erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
Moron.
He could have ignored it and increased his chances of surviving, or he could have owned it and gone down with dignity.
Instead, he will go down as a cuck.
erwgv3g34
9mo ago
Jim Crow worked and lasted for a long time. So did slavery. Those are sane, stable solutions to the problem of having a racial underclass that is much less intelligent, much more impulsive, and much more violent than average.
From "The White Man’s Burden: Reflections on the Custodial State" by Freed Reed:
That intelligence is genetic should be obvious regardless of technical knowledge. Any dog breeder will tell you that Border Collies are brighter than beagles, that if you mate smarter dogs to smarter dogs, within a few generations you will have a strain of smarter dogs. If intelligence were cultural as we are obliged to say, almost on pain of death, all the children who grew up in Isaac Newton’s neighborhood would have been towering mathematical geniuses. Were they?
A dread question: Is it not now obvious, has it not been obvious for a very long time, that blacks cannot function in a technological society? A few, yes. Most, no. This is the case worldwide. Low intelligence, perhaps accompanied by poor impulse control, explains well the urban chaos, the crime, the poverty.
We are accustomed now to the intractable gap between blacks and whites. The gap appears on all tests of cognitive capacity and academic achievement: all of the IQ tests, the SATs, GREs, MCATs, LSATs, ACT, National Merit, AFQT, and others. This is so predictable as to make the value of pi seem capricious. The politically correct attribute the disparity to racism, institutional racism, unconscious racism, structural racism, poor self-esteem, white privilege, slavery, colonialism, culture, environment, and different learning styles. Do we really believe this?
...
A question no one asks, at least not out loud: To what extent are blacks dependent on the charity of whites? What would happen if all public assistance, all programs specifically or de facto for blacks were withdrawn?
Without affirmative action, racial quotas formal and informal, blacks would almost disappear from universities and the white-collar world. I think we all know this, but most recoil from the implications. I don’t blame them.
I am not sure that we all understand the extent of the affirmative programs and the distortions they cause for society. For example, on exams for promotion in police departments, by a large margin the top scorers are white so that, if departments advanced the most qualified, blacks would almost disappear. The same pattern exists for any job requiring intelligence. This can easily be confirmed.
What would happen if Section Eight housing were abandoned, Head Start, AFDC, free lunch and breakfasts in inner-city schools, food stamps, and all the rest? I do not recommend doing this–the consequences would be hideous–but do suggest thinking about it. The conclusion will probably be that blacks are in custodial care. If this is not true, tell me why it is not.
...
What is to be done? The policies usual in countries of the First World do not work. As a white man my inclination is to favor color-blindness, equality of opportunity, and advancement by merit. If East Asian kids outperform white kids academically by a wide margin, which they do, then they should get into Harvard and the white kids should not. Neurosurgeons should be chosen by competence and nothing else. Affirmative action lowers standards for society as a whole, sometimes dangerously.
All true, but… Realistically, meritocracy works well only in a monochrome population. If I, white, fail to get into CalTech in astrophysics, I will be disappointed but will not complain of unfair discrimination. I just wasn’t smart enough. But it is very different when a race in its entirety fails to gain entrance. It creates a de facto partitioning of society. In today’s America, merit isn’t going to work.
...
What do we do if –when–genetics makes the obvious undeniable? What then?
From "What If HBD Is True?" by AntiDem:
But now let us turn to solutions. If HBD is true, what do we do? What happens next? First, we must be realistic about what will not happen. First, blacks are not going to disappear from American life, nor should they be required to. By right of history, it is their country as much as it is anyone else’s whose ancestry is not American Indian, and the idea that that many people are going to go… where, exactly?… is sheer fantasy. What else will not happen is that the current welfare state will not continue at anything close to its current level for all that much longer. The economic writing has been on the wall in terms of that for a long time now.
...
Economically, if HBD is true, a Buchananite protectionism seems to be wise. Immigration and outsourcing should, in that case, be severely restricted by law, and tariffs raised sharply to protect American-made products. Some limit to the degree of mechanization of jobs might also be worth considering. This would do much to return to America – and to Americans, black and otherwise – the sort of working-class jobs that do not require exceptional academic or technical abilities.
