dark
Veritas vos liberabit
No bio...
User ID: 1132
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Asia is facing its' own fertility crisis, but I think it's safe to say that almost universally, family housing isn't conducive to premarital sex. My point was rather that if it's a norm, it's not particularly unattractive, as it is in the US. Are Japanese, Indian or Chinese refusing to date because their counterparts still live with their parents?
Also, I can't say I've witnessed this in Asia, but Brazil, for instance, has the whole love motel thing going on, where entrepreneurial businessfolk set themselves out to allow the generationally entrapped to tryst and frolick away from the watchful eyes of their progenitors.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I feel like the poker analogy is working against you here. Try asking around a table how people would feel open jamming TT with half their life savings and years of their life on the line, whilst only getting to play 3-4 sessions (in this case, marriages prospects).
It's a numbers game. No one wants to cash at a specific tournament, or win a specific cash game. They want to come out ahead over all tournaments and games they play. You put your money in good spots and let the law of large numbers take care of the rest. And there'll will always be those unfavored by Fortuna (or Lady Variance, if you prefer), getting it in with AA vs KKs 8 times and losing every time.
If anything, I'd say slot machines are a more apt allegory, a game rigged against you unless you understand their inner workings.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
This additional information really confirms my initial impression. Very few men, even model level attractive, will have attractive women just fall in their lap and do all the heavy lifting. You're clearly not that attractive. But your description doesn't sound hopeless, you appear fit, no deformities/scarring that evoke an immediate reaction of pity/disgust. Women can be attracted to other things than just physical hotness: kindness, humor, cleverness, wealth, success, prestige.
Indeed, no woman will ever want you for just your physique, but does that matter? Do you want women for only their physique?
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I feel obligated to point out that Haruki Murakami is not Asian-American, he's just Asian (Japanese).
"whose inclusion I find borderline offensive" I wasn't offended at the quality of his writing :P
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Scandinavia doesn't surprise me here. I had a Swedish friend whose parents started charging him rent when he turned 18 (not unusual in the US, unheard of in Southeastern Europe/Asia).
I feel like you were on the right track with
I know I can cease arguing in such places (better for my mental health overall)
There are two cases to consider: when there is an actual immediate decision process at stake (that you can influence!), and when there isn't.
Let's consider the easier, latter case: there is nothing at stake, so this is a pure signalling exercise. Arguing about politics, and virtue signalling (for whatever set of virtues you may ascribe to) is almost never perceived charitably. It's at best quietly sanctimonious and at worst autistically obnoxious. It has value in in-group bond strengthening/groupthink signalling, not as an invitation for an actual reflection or discussion. When someone of a different faith than you discusses religion, do you "diplomatically" argue about their beliefs? Life isn't a college debate club, try to find things you might have in common instead of rehashing things that "trigger" you.
Now the harder instance, you're influencing a decision process (i.e., are sitting on a hiring committee). Here, you need to weigh the cost of revealing outsider political predilections (and becoming a pariah, especially in groupthink heavy environments like academia) against the damage to the decision process. Are you overlooking a once-in-a-lifetime candidate just to fill a diversity quota? That might pose sufficient institutional risk that it is worth speaking up. Thankfully, in such instances, there are compelling non-political arguments in favor of your position ("I'm not anti-diversity, the non-diverse candidate just happens to be vastly superior, and we'd be fools to pass them up").
Choose your battles. The best thing to do in an environment where they are "firing white people to bring in a minority" is probably leave. An environment that espouses beliefs that are antithetical to your values is probably a) somewhere you don't what to be contributing to and b) a profound waste of emotional energy that could be better spent elsewhere.
How to fight for what you believe in then? Associate and discuss your positions with like-minded people. Build circles you'd want to be a part of. Don't berate your waiter because they corrected you on a pronoun, in the same way you don't argue with Jehovah's witnesses or telemarketers.
Perhaps worth postfacing this with an apocryphal Twain quote:
Never argue with a fool, they drag you down to their level and beat you with experience
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I'm going to disagree on several points here.
It is typically male.
Female teenagers are edgy in other ways, they'll rebel against trad parents by espousing communism, sexual promiscuity or drug/alcohol abuse, dating outside/below their socioeconomic class, etc.
It’s a typically cosmopolitan feature of following the latest trend.
Trend opposition is just as twitchy and fickle as trend following. Edginess can also express itself as disagreeing with consensus, not just aligning with it.
