faceh
6d ago
He's the rare intellectual that lives up to the hype, and balances sharp wit with incisive commentary, backed by actual research.
Shame he's so old, we won't have him for much longer.
As I said before.
Huge swaths of men don't even have the OPTION to enter a situationship. (hate that term, personally).
Women can practice celibacy if they want, they can stay off dating apps, they can avoid hookups and demand commitment before sex (or, marriage, if they're trad enough).
Some percentage of them do, its just far smaller than it used to be.
How much agency do we ascribe to the rest of them?
The amount of women who have negative experiences is genuine and largely the fault of certain men who are over-represented in the amount of harm they commit.
The question, of course:
In what way are those men forcing, coercing, or otherwise cajoling women to act this way? What we learned post #metoo is that a LOT of women will retroactively claim they were forced or coerced when in fact they just folded to the most minute amount of pressure or even enthusiastically accepted advances from a more 'powerful' male.
And if women are unable to resist a minute amount of pressure, or can't be trusted to make good decisions around powerful males... what else might we need to protect them from?
And more importantly. If women are having bad experiences with a small subset of men, then why does that justify negative opinions about all men?
Why are men expected to tolerate bad behavior (and as seen in the stats, maintain a positive view of women as a whole) or be labelled misogynist, whilst women can base their opinion of the whole male gender on the conduct of <10% of them?
This is where we find ourselves. Unable, as a society, to police womens' behavior (in part because the men who would do the policing benefit too much from the current arrangement), but far, far too ready to go after males for the smallest misstep, and to heap all blame on the men for things they ultimately have no control over. And unable to shift out of this equilibrium because any proposal that might inconvenience ladies is politically nonviable. Nonviable, that is, while the Boomers are in charge.
faceh
6d ago
Perhaps, although I think they allow you to feel pride only in proportion to the amount of oppression that was heaped upon your people.
faceh
7d ago
Yeah, its usually the child support that really takes a bite out of the guy's ability to support himself. Instead of living in a house with the wife and kids... now he's paying to make sure the kids are given a decent living arrangement without him there... and if he wants to have the kids over he needs to find a living arrangement that isn't viewed as dangerous to them, so he's gotta pay extra for his own living space to be up to par too.
Florida passed some laws to put a harder cap on alimony, but if you divorce with a kid, or multiple kids under 10 years, you're getting stuck with quite the bill over the next 10 years.
Collective male guilt for crimes committed by men is axiomatic, but collective male credit for dangerous, essential labour carried out by men is never acknowledged.
This right here has to be my biggest objection to Woke/Social Justice/Leftism/cultural marxism thought when applied to historical 'privilege' arguments.
Collective guilt is assumed. Guilt for your ancestors' bad behavior is mandatory. And of course you can be collectively lumped in with people you've never associated with and share no beliefs with if someone deems you to possess enough characteristics in common with them.
But credit or pride? No, silly, you can't be proud of things members of your group did! You can't take credit for advances that were achieved by your forefathers! Those were individual accomplishments that you had no role in! Why would we let you claim those in the present? But of course the fact that you benefited from them should make you feel MORE guilty over your privilege!
Nevermind that whatever the mechanism they claim allows guilt to propagate forward through time... should by definition also carry credit and accolades forward.
And they do that because a fair accounting would make it clear that in the grand scheme, the amount of suffering that Westerners have caused in history, while it is a staggering amount, is on net outweighed by the sheer magnitude of benefits they have achieved for all humans, everywhere, and continue to achieve. So if you want to hold modern Westerners accountable for sins of their fathers, don't be surprised if they start looking back and taking credit for and pride in the successes and victories of their fathers, too.
As I've said before.
Women aren't the problem. But the problem is with women. It is harbored in their minds.
Its right there in the data. In every piece of reliable data that is available on this topic.
Here's the actual graph on the data about each gender's view of the other as discussed in that article.
72% of men under 30 view women positively. 7% view them negatively.
For women under 30, 50% view men positively, 21% view them negatively.
For women under 25, its 35% and 27%, respectively.