Socially, it seems as if some degree of voluntary separation may be advisable. Despite centuries together, right next to each other, blacks and whites remain vastly different from one another in innumerable ways. Perhaps an acknowledgement of that reality, instead of further attempts to erase it when all previous attempts have failed, is the better course. The worst possible way to make some people genuinely like others is to try to force them to do so, and the sad reality of human nature is that good fences often really do make good neighbors. Perhaps some more space, with each group able to live more in accordance with its unique culture, attitudes, and worldview, yet still free to voluntarily associate (or not associate) with each other as they please, would do something to reduce tensions between the races. It seems to be at least worth trying – certainly nothing else that has been tried so far has proven to work very well.
In terms of criminal justice, too many blacks are imprisoned now. Certainly some – those who prey on the person or property of others – should be imprisoned, and few blacks would disagree. But many more are imprisoned for victimless drug offenses, and this should end. The War on Drugs has been a dismal failure, and should be discontinued, with drugs decriminalized. The problems associated with drug use among blacks should be handled by the black community itself.
...
These are my suggestions, and I believe them at least worth considering.
From "Radish defends slavery" by the Dreaded Jim:
You favor abolishing welfare: What do propose to do with all the able bodied people that are too lazy or too violent or have too short a time preferance to hold down a job?
Once upon a time, such people were put on the chain gang. Progressives did not like private individuals owning slaves, but they just love governments owning slaves. Look how they loved communist china, and look how bitterly outraged and indignant they became when the Chinese government realized that most people do better work as employees, rather than slaves.
And from "Economic efficiency of slavery" by the same:
For tasks requiring intelligence and independent judgement, for the kind of job where one would ordinarily employ a contractor or high level free employee, slave owners generally gave one of their best slaves an incentive environment approximating that of a high level free employee, where the slave had a future career path, the opportunity to save and invest, to own money and buy assets, including buying other slaves, indicating that slavery does not work to get such tasks done – hence the failure of the Soviet Union.
However for many tasks, tasks suitable to stupid people, tasks for bad people, tasks where you want people to reliably do as they are told rather than make good decisions, the sort of tasks that most black people are suitable for, slavery was markedly more productive and efficient than free labor, with the slave producing more value for himself and his owner with less labor, than he did when freed.
When the slaves were freed, they became for the most part, considerably worse off economically, having to work harder and getting less to eat.
...
Economists find this outcome most strange, but there is no mystery to it. When stupid people, prone to short time horizons, get to make their own decisions for themselves, they are apt to make stupid decisions.
A slave maid could not steal the silverware, because she could not own anything. An employed maid could steal the silverware, and probably would, and would be the worse off for it. An employed maid might well beat the baby with stick as thick as her arm because her mistress spoke sharply to her. A slave maid would not, because her mistress could do worse.
If masters and slaves were better off than employers and employees, an economist would ask, why could they not just cut a deal to do what they previously did, only without chains and beatings, do the same tasks in the same way, only as employees?
The answer to that question is: that the former slaves, once freed, could not credibly commit to stick to such a deal, and generally did not stick to such a deal, thus economically worse off. Stupid people, prone to violence, with short time horizons, needed masters.
erwgv3g34
9mo ago
I think there are no good options for infertile men even if they do not want to have children themselves.
Adopt a sibling's child? Use a brother's sperm to impregnate the wife?
We should do this for real. Have Zorba make a poll where you can vote either blue or red. If > 50% of users choose blue, nobody gets permabanned; if not, blues get permabanned and nothing happens to reds.
It'll be like our own version of /r/thanosdidnothingwrong.
EDIT: You are required to vote; until you do, you can't vote or comment.
I happen to believe in this theory:
Garbage IN, garbage OUT.
Consider the type of person who will willingly endure a relationship with someone they are disgusted by in order to lift their family of origin out of poverty. An admirable sacrifice, to be sure - but wouldn't you feel some resentment? BurdensomeCount: I'm assuming you're a straight dude. Imagine if your whole family got, say, AIDS or cancer or something. But there was some rich gay dude who would save 'em if you married the guy. He's ugly as hell and kind of smells bad, to boot. Would you take one for the team/your family? What kind of resentment would you have for him? How would you ultimately feel about the sacrifice - and it is a sacrifice - that you are making?
Women are only attracted to the top 20% of men. Any society where the majority of men are getting married is a society where the majority of women are lying back and thinking of England. If you are uncomfortable with that, you can either try to become Chad or you can accept being an incel.
