erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
2yr ago
From "The Fourth Meditation On Creepiness" by Scott Alexander:
Imagine two Soviet spies in the Cold War US who have to get in contact with one another. The KGB forgot to give them a silly code phrase like "the wombat feeds at midnight" so they've got to figure it out on their own. The Americans know these two spies are trying to get in contact, so if one were to just ask random people "Are you a Soviet spy?" the Americans could quickly guess that the asker was a spy and arrest him.
You are one of the two spies, and you spot someone who you're about 50% sure is your colleague. How do you confirm they are also a spy with the lowest possible risk of getting arrested?
I bet there's some fancy cryptographic solution here, but my intuitive strategy would be as follows:
Me: Excuse me, sir, do you know any good borscht restaurants around here?
Other Spy: Ah, borscht. I love borscht!
Me: I hear Russian borscht is the best. Have you ever had any?
Other Spy: Yes, I was in Moscow once many years ago, before the war.
Me: Really? Have you ever been to [street the KGB headquarters is on?]
Other Spy: All the time! That's my favorite street! I used to talk to [name of KGB head] a lot.
Me: I am a Soviet spy. Are you one too?
Other Spy: Yes.
You would be immediately under suspicion if you asked patriotic Americans "Are you a Soviet spy?", since they would then know you were probably the other spy yourself. So instead you lead up with a question that seems innocuous to an American who's not thinking about spying, but to a Soviet who is specifically looking for another spy is sorta kinda suggestive of Russia. The other spy can't just say "Ah, I understand your code, I too am a spy" because then he might blow his cover to an American who was just looking for some good borscht. So he says something that slightly escalates the Russianness. You can't just blow your cover now, because you're still not sure he's not just an American who appreciates a good plate of borscht himself, so you escalate the Russianness slightly further. In other words, you start off with a conversation that could happen by coincidence, decrease the chance of coincidence a little bit at each exchange only once you get the signal from the other, and eventually the conversation becomes one that couldn't possibly happen by coincidence and you know he's the other spy.
When I was much younger and more terrified of women, this was exactly the route I would take. I didn't want to know if she was my fellow spy, I wanted to know if she liked me. I can't just ask, or I might end up as the next Julius Rosenberg. So instead - maybe we're sitting next to each other, so I move a little closer to her. If she moves a little closer to me, or does anything that could be interpreted in my feverishly optimistic brain as resembling this, then maybe I touch my leg against hers. If she touches her leg against me, maybe I rest my arm against her shoulder. If she rests her arm against my shoulder, I smile at her. If she smiles at me, then I ask for her hand in marriage.
One can also do this verbally. It would pain me to even type out the conversation, but I assure you it's still pretty awkward.
And when this doesn't work, sometimes if the other person just looks super Russian it's tempting to worry you've miscalibrated your subtlety ("Man, what if this guy just really hates borscht? Maybe I should call him Comrade and see what happens?) and try something else.
And okay, this is all super creepy, and I know that now, and I'm sorry for doing it, and I won't do it again.
(by the way, the one time this worked I was so flabbergasted and confused I completely forgot to ask for her hand in marriage. In case you haven't figured it out from this latest series of blog posts, I'm kind of an idiot.)
But let me try to explain (not justify, mind you) why this might seem like a thing someone should do.
I had a friend a few years ago, let's call her Alice. I asked Alice out on a date. She said she wanted to keep being friends. This went well. No, really. It actually went well.
Alice moved to another state, and a little while afterwards I went to visit her for a week. I worried if it might be creepy if I asked her to cuddle after she had said she wanted to be friends, but eventually I asked her anyway, and she said that was great and she loved cuddling and had been pretty desperate for someone to cuddle with.
We cuddled all week, but I was super super careful not to touch her breasts or any other part of her body that might be interpreted as outside the spirit of friendly platonic cuddling. On the last day she basically grabbed my hands and put them on her breasts and told me that she really liked having her breasts touched and obviously I was never going to get around to asking her of my own initiative.
And, being male, I thought Darnit, I could have been doing that the last six days!
And on the train home I was thinking about this, and I tried to figure out if there was something I could have done differently, and I decided that there is literally no non-creepy way to say "Excuse me, do you mind if I place my hands on your breasts?" Try it. I dare you to construct a non-creepy version of that sentence.
(as an aside, the existence of the non-threatening and socially acceptable word "cuddle" is super helpful. Before I learned that word I just never cuddled anyone, there is no non-creepy way to say "Excuse me, do you mind if I touch and stroke your body?")
