doglatine
7mo ago
Pretty brief for a top-level post, but I'm curious what everyone here thinks of Pod Save America. It had been vaguely on my radar, but I've just started listening to it in the wake of the election and I'm actually really impressed by both the sophistication of the conversation and the relative lack of virtue-signaling and idpol talking points. It all feels fairly high-decoupling to me, which was a surprise, as I'd assumed it was a solidly blue tribe rather than grey tribe show.
But because I'm late to this party, I'm curious to hear what others think. Have I just been lucky enough to hear an unusually reflective collection of episodes?
doglatine
7mo ago
Yeah, I think this is what I meant by making humor subject to "political analysis": not hand-wringing that rape jokes mean you're a rapist, but acknowledging that a group's perception of what's funny vs. unfunny could indicate something important about their underlying sentiments and desires, and that it's fair to investigate those sentiments by close-reading the jokes.
I'm, tempted to quote EB White's line that “analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog, few people are interested, and the frog dies of it". That said - I do understand this kind of analysis, and it's what a lot of my academic colleagues in the humanities spend their time doing. Over my time in academia, I've seen any number of articles, books, and editorials that lean into these strategies and I've come to have little patience for them. It can be a fun and an interesting exercise, but I'm less convinced that it helps us access truths in any meaningful way, at least most of the time. It's a kind of "social psychoanalysis" that just like regular psychoanalysis, is largely immune to falsification (Freudianism was one of the ur-examples that motivated Popper). You're into BDSM? Probably because you were spanked as a kid. Oh, you weren't spanked as a kid? Well, maybe that's why you're into BDSM. In the same way, you can imagine someone saying that the reason jokes about mothers are part of this humour is precisely because the mother-son relationship has such deep individual psychodynamic roots, and therefore it's funny to outrage people with it, in contrast to father-daughter relationships which come into being later in life and are parsed through a thoroughly adult lens. All of which is to say, sure, we can play with this analysis, but it will just tell us what we wanted to believe all along.
That's really interesting: when I asked the question I was thinking about a certain type of dumb and self-serious but also very athletic "jughead"-style guy that seems both common in sporty contexts and reasonably socially successful. Having known those folks in their administrative and bureaucratic afterlives, they seem too rigid, touchy and literal-minded to ever have been great at verbal sparring
I can't guarantee that I'm zeroing in on the same archetype here, but if I am, then I'd say that these guys are very good at playing these male games, perhaps surprisingly so. They're also just very good at sequestering them in the right contexts. They're definitely the people whose female friends would be most surprised to hear them talking that way, though.
doglatine
7mo ago
I think @Amadan has answered some of this, and I agree with everything he says, but just to add a couple of follow-ups...
do men think it's funny to joke about raping each other's daughters, the way it's funny to joke about raping moms?
Absolutely not, and interestingly in every 'locker room' context I've been in, joking about someone's kids in any negative way (not even just sexual) would code as deeply taboo. Here's a funny scene touching on that idea from In Bruges. I'm not exactly sure why it's taboo, when mothers are fair game, but jokes about someone's kids are ugly or dumb or gay would come across very poorly.
When a guy has no sense of humor, how does his participation in locker-room banter usually fall flat? Does he go too far? Not far enough?
I think it's fair to read a lot of this form of male-bonding as a kind of test or trial for male-coded social skills - being able to come up with a good clapback, knowing what's going too far, knowing how to insult someone in a way that they will correctly interpret as affectionate.* I think men who struggle with locker-room talk fall into two main camps. The first are those who can handle the social dynamics but don't like the mock aggression, and to oversimplify, they become theatre/art/literature club kids. The second are those who ASD kids who don't get the complex social dynamics. They'll tend to filter out into the predictable science, math, and engineering clubs.