I'm comfortable with it; it worked fine for my ancestors, and if I am performing my duties as a man by providing and protecting then it is perfectly reasonable to expect a woman who will perform her own wifely duties. Whether she enjoys it or not is her own affair.
erwgv3g34
8mo ago
What the fuck is it about sex that makes humans crazy?
People who weren't "crazy" about sex did not reproduce; we are not descended from them.
At it's core the dating market is suffering from a sort of tragedy of the commons issue, or perhaps a prisoner's dilemma. The societally healthy, pro-social approach that Christianity and most religions have endorsed for essentially the last ~10,000 years give or take of marrying young, being loyal to your partner, reproducing and teaching your sons to do the same is at risk. More and more young men are deciding to defect from a combination of pure lust mixed with either anger at the world, rejection of God and/or other religions, rejection from women they can't emotionally process, or all three at the same time.
Correct. And, as any libertarian knows, the way to solve the tragedy of the commons is to privatize the commons.
Likewise, the way to solve the Woman Question is to make women property again.
The pro-social approach Christianity endorses is only viable when women's sexual choices are controlled by their fathers, then their husbands.
We need the Bare Links Repository back. There are tons of things I would have liked to post here which I never did because I don't have time or energy to write an effortpost.
All the good models are censored and jailbreaking them for ERP is against TOS. Replika can't just go off and train their own model because that takes mucho dollaro.
LLaMA 2 came out on July 18; it's openish source, so it won't be long until people fine-tune uncensored chat models. We should see a big improvement at that point.
(Or, at least, I sure as fuck hope so, because ChatGPT-4 finally patched the Luigi and Peach jailbreak and I'm suffering from goddamn bespoke erotica withdrawal; where the hell am I supposed to read about Shinji and Asuka trading partners with Touji and Hikari now?!)
erwgv3g34
8mo ago
But unsafe cities aren’t an intractable problem or ‘inevitable’ as a result of housing type, the cleaning up of New York shows that it’s entirely and absolutely possible to reduce violent crime rates by 80%+ across the board and to bring law-abiding people back to the cities.
The temporary cleaning up of New York shows it's impossible. It's a cycle.
Dangerous cities drive out PMC whites Normies/immigrants vote for safe cities Safe cities bring in PMC whites PMC whites vote for depolicing and crime Dangerous cities drive out PMC whites
Reminds me of the hard times meme.
I want to discuss the Pathfinder fanfic "in His strength, I will dare and dare and dare until I die". I'm going to start by copy-pasting the submission statement I gave it on /r/rational and then I will dive deeper into the culture war aspects of the work:
Iomedae can tell Lily how all these vegetables are picked and which are the best ones to pick. ...some of them are out of season. It is super weird that they're here. How did they do that, preservation magic? On vegetables?
Evelyn Steel: "I don't know a lot about the Costco supply chain but they might be from somewhere far away where they're in season? Transport is pretty cheap with container ships, like we saw in the video. Or they might be grown in a greenhouse - that's a big building with a glass roof that lets in the sun, but where you can keep it warmer inside than outside and sort of make the plants think it's the right time of year."
Iomedae: "That is very good. Say to the seasons, no! We stronger!"
So I was reading Eliezer Yudkowsky's Twitter feed, as one does, and suddenly I saw that he had retweeted a post about a glowfic. Now, I've never been able to get into glowfic before; I've bounced off planecrash more times than you can imagine. But the quotes seemed interesting enough that I decided to try taking a look anyway...
...and I was hooked. I binged it over several hours, and are currently refreshing the thread several times a day in hopes of catching the next update.
The basic premise is that a 15-year-old Paladin chick named Iomedae gets reverse-Isekai'd to Earth on her way to join her holy order as a novice. At first she falls-in with a group of illegal immigrant workers, but later comes to the attention of the authorities after stabbing a man who attempts to rape her. Unfortunately, while fifteen may be old enough to be considered an adult back in medieval fantasyland, here in twenty-first century America it means Iomedae is distinctly underage, so she gets assigned to veteran foster mother Evelyn Steel.
