erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
Football and country music are at best orthogonal to the culture war issue in question. Is Anheuser-Busch willing to put out a statement saying that transwomen are men, or perhaps to send out a commemorative can to a prominent anti-trans celebrity like J.K. Rowling? If not, let the boycott continue until the company is bankrupt, the office buildings burned, the executives' heads on pikes, the barley fields sowed with salt.
They are trying to apologize to their base without alienating progressives; they are trying to go back to appearing neutral. Cannot be done. They made the decision to enter the culture war; now they have to pick a side.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
I wrote a comment and gave it to my sensitive reader.
Dude, I like your comments. Stop this nonsense.
erwgv3g34
3mo ago
States' Rights died in the Civil War, and Civil Rights pissed on the corpse. The blue tribe feels zero compunction about imposing its values upon the red tribe. Why should the red tribe be any different?
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
Copyright law is in general meant to prevent customer confusion (eg preventing people from believing knockoffs are authentic).
That's trademarks, not copyright.
erwgv3g34
11mo ago
It's hard to summarize books with hundreds of pages, especially when those books are, themselves, the collected summaries of thousands of blog posts and comments. But if I had to give you the elevator pitch...
Most of what you think you know about sex/romance/dating is a feminist lie, fed to you through a combination of the education system and the media, or people repeating falsehoods they themselves learned from school and movies and TV shows. These lies are useful to women and society, but harmful to you. The Red Pill metaphor comes from the famous scene where Neo chooses to wake up from the Matrix.
Once you learn accurate truths about women, men, dating, and sex, you will almost certainly choose to change your behavior. Both your new beliefs and your new behaviors will be extremely at odds with feminist dogma, and most people, being in thrall to that ideology, will indeed boil it down to you viewing women as objects to be manipulated for the benefit of men. But that is obviously not how a practitioner of the Red Pill would frame it; unlike fictional villains, real people don't usually think of themselves as evil.
A quick sample of Red Pill beliefs:
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Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive. Women are the gatekeepers of sex, men are the gatekeepers of commitment. Men are the expendable gender.
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As a consequence, men are attracted to the majority of fertile-age women. Women are only attracted to a small minority of men.
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Therefore, fertile-age women are able to easily have casual sex with men who are completely out of their league relationship-wise (rock stars, Olympic athletes, etc.) and often become deluded about their actual Sexual Market Value.
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Women and men are attracted to different things. Men are primarily attracted to youth, beauty, fertility, purity, and nurturing. Women are primarily attracted to height, status, power, money, violence, sexual experience, and dark triad traits.
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This explains why men age like wine, while women age like milk. Youth, beauty, fertility and purity are things that can only ever go down with age, while status, power, money, and sexual experience tend to increase with age.
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Ipso facto, any dating advice which assumes men and women are the same is nonsense. Few do this explicitly, but many do it implicitly by failing to give out different dating advice to different demographics, e.g. "be yourself".
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A surprisingly common mistake is projecting the desires of your gender into the other gender. For example, a woman in her 30s complaining about the lack of attention from high-quality men despite the fact that she spent her youth getting a fancy degree, a good paying job, a nice house, an expensive car, cool hobbies, etc. Not understanding that men don't give a fuck about any of that and would rather date a broke but cute 18-year-old waitress.
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Women become infertile much faster than men. By 35, usually too late to have children. If plan to have 2-3 children, should be married by 30 at the absolute latest. In our culture, where you are expected to date and cohabit for a few years before marriage, means a surprisingly short window between the time a woman becomes legal at 18 and the time it is too late for her to find a husband. Goes double for middle-class and upper-class women, who are expected to finish a degree at 22 before even thinking about marriage.
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Women often follow a dual-mating strategy of sleeping with high-value men in their sexual prime, then settling down with a reliable provider in their later years. This is called Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks. You want to be the Alpha Fucks, or at least avoid being the Beta Bucks.
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Some implications of this information to your own life; self-improve, lift weights, never commit to a woman over 25, never commit to a woman with children, pretend you have more sexual experience than you do, project confidence, never appear needy or desperate, etc.
erwgv3g34
8mo ago
Same with YouTube. I can't ever get the original video anymore; it's always some legacy media channel with talking heads in suits and ties giving me """context""" (i.e. the narrative) and playing censored, shortened clips full of jump cuts (I feel like I am watching an American documentary).
