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doglatine


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 05 16:08:37 UTC

				

User ID: 619

doglatine


				
				
				

				
17 followers   follows 2 users   joined 2022 September 05 16:08:37 UTC

					

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User ID: 619

tl;dr some quick attempts to get inside the mindset at the Kremlin concerning events in the war, in the run-up to Putin's speech expected in a few hours. Everything below could be immediately and awkwardly falsified if he announces some desperate escalation like general mobilisation or a nuclear strike against a Ukrainian military target.

Ever since the Ukrainian successes in the northeastern campaign, I've been trying to get inside the mindset of the Kremlin to figure out what their likely response is.

One thing that is almost certainly true (and easily underestimated) is that they are in their own psychological bubble, and there is no elite team of intelligence operatives whose primary job is to give Putin objective analysis. Human minds don't work that way: we easily form fenced-off epistemic communities that downplay our shameful fears and play up our pride. You can even see this reading the reports of US decision-making throughout the Cold War, when interservice rivalry ran hot and the USAF nuclear strategy advisors were giving opinions based not on what was in humanity's interests or even the USA's, but instead what would get them the most planes and status compared to the army and navy. And of course, you can see it easily on reddit, even getting a rush of ideological whiplash as you flit from one politically aligned sub to another.

(What about people like Girkin? Well, he's a doomer, and an outsider, and his criticisms are mostly quite careful. As far as I've noticed, he talks about the conduct of the war, not the wisdom in initiating it in the first place; or he says that Russia should be more committed, without once questioning whether the war is winnable even with full commitment.)

Given all the above, I think a useful and necessary starting point for understanding Russia's position is to try to imagine what your view would be if Russia's strategic situation was a lot better than you probably currently think it is (this is one reason why contrarian posters are valuable to any subreddit that takes itself intellectually seriously).

What does this involve? Maybe it means you think that Ukrainian morale is weak. Maybe you think that the EU is less united than it appears, and winter will be harder than Europeans are prepared for. Maybe you think that the United States is being opportunistic and will drop Ukraine without looking back when the conflict starts to swing back Russia's way. Above all, you're probably convinced that there won't be another breakthrough like in Kharkiv oblast: that was a one off, heads have rolled, and now discipline and morale have been restored to the troops. Reinforcements are coming in, Iran is sending useful drones, and the forthcoming referenda will encourage a surge of volunteers from the DPR and LPR.

Let's say that you, like Putin, were in the grip of this relative sunny outlook. What would follow from it for your reflections on the wider strategy of the conflict?

Above all, I think you would be aiming to take the long view of things, because the fundamentals are on your side. Forget today's battles and next week's offensives - focus on longer-term military-industrial capacity, and associated active measures in the Russian and foreign populations. You probably don't want to risk a general mobilisation - that might compromise your longer-term war fighting ability - but you want to get as many new volunteers as possible, ideally from less economically active areas of the country. And finally, nuclear weapons wouldn't be on the table; after all, you're winning this war, albeit more slowly and less gloriously than you'd hoped. Why would you risk alienating friends and allies and giving NATO a chance to intervene?

But you might ask, at what point does this Pollyanna-Putin outlook begin to crumble? When does the filter bubble burst, and Putin has his Downfall-style meltdown? When Ukraine liberates Kherson? Lysychansk? Donetsk? Sevastopol? I think the only answer we can give here is that people in general are very bad at facing up to uncomfortable realities, and can keep themselves from accepting painful truths for their entire lives if necessary. Or think of psychologist's Leon Festinger's now famous work on cognitive dissonance on doomsday cults: when the doomsday prophecy fails, people will go to great lengths to avoid accepting that they've been duped. I expect Putin to go out the same way, with his final thoughts being confidence that Russia can still be victorious, even as he has an unfortunate fall from a window.

("What about you doglatine? Why are you so sure that Putin's the one in the filter bubble rather than you?" Answer: Well, I've been trying to make clear predictions throughout this conflict both online and to my circle of geopolitics friends - this post is in that same vein - and I'd say I'm fairly well calibrated so far in terms of events on the ground. Part of the appeal of making explicit predictions is to try to break yourself out of these epistemic lagoons in the first place. All that said, I recognise that of course I'm in a filter bubble, sometimes through deliberate choice (once the novelty value wears off, it's just not fun to consume propaganda you disagree with). But even if my intentions were pure, filter bubbles are all but inescapable. Usually the best you can hope for is to get good at spotting the early signs of a bubble collapse so you can make a clean exit with your life savings and a modicum of your dignity intact. But that's far easier said than done)

In any case, I am curious what others think.

Extremely frivolous stuff, but there's a fun debate going down over on Aella's twitter about personal hygiene. In short, as a true empiricist, she measures lots of stuff about her daily routine (iirc, using an app called Daylio), and recently revealed her stats for 2023. What is causing a kerfuffle is not the number of days she had sex (63), took Adderall (126), or escorted (6), but the number of times she showered, namely 37 [sic].

Aella insists she doesn't smell (and says she's consulted with others to confirm this), but I think that's a very relative statement; some people seem to have a high baseline tolerance for stank of various kinds, to the point that even strong odours don't register to them as stank, while others like myself are very smell sensitive; at the risk of TMI, my wife was amused that I could tell when our kids in their diaper days had done a pee, because I could always smell it almost immediately even when she had no idea. Back in my online dating days, there were several dates I simply couldn't follow up on because the person I was with had bad personal hygiene. I'm not talking about a mild healthy body odour here, but when you're having sex doggy-style and get hit by bad ass-stench it's an instant boner kill. And I'll be honest, I've had a crush on Aella for ages; she's a very attractive nerdy woman, and as a sexually confident and charismatic female Rationalist, she is a very horny unicorn among horses. But I've got to say, learning that specific factoid about her life had a similar effect on my idle long-distance lust as an F150's tires do on a small rodent (not that she should care, of course - just putting it out there).

That said, I am a bit of ablutomaniac - I shower and/or bathe 2-3 times a day. I don't think it's a hygiene thing per se. I shower when I get up because it helps me feel awake and ready for the day; I often have a shower or bath in the late afternoon/early evening after a workout because it feels great to soak sore muscles; and I sometimes shower just before bed, because I find it really nice to get into a bed with clean, fresh-smelling sheets having just come out of the shower smelling clean and fresh myself. I also routinely use (carefully chosen, subtle) cologne on my body as well as both fabric conditioner and scent booster when washing my clothes.

Anyway, Aella's feed is pretty funny right now, to the point that she's holding polls about showering, and I was curious what folks here think about it. Obviously me and Aella are at different ends of the ablutic spectrum, but what's a healthy normal number of times to shower/bathe per day? How much of it is down to personal preference?

I hope this isn't too shallow for a top-level comment, but I wanted to share a personal observation about shifts in political views. Specifically, in the last couple of years, I've become a LOT more authoritarian on crime. Part of this is probably me getting older (damn kids, stop cycling on the sidewalk!), but I'd single out two main factors.

(1) A big part of it has been related to noticing shifting views on the issue among city-dwelling liberals (that's my in-group, whether I like it or not). I regularly visit a bunch of US cities for work, and I subscribe to their relevant subreddits, and there's been an incredible shift from "defund-the-police is a solid principle albeit the details need to be worked out" to "lock up the bums now". And similarly, several real life liberal friends who were traditionally pretty anti-police have become much more authoritarian of late, complaining about how e.g. the NYC subway used to be incredibly safe but has now become a creepy unpleasant space to inhabit, and something needs to be done.

(2) I've also had a lot more professional dealings with academic criminologists lately, and damn, it's been a wake-up call. It seems to be one of the most activist domains of academia I've ever encountered (and I deal with sociologists and social psychologists on a regular basis!). Over a few different conferences and dinners, I've chatted with criminologists who were pretty explicit about how they saw their role, namely speaking up for oppressed criminals; empirics or the rights of the wider populace barely came into the conversation. On top of this, there have been some spectacular scandals in academic criminology that have helped confirm my impression of the field. Suddenly, all those papers I happily cited about how prison doesn't work etc. seemed incredibly fragile.