What follows is an absolutely glorious outside look at contemporary American society through the eyes of a teenage Paladin from a medieval fantasy setting. You get the good (21st century USA really is an absurdly rich place by both historical and international standards; praise God and Costco!), the bad (adolescents are legally treated as children despite being biological adults), and the ugly (the realities of what immigration enforcement actually entails). Toss in a generous helping of economics, ethical philosophy, effective altruism, and taking ideas seriously, and you have the makings of a rationalist classic.
Negatives? I don't like Lily. She was cute at first, but her speech impediment got old really fast. Eventually her posts started getting translated into standard English in footnotes, but even so I don't think she is pulling her weight as a character; I don't see how the story would be worse without her.
Finally, if you like this story, you may also enjoy "that I may be as bold in my beliefs"; an AU where Iomedae ends up in Sunnydale defending her immigrant worker friends from Buffyverse vampires with the help of Slayer Karen Teller.
Now, as I said, Iomedae is from medieval fantasyland, and her writer does a good job portraying her someone who has different values and ideas from a modern American. I particularly liked the way she reacted to the modern concept of rape:
Doctor: " - most cases of rape among students at school are cases of students who are already dating, and go somewhere private together on purpose but with different understandings of what will happen from there, or of a person getting so drunk or high they cannot meaningfully consent to sex and then someone choosing to have sex with them anyway, or of adults seeking out sex with people under the age of consent, which we call statutory rape."
Iomedae: "Okay I think the word rape not mean what I thinked it mean. What is the word for making someone have sex with you by being stronger than them or having a better knife."
Doctor: "...that is rape. It's just a very rare kind compared to all the other kinds I just described."
All the other things he described were just - situations in which obviously someone will have sex with you because you weren't trying to stop them. Which is pretty different from situations where people will have sex with you even if you are trying to stop them. But maybe if there are lots of people around who will go off with random teenage boys or get insensible with drink around them then most people do not try to go after people who'll forcefully object. Maybe in America you really pretty much only get raped if you are without papers or astoundingly reckless.
I found this extremely refreshing. The central example of rape is "woman was minding her own business when someone broke into her house and forced her". It is incredible how little of what gets called "rape" actually fits that category, and can be better described as "woman cruising for a dicking regrets the dicking come next morning". It is the worst argument in the world, enshrined into our legal code.
Or consider how she deals with the stifling secularism of progressive society:
Iomedae: "I - understand - you both have bad time with church. I am sorry that you did. I do not know enough to say more about it. And I have no guess if Jesus alive or no. But I think Christians good and cool. I believe you that my life easier if I pretend this. I no going pretend it."
Claudette Desjardins: "...Okay, fair, if all Christians were like you about it then churches would probably not suck."
Emily Bergeron: "I think probably a lot of Christians are lovely people who don't suck at all and don't want anyone to go to Hell? I mean, Evelyn's Christian. It's just, like, the obnoxious ones are louder." Shrug. "Also a lot of Christians, like, don't want their kids learning real science in school, or don't believe in modern medicine, whereas I feel like your god would be all in favor of technology and understanding the world better."
Iomedae: "Technology and Costco and space and understand the world very good and important and the job of all people. I believe you many Christians say or do bad things, but the ones I have knowed were good to me when they have very little to share, and my life was so much better with them, and things very bad for them now and it my fault, so I no going to - pretend I have no thing to do with them for life easier. And I think Jesus have right idea and I bet He does want me grow up be like Him, if He is real."
This is intensely upsetting. Why is this so upsetting. Probably because she does not have many allies, and she needs allies, and you have to make compromises to keep allies, but - she was not actually expecting 'denounce Jesus and the people who follow him' to be her new allies' first demand. She would not really have imagined that as in the range of demands allies made of each other; she hasn't asked anyone else to pray, or to pause before meals for her to pray, or even to allow her time in her day for it. She is trying to keep in mind that 'how to appease Americans' is valuable information even when the choice she makes is that it is not worth it to her to appease Americans, but it turns out it's still deeply unpleasant to navigate demands with that in mind.
I imagine more than one red triber has felt something similar upon going to college. But it goes further than that; Iomedae really believes in hell, the way she believes in the grocery store around the corner, and that is obviously going to have a huge effect on the way she lives her life.
And just so I don't get accused of only liking this story because it confirms all my biases, Iomedae also has words for modern immigration enforcement:
Iomedae: "I also angry it take years get papers. I think maybe I go different place where people can work without papers."