Unstable.
Much like congress cannot bind a future congress, a country cannot credibly precommit itself to never grant political rights to a population of immigrants; once they are in the country they are a hundred dollar bill laying on the ground waiting to be picked up. It may take a generation or two, but eventually somebody is going to realize that they can gain political power by expanding the franchise in exchange for the implicit promise that the new citizens will vote for their faction, and act accordingly.
Case study: African-Americans. Explicitly imported as slaves without rights, remained so right up until Lincoln and his allies saw an opportunity to own the South by emancipating them, then cemented victory by making them citizens. Now America has to deal with a racial underclass whose primary concern at the voting booth is who will offer them the most gibs. As the saying goes, the colonists should have picked their own damn cotton. And if current year Americans were wise, they would clean their own toilets.
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
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.
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.
erwgv3g34
3mo ago
From 1984 by George Orwell:
"Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"
...
"The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men." He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: "How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?"
Winston thought. "By making him suffer," he said.
"Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy—everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever."
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
6mo ago
And a part me laughs a bit. They fucked around and found out. They didn’t do anything when the other white ethnicities were getting blasted and some orgs like the ADL promote white hate. And then the gun was turned on them.
Not only did they do nothing, not only was it some orgs; subversive anti-white ideology has always been highly disproportionality Jewish. There is a reason things like the early life Wikipedia section and the coincidence detection triple parenthesis echo became memes.
Frankenstein is finally getting attacked by his own monster.
erwgv3g34
1yr ago
Obligatory link to Gwern's outstanding review of McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War:
It’s not well-known, but one of the most consistent long-term sponsors of research into intelligence has been the US military. This is because, contrary to lay wisdom that ‘IQ only measures how well you do on a test’ or book-learning, cognitive ability predicts performance in all occupations down to the simplest manual labor; this might seem surprising, but there are a lot of ways to screw up a simple job and cause losses outside one’s area. For example, aiming and pointing a rifle, or throwing a grenade, might seem like a simple task, but it’s also easy to screw up by pointing at the wrong point, requires fast reflexes (reflexes are one of the most consistent correlations with intelligence), memory for procedures like stripping, the ability to read ammo box labels or orders (as one Marine drill instructor noted), and ‘common sense’ like not indulging in ‘practical jokes’ by tossing grenades at one’s comrades and forgetting to remove the fuse - common sense is not so common, as the saying goes. Such men were not even useful cannon fodder, as they were as much a danger to the men around them as themselves (never mind the enemy), and jammed up the system. (A particularly striking non-Vietnam example is the case of one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever, the Port Chicago disaster which killed 320 people - any complex disaster like that has many causes, of course, but one of them was simply that the explosives were being handled by the dregs of the Navy - not even bottom decile, but bottom duo-decile (had to look that one up), and other stations kept raiding it for anyone competent.)
Gregory’s book collates stories about what happened when the US military was forced to ignore these facts it knew perfectly well in the service of Robert McNamara & Lyndon Johnson’s “Project 100,000” idea to kill two birds with one stone by drafting recruits who were developmentally disabled, unhealthy, evil, or just too dumb to be conscripted previously: it would provide the warm bodies needed for Vietnam, and use the military to educate the least fortunate and give them a leg up as part of the Great Society’s faith in education to eliminate individual differences and refute the idea that intelligence is real.
It did not go well.
Two major memetic transmission vectors for progressivism, including transsexualism: the media and the education system. To protect your son, need to be willing to homeschool and kill your television (including streaming).
From "The cause of population decline" by the Dreaded Jim:
The Amish absolutely insist on controlling their kids schooling. They also ban television. They allow their adolescent kids out into the world to visit the fleshpots, but not, however, the classrooms. They fear both the classrooms and the televisions, but primarily the classrooms.
I would say that it is memetic infection, the same memeplex, propagated both by soap operas and the education system, each reinforcing the other, but primarily by the education system.