Many progressives certainly want to appear cool — they follow the latest trends in fashion and music — but does this desire foment any edginess?
Edginess strikes me as fractal, on a small enough scale, you're at the edge of some boundary. In hyper-woke circles, any pushback or criticism of the status quo might be considered edgy.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Republicans got more than 46% of the votes in 2020. Of the Republican vote, more than a third is white evanlegical protestant, and more than 70% belong to a white Christian religious group (PRRI). These populations tend to be geographically segregated: if you're from Cullman, Alabama, where more than 85% of the 40000 or so votes went red, I think it's safe to say a tatooed psychonaut pansexual anarchist hippie is not so much on the edge as levitating above the adjacent gulf, cartoon physics style.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I'm personally a fan of the Wellness Wednesday thread as one of the best random internet stranger advice sources. It escapes the rage-bait/circlejerk flair that the r/*advice subreddits almost universally share.
This isn't a culture war issue.
"Queer interest groups call for social censorship of topics based on witchhunt of the week" sounds like a plausible lede to any CW thread effortpost. Sure, there's a personal spin, where the interest groups are instead his friends, but that's about as CW a topic as you can get without going into "my friends are being beat up by $OTHER_RACE every other week, any (Wellness Wednesday) advice on arming myself for the coming race war?".
That said, not a single comment actually bites and turns it full fledged CW shit-flinging fest, he evens gets a concrete solution with uBlock rules.
As for the downvotes, I'll be charitable and attribute them to a natural response to an obvious troll post. The writing style gives it away
How can I support my trans friends while also being okay with people enjoying the new Harry Potter game?
How should I feel about streamers who choose to play the new Harry Potter game on stream? In some sense they have disregarded my friends' feelings and excluded them from their community!
The level of detail - trans friends (who I love dearly) - coupled with the admittedly amusing false dichotomies is a dead giveaway. There was no need to go into that level of detail to get meaningful advice - "my friends are getting offended because content-creators have different views than them, what should I do" would have sufficed and would have nonetheless garnered, I reckon, substantially the same response.
Arguing that Jesus was gay at $IVY_LEAGUE might not be trolling, but walking into a Texas church and asking the pastor whether there's any evidence to support that claim sure is.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
This is outlandishly culturally biased. Essentially everywhere except North America, people live with their parents until they save up to buy a house/move in with a partner. They may temporarily move out for schooling and whatnot if it's not close to home, but the expectation is certainly that they stay and save while they're close to home (were you going for a meta cheap shot about Asians/South Americans/Middle Easterns being inferior romantic partners by inference?).
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
10mo ago
Does protected sex/whoring contribute to real world development? What about pickup artists who go to bars every night to try to find women? Does that provide real meaning?
What I'm trying to get at here is that real meaning is ill-defined and most philosophers do include some form of pleasure and hedonism as an intrinsic value.
The worst fallacy, however, would be to try to argue meaningless work is more virtuous or valuable than meaningless pleasure. To argue that a substitutable office drone that shuffles emails around and does his 40 hours a week somehow is doing something intrinsically important than someone who plays MMORPGs all day. You can assign more value/respect to either of these activities, but I don't see how it's intuitively or aesthetically obvious that either is fundamentally superior.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
10mo ago
I'd put them in the same category as sex: not to the detriment of your health or other activities, not instead of self-fulfillment, ideally social and not masturbatory, etc.
I was going to push the artistic analogy but found the sexual one more compelling: artistic endeavors have too much of a positive connotation, gambling and smoking too much of a negative connotation, whereas sex straddles the boundary between puritanism and appropriate hedonism.
Video games can make you gasp and shake your head in wonder, can bring friends together to laugh and share, they can be a portal into a universe of creation, where the only limits are of the mind and the machine.
They can also be addictive and predatory, think of the people found dead at their computers, or with 6 figure debts from Candy Crush addictions. Is that any different than heroin or slot machines, or prostitution and camgirls?
I'll dial back my tone a few notches so we don't talk past each other. I think you've started this thread out of genuine concern for the culture of this place, which is a good common starting point.
I suspect if the political valence had been flipped he would've received at least a more neutral/positive response
Maybe..? I really feel like the trollbait tone attracted more disparaging replies. Picture
I have some Young Earth Creationist friends (who I love dearly) and they are offended by some of the Ice Age movies. When they see Ice Age content (including streams and clips of the new Ice Age 2: The Meltdown game), it can be offensive and threatening for them.
