaintances (such as the people they go to football games with) is representative of the population.
(I rather doubt that anyone on Twitter is making this argument. The interpretation that the whole crowd is 90% Indian is more provocative and thus more likely to go viral.)
daezor
1mo ago
Isn't astrology fundamentally opposed to leftism because it denies the Blank Slate and asserts that the most important aspects of one's character are determined (dare I say "assigned") at birth?
daezor
1mo ago
Doesn't receipt paper fade over time? Something to watch out for if you're using it for important recovery codes.
daezor
1mo ago
Am I, and people like me, not also people? Your thinking here is shady. You talk about people but obscure massive variance between individuals. You are universalizing too quickly.
We're talking about broad trends here, not necessarily universals, just what is sufficiently popular to be reflected in policy under a democratic system. The people on this forum are certainly not representative of the general population. Indeed, this is what I'm claiming is the formative experience of "nerds" - finding that one's own preferences are inexplicably out of step with the mainstream, and a consequent desire to place oneself as far out of reach of the "mob" as possible (which, in the present discourse, is termed "anti-democracy" or "fascism").
daezor
1mo ago
186 is the new upper-bound for the smallest gap that occurs infinitely often. It is conjectured that this value is in fact 2. But you can trivially prove that arbitrarily-large prime-free sequences exist (N!+2, N!+3, N!+4 ... N!+N).
If a constructive proof of P=NP is found, smart money would make an easy trillion+ dollars mining bitcoin and shorting the cryptocurrency markets (and all digital infrastructure stocks, for that matter) before claiming the piddling little Clay Millennium Prize.
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