And from "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" by AntiDem:
First, as the leftists used to say, “Kill Your Television”. I am not one who generally thinks that machines are inherently evil. Television is an exception. It is no more and no less than a hypnotic mind control device. Don’t believe me? Sit a hyperactive toddler in front of a television and watch what happens. They freeze, turn away from everything they were doing, and stare at the screen. Gavin McInnes once noted that the “on” switch of his television was an “off” switch for his kids, and so it is. Do you think this device does not place ideas in the minds of those who fall into a trance in its presence? And what ideas do you think the Hollywood/New York axis wishes to place there? I recall reading one account of a father who, tired of his two under-10 daughters’ bratty attitudes, limited their television viewing to a DVD box set of Little House on The Prairie. The change in his daughters’ behavior was dramatic – within a couple of weeks, they were referring to him and his wife as “Ma” and “Pa”, and offering to help with chores. The lesson is obvious: people (and especially children) learn their social norms from television, far more even than from the people around them.
Ideally, one would cut oneself off from it totally. Many find this rather difficult (I must admit, myself included at times). Some keep a television set, but make sure it is disconnected from broadcast channels and use it only as a monitor for a carefully-selected library of DVDs. Others (myself included) don’t own a set, but download a few select programs from torrent sites and watch on laptops or tablets. My total viewership of television programs tops out at perhaps 3-4 hours per week during particularly good seasons. Any traditionalist should strive to do the same. In fact, traditionalists should reject – should “drop out” of – all popular culture (especially that produced after, say, 1966) to the greatest degree possible, and make sure their children are exposed to it as little as possible. Music, video games, even the web – either drop out of it completely, or, at very least, carefully limit the time and scope of it in your life and the lives of your children.
While we’re on the subject of children: DO NOT send your children to a public school. “Drop out” here too; by which I do not mean that your children should go uneducated, but that you should – you must – homeschool. To do otherwise is pure child abuse. Perhaps fifty years ago, this was not the case, but these times are not those times. The failures of the public schools need not be repeated here, but they are undeniable, and any reasonably smart ten-year-old whose attention span hasn’t been destroyed by television can learn more by being left alone all day with a stack of books than they can in any public school classroom anyway. As for the universities, there are not quite any suitable replacements for them yet, but some lurk just over the horizon and will appear before long.
To say that one should “drop out” of – not bother listening to and not ever trusting – the mainstream news media goes without saying.
College is harder. Long way off, but think ahead. Learn a trade?
These days, lots of kids also transed by internet; do not give smartphone. If must use computer/internet, do so on desktop in living room in clear view of everyone. Otherwise, at risk from TikTok, Discord, and porn.
Yes, this is somewhat hardcore asceticism. Is necessary. As society becomes more degenerate, a greater level of eccentricity is required to keep healthy. Same as addiction.
Should also go to church, the tradder the better. If right ethnicity, become Orthodox; if not, Catholic or Mormon. Islam is also resistant, but has serious downsides; last resort.
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.
erwgv3g34
2mo ago
Reposting a comment I made that got lost during the rollback:
Catholicism tells us that the wine and bread are LITERALLY the blood and body of christ. It is not compatible with science.
On the contrary, transubstantiation is a belief that is almost designed to be perfectly compatible with science.
Specifically, Catholicism claims that all the "accidents" of the wine and bread remain the same, but that the "substance" of the wine and bread become the blood and body of Christ. In other words, in every single way that we can observe and measure, the wine and bread remain wine and bread. But in some deeper, fundamental way, the wine and bread become the blood and body of Jesus.
Which is nonsense, but it's nonsense of the not even wrong variety. And while "not even wrong" is a bad thing for a scientific theory to be, it is a very good thing for a religious belief to be. Partly because it means the religion is safe from being falsified by scientific evidence, but much more importantly because the religion will not be driven insane by the need to deny reality.
Contrast creationism; if you have committed your faith to 7 days and Noah's ark, then when Darwin shows up with dinosaur fossils in his arms you have to either renounce your God or you have to turn your back on biology. And geology. And cosmology. And...
In "Universal Fire", Eliezer Yudkowsky points out that all of reality is connected, and that you can't change just one little thing without changing the whole.