If men are steeped in misogyny and treat women so horribly, how does it work that a supermajority of men view women positively, and a substantial minority of women view men negatively. This is incoherent without some very strained definitions of the terms used.
The only way the data makes sense is if these women absolutely believe men are steeped in misogyny, and do not realize that this appears to be misguided and incorrect.
It also pairs well with this bit of data out of the UK where young (teen) men in relationships report substantially more abusive behavior from their partners than the women do. This suggests that men's 'flaw' is believing in the goodness of most women in spite of experiencing their bad behavior.
And of course the official governmental policy [in the UK] is to crack down on male behavior. They (the UK) are trying to ban depictions of strangulation in porn even though, once again, women tend to be slightly more likely to consume such content. Its not clear to me if this is an incompetent government that is ignoring the data, or a malicious/intentional attempt to shape the outcomes by force because it just doesn't like what the data shows and wishes it were different.
How is it possible that after decades and decades of civil rights advances favoring women, they're LESS satisfied with their status in society?
How is it possible that they view men as collectively the biggest danger to their rights and safety when, A) women are as a class safer than they've been at literally any point in history and B) men have very peaceably stood aside or actively boosted women's interests to enable the aforementioned civil rights advances?
If the entire course of the civil rights movement was viewed as an empirical study, an experiment in trying to truly increase human thriving by social engineering and applying technology to alleviate almost every burden that is nominally borne by women... hasn't it objectively failed at that goal?
They're more sad. More mentally ill. Less healthy. They have more STIs (likely because they tend to have more sex partners). They have more debt (although you can certainly argue they're more financially independent). They commit suicide (slightly) more often. And to the extent they still care about marriage and childbirth, they're having more trouble finding and keeping relationships, and they're having fewer children, later in life, if at all. They've acquired artificial signifiers of success like degrees and job titles and digital photo albums full of travel photos... but have so very little tangible to show for it.
All the material wealth we've accumulated has made life easier, across the board. So most 'difficulties' they complain about must be either illusory or self-imposed. It is simply impossible that men as a group are conspiring to keep the women from achieving true happiness.
Anyway, my nutshell theory is that the women are wonderful effect simply dominates cultural and political norms. That's why we get a documentary about the Manosphere and its effect on women, and NOT one about Tiktok and Feminist influencers and its effect on women. Because there's an unstated assumption of "if women are doing it, it can't be bad!"
In spite of the latter being an OBJECTIVELY bigger deal with larger negative impacts on both the individual and social level.
Yes, I'm, still mad.
faceh
7d ago
Well that's what I'm saying. If they used AI to shortcut through most of law school, they would still have to pass exams.
So its plausible someone who leaned heavily on AI wouldn't know enough to pass a bar exam.
But a little implausible they'd have gotten out of a T50 law school with their GPA intact.
faceh
7d ago
facing a workload crisis on many fronts
See this is my other point, the Gov't COULD expand the Judiciary with more judges and staff and alleviate things, but AI is such tempting solution here.
And it genuinely becomes a question "if the AI is 90% as good as a judge at ruling correctly... why bother with the judge for less important matters?"
And at the county level, the judges can be very bad indeed.
faceh
8d ago
Can I be more generally annoyed that outcomes for elites are uncorrelated with the impact their policies have on the rest of us which makes them unsuited for making good decisions that advance their constituents' interests?
I just want a filter that removes the bad actors and keeps them out of positions of power or influence. Seeing them enjoying rewards and acclaim after they inflict disastrous harm just reminds me that on a systemic level we simply don't hold our elites to a high enough standard/they have insufficient skin in the game.
faceh
8d ago
And silly me I thought law schools were supposed to be, to some degree, a filter for competence.
Are these people able to pass their bar exams? HOW?
faceh
8d ago
I get summer associates and associates regularly that cannot draft coherent 3 page motions or briefs.
Oh boy.
These from top 50 law schools?
Multiple people have been caught by partners on major cases submitting fake (presumably AI generated) case citations. Sometimes this only get caught on appeal.