Putting your hands on someone's breasts without asking them is a much worse offense than asking "Excuse me, do you mind if I place my hands on your breasts?". But, someone who actually puts their hands on someone else's breasts without asking them is likely to get swatted away and get a "Go away, creep!" and then the issue will probably never be spoken of again. If there were a rumor at my high school that some guy had put his hands on some girl's breasts, it would die down in a week, two weeks tops. On the other hand, someone who goes up to a girl and asks "Excuse me, do you mind if I place my hands on your breasts?" becomes a creepiness legend. If there were a rumor at my high school that some guy had asked a girl for permission to put his hands on her breasts, then that rumor would pass down from upperclassmen to lowerclassmen through the generations, and a thousand years from now when the high school exists only in cyberspace the disembodied transhuman freshmen would still be giggling to one another about it.
The same is true of the creepy Soviet-spy escalating thing. Is it creepy and horrible? Yes. Is it so utterly non-juicy that it would never make a good rumor? Also yes. So the more terrified a guy is of asking "Would you like to go out?" or "Would you like to cuddle?" or even "May I put my hands on your breasts?", the more likely he is to try creepiness instead. On the other hand, the day you can ask consent without any fear of reprisal or shaming is the day that men give a huge sigh of relief and just ask out the women they like without going through the whole creepiness rigamarole which honestly is pretty stressful for us too.
This is why I keep stressing that creepiness comes from male weakness rather than male privilege. If there were no risk of getting arrested, then the Soviet spy wouldn't ask silly questions about borscht. If there were no risk of being pilloried as a horrible creepy person for asking out a person "above your station", then creepy high school me wouldn't have sat uncomfortably close to girls in the hopes that this would prompt them to spontaneously show interest.
It's not exactly an invitation for sex. It's an invitation to move to an isolated place where sex might plausibly happen. It's the next step in escalating the flirting dance. By agreeing to go back to a man's room for coffee, a girl is not necessarily saying "I will have sex with you", but rather "I am open to the possibility of having sex with you if you play your cards right."
The coffee is just an excuse. It could just as easily be "do you want to come to my place to watch Netflix?" or "do you want to go back to my room to see my marble collection?" Conversely, nobody thinks that "do you want to grab a coffee at Starbucks?" is going to lead to public sex on the Starbucks bar. The move from a public space to a private space is the key.
It just has to be plausibly deniable so that the girl can tell herself (and her friends, and her family, and her boyfriend/husband...) that she really didn't mean to sleep with the guy, but it "just happened". It's a way to get past her anti-slut defense. Otherwise, there is too much common knowledge.
Every woman says "no". That's the most basic of shit tests. In order for a man to become romantically/sexually successful, he needs to learn to differentiate between a fake "no" and a real "no" and power through the former.
If people actually took the feminist line about how "no means no" seriously, nobody would ever have sex, because that is simply not how women work.
The woke oppose each and every anti-criminal policy because they believe, correctly, that such measures will have a disparate impact on blacks. It's a doublethink situation similar to Dreher's Law Of Merited Impossibility, except instead of "it will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it" it's "blacks are not more criminal than average, and if you support any tough-on-crimes policy you are a racist because criminals are disproportionately black."
As Covfefe Anon says, "The Woke Are More Correct Than The Mainstream".
He had this absolutely mind-blowing ten-post sequence on gender, sex, etc. It was his best work until "Meditations on Moloch".
@Lepidus already mentioned Scott's redpilling stint in Haiti.
A few more, from #ThingsIWillRegretWriting: "Stuff", "Libya", and "I believe the correct term is 'straw individual'".
Finally, a personal favorite on school and teacher incentives.
erwgv3g34
2yr ago
In humans, good traits are correlated. Beautiful people tend to be smarter. Smarter people tend to be harder working. And so on. It would be amazing if selecting for high-IQ embryos did not also select for high-IQ correlates.
erwgv3g34
2yr ago
The success sequence is not a tool for avoiding social isolation; it just averts poverty. Are you poor? If not, it did its job.
Nobody cares about making the kids of the underclass all IQ 120 at minimum, because they're still going to live in crappy single-parent homes in crime-riddled shitholes and go to schools where metal detectors and armed security guards are needed because the little darlings shoot each other
No they won't. That's what an IQ of 120 means. "A ghetto/barrio/alternative name for low-class-hell-hole isn’t a physical location, its people." Poor areas are not awful because of tragic dirt; they are awful because they are filled with stupid, violent, impulsive people.