Matches catch fire because of phosphorus—“safety matches” have phosphorus on the ignition strip; strike-anywhere matches have phosphorus in the match heads. Phosphorus is highly reactive; pure phosphorus glows in the dark and may spontaneously combust. (Henning Brand, who purified phosphorus in 1669, announced that he had discovered Elemental Fire.) Phosphorus is thus also well-suited to its role in adenosine triphosphate, ATP, your body’s chief method of storing chemical energy. ATP is sometimes called the “molecular currency”. It invigorates your muscles and charges up your neurons. Almost every metabolic reaction in biology relies on ATP, and therefore on the chemical properties of phosphorus.
If a match stops working, so do you. You can’t change just one thing.
The surface-level rules, “Matches catch fire when struck,” and “Humans need air to breathe,” are not obviously connected. It took centuries to discover the connection, and even then, it still seems like some distant fact learned in school, relevant only to a few specialists. It is all too easy to imagine a world where one surface rule holds, and the other doesn’t; to suppress our credence in one belief, but not the other. But that is imagination, not reality. If your map breaks into four pieces for easy storage, it doesn’t mean the territory is also broken into disconnected parts. Our minds store different surface-level rules in different compartments, but this does not reflect any division in the laws that govern Nature.
We can take the lesson further. Phosphorus derives its behavior from even deeper laws, electrodynamics and chromodynamics. “Phosphorus” is merely our word for electrons and quarks arranged a certain way. You cannot change the chemical properties of phosphorus without changing the laws governing electrons and quarks.
If you stepped into a world where matches failed to strike, you would cease to exist as organized matter.
In "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning", Scott Alexander elaborates on the sociopolitical consequences:
So imagine the most irrelevant orthodoxy you can think of. Let’s say tomorrow, the government chooses “lightning comes after thunder” as their hill to die on. They come up with some BS justification like how atmospheric moisture in a thunderstorm slows the speed of light. If you think you see lightning before thunder, you’re confused – there’s lots of lightning and thunder during storms, maybe you grouped them together wrong. Word comes down from the UN, the White House, the Kremlin, Zhongnanhai, the Vatican, etc – everyone must believe this. Senior professors and funding agencies are all on board. From a scientific-truth point of view it’s kind of a disaster. But who cares? Nothing at all depends on this. Even the meteorologists don’t really care. What’s the worst-case scenario? Nobody can say “Lightning comes before thunder, but our social norm is to pretend otherwise”. They have to say “We love objective truth-seeking, and we’ve discovered that lightning does not come before thunder”. And so the Kantoroviches of the world will believe that’s what they really think, and try to write polite letters correcting them.
The better a scientist is, and the more curiosity they have about the natural world, and the more they feel deep in their gut that Nature ought to fit together – the more likely the lightning thing will bother them. Somebody’s going to check how light works and realize that rain can’t possibly slow it down that much. Someone else will see claims about lightning preceding thunder in old books, and realize how strange it was for the ancients to get something so simple so wrong so consistently. Someone else will just be an obsessive observer of the natural world, and be very sure they weren’t counting thunderclaps and lightning bolts in the wrong order. And the more perceptive and truth-seeking these people are, the more likely they’ll speak, say “Hey, I think we’ve got the lightning thing wrong” and not shut up about it, and society will have to destroy them.
And the better a school or professor is, the better they train their students to question everything and really try to understand the natural world, the more likely their students will speak up about the lightning issue. The government will make demands – close down the offending schools, fire the offending academics. Good teachers will be systematically removed from the teaching profession; bad teachers will be systematically promoted. Any educational method that successfully instills curiosity and the scientific spirit will become too dangerous to touch; any that encourage rote repetition of approved truths will get the stamp of approval. Some other beliefs will be found to correlate heavily with lightning-heresy. Maybe atheists are more often lightning-heretics; maybe believers in global warming are too. The enemies of these groups will have a new cudgel to beat them with, “If you believers in global warming are so smart and scientific, how come so many of you believe in lightning, huh?” Even the savvy Kolmogorovs within the global warming community will be forced to admit that their theory just seems to attract uniquely crappy people. It won’t be very convincing. Any position correlated with being truth-seeking and intelligent will be always on the retreat, having to forever apologize that so many members of their movement screw up the lightning question so badly.