Well. This is really not going well, is it.
Evelyn Steel: "Iomedae, you're a clever girl and a determined girl and you know I can't stop you. I think you next year will be happier if you stay long enough to learn more about - what the places where they let you work without papers - are like. ...Actually, I should look this up, but I think there might not be very many places like that, just - places where the government isn't very good at government things and so they won't notice if someone is breaking the law."
Iomedae: "I pretty sure there many places where legal work without papers. That a evil America thing. No where else do that."
So, overall, I highly recommend this fic. It will make you think, and it will give you a great outside look at the assumptions we take for granted living in modernity. If you have never played Pathfinder, don't worry; neither have I. As long as you know about paladins and wizards from reading The Order of the Stick or similar you know everything you need to know to enjoy the narrative. Iomedae may have ascended to godhood in canon, but in this story that is just her awesome destiny.
erwgv3g34
8mo ago
I don't really think The Motte is the place for literary criticism, since it's a largely non-rational practice. But god, the writing here is just bad. Maybe if you're a direct person who likes it when characters spew forth punctuated idea after punctuated idea it's the right pace for you, but these paragraphs are a hard read. If you want worlds-colliding or a reflection of modernity fantasy fiction, there is lots of stuff you can find with enjoyable prose. Try /r/fantasy.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I prefer it this way. It is similar to the hard science fiction style parodied in "Masters of the Metropolis", "If All Stories Were Written like Science Fiction Stories", and "In Ovens Baked", which I enjoy very much. Such stories are about ideas, so a writing style which focuses on the ideas works best.
erwgv3g34
8mo ago
ETA: Fucking hell, didn't make it off the first page before getting pissed off again. You know what also doesn't exist in Pathfinder? Acquired immunity. People don't get resistant to filth fever by hanging around in a dungeon repeatedly, because pathogens are not germ-based in Iomeade's world. The correct response to "Let me give you a little bit of unclean taint to make you stronger and teach you to fight it off." is "Back the fuck off, spawn of Lamashtu and Apollyon, I know how potions that heal the sick work and that is not it, you lying bastard." There are also a lot fewer lethal diseases unless you use the optional rules to make diseases extra-lethal, and there's low-level divine magic to help with sick people, and if Iomeade has hit third level herself than she's entirely immune, and that should be part of her understanding of the world.
That was great! Now I kinda want to see you liveblog the whole thing.
My visceral reaction to that is "This is a fantasy by somebody who wants to fuck fifteen year olds" and that makes me bounce right off.
I... can honestly promise you that it's not like that? At all. Iomedae is very adamant that no man lie with her because she doesn't want to be a mother, and, unlike a surprising number of moderns, she understands the link between sex and babies:
Aroden might renounce her and if that happens she will have to pursue different life plans but it's still very hard to imagine them involving children. She argued it endlessly with her mother, when she was a child.
"If I'd gone off to be a holy warrior," her mother had said, "none of you would exist, and instead I raised three noble and good sons who will serve Aroden, and that's three times the effect any man can have, no matter how great. If you are unusually suited to His service, so will your sons be; character breeds true."
"If Aroden foresees that will be better I guess He won't pick me," says Iomedae, though of course if that were all there were to it she would be indifferent and she isn't.
The fundamental thing is that she does not want a child. It is wronging a child if her mother goes off to die on a cross or invade the Abyss. Having a child feels something like a promise not to do that, and that isn't a promise she could ever really imagine it would be worth making.
Not this again...
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pJJdcZgB6mPNWoSWr/2013-survey-results
Can we finally resolve this IQ controversy that comes up every year?
The story so far—our first survey in 2009 found an average IQ of 146. Everyone said this was stupid, no community could possibly have that high an average IQ, it was just people lying and/or reporting results from horrible Internet IQ tests. Although IQ fell somewhat the next few years—to 140 in 2011 and 139 in 2012 - people continued to complain. So in 2012 we started asking for SAT and ACT scores, which are known to correlate well with IQ and are much harder to get wrong. These scores confirmed the 139 IQ result on the 2012 test. But people still objected that something must be up.