(A surprising amount of people don't seem to realize this; they talk about good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods as if rich people used their wealth to hog all the good real-state where shootings and robberies and rapes and so on don't happen, as if those were natural phenomenon like lighting bolts rather than something caused by the people who actually live in those neighborhoods; likewise, complains about disparities in funding, as if schools in rich areas were taking advantage of a gold mine they unfairly took over rather than taxing the economic surplus produced by superior human capital)
Education doesn't do shit because trying to teach algebra to a boy with an IQ of 85 is a waste of time. Increasing his IQ to ONE HUNDRED AND FUCKING TWENTY would be the biggest improvement in the human condition since the industrial revolution.
Even if they start materially poorer, you have eliminated all the dysfunction. College students also live in material poverty, but they have much better lives, because they are smart and hard-working and nonviolent. "If you take the exact same facilities and you fill them with inner city gang members, drug addicts, ex-convicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, and single mothers, you get a housing project."
And just like college students, after a while those 120 IQ kids will start accumulating capital and lifting themselves out of poverty. It's much easier to follow the Success Sequence when you have the intelligence of an undergrad.
Yes, they will still be below elite kids who got uplifted to an IQ of 140, but that's relative poverty, not absolute poverty. Caring about that is the politics of envy. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's." It's societal poison.
erwgv3g34
2yr ago
From "I Am A New Atheist, And I Repent":
One of my core beliefs was that humanity is better off without religion. Religion introduces error and dogma unnecessarily. It appropriates human’s need for community and diverts it for its own ends. It hijacks emotional drives to steer people into atrocities. In summary, it always siphons off value to preserve itself, provides nothing of value in the best case scenario, and in most cases actively degrades humanity.
One of the reasons I thought this is because I truely and deeply believed my generation’s Big Lie. That lie being that All People Are (Roughly) The Same. “All Men Are Created Equal” taken to the extreme. There were many simple, obvious facts of reality that I discovered in my 30s that genuinely shocked me, because I had so fully believed this Lie. It would be like a Christian expecting Jesus to take the wheel of their car when they let go, and being honestly, deeply shocked when the car crashes. I still think this Lie is Noble, and there is some value to it… but ultimately, like all lies, it is destructive. I plan to write more about this Lie and my relationship to it in a future post.
This is important, because *I* didn’t need religion. To me, it provided nothing of value. I understood morality and why other people matter. I found it important to understand the most accurate model of reality possible, unfettered by convenient falsehoods (haha, see previous paragraph). I was self-motivated, socially isolated, and highly Open/Novelty-seeking. Religion was simply a thing that was wrong, and that often served as a handicap.
Since Everyone Is (Roughly) The Same, this must be the case universally. Anyone who thought that religion was net-positive in any case was a victim of religious brainwashing. They’d been deluded, lied to, or violently suppressed, into clinging to humanity’s most destructive parasite. It was my duty to help them break free.
I was so, so very wrong.
It turns out people are different. Shockingly different, in some cases. There are large segments of the population that need what religion provides. Their psychology is vastly different from my own, and they cannot live without the sort of totalitarian guidance that religions provide.
I would not have believed this if someone told it to me, no matter how much supporting evidence they threw at me. Even six or seven years ago I wouldn’t have believed them. I would have to see people freed from religion, drown for years, and then finally create a new religion from whole cloth to supplant the old one, to believe this. I would have to see it with my own eyes, happening in real time.
Over the past few years I watched a new religion born. A secular religion, which doesn’t have the dead-easy failure mode of requiring belief in a sky-fairy. But, since it was created in America, with strong Christian roots, it has all the trappings of Christianity.
Original sin
Essentialism
Repentance and confession
Manichean good/evil dichotomy
Focus on martyrdom and victimhood
Salvation dispensed by the church and needing constant reaffirmation
Even worse, since it is a new religion that is being seized as a lifeline by people who’ve been spiritually drowning for over a decade, it is full of fiery zealots. All conflicts are recast as spiritual struggles focused around the original sin. Like the puritans, they can harbor no dissent in their midst. Everyone must be equally zealous and on their side, or they are on the side of evil. Any price is worth paying to save a soul from evil.