Some people in the know will try to warn their friends and students – “Look, just between you and me, lightning obviously comes before thunder, but for the love of God don’t say that in public“. Just as long as they’re sure that student will never want to blackmail them later. And won’t be able to gain anything by ratting them out. And that nobody will hack their private email ten years later, then get them fired or imprisoned or burned at the stake or whatever the appropriate punishment for lightning-heresy is. It will become well-known that certain academic fields like physics and mathematics are full of crypto-lightning-heretics. Everyone will agree that physicists and mathematicians are useless eggheads who are probably good at some specific problems, but so blind to the context of important real-world issues that they can’t be trusted on anything less abstruse than e equalling mc squared. Dishonest careerists willing to go in front of the camera and say “I can reassure everyone, as a physicist that physics proves sound can travel faster than light, and any scientists saying otherwise are just liars and traitors” will get all the department chairs and positions of power.
But the biggest threat is to epistemology. The idea that everything in the world fits together, that all knowledge is worth having and should be pursued to the bitter end, that if you tell one lie the truth is forever after your enemy – all of this is incompatible with even as stupid a mistruth as switching around thunder and lightning. People trying to make sense of the world will smash their head against the glaring inconsistency where the speed of light must be calculated one way in thunderstorms and another way everywhere else. Try to start a truth-seeking community, and some well-meaning idiot will ask “Hey, if we’re about pursuing truth, maybe one fun place to pursue truth would be this whole lightning thing that has everyone all worked up, what does everybody think about this?” They will do this in perfect innocence, because they don’t know that everyone else has already thought about it and agreed to pretend it’s true. And you can’t just tell them that, because then you’re admitting you don’t really think it’s true. And why should they even believe you? Would you present your evidence? Would you dare?
As the Dreaded Jim famously said:
The fundamental realization of the Dark Enlightenment is that all men are not created equal, not individual men, nor the various groups and categories of men, nor are women equal to men, that these beliefs and others like them are religious beliefs, that society is just as religious as ever it was, with an official state religion of progressivism, but this is a new religion, an evil religion, and, if you are a Christian, a demonic religion.
The Dark Enlightenment does not propose that leftism went wrong four years ago, or ten years ago, but that it was fundamentally and terribly wrong a couple of centuries ago, and we have been heading to hell in a handbasket ever since at a rapidly increasing rate – that the enlightenment was dangerously optimistic about humans, human nature, and the state, that it is another good news religion, telling us what we wish to hear, but about this world instead of the next.
If authority required me to believe in Leprechauns, and to get along with people that it was important to get along with required me to believe in Leprechauns, I would probably believe in leprechauns, though not in the way that I believe in rabbits, but I can see people not being equal, whereas I cannot see leprechauns not existing.
And:
If we only count religions that officially admit to being supernatural, pretty obviously religion is declining. If, however, we define religion more broadly, then religion is increasing by leaps and bounds.
If authority assures you that leprechauns exist and that authority can see them, it does not take much faith to believe, since you cannot see leprechauns not existing. If, however, authority assures you that all humans are equal, or that all groups and categories of human are equal, it takes outstanding and extraordinary faith, since every day you see individuals, groups, and categories being strikingly and obviously unequal, for reasons cultural, genetic, and hormonal.
Further, belief in the flying spaghetti monster not only does no harm, but is apt to inculcate the accumulated wisdom of the ages, inculcating prudent and virtuous behavior, whereas belief in equality tends to inculcate bad behavior, as illustrated by the inability of “Occupy” to operate an urban campsite.
erwgv3g34
3mo ago
From "Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle" by Scott Alexander:
The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
Same phenomenon you see in r/PoliticalCompassMemes. In fact, "Seven Zillion Witches" was considered as one of the possible names for what would eventually become The Motte, though I can't find the thread right now.
The alternative explanation would be that HBD and PUA are correct, so any place which allows uncensored discussion of those topics will eventually convince people to believe in them, and believing in HBD and PUA is sufficient to qualify as alt-right.
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
Yes, it is rational to care about propaganda in movies. From "The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence":
In the ancestral environment, there were no moving pictures; what you saw with your own eyes was true. A momentary glimpse of a single word can prime us and make compatible thoughts more available, with demonstrated strong influence on probability estimates. How much havoc do you think a two-hour movie can wreak on your judgment? It will be hard enough to undo the damage by deliberate concentration—why invite the vampire into your house? In Chess or Go, every wasted move is a loss; in rationality, any non-evidential influence is (on average) entropic.