I've framed it in terms of high school, but I really think this kind of male behaviour really gets going around puberty in high-testosterone environments, specifically sports teams, and it filters out some people from male sports in general (not coincidentally, the boys on top of the sports hierarchy tend to be on top of the male high school hierarchy in general). Nonetheless, it persists into adulthood in similarly all-male and high testosterone contexts, and whenever you get a group of men of any age together with alcohol and an absence of women, it will tend to manifest. Again, there will be some guys for whom this is more natural, and others who find it uncomfortable, so they'll tend to just change the subject or shift the vibe.
And also to clarify re this:
I'm also a bit skeptical of attempts to place male aggressive humor beyond political analysis because it's supposedly so impartially transgressive and also 100% facetious and harmless.
@Amadan completely nailed my position. I'm not saying it's beyond political analysis - that's what I'm trying to do, through giving it a genealogy. I also think Fuentes is knowingly violating the norms here to get a reaction. But I also think a lot of the commentary I've seen from women involves a straightforward epistemic mistake in interpreting his intention and failing to contextualise it in the background of male-coded banter. As you note, there are practical reasons why women have a hair-trigger sensitivity to any kind of rape humour, but that's also what Fuentes is relying on.
doglatine
7mo ago
Interesting stuff! Makes sense to me that Transformer architectures won't take us all the way to AGI, but I remain bullish on the prospects for AGI before 2030. ChatGPT released almost exactly 2 years ago, and its impacts won't be felt for years to come, especially in terms of the influx of human capital and investment in frontier capabilities it prompted. Millions of people are now working towards an AI career who weren't doing AI in November 2022 - a smart 18 year old freshman who was inspired by ChatGPT to switch from Physics or Engineering to Compsci would still be getting his college credits.
But for the original claim to be true, that rape jokes are just fun male bonding and guys don't take it too seriously, then there should be no gay taboo at all, correct?
The gay taboo is specifically about gay desire. That's why "I'm going to bend you over and fuck you in the ass" is not a viable taunt for straight men to make with each other - because it would easily be answered with "sounds pretty homo dude".
Conversely, inter-male jokes about being the victim of male-on-male sexual violence are pretty common. For example, in my all-male D&D campaign, the party encountered a lascivious older male NPC wizard who was clearly had a crush on the party's young attractive male bard, played by a dude we'll call Adam. Cue endless jokes among the players directed at Adam talking about how he'd better sleep on his back tonight, how his ringpiece felt the next morning, was his anal virginity still intact, etc.. And I should add that this is a pretty progressive group - I'm the closest thing to a right-winger! Needless to say, if this had been a female player - or even a man playing a female character - the players wouldn't have made those same jokes.
Some of that is because they're nice liberal guys who (unlike Nick Fuentes) have internalised the idea that this isn't something decent men joke about, but also because male-on-female rape largely just isn't funny for men in the same way as male-on-male rape or female-on-male rape. To give another case, a male friend of mine was actually in a pretty exploitative gay male relationship at his British boarding school - he (age 14) was the eromenos to an older (17 year old) erastes. And although he's now completely straight-identified, when he's with his old friends from school they make jokes at his expense about it, and he takes them in good humour, even though it was clearly pretty exploitative and illegal.
I appreciate you engaging with this sincerely, but for what it's worth, I think it sort of makes my point that most people who aren't straight males are deeply unaware of the way straight men standardly talk to each other or the underlying intentions behind it. One of my old undergrad students came out in his second year as a trans man, and as an avid soccer player, he switched from the women's to the men's team (I should add, this was a casual college team, not elite sports). But he told me he was absolutely shocked and appalled to hear how the men's team spoke to each other in the (literal!) locker rooms and at the pub afterwards - casual racism, homophobia, misogyny, etc. was rampant. I tried to gently suggest to him that this was very much how men interact in all-male settings, and it wasn't probably wasn't the product of malice or genuine animus, instead reflecting transgressive humour, and he should take it as a compliment that he was being fully accepted as "one of the guys." But it was a real culture shock for him, and something he wasn't remotely prepared for when he transitioned.