When the scales fell from my eyes and I finally realized what had happened, I felt true crushing failure. Not because I had failed in my objective. Tradition religion is less relevant than ever. The New Atheists won. But in winning, having not realized how different others are, we left a massive religion-vacuum in society. We laid the groundwork for a new religion. One that had been purged of the greatest weaknesses of traditional religions, and with a dense underbrush of religion-starved kindling to tear into.
erwgv3g34
2yr ago
RE: The Watch Thread, I wear a Casio W800H. I picked it over the more iconic F91W because it tells you the date as well as the time, and it was only $10 more, which I figured was negligible amortized over the battery's 10-year lifespan. What does that say about me?
erwgv3g34
2yr ago
erwgv3g34
2yr ago
From "The Simpsons and Cultural Decline" by Free Northerner:
I’ve been watching the first two seasons of the Simpsons the last couple weeks. It’s been years since I’ve watched the show, but I still remember the first ten seasons or so as some of the best TV yet produced.
The first season came out in 1989-90, just 25 years ago, and I remember the show being controversial when it came out; I wasn’t allowed to watch it until some time in high school, about a decade after it first started showing. It was controversial enough that Bush actually used the Simpsons as a negative example of a family. Yet, re-watching now, it’s amazing how tame and traditional it is compared to media offerings today.
Obviously the ‘offensive’ humour in the Simpsons is nothing compared to stuff like Family Guy or South Park, but that’s not the whole of it or even the most important part. It’s not the stated messages, but the basic assumptions in the show.
The Simpsons family is intact and stable, if slightly dysfunctional, and hold to functional, almost traditional, family values. They all love each other, however much they might bicker. Homer is a flawed man, often selfish or stupid, but still loving and caring towards his family. Marge is shown to love and respect Homer, despite her occasional anger at his flaws. Bart disrespects Homer occasionally, but it is shown as a clear deviancy for laughs; it also clearly shown that he does look up to and admire Homer. The kids fight, but at heart care for each other.
...
The Simpsons has a subtext of Homer as patriarch. A few times in the first couple of seasons Homer makes a family decision, whether it is selling the TV to attend counseling, buying a new TV, or choosing a camping spot, to name a few examples. The rest of the family complains or looks unhappy, yet it is not even questioned that, however flawed he or his decision may be, it is Homer’s place to decide these things. The show just assumes the father makes the major family decisions.
...
The episode Homer’s Night Out, centres around a picture of Homer dancing with a belly dancer at a bachelor party. The (non-nude) picture creates a town-wide scandal, brands Homer as a ‘swinger’, and is seen as something fundamentally deviant and abnormal.
...
The show assumes that normal people go to church on Sundays and say grace at mealtime. Prayer is a casually accepted part of the show, as is religion.
...
Other, less remarkable, moral lessons are also included. The pro-family/loyalty message of Life on the Fast Lane. How Marge’s sisters constant denigration of Homer is shown as negative, destructive behaviour. In one episode, Marge is casually referred to as Mrs. Homer Simpson.
All this is not to say the Simpsons is a font of traditional values, it is a liberal show, it does have some fem-centrism, and is rather subversive, but it is a good example of just how fast our culture is collapsing. Just a couple decades ago, the Simpsons was a controversial show that was held up by the president as an example of family dysfunction. Yet compared to today’s cultural wasteland, where broken families are common, disrespect and degeneracy are the norm, and the husband as the head of the family is, at best, a joke, it is very tame, almost traditional.
erwgv3g34
2yr ago
That's not how it works. See "The Tragedy of Group Selectionism" by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Tolkien was going to enter the Canadian public domain in 2024 and, yes, that would have legally allowed Canadian companies to produce their own adaptations of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, for release and consumption in Canada and other countries with life + 50 copyright only (though, realistically, it's very unlikely that any Canadian studio would try to make a fantasy TV show or feature film with no help from Hollywood and no hope of release in America or China, so at best you would get a few books, the commercial equivalent of fanfic, like the James Bond anthology License Expired).
Last year, though, Canada extended its copyright term to life + 70, effective retroactively for authors who have yet to enter the Canadian public domain (though not, thankfully, for authors who are already there) in order to meet its obligations under the USMCA. This is a textbook example of how the US uses trade deals to demand that other countries go along with America's outrageous and oppressive copyright laws. So now Tolkien will not enter the Canadian public domain until 2044.
See previous discussion on /r/slatestarcodex.
Rather famously, we spent and continue to spend a ton of money on the liberal promise of education for everyone, and it turns out that they can't do that; FCFromSSC had a pretty entertaining post on CultureWarRoundup about it when DeBoer finally admitted to the writing on the wall, though given he got modhatted for linking it contemporaneously I'm a little hesitant to link it now.