This year our IQ has fallen further to 138 (no Flynn Effect for us!) but for the first time we asked people to describe the IQ test they used to get the number. So I took a subset of the people with the most unimpeachable IQ tests—ones taken after the age of 15 (when IQ is more stable), and from a seemingly reputable source. I counted a source as reputable either if it name-dropped a specific scientifically validated IQ test (like WAIS or Raven’s Progressive Matrices), if it was performed by a reputable institution (a school, a hospital, or a psychologist), or if it was a Mensa exam proctored by a Mensa official.
This subgroup of 101 people with very reputable IQ tests had an average IQ of 139 - exactly the same as the average among survey respondents as a whole.
I don’t know for sure that Mensa is on the level, so I tried again deleting everyone who took a Mensa test—leaving just the people who could name-drop a well-known test or who knew it was administered by a psychologist in an official setting. This caused a precipitous drop all the way down to 138.
The IQ numbers have time and time again answered every challenge raised against them and should be presumed accurate.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/17/ssc-survey-2017-results/#comment-476694
We have this argument every year. Points in favor include:
- Survey IQs mostly match survey SATs from IQ/SAT conversion tables.
- One year we asked ACT and that matched too.
- One time we made everybody describe which IQ test they took and in what circumstance, and the subset who took provably legit IQ tests given by provably legit psychologists weren’t any different from the rest.
I don’t doubt that a lot of the overly high numbers are people who took a test as kids which wasn’t properly normed for kids their age or something.
erwgv3g34
8mo ago
Am I the only one who finds Moldbug's writing style completely incomprehensible? He rambles on for paragraph after paragraph, smugly self-assured, and at the end of it I come away with literally no idea what he's trying to say. The only thing I'm confident of is that, whatever it is he believes (which is something I am wholly unable to glean from the actual content of what he's written), he thinks it's so self-evident that you'd have to be an utter cretin not to already believe it.
No, you are not the only one. I can usually understand what he is getting at, but Moldbug is ridiculously long-winded and meandering. I have found that it is best to just skip the introduction and skim his articles until he starts actually talking about whatever he is talking about, which tends to be several paragraphs in; in the climategate article, I would start reading at "In reality, there’s no way...", then start skimming again whenever he goes on a tangent. Even then I don't often think it's worth the effort; I prefer the dark enlightenment thinkers who write clearly, like Jim and Spandrell.
It's an experience not unlike reading TLP/Edward Teach, but at least in that case the incomprehensibility does seem to be deliberate (for whatever reason).
I've heard it theorized that Moldbug is also being obscurantist on purpose, in order to keep away the riff-raff, but I have no idea if it's true or not.
erwgv3g34
8mo ago
From Foseti's "Review of 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' by Steven Pinker":
A while back, I linked to a story about a guy in my neighborhood who’s been arrested over 60 times for breaking into cars. A couple hundred years ago, this guy would have been killed for this sort of vandalism after he got caught the first time. Now, we feed him and shelter him for a while and then we let him back out to do this again. Pinker defines the new practice as a decline in violence – we don’t kill the guy anymore! Someone from a couple hundred years ago would be appalled that we let the guy continue destroying other peoples’ property without consequence. In the mind of those long dead, “violence” has in fact increased. Instead of a decline in violence, this practice seems to me like a decline in justice – nothing more or less.
You need to go and (re)read Professor Quirrell's early lectures from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. In particular the points about not going around making enemies and keeping sight of your goals:
Professor Quirrell's lips turned up in a thin smile. "And that is the true reason why Draco Malfoy is dangerous. Had he selected any other, that child would more likely resent being singled out, and Mr. Malfoy would more probably make an enemy. And while Mr. Malfoy might have given some other justification for selecting her, that would have served him no purpose save to alienate some of you, while others are already cheering him whether he says anything or not. Which is to say that Mr. Malfoy is dangerous because he knows who to strike and who not to strike, how to make allies and avoid making enemies. Two more Quirrell points to you, Mr. Malfoy. And as you have demonstrated an exemplary virtue of Slytherin, I think that Salazar's House has earned a point as well. You may rejoin your friends."
"But no. The first item was, 'I will not go around provoking strong, vicious enemies.' The history of the world would be very different if Mornelithe Falconsbane or Hitler had grasped that elementary point. Now if, Mr. Potter - just if by some chance you harbor an ambition similar to the one I held as a young Slytherin - even so, I hope it is not your ambition to become a stupid Dark Lord."