This is partly because the norms of mixed company are now, and long have been, far more influenced by all-female conversational and social norms than all-male ones. Sure, people were a bit scandalised when Sex and the City came out and showed how women "really talk to each other", but in general, my sense is that there's less of an obvious frame-shift between all-female and mixed company than all-male and mixed company. This is especially true given the major transition in many white-collar professional contexts over the last thirty years from male conversational norms (Pirelli calendar, lots of banter, explicitly cut-throat dynamics) to female ones (superficial positivity, politeness, less overt aggression).
I'd flag that in giving the above spiel, I'm not defending male conversational norms as inherently superior or suggesting that there's nothing wrong with making rape jokes on twitter. A lot of men feel that the "locker room talk" is puerile or gross or dumb, and deliberately avoid it; for my part, at high school I always enjoyed the comparatively polite mixed-company norms of Drama Club more than those of the all-male sports teams (although it was partly because I was a horny straight male teenager and had crushes on various theatre girls). On top of that, men since time immemorial have known that certain kinds of banter or humour were not suitable for mixed company, and people who make rape jokes in front of women are violating male as much as group social norms ("don't scare the hoes" may be a modern coinage but the sentiment is an old one). Of course, social media makes these things complicated insofar as it collapses traditional distinctions of space and group, but I think Fuentes knew exactly what he was doing.
So yeah, as I said, bad memetics for the right, and I'm not surprised it got the reaction it did. The only hill I'm dying on here is that I think that the actual communicative intention behind this kind of humour is typically misconstrued by women as more sincere or literal or psychopathic than it is, whereas men can more readily see that it's taking a kind of entirely performative humour/banter/mock aggression that's common in all-male contexts and employing it outside of them.
doglatine
7mo ago
A fun big party for the Dem staffer class.
A good description for the Democratic Party as a whole.
doglatine
7mo ago
The topic of sexual assault is certainly nothing sacred in these interactions in the same way it is in mixed settings, but there’s typically the gay taboo in all of this, so you’re not going to joke about raping another man unless you’re willing to roll with that. That said, as the homophonic taboos weaken, I expect we’ll see more inter-male banter like this.
doglatine
7mo ago
A right-wing female friend sent me a screenshot of this yesterday and said she was embarrassed to be associated with the idiots who wrote it. For my part, I think it's counterproductive memetics. While I've personally chuckled at some similar memes - e.g., "They're milking AOC on the White House lawn and you're laughing?" for its sheer absurdity - I reckon this kind of extreme edgelord humour is alienating and mysterious for the vast majority of women.
Male friends can absolutely drag the shit out of each other and it's still pretty good-natured, or even an active form of bonding, but nothing as overt happens in female circles. Similarly, young men on voicechat on videogames have been talking about fucking each others' moms in various depraved ways for decades, while lots of women experience this as traumatising aggression. It's clearly a gendered phenomenon, potentially even a biological one - it wouldn't surprise me if we found that isolated tribes in Papua New Guinea where men bond with "your momma" jokes. But I think it codes as grossly and pointlessly inoffensive to most women and genuinely scary to some. While I think that's large because they just "don't get it", that doesn't change the fact that it's probably bad politics.
doglatine
7mo ago
They absolutely have. It's a predictive model rather than just tallying up confirmed votes. In fact, rather to my chagrin, Nate Silver told his subscribers-only chat to just "watch the Needle" because it's got much better granularity than his own Silver Bulletin model for interpreting county results.
doglatine
7mo ago
New York Times needle now predicting Trump to win the popular vote by 0.3%. That would be absolutely startling.
doglatine
7mo ago
Nate Silver was betting Trump's margin wouldn't exceed 8 points, so it's (arguably) looking like Nate will be down $100,000 if the contract was indeed signed.
doglatine
8mo ago
What are the best liveblogs/streams to watch the election on? I don’t mind stuff that’s partisan but it’s nice to have a mix.
doglatine
8mo ago
Just my age! I’m used to thinking that everyone here is a grumpy middle-aged person like me 😆
doglatine
8mo ago
My recollections of 2016 are clouded. I was barely 16 at the time
Speaking as a long-term mottizen this was a wild thing to read.
doglatine
8mo ago
Probability and stats have always been my favourite parts of mathematics and I have zero interest in gambling (I went to Vegas once, lost $50, won $30, and felt vaguely annoyed and bored and went to drink cocktails in the hotel pool and haven’t gambled since).