I'm not. @FCfromSSC's comment was amazing and deserves to be spread. Context.
erwgv3g34
3yr ago
From "Fiscal Cliff Notes" by Scott Alexander:
Every time there is a Big Deadline, the two sides are unable to make progress until Right Before The Big Deadline. And then every time, they push through the obvious compromise deal at the last second.
And every time, people complain about how immature and incompetent Congress is to spend months deadlocked over the issue and not be able to solve it until the night before, like a schoolchild throwing together a book report ten minutes before class. The Internet tells me:
The Fiscal Cliff deal that was struck last night is one that my Toyota salesman could have put together in 10 minutes. Yet, it took months and months and months of back and forth dancing and massaging and grandstanding and who knows what, to get what we got.
One thing I wish we could put in every school and courtroom on those stone tablets where they were going to stick the Ten Commandments before they had to cancel that for First Amendment reasons is some version of "WHEN YOU SEE PEOPLE WHO SHOW EVERY SIGN OF BEING SMART GUYS - LIKE GETTING ELECTED TO LEAD THE MOST POWERFUL COUNTRY IN THE WORLD - APPEARING OBVIOUSLY SPECTACULARLY INCOMPETENT, AT LEAST CONSIDER THAT THEY'RE DOING SOMETHING THAT MAKES SENSE FROM WITHIN THEIR OWN INCENTIVE SYSTEM. ALSO, LEARN SOME GAME THEORY."
The particular game theory concept involved here is called "brinksmanship". Wikipedia says:
"Brinkmanship is the practice of pushing dangerous events to the verge of—or to the brink of—disaster in order to achieve the most advantageous outcome. It occurs in international politics, foreign policy, labour relations, and (in contemporary settings) military strategy involving the threatened use of nuclear weapons."
Suppose there is a pie to be divided up, plus some disastrous outcome if no agreement is reached. For example, you and I must split a pot of $10,000 between us, and unless we can both agree on the same split by midnight, we both die horribly. If we are both good people, we can agree to split it 50-50 and that's that.
Suppose I am greedy. I can say "Actually, I will only accept a 90-10 split in my favor. So either agree to that, or I guess we'll both die horribly at midnight." If you believe me, your choice is to settle for a smaller amount of money, or to die horribly. It would seem reasonable to agree to the smaller amount of money.
However, you might also be tempted to call my bluff. "Okay," you say. "I guess we'll both die horribly at midnight."
And maybe I say "Oh, no, just kidding, I'll accept 50-50." Or maybe I decide to call your bluff and say "Okay then, see you in Hell."
And if I do the latter, maybe you think "Oh, he wasn't bluffing after all, I'll just agree to the 90-10 split then." Or maybe you say "I bet that's another bluff. I'm just going to sit here until 11:59 and see if he starts sweating."
If both players are at least a little bit greedy, and there's no disincentive for waiting, the game ends with both players saying "Okay then, I guess we'll both die horribly at midnight," whistling in the most deliberately carefree-seeming manner possible until then, and simultaneously saying "No, wait, changed my mind, I'll accept 50-50!" at 11:59 and 59 seconds.
erwgv3g34
3yr ago
Worth the Candle by Alexander Wales is on Royal Road* and it's the best novel I've read in years. A 1,600,000 word rational self-insert litRPG isekai webnovel about a depressed teenager who gets transported from his English class to the magical land of Aerb to face his inner demons come to life with the help of a harem of beautiful girls† sounds like a trainwreck, but Wales's genius turns it into a masterpiece. The setting is vast, logically coherent, and enchantingly interesting, Juniper and Amaryllis are incredibly smart, knowledgeable, and driven, there is a great supporting cast, tons of action with interesting obstacles to overcome, and an amazing ending.
* Though I prefer the AO3 version, since it lets you download an EPUB/MOBI/PDF for your Kindle/Kobo/Nook and read the whole thing in one page.
† Or, as the original description put it, "It's a self-insert litRPG portal fantasy, loosely based on my personal experience of falling into a portal to another world and discovering that I had a character sheet attached to my soul."
erwgv3g34
3yr ago
What was that thing where the Wikimedia foundation was giving grants to some CRT-type charity that people thought was highly dubious? I think Yudkowsky retweeted about it.
https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1579776106034757633.html
If you use Wikipedia, you've seen pop-ups like this. If you're like me, you may have donated as a result.