And from "Boycott people who hate you":
Using their products will harm you. Seek out alternative products
Boycott the Star Wars movie Rogue One. All the villains are white males. All the heroes are not. Not only will this depress you and persuade you that you are evil and villainous and doomed to lose, but this guarantees bad writing and a boring show for the reasons explained by Orwell. If it is written to political formula, it is written to formula, so all the characters are living dead, placeholders and formulae, not people that you might care about. They kill a few of the heroes to try and make you care, but you won’t care.
And that's just for adults who are aware they are watching propaganda. As @WhiningCoil says, it is ten times worse if you have children. From "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out":
First, as the leftists used to say, “Kill Your Television”. I am not one who generally thinks that machines are inherently evil. Television is an exception. It is no more and no less than a hypnotic mind control device. Don’t believe me? Sit a hyperactive toddler in front of a television and watch what happens. They freeze, turn away from everything they were doing, and stare at the screen. Gavin McInnes once noted that the “on” switch of his television was an “off” switch for his kids, and so it is. Do you think this device does not place ideas in the minds of those who fall into a trance in its presence? And what ideas do you think the Hollywood/New York axis wishes to place there? I recall reading one account of a father who, tired of his two under-10 daughters’ bratty attitudes, limited their television viewing to a DVD box set of Little House on The Prairie. The change in his daughters’ behavior was dramatic – within a couple of weeks, they were referring to him and his wife as “Ma” and “Pa”, and offering to help with chores. The lesson is obvious: people (and especially children) learn their social norms from television, far more even than from the people around them.
Ideally, one would cut oneself off from it totally. Many find this rather difficult (I must admit, myself included at times). Some keep a television set, but make sure it is disconnected from broadcast channels and use it only as a monitor for a carefully-selected library of DVDs. Others (myself included) don’t own a set, but download a few select programs from torrent sites and watch on laptops or tablets. My total viewership of television programs tops out at perhaps 3-4 hours per week during particularly good seasons. Any traditionalist should strive to do the same. In fact, traditionalists should reject – should “drop out” of – all popular culture (especially that produced after, say, 1966) to the greatest degree possible, and make sure their children are exposed to it as little as possible. Music, video games, even the web – either drop out of it completely, or, at very least, carefully limit the time and scope of it in your life and the lives of your children.
The Amish understand this very well, which is why they do not have televisions:
I once heard David Kline tell of Protestant tourists sight-seeing in an Amish area. An Amishman is brought on the bus and asked how Amish differ from other Christians. First, he explained similarities: all had DNA, wear clothes (even if in different styles), and like to eat good food.
Then the Amishman asked: “How many of you have a TV?”
Most, if not all, the passengers raised their hands.
“How many of you believe your children would be better off without TV?”
Most, if not all, the passengers raised their hands.
“How many of you, knowing this, will get rid of your TV when you go home?”
No hands were raised.
“That’s the difference between the Amish and others,” the man concluded.
I don't have children (yet; growth mindset!), but if I did, I would endeavor to make sure they did not have access to over-the-air television or streaming media like Netflix. Rather, I would take advantage of the decades of existing work that @quiet_NaN points out and provide them with a library of titles composed of classic Disney movies (Snow White, Pinocchio, etc.), Don Bluth Movies (The Land Before Time, The Secret of NIMH, etc.), and Studio Ghibli movies (Laputa: Castle in the Sky, Spirited Away, etc.). As Gwern says, "Culture Is Not About Esthetics".
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
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.
Specially since Stable Diffusion's only advantage over Dall-E 3 and Midjourney v6 is being uncensored. Why the fuck would I go through the trouble of buying a GPU and downloading SD to my own machine if I can't use it to make pictures of Violent Sexy Hitler? Doubly so since SD models became non free software/open source; SDXL Turbo, Stable Video Diffusion, and Stable Cascade all require you to pay a monthly subscription fee to legally use them for commercial purposes, and Stability AI's stated intention is to do the same for all future model releases.
SD 2.1 sank because it was censored. I hope SD 3 fails, too, and the community continues to focus on SD 1.5 and SDXL, which are the libre and uncensored models (SDXL just got a nice boost in the form of SDXL-Lightning!).
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.
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