Downvotes are the online equivalent of an eye-roll or a sneer. You're not (at least, necessarily) dignifying the thought with a fully-formed response or counter-argument, but you're shaking your head as your counterpart speaks. Now prof_xi has strolled into the temple and yelled Sibboleth, and though the Gileadites did sneer, they did not slay him.
The Culture War Thread aimed to be a place where people with all sorts of different views could come together to talk to and learn from one another.
[...]
But once you remove [spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse], you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all.
The one foundational principle of this place, the shibboleth of Mottizens, is the belief that if it can be said respectfully and civilly, it can be said here. This is a bastion of (moderated) free speech. The Motte left reddit (amongst other reasons) because of increasing admin attention, notably around transgender CW conversations. The Motte has survived the Pharaoh chasing them across the Red Sea (r/ssc -> /r/TheMotte) , and wandering the desert for 40 years (r/TheMotte under a fickle and vindictive YWVH/spez), before finding its Promised Land here. An entire Exodus just to keep worshipping at the altar of freedom of expression.
prof_xi wandered amongst the Israelites to ask how people felt about them Moabite thots and gods. He waltzed into a mosque to ask help for his friends who are putting together a Mohammed sculpture visible from space.
I believe that my trans friends should be able to browse the internet without seeing content they deem hateful/disturbing
This is about as antithetical to the spirit of this place as you can get. And as far as a response to the desecration of local idols go, that thread managed to remain essentially constructive and, in my opinion, exceedingly charitable.
What's on display here isn't Red tribe bias lynching a befuddled Blue tribe newcomer, rather overly polite entertainment of a pretty conspicuous troll.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
10mo ago
There are unloaded terms for these activities: census or polling statistics.
They are opt-in and don't infringe on privacy, and only the most hardline small government libertarians usually object to them.
People are generally uncomfortable with widespread/automatic surveillance because it's
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opaque; inspecting the methodology and ethics thereof can often only done post-hoc, often with leaks and after non-trivial social costs are already borne
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surprisingly effective and perceptive; see how much information can be gleaned from metadata with phone calls, or IP connections that are encrypted with TLS, but not routed over TOR
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susceptible to abuse; you want to shift the framing to gloss over this, but is that logically honest? is it reasonable to assume organizations have individuals best interests in mind? it is always tempting to label dissidents as terrorists and crack down on them with the full force of the state, but does that lead to a productive and free society? would you rather live in China, where discussions about the CCP are mired in doublespeak/downright avoided, or the US, which has pretty robust protections of speech that don't have clear National Security dynamics (see Snowden and Assange as obvious counterexamples)?
I think it's also important to understand the unease around privacy is not necessarily utilitarian and logically consistent: Alexa listening in on your sex life and giving you sex toys recommendations based on orgasm frequency is certainly useful, but would make almost anyone I know very uncomfortable.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
11mo ago
You need to bear as much of the communication brunt as possible. Let the engineers focus on their jobs and protect them from whimsical business needs shifts, and protect the business from misguided but well-intentioned engineers.
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Inspire your reports to do their best work.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
11mo ago
Microplastics and EA (Estrogenic Activity) chemicals are somewhat orthogonal.
This paper is a decent introduction to how widespread EA chemicals are, especially when the polymer is stressed (UV, microwave, dishwasher, etc). I'd think it's fairly common knowledge not to microwave and use the dishwasher with plastic, but hey, if not, that's a low hanging lifestyle change.
Microplastics at this point are ubiquitous, and unless you're using your own filtration system (reverse osmosis or similar) that you have tested for all the water you use, you're going to have some level of exposure. What level is acceptable? Last I checked, the science hadn't really settled there, so let's wait while they make mice chug microplastic water to see if anything bad happens. My personal level of risk tolerance for microplastic lands around processed meats: unclear mechanism for harm, but if avoiding them is cheap and easy, why not?
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
10mo ago
You've captured something I've been feeling since the /r/SSC split. I've pondered and written drafts that I've discarded, because they never quite hit the nail right about what I felt had changed.
After reading this, I think you really got it. Optimism and hope are gone. That doesn't mean that verbal sparring isn't a worthwhile exercise, but the people who do genuinely see a hopeful vision for the future have mostly left (or are drowned out by the sunken masses).
Since the move from reddit, I've found myself almost exclusively posting on the WW thread.