I'm going to add two quick personal longstanding reasons why I'm inclined to be quite authoritarian on crime -

(i) Despite my fallouts with The Left, I'm still broadly a social democrat; I think that an effective state is one that provides good free services to all its citizens, including things like high quality education, healthcare, and public transit. But in order to be democratically sustainable, this requires a certain amount of imposed authority: if public schools become known as a magnet for drugs and gang violence, then middle-class parents will pull their kids out and send them to private schools, and won't give their votes or (more importantly) their organising energy to maintaining school quality. If subways become excessively creepy and weird and violent, the middle classes will get Ubers, and vote for candidates who defund public transit. In short, if the middle classes (who have options) decide not to make use of public options, then public options will die their democratic death. Speaking as someone who likes public options, I think it's essential that fairly strong state authority is exerted in public utilities to ensure that they are seen as viable by the middle class.

(ii) I have a weird sympathy towards Retributivism as a theory of justice and crime. More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed. As soon as we stop regarding criminals as people, but just factors of (dis)production, then I think we do them and our society a disservice; it's treating them as cattle. Instead, I'm sympathetic towards a more contractualist approach that mandates we treat all citizens as autonomous individuals who enter into an implicit social contract by virtue of enjoying the benefits of society, such that we would be doing them a disservice of sorts if we didn't punish them for their crimes. Let me try to put that in a maxim: you're an adult, you're a citizen; you fucked up, now you pay the price. If we didn't make you pay the price, we'd be treating you like a child or an animal.

Obviously lots more to be said here, but I'll save my follow-ups for the comments. Curious what others think.

Just a quick Sunday morning reflection, but just wanted to briefly float an idea about affirmative action, ethnic identity, and university reform. As most people probably know, the Supreme Court is widely expected to strike down affirmative action in the near future. However, speaking as someone well ensconced within the very apse of the Cathedral, I'm doubtful it will change much; Admissions inevitably involves a huge amount of illegible subjective decision-making, and the religion of DEI means that there will be no shortage of reasons to prefer candidates from under-represented minority backgrounds. Sadly, I expect this to continue trumping any kind of class-based affirmative action, for which a far stronger moral case can be made.

If the US is indeed headed towards a new regime of ethnic spoils, how can young Americans who don't benefit from being in an officially recognized URM group - especially those who are nonetheless disadvantaged - still reap spoils of their own in the higher education systems? There are two particular groups I have in mind here. The first is Asian-American students, long the ones who have paid most of the price for boosting enrollment of otherwise underrepresented minorities, while the second is white Americans, especially those from working-class or otherwise economically underprivileged backgrounds.

I wonder if a similar solution might work in both cases. Specifically, is there any reason a new private university couldn't declare as part of its mission statement that it is dedicated to "understanding and promoting Asian and Asian-American identities", or some such, and require all candidates to submit a personal statement spelling out their identity or affinity with one or more aspects of Asian or Asian-American culture? Of course, non-Asian candidates wouldn't be barred from applying, and you'd probably want to take a hefty chunk of non-Asian students anyway, but it would provide a plausible and conveniently illegible selection mechanism to ensure that Asians and Asian-Americans applying to the university would have a natural advantage in getting in.

Could something similar work for white students? As stated so baldly, I think not. "Whiteness" as an identity is seen as too toxic, too vague, and too novel an identity to ground any kinds of claims for preferential treatment; any scholarship program for self-identified White students would be regarded with utter hostility, and would be a poison chalice for any student foolish enough to accept it. What might be more acceptable is to found institutions dedicated to one or another group of "hyphenated-Americans", the most obvious candidate groups being Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Polish- (or more broadly Slavic-) Americans. Again, in each of these cases, you wouldn't have any kind of explicit cultural discrimination in place, but candidates could be assessed heavily based on how deep and sincere their affiliation, identity, or attachment to the given identity was, as expressed in their relevant candidate statement.

While any such institution would be the target of snarky articles from the New York Times et al., I think that if done sincerely (and ideally using the language of DEI) it would be hard to truly tar the endeavor with the charge of Asian- or white-supremacism. There's simply too much obvious conceptual overlap with existing programs that favor URMs, so to truly rail against it, commentators would have to say the quiet part out loud, so to speak, which would alienate moderates.

Of course, the really hard part would be making these universities places that students actually wanted to go to. For my part, I think the current higher-education system in most of the world is a stagnant cartel, with actual teaching being near the bottom of priorities, and the whole edifice is ripe for disruption. The main challenge to overcome would be the brand power of the old guard, especially the Ivy Leagues, and that's hardly a trivial obstacle to overcome. Perhaps the best two initial strategies in this regard would be (i) hiring a bunch of very good emeritus faculty, who could write excellent letters of recommendation for grad school etc., and (ii) focusing in the first instance on teaching disciplines with relatively legible outcomes, e.g., material sciences, machine learning, data science, mathematics, etc., rather than the humanities. Over a few years, I think it would be entirely possible to cultivate a reputation for providing a superb education in these disciplines, such that employers would have to take note.

All of this would require a large amount of startup capital, but there are Silicon Valley libertarian-types who could - ideally anonymously - bankroll this kind of operation (so Peter Thiel, if you're reading, get in touch).

But perhaps I'm being naive, and there are obstacles here that I'm not seeing. What do you all think?

As I'm sure many of you are already aware, it's been another insane 48 hours in Ukraine. The "side offensive" in the northeast that accompanied the "main offensive" in Kherson has made astonishing progress, with Ukrainian forces pushing all the way to the Oskil River, with Kupyansk under attack and Izyum and Lyman both threatened. None of this will mean much to most us, I realise, so here's a quick (already outdated) map of the progress.

It's important not to get carried away here; while this is the closest we've come to a true war of movement since April, and there are reports of desertions and surrenders by Russian forces, we're dealing with one front in a war with at least three more (roughly, in the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Donetsk sectors). This will probably not trigger a general collapse of Russian forces. Moreover, it is still possible that Ukrainian forces will find themselves overextended and vulnerable to counterattacks. However, as matters stand, this looks like a decisive operational-level victory for Ukraine.

My main uncertainty in what follows is what Russia's response to this apparent defeat will be, given that the underlying tides seem to favour Ukraine. Mass mobilisation may have helped a few months back, but - in addition to its political difficulties - it's unclear whether this late into the war it will be sufficient to turn the tide. Obviously there's always the option of nuclear escalation, but this would be a colossal gamble for Russia, potentially leaving them diplomatically isolated while providing limited relief on the battlefield. Another possibility would be for Russia explicitly to use the Zaporizhzhia plant as a hostage, but again it's unclear how that would translate into gains on the battlefield. And all the while, Russia's gas blackmail strategy seems to be floundering; not only have European reserves filled at faster than expected rates, European gas futures continued to fall, suggesting optimism about long-term supply issues.

Clearly, the best solution for Russia is the removal of Putin. His successor might still be able to cut a deal with the West that allows them de facto control of Crimea (for example, via a Hong Kong-style lease agreement, accompanied by a clever financial 'reparations package' that involves minimal pain on all sides). That will not begin to ameliorate the damage this idiotic war has caused to Russia and Ukraine, but at this point it is the least bad option. The only question now is how Russia can best ensure a relatively fast recovery from the self-inflicted harm it has created.

I had the pleasure last night of watching the 2011 documentary Empire of Dust, a Belgian film that explores interactions between a Chinese construction group and local Congolese in rural Congo. I'm sure many of you have seen it - you've certainly seen this meme - but I wanted to bring it up anyway for discussion, as it was a brilliant piece of film-making and very thought-provoking. The whole thing is available free here on Youtube.

The main theme of the documentary is probably cultural differences between Chinese and Congolese workers. The Chinese complain about how the Congolese are lazy, dishonest, and disorganised and are only interested in beer, dancing, and football. We see lots of glimpses of this, with many scenes of Congolese workers just standing around doing nothing, and seriously dysfunctional industry and construction.