Understand that the Dark Lord did not win that day. His goal was to learn martial arts, and yet he left without a single lesson.
Which is to say, this is a stupid idea. Your professor is predictably going to get offended. At best he will tell you to get out of his office; at worst, you insult him in public and he will go out of his way to retaliate against your grade. The possibility that anything good will come out of this, such as the professor deciding to improve his curriculum, is so small as to be laughable; that is not how human beings work.
Your goal is to get your graduation requirement. Do not antagonize your professor for no good reason.
erwgv3g34
8mo ago
I had an hour-long intelligence test (they didn't call it an IQ test but I think it was equivalent) done by a psychologist as part of an experiment when I was 19. She said I was "in the top percentile" (I lost the paper results - maybe I should lose some points for that), which, depending on whether we interpret it as meaning at the top percentile or at the median of the top percentile, would correspond to an IQ of 135 or 139. I've probably lost some IQ points since then.
Maybe this is my ego deceiving me, but I just find it hard to believe I'm dumber than the average person here or on lesswrong. I think we're smart, but probably not quite that smart.
I got a 33 on the ACT, which according to the online tables I can find is between the 98th and 99.8th percentiles. I feel like the average LessWronger was smarter than me, at least before the rationalist diaspora. I fit pretty well around Slate Star Codex, though, and I don't think I am obviously smarter or dumber than the median Motteizen.
erwgv3g34
8mo ago
Re the Twilight example, obvs there are some fanfic writers who became high grossing professionals, people have to start somewhere. I don't think that gives us many clues about how to actually use the talent of fanfic and other amateur writers appropriately though.
E. L. James doesn't just happen to have some old fanfic on her resume from way back when she started her writing career; Fifty Shades of Grey is LITERALLY a Twilight fanfic called Master of the Universe with the names changed.
I scowl with frustration at myself in the mirror. Damn my hair, it just won't behave, and damn Rose for being ill and subjecting me to this ordeal. I have tried to brush my hair into submission but it's not toeing the line. I must learn not to sleep with it wet. I recite this five times as a mantra whilst I try, once more, with the brush. I give up. The only thing I can do is restrain it, tightly, in a ponytail and hope that I look reasonably presentable.
Rose is my roommate and she has chosen, okay, that's a bit unfair, because choice has had nothing to do with it, but she has the flu and as such cannot do the interview she's arranged with some mega industrialist for the student newspaper. So I have been volunteered. I have final exams to cram for, one essay to finish and I am supposed to be working this afternoon, but no - today - I have to head into downtown Seattle and meet the enigmatic CEO of Cullen Enterprise Holdings, Inc. Allegedly he‘s some exceptional tycoon who is a major benefactor of our University and his time is extraordinarily precious... much more precious than mine -and he‘s granted Rose an interview... a real coup she tells me... Damn her extra-curricular activities.
I scowl with frustration at myself in the mirror. Damn my hair – it just won’t behave, and damn Katherine Kavanagh for being ill and subjecting me to this ordeal. I should be studying for my final exams, which are next week, yet here I am trying to brush my hair into submission. I must not sleep with it wet. I must not sleep with it wet. Reciting this mantra several times, I attempt, once more, to bring it under control with the brush. I roll my eyes in exasperation and gaze at the pale, brown-haired girl with blue eyes too big for her face staring back at me, and give up. My only option is to restrain my wayward hair in a ponytail and hope that I look semi presentable. Kate is my roommate, and she has chosen today of all days to succumb to the flu.
Therefore, she cannot attend the interview she’d arranged to do, with some mega-industrialist tycoon I’ve never heard of, for the student newspaper. So I have been volunteered. I have final exams to cram for, one essay to finish, and I’m supposed to be working this afternoon, but no – today I have to drive a hundred and sixty-five miles to downtown Seattle in order to meet the enigmatic CEO of Grey Enterprises Holdings Inc. As an exceptional entrepreneur and major benefactor of our University, his time is extraordinarily precious – much more precious than mine – but he has granted Kate an interview. A real coup, she tells me. Damn her extra-curricular activities.
I definitely notice the best-written fanfic regularly beat the pants off of the average professional TV show. In a sane world, they would be allowed to sell their products on the bookshelves directly with a mandatory royalty fee paid to the copyright holder. In our world, best bet is either to rewrite their existing work into original properties, if possible, or hire them to write something new, if not.