Also mildly disappointed no one has picked up (or at least commented online about) Veritas vos liberabit, which, like Arbeit macht frei, gives me a sardonic reminder of what transpires here every time I post.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
10mo ago
Many approaches to this:
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Pharmacological: Executive function in a pill, adderall, lisdexafetamine, modafinil, pick your stimulant (poison). Congratulations, spreadsheets and doing your taxes is now fun
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CBT-esque: Stop blaming yourself for failures, understand that most people are behind on their todo lists. If it wasn't urgent yesterday, it can't be that urgent today. If it's worth doing well, it's worth half-assing (perfectionism trap). This addresses the 'feel stupid' part of your procrastination loop.
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Mind hacks/habit building: Do this slowly, but maybe make a habit of 1 task at 6PM every night. Again re: CBT, don't blame yourself if you miss a night or two because you're sick. If it takes less than a minute to do, never put it off. Etc etc.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
You sound like you have severe self-esteem issues and maybe mild anxiety. Not as a clinical diagnoses, but as character traits that hinder you in fulfilling your social potential.
Living on the spectrum comes with its share of frustrations because you will be routinely misunderstood. It seems you have at least in part overcome that, as a medical student, which is on the path to a high status/well respected job anywhere in the world. In countries with arranged marriages, you likely would have no problem at all finding a partner.
My suggestion to you would be to find some activities, true to your identity and interests, which would help you enlarge your social circle. It could be volunteering (natural since you're a medical stundent), exercise/sport related such as yoga, spiritual such as temple or church. Don't worry about finding a partner, focus just on finding people who appreciate you for who you are. Don't be creepy, but don't let fear of being perceived as a creep prevent you from talking to and meeting people.
You managed to overcome the limitations of autism for your professional life, you can do so (with work and practice) for your social life as well. You may think differently from people but that doesn't mean you cannot learn to understand them.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Glad to see evidence of this (can't find any), but I think we've veered close to CW territory.
https://github.com/tbreuss/dns-blacklist-check
^ Project that uses blacklist with recent commits
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Yeah, I think we disagree on the premise (whether it's trolling or not), which then colors our view of the rest of the incident. -- Sidenote: @ZorbaTHut, any chance for troll prediction markets with a karma reward system? Or actually more generally, karma system based around correctly predicting/adjudicating moderation results (i.e., extended comment judgement requires you to slide a probability bar for each of the outcomes).
I personally hate the type of feeling based analysis that pervades forums (it feels overwhemingly X-tribe, so much more than before, halycon days, blah blah blah). I think polling (modulo polling bias) and other analytics can give much better insight into dynamic and culture progressions than any rudimentary glance over a few threads. Since this is the "Something Shiny" thread, maybe optional polling built in to themotte.org? Recurring, get a sense of trends over time. With a system like that, you can conclusively* answer questions like are Blue Tribe folk actually leaving in droves? Maybe they're actually becoming Grey/Purple/Red as they spend time here. Maybe there never were that many, and they got busy with other things in life. Maybe they're actually more common, just more moderate in tone and therefore stand out less. These datasets are now all a SQL query away. I hope the custodians use it wisely.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Male loneliness: Porn/AI companionship/tailored OnlyFans content. Bona fide prostitution where it's legal.
Male violence as a result of loneliness: I was going to go for an easy slam dunk, but the literature is unclear here. It appears that the proportion of young males is a stronger predictor of political violence than whether they are married or not. Barring that caveat, women exclusive spaces (i.e gyms/classes/... workplaces..?), burbclave type housing arrangements. Maybe easier to just hope unmarried does predict political violence and go short political stability and long volatility.
Mating malaise: dating apps that "solve" this (expect the bizarre proliferation of feature equivalent but community disjoint dating apps to continue), private colleges (already predominantly female, many there essentially just as an exercise in rubber-stamping and with the hope of finding a husband that's not from their hometown shithole), startups that will "solve" fertility crises (I expect government funding for these to explode in the next 2 decades or so)
Zero people predicted a pandemic
A pandemic is the prototypical black swan event. If you asked people what are the odds of a largely asymptomatic highly contagious coronavirus mutation that crosses over from bats/other reservoirs or is engineered in lab spreads into a worldwide pandemic over the next 30 years, I'm sure many people would have given sensible probability estimates.