On the other hand, the Chinese foreman, Lao Yang, often comes across as grumpy, abrupt, and occasionally inhumane. He rarely smiles, doesn't engage in any playful or friendly conversation that we see, berates locals for their ignorance, and argues with local Congolese about price constantly. His Congolese translator actually addresses this, saying "he may seem like he's grumpy about something, but that's just how he is all the time." The Congolese by contrast seem generally relaxed, amiable, and friendly (though admittedly difficult to work with).

Lao Yang is at his most engaging and humane, it seemed to me, when he was marveling at the old Belgian infrastructure and talking about how devastating it was to see it completely neglected - "Do you have any idea how hard it must have been to build that railway?" On the one hand, he's still scolding his Congolese contact Eddy, but he comes across as a genuine engineer, sad to see great works in decline.

Also striking to me were the physical differences; despite the poverty and (one assumes) malnutrition, the Congolese men were mostly tall and muscular and generally physically impressive, whereas most of the Chinese we see looked comparatively weedy. Again, Lao Yang addresses this, saying something to the effect that "this is a harsh land where only the strongest survive, which is why everyone here is so well built".

I don't have any grand culture wars lessons here, other than the obvious one that culture matters - China and Congo are very different societies, and what works in one may not work in another. It also made me somewhat more pessimistic about West Africa's potential for economic development, though perversely, made me more positively disposed towards its culture. The movie also has some odd coverage of colonialism; there's no real criticism of the Belgians demonstrated (when discussing the Congolese motivations for seeking independence in 1960, Eddy says simply "we wanted to rule ourselves"), and a general sense of missed opportunities at failing to preserve the infrastructure and development left by the Belgians.

In any case, it's a wonderful film, and now I'm on a documentary kick, I'd love to get some more recommendations. Most of the documentaries on Amazon seem to either be fairly introductory science that I already know (e.g., Cosmos stuff) or else have a focus on individual personalities - true crime, famous sportsmen, outrageous personalities, etc.. I enjoy a good tale of real survival, but in general, I'm more interested in films that help expand my knowledge of the world, especially stuff like geopolitics, history, or culture. Would love to hear some suggestions!

I know this may not be the usual place to get feedback on academic research, but there's a paper idea I've been mulling over for a while that I wanted to run past the community, since it dovetails nicely with many of your interests (and I'm sure you'll have some interesting things to say). In short, I'm increasingly thinking that genuine beliefs may be a lot rarer than people think.

The inspiration for this came about partly through conversations I've had with friends and family members, and I've noticed that people sincerely say and profess to believe shit all the time while simultaneously failing to exhibit most or all of the conventional features we'd expect in cases of genuine belief. Consider my sister, who is a staunch activist in the domain of climate change, yet recently bought a new gas guzzling car, has never given any serious thought to reducing her meat consumption, and takes 12+ international flights a year. Or consider my dad, who says extremely negative things about Muslims (not just Islam), yet who has a large number of Muslim friends who he'd never dream of saying a bad word about. Or consider me, who claims to believe that AI risk is a deep existential threat to humanity, yet gets very excited and happy whenever a shiny new AI model is released.

I'm not saying that any of the above positions are strictly contradictory (and people are very good at papering over apparent tensions in their beliefs), but they all have more than a whiff of hypocrisy to me. There are a lot of famous cases like this in the heuristics and biases literature, and to be fair, psychologists and philosophers have been investigating and theorising about this stuff for a while, from Festinger's famous cognitive dissonance framework to contemporary belief fragmentation and partial belief accounts.

However, one view that I don't think anyone has properly explored yet is the idea that beliefs - at least as classically understood by psychologists and philosophers - may be surprisingly rare (compare the view of philosophers like John Doris who argue that virtues are very rare). Usually, if someone sincerely professes to believe that P, and we don't think they're lying, we assume that they do believe that P. Maybe in extreme cases, we might point to ways in which they fail to live up to their apparent belief that P, and suggest that they can't believe P all that strongly. However, for the purposes of folk psychology, we normally take this as sufficient grounds for ascribing them the relevant belief that P.

Contrast this with how psychologists and philosophers have traditionally thought about the demands of belief. When you believe that P, we expect you to make your other beliefs consistent with P. We expect that P will be "inferentially promiscuous", meaning that you'll draw all sorts of appropriate inferences on the basis that P. And finally, we expect that your behaviour will largely align with what people who believe that P typically do (ceteris paribus in all these cases, of course).

To be sure, we recognise all sorts of ways in which people fall short of these demands, but they're still regulatory norms for believing. And simply put, I think that many of the standard cases where we ascribe beliefs to someone (e.g., a relative saying "no-one trusts each other any more") don't come close to these standards, nor do people feel much if any obligation to make them come close to these standards.

Instead, I think a lot of what we standardly call beliefs might be better characterised as "context-sensitive dispositions to agree or disagree with assertions". Call these S-dispositions. I think S-dispositions have a normative logic all of their own, far more closely linked to social cues and pressures than the conventional demands of epistemology. The view I'm describing says that S-dispositions should be understood as a distinctive kind of psychological state from beliefs.

However, they're a state that we frequently confuse for beliefs, both in the case of other people and even ourselves. That's partly because when we do truly believe that P, we're also inclined to agree with assertions that P. However, I don't think it works the other way round - there are lots of times we're inclined to agree with assertions that P without meeting any of the common normative criteria for strict belief. But this isn't something that's immediately transparent to us; figuring out whether you really believe something is hard, and requires a lot of self-reflection and self-observation.

Consider someone, John, who sincerely claims to believe that meat is murder. John may find himself very inclined to agree with statements like "animal farming is horrific", "it's murder to kill an animal for food", and so on. But let's say John is reflective about his own behaviour. He notices that he only started asserting this kind of thing after he fell in love with a vegan woman and wanted to impress her. He also notes that despite making some basic efforts to be a vegan, he frequently fails, and doesn't feel too bad about it. He also notes that it's never occurred to him to stop wearing leather or make donations to charities trying to reduce animal suffering. In this case, John might well think something like the following: "I had a strong disposition to agree to statements like 'Meat is murder', but my behaviour and broader mindset weren't really consistent with someone who truly believed that. Whatever state it is that makes me inclined to agree to statements like that, then, is probably not a sincere belief."

I think an obvious objection here is that this is a semantic issue: I'm essentially no-true-scotsmanning the concept of belief. However, I'd push back against this. My broader philosophical and psychological framework for understanding the mind is a "psychological natural kinds" model: I think that there really are important divisions in kind in the mind between different kinds of psychological state, and a big part of the job of cognitive science is to discover them. The view I'm describing here, then, is that a lot of the states we conventionally call beliefs aren't in fact beliefs at all - they're a different psychological natural kind with its own norms and functions, which I've termed S-dispositions. There may be some interesting connections between S-dispositions and strict beliefs, but they're weak enough and complicated enough that a good ontology of the mind should consider them separate kinds of psychological states.

I also think this 'sparse beliefs' view I'm describing has some interesting potential upshots for how we think about speech and epistemic virtue, including the simple point that S-dispositions are ubiquitous and strict beliefs are rare. I'm still figuring these out, and I'd like to hear others' views on this, but it raises some interesting questions. For example, should we have a different set of norms for rewarding/punishing S-dispositions from those we apply to beliefs? If someone says "Russians are a bunch of fucking savages", and we have reason to believe that it's merely an S-disposition rather than a belief, should we judge them less harshly? Or similarly, if someone has two contradictory S-dispositions, is that necessarily a bad thing in the same way that having two contradictory beliefs would be? Should social media platforms make an effort to distinguish between users who casually assert problematic or dangerous things ("men should all be killed") versus those whose broader pattern of online interactions suggests they truly believe those things? What sort of epistemic obligation if any do we have to make sure our S-dispositions line up with our strict beliefs? Is there something epistemically or morally problematic about someone who casually says things like "Americans are idiots" in specific social contexts yet in practice holds many Americans in high esteem?

In any case, I'm in the early stages of writing a paper on this, but I'd love feedback from you all.