The reason is simply that I think intelligence basically just is predictive ability. This operates at different levels, of course. A smart goalkeeper will be able to guess which way a penalty-taker will shoot, and a smart driver will predict that the car ahead will change lanes suddenly. By contrast, a smart lawyer might give you advice on how to avoid getting sued and a smart accountant on how to avoid paying as much tax. A smart scientist may identify a novel experimental technique for testing a theorem. A smart philosopher might give advice which if followed will reliably allow you to live a more virtuous or contented life. In all these cases, we’re identifying the threads of cause and effect and making claims about how one informs the other.
This is why when I hear people say LLMs are “just next token predictors” it doesn’t tell us much about their psychological capacities, because we’re next token predictors too (or more exactly: prediction error minimisers). That’s not an uncontroversial claim, of course, but it’s also not an outrageous one in the context of contemporary cognitive science; the predictive coding/free energy frameworks of people like Andy Clark and Karl Friston are rapidly becoming the consensus or at least plurality view on questions of ur-principles of cognition.
But why should we care about predicting the US election specifically? I think because it’s a big meaty complex problem that is amenable to insights from a variety of different methods and life experiences. Sure we can take the Nate Silver approach and read daily polls and build models, but you can also glean insights from just talking to people at the bar or from sampling the vibe in your niche industry or from developing your world-historical theories or a million other methods. Nate Silver will probably beat you on average, but it’s not crazy to think that for a general election these kinds of interactions and experiences might give you a useful insight. That makes election punditry an unusually inclusive form of prognostication — you can debate it with your mom or your Uber driver or your babysitter. In that sense, it’s a very American sideshow to the very American event.
doglatine
8mo ago
Yeah, that was my thought. Either that, or he didn't want to get too associated with Scott for his own reasons. But the way he made a point of saying he didn't know who wrote it then deliberately fumbling over the title struck me as slightly affected.
doglatine
8mo ago
It’s entirely compatible with active measures or just general FUD tactics for a state to fund groups that have multiple ideological goals at odds with their own. And that’s without considering the possibility of miscalculations; the US funded bin Laden for decades, after all.
doglatine
8mo ago
This doesn’t match the figures I’ve seen at all — total US contributions to Ukraine are measured around $175 billion over the last two and a half years, with another $60 billion or so from the EU, so an OoM less than trillions”.
doglatine
8mo ago
Everyone should vote (or not vote!) as seems best to them, without regard for "picking a winner." To behave in any other way is to make of oneself another simple tool of party political machines.
This might be true under causal decision theory, but it’s not necessarily true under evidential, functional, or timeless decision theory. Specifically, whether or not I choose to vote (and who I vote for) can provide very strong evidence about the voting behaviour of others like me, even in different states. If you’re a “bellwether voter”, it could be the case that by deciding to vote, you resolve reality so that others like you have also voted and your preferred candidate gets in.
Obviously if you’re a two-boxer this is superstitious nonsense!
doglatine
8mo ago
I wonder how much Twitter changes this. It really does feel like Musk’s takeover of the platform has had major benefits for non-leftist media and organisation, and perhaps suggests strategies for the right going forward — most crudely, getting RW billionaires to buy space in the public forum.
doglatine
8mo ago
No jitters in financial markets as yet, which is encouraging; not even a blip on TSMC's share price.
doglatine
8mo ago
As Edmund Burke famously put it —
His unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. ... Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
It’s definitely — and explicitly — pro-Democratic party, and features calls for political donations. However, it also feels (to me) quite fresh and direct and pretty bold in its analysis.
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