Wikipedia is an amazing website, and the appeals seem heartfelt. But I've now learnt the money isn't going where I thought...
The organisation which administers Wikipedia - to whom the money goes - is the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. Wikimedia is a San Francisco non-profit with 400 employees - which has exploded in size in recent years.
In a decade, Wikimedia's spending has soared: from $10 million in 2010 to $112 million by 2020.
This suprised me, seeing as Wikipedia seems to be functionally the same website it was 10 years ago. So what explains this huge increase?
Maybe more people use the site, making it more expensive to run?
No: 2021 website hosting cost $2.4 million - which is LESS than it did in 2012.
In fact, according the Wikimedia Foundation's own website, less than half of what they spend goes on directly supporting the website.
Bear in mind - Wikipedia used to be an incredibly cheap, volunteer run website. Watch a minute of this video of Jimmy Wales talking about how Wikipedia operated back in 2005:
So where is the money going? Well, a lot of it Wikimedia gives away to other organisations. And a significant portion of their staff are employed in that process. From 2012 to 2020, the spending on salaries increased fivefold, and $22.9 million was given in grants.
At this point, you should know that while Wikipedia emphasises a "Neutral Point of View", Wikimedia is openly politicized. It is a full participant in America's culture wars, and this helps us understand how they spend the donations.
Let's take a look at two big recipients.
The SeRCH Foundation received a quarter million dollars of donor cash. Glancing at the website, you could assume it was about the admirable goal of minority representation in STEM
However on closer inspection, it turns out to be a bit more unusual than that. They're proponents of an "Intersectional Scientific Method" involving "hyperspace"(?)
Their output is extremely long YouTube videos which get about 50 views a time
In the videos they discuss issues in science like objectivity (they're against it) and bias (they're in favour).
There's been one new video in the last year.
Also enjoying Wikimedia's largesse was Borealis Philanthropy. Borealis is yet another grant giving organisation: They're even more political, and fully committed to driving America's cultural revolution.
Wikimedia gave $250,000 to Borealis's Racial Equity in Journalism Fund. That money was then cascaded down to a dozens of ideologically aligned news outlets across the US.
Thus, the money you give to keep Wikipedia online is diverted to bankroll the inescapable American culture war.
Back in 2017, a Wikipedian called Guy Macon wrote a strident article entitled "Wikipedia has a Cancer". He predicted Wikimedia's runaway spending would bankrupt Wikipedia, resulting in its takeover by Facebook or Google.
Since then, Wikimedia's budget has almost doubled.
What Macon misunderstood is that orgs like Wikimedia are not cancers. They are parasites that cannot survive outside their host. Almost nobody would donate to Wikimedia so it could spend money on these causes - without Wikipedia, Wikimedia would starve.
In the west, an advanced industry of NGOs, charities, and foundations has evolved which funds so much of the weirdness in our daily lives. A caste of activist-professionals have emerged, which inevitably capture any non-profit with spare cash.
This is what is sometimes called The Blob: a powerful but inconspicuous force that has given us the dysfunction of the 21st century.
Wikipedia is an amazing and important website. But it doesn't need your money. It has enough to stay online, improve and grown.
What it needs more donations for is to fund one side in the United States' culture war.
A sad footnote to this: In 2021 SeRCH ran their own funding programme, "Hot Science Summer".
In deciding who to fund, the key criteria was use of the Intersectional Scientific method. Everything else - a scientific background, data - was optional. What could possibly go wrong?
One of the projects was into spatial learning in the California Two-Spot Octopus, for which the researcher got 12 hatchling octopuses.
Unfortunately, the lab experiment went horribly wrong, killing the poor creatures before the research could be concluded.
erwgv3g34
3yr ago
I'm Latino. I'd support a politician that wanted to take away the Hispanic franchise, because my fellow Latinos tend to vote for socialism at a much higher rate than Anglos.
erwgv3g34
3yr ago
Is that the male pick-up artist's version of "I'm ready to settle down with a good man?"
No. First, because sexual experience increases a man's Sexual Market Value, while it torpedoes a woman's SMV. And, second, because women who say that would happily go on riding the Cock Carousel, except that they are no longer able to (either because they hit The Wall and are getting passed over by their younger peers or because they got pregnant and ended up a single mother who is now looking for a bailout). Whereas a PUA like Roosh could have easily kept pumping and dumping women indefinitely. It seems he genuinely burned out on the hedonic treadmill.
Me and some others tried to speak up. The jannies censored our comments.
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