Just a quick reflection, but something I wanted to run past the community. More and more as I've gotten older, I've found that critics and reviewers of games, movies, books, shows, etc. have been getting less and less useful as guides to what I'll enjoy or find interesting/beautiful/inspiring. There's no single pattern, but to give a couple of examples, in videogames, I often find high-rated AAA titles quite shallow, soulless, and needlessly time-consuming, whereas I have a real soft spot for AA games that may be a bit janky or have dated graphics but but have real creative vision and create an immersive world. In cinema, it's something similar; I find contemporary superhero movies and the recent crop of Star Wars films to be extremely uninteresting, mainly because I find it hard to take their narratives seriously and get immersed by them - they feel more like rides at an amusement park than a serious attempt at worldbuilding and storytelling. Similar patterns apply for me in TV and literature, and these days, I'm wary of entertainment products that score incredibly highly with reviewers, and am more interested by those that have a wide spread of love-or-hate-it reviews and/or a big gap between critic/user scores.

I don't think it was always this way. I've always been a big reader of gaming magazines, for example, even as a kid, and I also tried out a huge number of games by renting them from Blockbusters and similar. There, the review scores were remarkably predictive of my enjoyment. And to this day, I can't think of many cases of truly great games on the Megadrive/Genesis or N64 (my main consoles as a kid) that were panned by critics but adored by a good chunk of fans. And I remember from roughly 2002-2010 thinking that Rotten Tomatoes was basically godlike, pretty much always accurately predicting how impressive I'd find a movie.

I'm interested in what's causing this. Four quick hypotheses.

(1) It's just me. For whatever reason, my tastes have shifted so they're no longer aligned with the dominant standards of taste among reviewers. Maybe this is just because of idiosyncratic ways my tastes have evolved (hypothesis 1a), but a related possibility (hypothesis 1b) is that whereas I used to be more agreeable and subconsciously attempt to align myself with critical opinion, tricking myself into aligning my opinions with theirs, in recent years I've become more contrarian, so that the placebo-pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, and I now make a point of actively trying to dislike popular stuff.

(2) It's not just me, but it's a predicable generational effect. My positive experiences with reviewers started to change when I hit my late 20s and became a dad, thereby shifting marketing demographics significantly. Reviewers' standards of taste are very much aligned with 18-30 single consoomer demographic, but more weakly aligned with people who fall outside this group. If this were true, then I'd be curious to know, e.g., which 90s films resonating with my current demographic but panned by critics I might be able to retrospectively enjoy.

(3) Reviewers have gotten shitter because of corruption or politics. This is one I'm sure we've all been waiting for! It's a common opinion in many places that reviewers of movies, games, shows, etc. have either become very corrupt (1a) and/or have sold out to woke interests (1b) in a way that is not predictive of the experiences of mainstream audiences. If either of these were true, we'd expect a growing gap between critic and user opinion as measured by e.g. rotten tomates, metacritic, or Steam scores. I'd love to see data on this.

(4) Media markets have fragmented along taste lines, so reviewers - through no fault of their own - have a tougher job making recommendations. This is a tempting one for me, not least because it paints an optimistic picture of an era of cultural plenty, and it certainly seems we're awash in more varieties of content than ever before. If this were true, then we'd expect to see a growing standard deviation in review scores for art, games, and entertainment, as reviewers found themselves in a period of cultural continental drift and began drifting away from each other. I'd love to know if this is true.

What do others think? Does my experience resonate? Is it an age effect? What hypotheses am I missing?

(Crosspost from CredibleDefense)

Absent a negotiated settlement in Ukraine, and assuming Putin or his appointed successor remain in power in Russia in the medium-long term, it seems unlikely that sanctions on Russia will be lifted any time soon, not least because Europe's transition to LNG over piped gas will be well underway by then and economic pressure for a relations-reset will be relatively muted. Under this "North Korea" scenario, Russia is envisaged to remain a hostile actor to the West and to Europe especially, in the domains such as nuclear sabre-rattling, cyberwarfare, political influence, funding of terrorism, and so on.

What should the West's response be to this new threat on its doorstep? One obvious possibility would be to accelerate and strengthen the NATO missile defense program. While the kinetics of a 99%+ intercept rate remain extremely challenging, a limited missile defense shield capable of reliably intercepting a small number of targets is vastly more technologically viable now than in Reagan's era. Indeed, the fundamentals of such capabilities are arguably already in place, with Aegis Ashore batteries in Romania and Poland (soon to become operational), THAAD batteries are active in Turkey, and Patriot systems in Germany, Spain, Greece, Poland, Romania, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Slovakia. While there has been persistent concern among NATO powers that a missile defense system would risk antagonising Russia, the changing geopolitical environment means that many European governments may be politically and financially willing to commit to accelerating the shield.

What of developments in hypersonics and decoy tech? While these do pose challenges, in the case of Russia at least, the Ukraine war suggests that many of their vaunted capabilities may be mere vaporware, or at least perform well below claimed performance measures. Moreover, other technological developments in fields like AI have the potential to make reliable interception more feasible.

What would the point of all this be? In addition to providing NATO with a better way to prevent nuclear bullying by Russia of its neighbours, and to defend against rogue international actors, we might reasonably hope to present Russia with a painful dilemma much like that faced by the Soviet Union in the light of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative: either commit to an arms race that it can ill afford, or risk its nuclear capabilities being de-fanged by a more technologically-advanced West. If anything, Russia's current position is worse than that of the Soviet Union in this regard, given its relatively weaker scientific and industrial base and etiolated conventional forces. And whereas Reagan's SDI was mostly pie-in-the-sky thinking in the 1980s, contemporary missile defense boasts impressive and growing capabilities.

Of course, absent any miracle breakthroughs, it remains unlikely that any missile defense shield in the near- or medium-term would be able to withstand a massed nuclear strike involving hundreds or even thousands of warheads. However, the old principles of mutually assured destruction mean that this is not the most pressing nuclear threat that is faced by the West today. Instead, we face the risk of an increasingly isolated, weakened, and aggressive Russia using nuclear weapons in a more restricted capacity to gain battlefield advantages or to coerce its neighbours. Even a limited shield would be useful in combating these threats, and may help contribute in the longer-term to the downfall of Russia's current regime.

Honestly some of the reactions here make me feel we’ve drifted away from the high-decoupling crowd we used to be, closer to normie conservatism. Pray god some of these people never get into a moral philosophy class or their heads will explode. “Why are you even thinking about pushing fat men off bridges? Are you some kind of sicko?”

I can feel the emotional appeal of this kind of "men in trouble" narrative, but I don't think it matches empirical reality all that well. Consider one of Fight Club's most famous quotes:

We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

Sounds like a real crisis of masculinity. But where's the data? Male suicides per capita have been largely static or declining in almost all Western countries including the US. Reported mental health issues have increased, but this increase is driven more or less exclusively by worsening mental health in women; male mental health as measured by referrals has been relatively stable over the last twenty years - link to some UK data here.

I feel like this pattern is borne out among my friends and acquaintances too. I'm in my 30s, and I know quite a few women who have had serious mental health crises (usually associated with high stress jobs, especially in combination with parenting), whereas my male friends have mostly thrived, and now are happily ensconced in their careers and having kids. Quite a few of them had rocky spells in their 20s, but that's a normal part of growing up, especially for men where risk-taking is more common.

I don't know why so many right-wing Zoomers are obsessed with the evils of porn. I don't think porn is necessarily a great thing, in the same way that watching loads of TV isn't ideal for you, but I've yet to see anyone blow up their life with (legal) porn, whereas I've known people blow up their lives with alcohol, opiates, cocaine, gambling, and reckless driving, none of which are exactly new (though the opiates are getting worse). And when I look at subreddits like /r/loveafterporn, I'm much more inclined to see the person with the mental illness as being the controlling/BPD or psychodrama-seeking wife who is treating her husband's porn use as an existential threat to the relationship, rather than the poor guy who's jacking off to legal teens behind his wife's back.

More broadly, I think some of the male Zoomer doomerism (Zoomerism?) is just a matter of people looking for a romantic narrative around their gender generation. Which is fine, Palahniuk was doing it for GenX in Fight Club. But absent supporting data, I'm inclined to view it as a narrative rather than fact.

