erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
Yes. She's BothAfternoon as well, so somebody can just contact her on reddit.
Things just aren't the same without her.
Romance novels/movies are totally the female equivalent of porn.
The thing to understand is that men and women are attracted to different things. Men are primarily attracted to youth, beauty, and fertility, all of which can be appraised based on appearance[1]. Meanwhile, women are somewhat attracted to physical characteristics, like height and muscles, but what really gets their motor running about a man are his nonphysical attributes; rich, aloof, dominant, confident, dangerous, badass, high status, leader of men, sexually experienced, dark triad traits, etc.
The purpose of porn is to stimulate a man's reproductive instincts. And since men are primarily attracted to visual cues, porn mostly consists of an endless stream of images depicting naked girls who moan a lot. Sometimes there is a plot, but if so it is perfunctory, like the 20 minutes in a horror movie you spend watching random kids act like jerks before the monster shows up and starts fucking them up. Hentai doujinshi has it down to a science; 5-10 pages of setup, followed by 15-30 pages of fucking.
And, likewise, the purpose of romance novels and movies is to stimulate female sexual instincts. But as we stablished, women are attracted to completely different things than men are. So, instead, romance stories depict an endless stream of billionaire athlete demon pirates kings who look great with their shirt off and declare their undying love for the audience surrogate. It is nine hundred pages of the male love interest demonstrating how aloof and alpha he is, a hundred pages where he breaks down, gets weepy, and shows his soft inner core of twu luving betaness, and one page where he tears the lady’s clothes off with his teeth and the couple finally at long last get some action.
Needless to say, both of these can lead to rather... unrealistic expectations.
[1] And secondarily attracted to purity, kindness, fidelity, humility, and obedience, but those are harder to depict in porn. Not that people don't try; the nurse is a popular porn character for a reason, and hentai doujinshi will usually devote what little space is reserved for the plot to making sure you understand that the girl is a virgin.
Would you be okay with a guy fucking some of the senior girls or recently graduated graduated senior girls if he wasn't a teacher? Why?
My answer is that it would be okay for a high school teacher to marry one of his students; i.e. to make a lifelong commitment to supporting her and their children in exchange for exclusive sexual access. Conversely, it is not okay for a dude to pump and dump several high school girls, or recent high school graduates; the fact that the man in question happens to be their teacher is completely irrelevant.
My experience with jocks (students who participated in the school's sports teams) is that they were perfectly nice, friendly people. Not as smart as me, but then again I wasn't as athletic as them.
Virtually all trouble (bullying, fighting, stealing, class disruption, etc.) was caused by underclass kids. And, yes, they were mostly black.
https://www.vault.themotte.org/post/the_barbarian_and_the_711_clerk
Also, that vault entry's title should have a hyphen between "7" and "11".
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
I don't know if it's my favorite, but I really liked "Gratitude Walking Through Walmart". It's hard to remember, but poverty is the default state of mankind. Anatomically modern humans spend tens of thousands of years living in mud huts and owning no more than what they could carry. The incredible amount of wealth that I have access to after working for a day and dropping by the local Walmart with my wages is nothing short of an economic miracle.
From "Thanksgiving Prayer" (2008) by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Dear Global Economy, we thank thee for thy economies of scale, thy professional specialization, and thy international networks of trade under Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage, without which we would all starve to death while trying to assemble the ingredients for such a dinner as this. Amen.
And from "Contra Robinson On Schooling" (2016) by Scott Alexander:
I often see poor people using food stamps at my own grocery store, so I know the quality of service these poor people get for their money. And it is really good. Practically all grocery stores are really good. There's a story about Boris Yeltsin coming to America for the first time, walking into a random grocery store, seeing that random middle-class Americans had a better selection of goods than the highest-status Soviet officials, and freaking out that this was some kind of weird Potemkin economy that the Americans had set up to demoralize him. Grocery stores don't just have fifty different kinds of cereal and a hundred different kinds of soda, they're also really cheap. You can buy a day's worth of food for an hour's minimum-wage work, maybe two hours if you want a little quality and variety.
Try searching r/TheThread for their usernames to find their Quality Contributions.
Yes, this is the point that was so eloquently made by Eliezer Yudkowsky in "Universal Fire" and by Scott Alexander in "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning". Everything is connected; you can't deny reality in just one little harmless area without starting a chain reaction which ends up with promising young scientists purged, freedom of speech destroyed, epistemology in tatters, and object-level policy disaster after disaster.
Agreed. I come from South America; Latin American countries don't have their own animation industries, so I grew up watching imported American cartoons and Japanese anime. I never had any problems identifying with Goku just because he was Japanese.
To this day, I feel a thousand times more represented by Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres (a white Briton written by an American Jew) than I do by a character who shares my race like Jaime Reyes. HJPEV thinks like me; Jaime merely looks like me.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
We live in Sequel world now, no further universes are allowed.
New universes still come out occasionally, but they have to prove themselves as books first. Both The Martian and The Expanse started out as novels.
Also, you're not allowed to not care.
"You may not be interested in the culture war, but the culture war is interested in you."
But even though you may not be allowed not to care, you are still allowed not to watch.
erwgv3g34
1yr 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.
erwgv3g34
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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.
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.
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.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
That's not how it works. See "The Tragedy of Group Selectionism" by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
erwgv3g34
1yr 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
1yr ago
It must? Why?
Not only do you have all of old media to consume, not only do you have anime and k-drama providing modern alternatives, but you always have the option to drop out and walk away, as the Amish do.
Boycott people who hate you.
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