Pandemics are largely excluded under force majeure clauses, but take Wimbledon, for example, that following the SARS outbreak in 2002 bought pandemic insurance under an infectious disease clause. They paid roughly 31.7mm USD over 17 years in premiums for 142 mm USD payout. Back of the napkin math (assuming that the payout would be the same every year, i.e. Wimbledon's profits don't increase corresponding to premium increases, which of course in reality they do) suggests that the risk analysts estimated that a Covid-scale pandemic happens at most every 78 years or so. Since they probably factored in losses due to more probable minor diseases, the Covid-19 pandemic was roughly a once in a century event. This passes a cursory sniff check with the last global pandemic being the 1918 Spanish flu.
Safe to say people were thinking about, and even buying insurance against, the risk pandemics posed, so your first point is wrong.
About zero people predicted double-digit inflation (except for the usual people like Peter Schiff who make this prediction every year)
How about conditioning on the aforementioned black swan event and stipulating that US M0 practically doubled and M2 grew by about 5T USD (25% from 15T in 2020) whilst US treasury yields were kept at historic lows? The low interest low inflation free money paradigm that has dominated the past decade, under a historically axed lens, seems more like an exception than a new rule.
No one predicted Dall-E, Chat GPT, etc.
The GPT model was novel, sure, but also came out in 2018, so roughly 5 years ago. It was designed specifically to avoid the problems of supervised learning in NLP. What's surprising is perhaps how far it scaled?
EDIT: amusingly, we both forgot to reread Scott's post
If AI can generate images and even stories to a prompt, everyone will agree this is totally different from real art or storytelling.
This is basically GPT-3 and DALL-E. ChatGPT is GPT-3.5 fined-tuned with RLHF. So Scott did essentially envision this event, although maybe he didn't assign a high enough probability on it for your taste.
No one predicted Putin making a major move
This has been discussed in the other threads, but again, once faced with the question, would people really ascribe that low a probability to it? Putin and the other minds in the war rooms cannot have been aiming for a protracted land war, this is more a political decapitation with a puppet substitution gone horribly wrong. If you rephrase war to political/military intervention that aims to replace the Ukrainian head of state, the odds might climb further, and now you can just ask what are the odds of that surgical strike devolving into full-scale war. The Russians were what, 100 miles from Kiev? There is an other timeline where Zelenskyy is either dead or in exile, and Ukraine is not in rubble.
...goes to show how hard predicting is.
Sure? It's a chaotic system, and the conditional probability trees have exponential branching factors? No one is pretending to be prescient or an augur here, the exercise is just in estimating probabilities.
The "prescient" fool confidently spouts "predictions", whilst the wise man merely scribbles down a few numbers and replies, "Wanna bet on it?"
I'd like to make a meta-comment here; I got this thread in the daily volunteer janitorial duties. Without context, I see consensus building, cherry-picked (though not insufficient) evidence to support his claims -- No Chinese-Americans are not just high IQ whites seems to be the one real claim of the entire post, which the subsequent evidence feels so disconnected from I almost forgot about it --, vague weakmanning.
That said, on a quick read, and without seeing his name, it wasn't even clear to me whether he was pro or anti East Asian. The first two sections seem to suggest that the babies are a lot tougher/more stoic than Europeans, not a priori a negative trait. The last section, without context, could read as evidence of East-West cultural incompatibility or discrimination. Initially, when reading the title, I thought he was going for Chinese don't just have higher IQs, they are more resilient/industrious in general. This falls apart in the third section, where he's hammering the trope of East Asians = seen by Westerners as emotionless/cold/disconnected, which I think vaguely passes muster? There's considerable asymmetry in general cultural exports between East Asia and the US after WW2/Korea.
He's begging the question with Where are the great East Asian-American novelists?, but taking a step back, my main exposition to Japanese/Chinese culture has been self-sought (barring reading Sun Tzu when I was a young teenager, who's become a ubiquitous prototype of eternal Eastern wisdom) and entirely autochtonous. I've briefly perused top 25 best books in Asian-American literature and don't recognize a single title (except for a Murakami book, whose inclusion I find borderline offensive).
I believe I rated this as Bad, maybe an extremely charitable Neutral, but I feel this showcases a shortcoming of the hyperlocal view the volunteer system offers: not only am I unable to immediately view his previous posts (which in my opinion are significantly easier to classify without context) -- they are two clicks away, context then profile --, but am also not necessarily aware that this is a toned-down/more indirect version of the usual manifesto, for which he was already warned.
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