I’ll just throw my hat into the ring here and say I’m surprised that more sex-starved white guys aren’t looking overseas for partners, especially to East/Southeast Asia. Quite beyond sexual reasons (Asian women tend to be considered highly attractive by westerners as judged by eg response rate on dating sites) and cultural reasons (Asian cultures tend to be more family-oriented, with loyalty especially being highly prized), there’s simple market dynamics — a white guy in Vietnam or the Philippines or even Hong Kong has massively inflated Sexual Market Value.

Of course, the way to approach this is NOT to go via some skeezy online site, but rather to spend time in relevant country. If a single white dude saves up his money and vacation days, he can spend 6 weeks in the Philippines or Vietnam having a fun time, and if he does his research first, he can go to places where he’ll meet smart accomplished trendy young women rather than just bargirls, especially if he’s spent a few months acquiring rudiments of the relevant language. This can easily lead to relationships and marriage, and I know several “success stories” like this. Ideally, though, a single white guy would simply move out to the relevant region for a while — maybe a year — and conduct the matchmaking under a more relaxed timescale. The best life stage for this would be a gap year or similar, or just a career break. English language teaching is an obvious pathway here, but there are usually industry-specific routes too.

Finally, if you can’t bring yourself to leave your home country, you could just try spending more time in relevant foreign-origin communities. Take lessons in Malay or Vietnamese or Tagalog or Mandarin, get to know your local Asian restaurants and cafes, go to cultural events, etc.. Obviously, though, don’t be a creep about it — you’re going to these places to be in an environment where you’re hoping romantic interactions are more likely to occur spontaneously, rather than specifically going there to hit on women.

I’m not saying that white guys should give up on white women — some of my best friends are white women, and I’ve had lots of rewarding romantic relationships with them — but I do think Western gender relations are in a really toxic and fucked up place right now, and I’m surprised more men aren’t looking for more genteel and constructive alternatives.

In what’s becoming an annual ritual, I’m putting together a list of predictions for the year to come to share with some like-minded friends, mostly for fun and discussion. They’re still a work-in-progress, mostly cobbled together yesterday on the toilet, so I’m keen to tweak them. Format is straightforward.

<5% chances

Four things that you are extremely confident will not happen, the less obvious the better (no points for “the sun goes supernova”). To get top score, none of these should happen.

(1) Chinese invasion or full-scale blockade of Taiwan.

(2) Domestic terror attack in Western country killing >500 people

(3) Major housing price collapse (>25% YOY fall) in any G7 economy

(4) Nuclear weapons used outside Ukraine

~25% chances

Four things that you think are fairly unlikely to happen in 2023. For perfect calibration, exactly one of these should happen.

(5) At least one nuclear weapon used in Ukraine.

(6) Trump declares he will not/cannot run in the 2024 election.

(7) New serious COVID variant triggers new serious round of pandemic (more than 30 days of national lockdowns in UK)

(8) Average OPEC oil price for 2023 >$110

50% chances

Here I’m shooting for 2/4 to come true.

(9) BTC price recovers to at least $25k within first six months of 2023.

(10) Twitter announces bankruptcy.

(11) Western-made jets supplied to Ukraine

(12) Erdogan to win June 2023 Turkish national elections

75% chances

Shooting for 3/4.

(13) No new UK General Election.

(14) Vladimir Putin still President of Russia.

(15) A free Open Source LLM available by December 2023 with equivalent functionality to ChatGPT and no hard content restrictions.

(16) UK economy experiences net negative growth in 2023

>95% chances

Shooting for 4/4 here, but again, less credit for extremely obvious stuff.

(17) Joe Biden still President of USA at end of 2023

(18) SCOTUS overturns Regents of the University of California v. Bakke

(19) Xi Jinping remains Chairman of Communist Party

(20) SpaceX has first successful orbital flight of Starship.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

A quick post for the new subreddit. Are we headed for a new era of polygyny? Looking at contemporary metropolitan dating markets, both anecdote and data arguably suggests that what I’d call casual open polygyny is becoming a lot more common. By this I mean sexual dynamics in which men and women enjoy casual open sexual relationships, but where the male parties in such relationships have more simultaneous female partners than the female parties have male partners. I think the data supports this kind of polygyny specifically rather than general polyamory as the dominant new model, insofar as it seems that a large subset of young men have few or zero sexual partners and a small subset of men have large numbers of sexual partners, with the SD in number of sexual partners being much higher for men than women. (But of course there are plenty of women who have multiple partners too.)

If I had to guess, I’d say this trend is being facilitated by things like hookup apps, societal atomisation, better contraception, and the decline of religion. But we also perhaps shouldn’t be too surprised — monogamy and polygyny are the two most common stable mating norms both cross culturally and historically (polyandry is exceptionally rare; general polygamy fairly rare).

Still, this trend obviously creates a problem in the longer run, because our society is still largely built around social monogamy: Men and women who form long term partnerships overwhelmingly do so on a one-to-one basis. As sexually actively young people transition from polygyny to monogamy in their late 20s, this leaves a lot of jilted women and bitter romantically inexperienced men, hardly a recipe for a happy long term marriage.

In the long run there will probably be some kind of correction, possibly via polygynous marriages becoming more commonplace.

There will also need to be a correction in terms of norms and expectations. Looking to the future, a significant proportion of young men may simply fail to find a romantic life partner unless they can distinguish themselves in some way. This is already how it works in many stable polygynous societies, but a lot of the resentment of Incels comes about because we’re at a liminal period, where monogamous norms dominate public discourse but de facto open casual polygyny is an increasingly common in the sex lives of young people.

Just to pick up on one aspect of this, I completely agree about the importance of having decent Fermi estimation skills, and it’s something you can definitely train. I’m continually amazed at how many people don’t have basic frames of reference for things like populations, money, timescales, distances, etc..

I remember hearing a prominent philosophy academic once say in a talk that “octopuses evolved 500 billion years ago”. I assumed it was a slip of the tongue, but then she gave the same talk a month later and made exactly the same mistake. I assume she read “500 million” somewhere and it got transmuted to “500 billion” in her head, but jeez, you should be instinctively sanity-checking and filtering that stuff in your head (“are octopuses an order of magnitude more ancient than the universe itself?”).

In the interests of fun, here’s one of my favourite (paired sets of) Fermi questions for the sub.

(1) Imagine our sun as the size of a baseball located in New York. Mutatis mutandis, how far away would the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) be?

Answer: about 2000km (approximately the distance from NYC to Oklahoma City).

Reasoning: Proxima Centauri is 40,208,000,000,000 km away. Our sun is 1,392,700 km in diameter, so it would take approximately 28 million suns in a line to reach to Proxima Centauri. A baseball is approximately 7cm in diameter, and 28 million baseballs would stretch approximately 2000 km.

(2) Imagine our galaxy as the size of a dinner plate (again let’s say in NYC). Again mutatis mutandis, how far away would the nearest galaxy (Andromeda) be?

Answer: about 7.5 metres away!

**Reasoning: the Milky Way is approximately 100,000 light years in diameter. Andromeda is approximately 2.5 million light years away, so it would take 25 Milky Ways stacked end to end to reach it. A large dinner plate is approximately 30cm in diameter, so 25 of them stacked end to end would extend 7.5m.

My surprised upshot: compared to interstellar distances, galaxies are unbelievably close to each other!

Just some quick thoughts on the future of the internet. In short, I expect the way we use the web and social media to change quite dramatically over the next 3-5 years as a result of the growing sophistication of AI assistants combined with a new deluge of AI spam, agitprop, and clickbait content hitting the big socials. Specifically, I’d guess most people will have an AI assistant fielding user queries via API calls to Reddit, TikTok, Twitter, etc. and creating a personalised stream of content that filters out ads, spam, phishing, and (depending on users’ tastes) clickbait and AI generated lust-provoking images. The result will be a little bit like an old RSS feed but mostly selected on their behalf rather than by them directly, and obviously packed with multimedia and social content. As the big social networks start to make progressively more of their money from API charges from AI assistant apps and have fewer high-value native users, they’ll have less incentive to control for spambots locally, which will create a feedback loop that makes the sites basically uninhabitable without AI curation.