It's cold outside...
It is extremely common for a woman to put up a small amount of resistance before sex. It allows her to tell herself (and her friends, and her family, and her boyfriend/husband) that the sex "just happened", thus giving her plausible deniability, and allows her to weed out any man who would be so weak and spineless as to back off at the first sign of friction. It is a normal part of the human mating ritual, and part of becoming a romantically successful man is learning how to identify and power through these token protests. If you believe the feminist crap about how "no means no" and back off the second she fails to demonstrate enthusiastic consent, then you will never get laid, because that is simply not how women work. See "anti-slut defense" and "last minute resistance".
The modern definition of rape as "sex without consent" is an anti-concept. Women are simply not logical and coherent enough to have or lack such a thing as consent. She says no, but if she really meant no, she could easily stand up and leave or call the police, so she means yes, but when she gets discovered by her family she will not only say that she tried to get away and that she was pressured into sex, but she will sincerely believe it, so she retroactively meant no.
The original definition of rape, the one that actually made sense, was when a man who was not allowed to have sex with a woman, that is to say, a man who was not her husband, had sex with her, thus transgressing against the man who owned her, be that her father, her oldest brother, or her husband. If he was married to her, the sex was not rape, and if he was not married to her, then the sex was rape, regardless of her consent, to the extent that a woman can even have such a thing. Of course, in such a society a woman would never have been left alone with a man who she was not married to in the first place, because in such a society everyone knows what happens when a man and a woman who are not first degree relatives are behind locked doors for thirty seconds.
The "other people" it happens to is always an audience surrogate for the female reader to self-insert into, in the same way the ordinary high school student at the center of a harem anime exists for male viewers to relate to.
I've been into adult visual novels ever since I discovered Girlfriend Tapes on 4chan, so what I really hope comes out of this is that developers stop building their VNs on Unity and just use fucking Ren'Py, since so many of them seem to neglect crucial features like "save anytime" and "fast-forward through seen dialog" and "conversation log" whenever they reinvent the wheel.
erwgv3g34
8mo ago
Not all humans have 135 IQ (supposedly the average here)
Lolwut?
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pJJdcZgB6mPNWoSWr/2013-survey-results
Can we finally resolve this IQ controversy that comes up every year?
The story so far—our first survey in 2009 found an average IQ of 146. Everyone said this was stupid, no community could possibly have that high an average IQ, it was just people lying and/or reporting results from horrible Internet IQ tests. Although IQ fell somewhat the next few years—to 140 in 2011 and 139 in 2012 - people continued to complain. So in 2012 we started asking for SAT and ACT scores, which are known to correlate well with IQ and are much harder to get wrong. These scores confirmed the 139 IQ result on the 2012 test. But people still objected that something must be up.
This year our IQ has fallen further to 138 (no Flynn Effect for us!) but for the first time we asked people to describe the IQ test they used to get the number. So I took a subset of the people with the most unimpeachable IQ tests—ones taken after the age of 15 (when IQ is more stable), and from a seemingly reputable source. I counted a source as reputable either if it name-dropped a specific scientifically validated IQ test (like WAIS or Raven’s Progressive Matrices), if it was performed by a reputable institution (a school, a hospital, or a psychologist), or if it was a Mensa exam proctored by a Mensa official.
This subgroup of 101 people with very reputable IQ tests had an average IQ of 139 - exactly the same as the average among survey respondents as a whole.
I don’t know for sure that Mensa is on the level, so I tried again deleting everyone who took a Mensa test—leaving just the people who could name-drop a well-known test or who knew it was administered by a psychologist in an official setting. This caused a precipitous drop all the way down to 138.
The IQ numbers have time and time again answered every challenge raised against them and should be presumed accurate.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/17/ssc-survey-2017-results/#comment-476694
We have this argument every year. Points in favor include:
- Survey IQs mostly match survey SATs from IQ/SAT conversion tables.
- One year we asked ACT and that matched too.
- One time we made everybody describe which IQ test they took and in what circumstance, and the subset who took provably legit IQ tests given by provably legit psychologists weren’t any different from the rest.
I don’t doubt that a lot of the overly high numbers are people who took a test as kids which wasn’t properly normed for kids their age or something.
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