One result of this is that Google is kind of screwed, because these days people use it mainly for navigation rather than exploratory search (eg you use it to search Reddit, Twitter, or Wikipedia, or find your way to previously-visited articles or websites when you can’t remember the exact URL). But AI assistants will handle navigation and site-specific queries, and even exploratory search will be behind the scenes, meaning Google Ads will get progressively less and less exposure to human eyeballs. This is why they urgently need to make Gemini a success, because their current business model won’t exist in the medium-term.

All of this feels incredibly predictable to me given the dual combination of AI assistants and spambots getting much better, but I'm curious what others think, and also what the consequences of this new internet landscape will be for society and politics.

100 days to victory; or, will the Ukrainian offensive ever culminate?

If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything will look like a nail, as the old saying goes. As an amateur World War One historian, I've previously mused on this subreddit that the Russian offensive from April through to June was playing out in some ways like the German Spring Offensive of World War One: making some worrying gains on paper and inflicting heavy losses on the enemy, but also eroding some of the attackers' manpower and getting their best troops killed off.

Now that the Ukrainians are on the offensive, I'm starting to see parallels with the Allied 100 Days Offensive of the First World War - lots of offensives up and down the line, attacks behind enemy lines, heavy casualties on both sides, and no obvious culmination point where offensive operations have to cease. I think many of us were expecting the Kherson offensive, when it came, to be a short sharp shock and awe attack - throwing large amounts of resources into a small area of the line with the goal of capturing one specific city. But with the recent attacks at Kharkiv and in the Donbas, and the relatively steady pace of the offensive in Kherson, I'm wondering if the goal is to create a new unrelenting offensive up and down the line.

This would have many goals, most notably keeping the Russians continually on the backfoot. However, if Ukraine is confident in its logistics and supplies, then it might allow them to achieve a kind of "offensive escape velocity", a positive feedback loop where they maintain the initiative, pick their battles, and inflict steady casualties, gradually tipping the war more and more in their favour. This in turn could prevent Russia from regaining the initiative and concentrating new troops for an assault and allow the offensive to gradually sap their resolve and manpower.

Here are some of the indicators that we would expect to see if Ukraine had this strategy in mind and were pursuing it successfully -

Non-culmination. There won't come a distinct day or week where the offensive culminates. Instead, the offensive will be maintained continually, but with increasing emphasis given to one theatre after another.

Taking of prisoners. One distinctive feature of the 100 Days Offensive was that the Allies began to capture increasing numbers of German prisoners. This in turn reflected plunging morale among German troops. If we see the same thing here, it would provide evidence that the war might be coming to a close.

Undoing enemy progress. One painful feature of the 100 Days Offensive for the Germans was that almost all of the gains of the Spring Offensive were undone in fairly rapid order. This in turn further depressed their morale. If Ukraine were to launch successful attacks on Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk, this could have a similar effect.

Striking seemingly impregnable strongpoints. Another key feature of the 100 Days Offensive was its successful breaching of the Hindenberg Line like the battle of St Quentin Canal. It's not clear what the equivalent would be in this war - perhaps some successful attacks on the northern tip of Crimea proper.

I'm not saying this is likely per se, and it may be mere hopium, but it's a new hypothesis about Ukraine's broader strategy that's come to mind, one that I'll be updating as news comes in.

I’m surprised no-one mentioned the way this incident has been covered on the /r/NYC subreddit. Given that it’s a deep blue city and Reddit is a deep blue site, you’d think everyone would be up in arms about Neely’s death. But the dominant mood is dramatically more pro-Penny than here, for heaven’s sake. Multiple posters saying that he did what needed to be done, people have a right not to be hassled by psychopaths on their commute, even some highly upvoted comments calling out progressivism by name as the ideology that created this problem. I’m utterly bemused and perplexed. Am I missing something?

On a related note, if Trump is canny, he’ll make his candidacy about law and order this time. The democrats can’t plausibly reclaim that particular political mantle after the prominence of Defund The Police, and there are enough true cop-haters along the Democrat activist base that you’d never get message discipline on the issue. And while I don’t have good polling on the issue, my sense from reading the city subs on Reddit is that crime is creeping up voters’ list of priorities. Oh, and as an issue it’s less alienating than immigration for many Latino voters, while being able to be plausibly connected to immigration with Trump’s base (“I’ve been gone four years and we have chaos in the streets of our cities, chaos on the border”).

It's definitely going to be a tough winter, but in terms of total demand reduction, there's probably quite a lot of low-hanging fruit to be plucked, whether it's turning down the thermostat 1 degree, turning it off for longer periods, waiting till later in the year to turn it on. Much of that will happen organically as people see their gas bills. Of course, that won't directly help people who are already struggling to pay their bills, nor will it help industrial processes that are reliant on gas, so some state intervention will be required. However, I'm less worried than I was a month ago, and encouraged both by how quickly Europe has filled its storage and the trends in euro gas futures (now down to their lowest since July... still high, but the worm may have turned). As for next year, we'll hopefully have more infrastructure in place, like the floating LNG terminals in Germany, more renewables, more heat pumps, more insulation, etc..

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life

(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)

Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

(Apparently quoting The Gods of the Copybook Headings is gauche these days, but it's still so good)

More seriously, I find this a fascinating topic, but I also feel this might specifically be a Zoomer/late Millennial issue in the West. I'm in my late 30s and here are a few observations about me and my friendship groups over the 00s and early 10s -

  • Pretty much all my friends are now married with children, with not a single divorcee among the 20+ married couples I'm in regular contact with.

  • All my friendship groups from undergraduate to present were very mixed gender, and two of my all time best friends are women (I was actually "maid of honour" at one of their weddings!)

  • Throughout my 20s, there was a lot of sex had by all, although true one night stands (as opposed to short relationships/flings) were moderately rare.

  • Online dating in the form of sites like OKCupid was niche but fun, and lots of people met serious partners there (Tinder didn't exist).

  • Social networks were only weakly integrated with friendship groups (most people didn't notice what others were posting), and functioned more in the spirit of content sharing platforms than true extensions of social life.

This is of course highly selective, insofar as I'm about as outgoing, bourgeois, metropolitan, etc. but in general, it felt to me like the 00s and early 10s were a really good time for gender relations.

On the other hand, observationally, it really does seem like something has changed for younger men and women, really in the last 8-10 years. More and more young men are complaining about sexlessness, Tinder has intensified 'winner takes all' dynamics around sex and made one night stands more common, TikTok and Instagram have created new popular bimboid aesthetics for women (and some men), the culture war has polarised politics between men and women still further, etc., etc..

So I'm curious to hear from others here. For Mottizens in my broad age demographic, were gender relations as good as I remember when we were young and easy under the apple boughs? For Zoomer Mottizens, are things as bad as they look from the outside? And especially interesting, for Mottizens in their late 20s/early 30s, was there a notable transition period when you started to see gender relations getting worse?

Reposting my original advicepost from the Motte —

Since dating came up in last week's Culture Wars thread and seemed to trigger a bit of brief discussion, I thought some people in this sub might be interested in hearing a bit of dating advice geared towards contrarians. Back in Radicalizing the Romanceless, Scott says -

Male attractiveness seems to depend on things like a kind of social skills which is not necessarily the same kind of social skills people who want to teach you social skills will teach

I think I can give some useful pointers in this regard. Note that as sex and dating are fundamentally gendered experiences, most of my advice is geared towards straight men, and won't be applicable to straight women (though some surely will). I'd be interested to hear female perspectives as a result. I also imagine that a lot of people won't be interested in hearing advice on this topic, or will find some of what follows obvious and patronising. This is probably unavoidable, but apologies in advance.

As to why I feel arrogant enough to give any advice: I've had a fairly long, rich, and interesting dating life, with quite a few painful lessons learned along the way. I discovered the existence of sex and romance relatively late by some measures - in my late teens - when I lost a lot of weight and suddenly found women responding to me differently, so I think I have a bit more insight than someone for whom this stuff came wholly naturally. Additionally, I'm fascinated by sex and dating norms, both on a philosophical and practical level (in fact, I've taught undergraduate classics on the applied ethics of sex and romance), and despite now being happily married I still read a lot of dating and love advice out of raw curiosity. Still, as always, YMMV, and I'm happy to debate any of the below points.

(1) Don't be unattractive. Sorry to start out with this one, but it can't be overstated. This particular bit of advice is usually placed second to "be attractive", but I think being attractive is a lot harder than not being unattractive, so I'd recommend focusing on the latter. Worse still, I think trying to be attractive can lead people to try to be extravagant or unconventional in their personal style or behaviour (see 'peacocking') and this can backfire horribly. Instead, focus on minimising unattractiveness. This means obvious stuff like good personal grooming - don't underestimate the difference wearing cologne, having good dental hygiene, having a good haircut, and trimming your beard regularly can make.

It also means having a good solid wardrobe and sense of style. I'd suggest that for most men conservatism is the right strategy, at least to begin with - stuff like OCBDs, slim or straight leg jeans, smart sneakers or brogues, and fairly slim fitting cashmere or merino wool sweaters. As a rule of thumb, if you're interested in looks, buy clothes that are slightly tighter than is optimal for comfort (surprisingly, this also applies if you're overweight). Malefashionadvice has some good tips, but bear in mind it's a bit of a circle jerk. One of the key purposes of all of these efforts (in addition to looking and smelling better) is to show that you are sensitive to and aware of presentation norms in your peer group.

Of course, it can also help a lot if you have chiseled abs and arms like Henry Cavill, and everyone should figure out a good diet and exercise routine for their long-term health and mental well-being. But that's a huge topic I won't address here. I'd also flag that I think being 'ripped' or 'shredded' or even just in good physical shape are factors that can be overstated in dating - there are plenty of stylish, well-dressed, funny, confident but slightly pudgy men who are also real casanovas, and plenty of desperate depressed singletons over at /fit/. Above all, don't put off dating until the day you have a body like a Greek god: it will probably never come.

(2) Don't assume dates will come to you. Most men can go years without ever once being approached by a woman with explicit romantic interest. You will need to be proactive to find a romantic partner. In the modern age, this sadly means getting on dating sites and apps. The upside to this is that the costs of failure are typically pretty small: the people you meet are people you will never see again, and with whom you probably have no friends in common, so even if it's all horribly awkward it will have few negative consequences downstream. While I've been out of the dating pool long enough that I can't recommend the best current apps, a good rule of thumb is to be proactive about setting up as many dates as possible and to triple your rate of failure (though always remember the human... and for god's sake never, ever send dick pics to anyone you've known for less than six months).

Most dates will inevitably be crash-and-burn ventures, but as long as you learn from the experience and gain confidence, you'll still be benefiting. I would strongly suggest that you don't pay for your date's food and drinks on the first few dates. It increases the costs of a bad date and can lead to bitterness and unreasonable expectations. Besides, it's current year, as the meme goes. Note that each dating site and app has its own norms and strategies. Each has its own target demographics, and while some will skew towards detailed profiles and lengthy intro messages, others will be more of a numbers game (though they all are to some extent). When you join a new dating site, try to learn 'the meta', whether from reading blogs or asking the advice of friends. One big point worth emphasising: the pictures you put up really matter. That may seem shallow, but it's just how it is. Get the advice of friends, and maybe even get a professional photoshoot done. The difference between a bad set of profile photos and good ones is colossal.

(3) Don't treat dating like a purely cooperative venture. While dating is ultimately a non-zero sum game that should lead to happy relationships, early on, there's a definite element to it that requires a more strategic mindset. This is a delicate point, and I certainly wouldn't recommend being adversarial about it, but you should certainly be trying to manage your date's first impressions of you (see point 4 below). While you shouldn't think of a date like a job interview, it's not totally crazy to think of it as resembling a pitch to an investor: you want to accentuate your positives and avoid dwelling on the negatives. You need to be confident and genuinely believe that you have something valuable to offer the other party. Hopefully most of you believe you do have value to offer, whether it's your intellect, your common sense, your good finances, or your in-depth knowledge of the Punic Wars. If you don't think you have anything to offer, you're not ready to date. See a therapist or work on yourself until you've nurtured a bit of confidence. But otherwise, you should really reflect on your best qualities and ground your behaviour in the date on a strong sense of your own value. "I have a lot to offer as a romantic partner, and any woman who chooses to date me will be making a great choice," is a useful mantra, even if sometimes it takes a bit of effort to internalise it.

(4) Don't just be yourself. A huge amount of what we look for in a partner is good judgment, especially in social matters. There are a lot of people out there who are weird, awkward, and generally indifferent to the social cues of others, and a lot of early dating is about weeding these people out. If you're too up front, you can easily come across as someone who simply doesn't get it. There's nothing wrong, for example, with having wargaming, Magic The Gathering, and videogames as your main hobbies, but these are not high status activities, and if you lead with these you look like someone who simply doesn't notice what's high status and what's not. If you want to talk about hobbies, try to cultivate some that are high status: physical activities like climbing, running, and team sports are good, as are outdoor activities like scuba, skiing and even hiking. Travel, languages, and literature are solid, and food and cooking are easy and safe, if a bit pedestrian. Being able to talk about what's trendy in culture and your city is also helpful, e.g., "have you been watching Tiger King?" and "have you seen the fancy new restaurant that opened on main street?".

You don't need to invest too much time and effort into these interests and hobbies - just enough that you have something to say about them and can honestly report that they're something you're interested in. I'd also flag that talking about sex, kinks, and exes on a first date is generally a bad idea (unless you're meeting someone from Fetlife, of course). Again, it's about displaying good judgment and showing that you're not one of the creepy weirdos with no filter. A good general rule for most straight men is to follow women's lead on these issues, and to reveal personal information carefully and gradually. I imagine some people think this all sounds dismal: "I want a partner who accepts me for who I am, warts and all!" I think that's absolutely a realistic thing to aim for, but the process of opening up should be done gradually and in a way that's responsive to the growing intimacy between you and your partner.

(continued below)

/u/justcool393 has a nice post about science and values below, and the conversation veers into discussion of what makes for good science. Without wanting to criticise anyone in that conversation, I'd like to vent a bit about a problem with broader discussion around Science (with a capital S), namely a kind of essentialism about science and the scientific method that's ubiquitous in Rat-adjacent spaces and popular science reporting.

In short, one of the few really good insights coming out of history & philosophy of science in the last fifty years has been the demise of Essentialism about science, in favour of a view of science as disunified and pluralistic. If you start looking at the history of activities we label as "science", you'll find radically different methods, norms, and distribution of labour being adopted at different times, different disciplines, and different theorists.

This is true synchronically - some fields like pharmacology that have to deal with the insane complexities of human physiology are data-centric and heuristic by nature, others like particle physics involve a lot of narrow theoretical work and are reliant on dramatic insights, others like material science are somewhere in between. Moreover, ideas like replicability and experiment simply don't apply to all branches of science; many areas of geology (e.g. study of mass extinctions) are dependent on natural accumulation of evidence and lucky finds, while others (like parts of cosmology) are strikingly limited in the kinds of experimental data they can access, so the challenge becomes a matter of using existing data to probe theories.

But it's also true diachronically; what made for successful science in the 18th century is very different in many respects from what makes for successful science in the 21st century. Part of that is the disappearance of low hanging fruit, and the need for large scale co-ordination across teams with tens of thousands of contributors. Part of it may also be that we have stronger priors on which theories we can discard with minimal proof (e.g., perpetual motion machines). And while it's tempting to see these shifts in norms and practices of science over time as reflecting some linear trend, there's no guarantee that's the case. Here it's worth using the heuristic of an underlying "tech tree" that we're climbing (of course, things aren't like that, but work with me). In videogames, usually the amount of research points required to unlock the next branch of the tree increases steadily over time. But there's no reason to assume that has to be the case, or applies in a blanket way across different areas of science. We don't know what the future of the tech tree will look like; it's possible that advances in technology and society could open a new wave of "gentleman scientists" (cf. some of more optimistic commentary on the LK-99 affair).

I imagine some of you might be tempted to scoff at this and try to boil down "Science" into a few sensible epistemic rules, e.g., use of Bayes's theorem, active efforts at disconfirmation, preregistration of explicit weighted hypotheses, etc.. I think this is valuable as epistemology, but it doesn't provide a core to science - for one, plenty of non-scientific practices (e.g., running a sports team, managing an investment fund, optimising a relationship) also benefit from incorporating these rules. For another, many of the most fertile and successful canonical periods in the history of science (e.g., the Enlightenment) were a methodological Wild West, where few if any of these rules applied. So it's neither sufficient nor necessary for something to be science that it embody these principles. But perhaps most fundamentally, this approach to essentialising science relies on drawing a misleading equivalence between scientists and individual believers. In fact, belief doesn't have to come into science at all: someone can be a perfectly good scientist while remaining personally agnostic on the theories they're testing. What matters is that, for example, the results of their experiments are appropriately incorporated within industry and institutions. Indeed, there are some occasions where arguably science benefits from individual epistemic irrationality; e.g., scientists on the fringes who pursue low-probability high-impact theories to the detriment of their careers because they're (irrationally) true believers. All of those scientists would be individually better off (and more likely to get jobs) if they pursued safe mainstream alternatives. But if everyone does that, science is more likely to get stuck in local theoretical minima.

So if there's no core to "science", then what should we attribute the remarkable successful Renaissance/ Enlightenment technological revolution to? This is a big question, and I won't seriously attempt to answer it here. But two quick thoughts.

First, I wouldn't underestimate the role of what we could loosely call "engineering" - the steady accumulation of advances in things like horse-breeding and ship-building and glass-blowing and metallurgy and mining and industrial chemistry and carbon-fiber construction and so on. Many of the advances we think of as instances of historic scientific genius (e.g., Enlightenment astronomy, Hooke's microscopy, Faraday's insights on electromagnetism; see also, famously, John Harrison's resolution of the longitude problem) were very dependent on prior slowly-accumulated advances in fields like these, built on the back of lengthy intergenerational metis rather than just technê.

Second, I'd emphasise that the major expansion in human knowledge that (according to the traditional story at least) started in Europe in the 1600s-1700s and has since taken over the world should not be attributed to us summoning The Science Demon (the Science Demon doesn't exist, on my view; he's like like sixty different minor demons) but something rather more abstract. If I was pressed, I'd call him something like "pluralistic-quantified-high-stakes-competition-demon" (a close relative of one of the Darwinian demon). What started to happen in Europe, maybe, around the 1600s-1700s, was European civilisation started to converge on a successful recipe, involving lots of inter-state and inter-elite competition, increased quantification/visible demonstrations of results via things like warfare, ideological pluralism allowing lots of experimentation, etc..

That said, I'm not a historian, and precise characterisation of the demon is beyond my paygrade as a philosopher, so I'll leave my speculations at that. But what I would emphasise is that if are looking for any kind of unified explanation of "the success of science", it won't be at the level of "do experiments using method X"; it'll be something far bigger and more abstract, more at the level of civilisation-wide social-institutional design than epistemology.

There's a whole raft of powerful policies waiting beyond the Overton Window, e.g., making eligibility for government benefits or government housing dependent on having at least 1 French grandparent. As long as one is willing to address the charge of "second-class citizenship" with 'yes, and so what?', then France can quickly make itself intolerable for its own immigrant underclass.

I'm glad you're defending this line of argument. That said, it's not clear to me that decentralised enforcement of the law is going to lead to widespread violence and vigilanteism. It always amazed me that police forces were relatively rare in both the ancient and medieval worlds, and that was largely due to a combination of collective enforcement of norms and the ability of wealthy respectable private citizens to pay for investigators/private muscle.

I'm not say that's better than our present arrangement, or that it's compatible with the luxury liberalism we enjoy today, but in many cases it worked surprisingly well.

tend to accept those outlandish victim stories at face value

An untrue sideswipe, especially in light of the example you chose. I am very much a 'Russophobe' in the sense of viscerally disliking the Russian state, and maybe even the Russian nation, but there's a lot more nuance to it than you paint here. For one, I learned my Russophobia years ago mostly from Russian expat grad students, as we'd sit in my college's MCR digesting dinner over a glass of Tokay. They were the one who taught me the names of Berezvosky, Khordokovsy, Lebedev, etc., who informed me that the chavviest Brit is a positive gentleman and intellect compared to the basest of their countrymen, that Putin's administration was Weekend-at-Bernie's for the Soviet Union, a cargo cult nation held together by inertia and oil and gas revenue. No-one is so good at hating Russia and Russians as Russians themselves, so I learned from the best, but the circumstances meant that of course, a special pardon was given to Russian expats, and a lesser but still significant one given to embittered children of the old intelligentsiya class who were still stuck in Russia (every expat starts has to start as a pat, after all). That's carried over to my attitudes in daily life; for example, I've been cautious about fulminating about the war with my son because there are several young Russian kids at his school, and he might not realise that they're almost certainly not aligned with the problem.

Moreover, a lot of my loathing of the modern Russian state comes from its utterly degenerate form (in the true sense of that term, not the Fuentes/4chan misappropriation). I have some actual respect for the USSR, and when I hear Shostakovich's anthem, I get the stirrings of something. That's not to deny the USSR was an expensive and unforgivably bloody experiment in leftist delusions, of course - Stalin in particular was a disaster of a leader and a human being - but throughout much of its history, there was something at least aesthetically impressive there: a grandeur and ambition. Even beyond the aesthetics, it was, at least at certain times and places, a genuine attempt to built a society on fundamentally new lines from those of the West. Of course, it failed, and history can learn from that, but there was still a hint of something honourable and aspirational there, in some respects even akin to the American Revolution. By contrast, modern Russia is a dumb klepto-petro-state feasting on the bones of its predecessors.

In any case, I think events like the one you describe would prompt at least some skepticism on my part, largely because it pattern-matches to other hoaxes, and partly because it seems unlikely in its own terms. Russians are rare in Europe, and comparatively many of them are wealthy or at least well connected. Far more likely to be ethnic Russian from the Balts than actual Russians (no visa required) or generic anti-Ukraine skinheads from Hungary or Poland or Serbia or even France. The actual explanation would probably have occurred to me too, though perhaps far down the list. I don't always apply such high standards of discretion to news when it comes in from Ukraine - I do a fair amount of willful optimism about the battlefield situation. But in operational matters at least, my predictions seem fairly well calibrated thus far, even accounting for my optimism bias, and I have no ability to materially influence things, so I'm happy to stick with my Pollyannaish prognostications of the military situation.

As for Armenia and Azerbaijan - of course, my sympathies are entirely with Armenia. It's barely a third the size of Azerbaijan with fewer allies and no petro revenues. It's an ancient bastion of Christianity in a part of the world that's been hostile to it for the last thousand years. They've already endured one genocide. But there's very little the West can do here - Armenia is landlocked, has no land corridors to the EU, is a CSTO member, and the EU is in no position to start using energy sanctions on Azerbaijan (the US has more freedom to act, and I'm still holding out hope for Pelosi's visit). I have quite strong feelings about the conflict nonetheless, and if anything, Russia's abject failure to protect its own client state from a genuine case of unwarranted aggression and ethnic cleansing further diminishes my opinion. If there was ever a time Russia could deliver on its promise of upholding Christianity in Asia or of constituting an alternate source of global order, this is it: a small long-suffering Christian nation on Russia's doorstep is under attack from a larger richer Turkic Muslim aggressor, and they have every legal right to intervene, and could do so easily. At the current time, of course, they have the excuse (!) that any potential intervention might provide a distraction from their very important and sincere commitment to several more months of sustained militarised slaughter of Slavs up and down the Dnieper. But what of the 2020 war, when they could have quickly bitchslapped Azerbaijan into accepting the status quo, and proven themselves Armenia's saviour? But no, Putin was greedy and stupid and had no real ideological commitment to helping Armenia, so waited until most of Artsakh had been reconquered by Azerbaijan, then belatedly tried to insert himself as a 'diplomat' (except it turns out, people need to take you seriously for that to work, as we're seeing now). Yet more evidence that Russian civilisation would be a good idea.