Oh BOY.
faceh
9d ago
Yeah. If Sam doesn't have a team of Blackwater mercs in exoskeletons guarding his house 24/7 then Silicon Valley is a joke.
faceh
9d ago
Its doing the same work but faster, cheaper, and probably more thoroughly, and can be scaled up arbitrarily.
faceh
9d ago
I mean, expanding areas where they are capable of grifting and grafting.
The courts aren't particularly suitable for that.
The courts are more just targets for ideological subversion.
faceh
9d ago
Yep.
The implied lack of upward mobility is probably the part that would make it unbearable.
You're a waiter because that's the only role you are capable of serving in this world. You cannot ever expect to get recognized for more than that. Not even luck will save you.
The patrons who use your services may even treat you with basic dignity, but yeah, your status will never approach theirs, and you both know it.
faceh
9d ago
Right, but I don't see the incentive for governments to expand the existing systems, which are already getting seriously backlogged (at least around here).
I just don't see anyway to sustain the pipeline if fresh Associates CANNOT outperform the LLMs, especially on price.
If a law firm can spin up an arbitrary amount of 'agents' that have all the requisite knowledge to handle a given legal issue, maybe they hire some attorneys to wrangle the agents and sign off on their output.
But that doesn't give those attorneys good legal experience they can translate into advancing their career. That's a step above doc review.
Hell, AI should be able to replace most Law School professors. It SHOULD become possible to become a competent lawyer without setting foot in a law school campus.
So naively, what I see coming down the pike is a massive spike in the 'supply' of legal knowledge that is on tap... and no clear reason why people should prefer the person who got a 6-figure loan for law school (and has to bill accordingly) over the $20-$200/month uberexpert that lives in their pocket. So from whence comes demand for human lawyer?
Basically one thing: Accountability. They can be punished for screwups.
One of the dirty little secrets of the US Court system is that a lot of the time judges throw out meritorious cases because they believe the system is just too busy to be bothered. A lot of wrongs never get litigated simply because there just aren't enough lawyers and judges to handle them.
One possible outcome is that governments spend money beefing up their legal systems, staffing out enough judges and clerks and such to actually meet the surge.
But courts are a pure cost center, so I just doubt it happens. Instead I think more disputes go to private arbitration, or maybe AI Mediators become a popular option. I think the demand for NONJUDICIAL resolutions surges! They're cheaper and possibly even more accurate. And if mediation and arbitration becomes popular... guess what all those rules about attorneys being needed to argue for a jury or represent a corpo get sidestepped very neatly.
faceh
9d ago
Yeah, and that's the existential horror of the situation to me.
You can dissent from the Culture, you can rebel, you can even try to kill yourself.
But none of that will change the outcome.
Its still there. Everywhere. Inevitable. And all alternatives are inherently worse.
I have before said that the inverse of the Culture might be a civilization of pure P-zombies whose whole, entire goal is removing sentience from the universe. Not intelligence, just sentience.
Assuming they're technologically equivalent to the culture, would the Culture win that fight?
For all you or I know, we're currently in an alpha version of that simulation right now.
Or... the final version.
I actually had that thought as I was pondering this, along the lines of "oh shit what if the singularity happened in 2025 and the superintelligence is just A/B testing or Beta testing the environment to find the ideal amount of suffering, adventure, surprise, intrigue, and danger for human 'thriving.'
Its trying out things like the Moon mission and prediction markets/gambling and weight loss drugs and seeing how we react. Its moving oil prices around, its delaying GTA 6, its generating ridiculous amounts of AI "slop" to see which ones click with us.
(Oh wait, I just invented the plot of The Amazing Digital Circus from first principles)
faceh
9d ago
That is 5000% my own objection to the Culture as portrayed.
The ONLY entities with true volition in that universe are the minds. No human ever makes a meaningful choice, and whatever influence they have on their own fate is inherently pre-calculated in by the minds.
And somehow the humans are 100% aware of the arrangement and there are few dissenters, although they can get uppity from time to time.
It honestly makes me sympathetic to Culture opponents just on the basis of "yes, maybe they're sadistic, evil, and backwards, but at least they're the masters of their own fate dammit!"
I think that's the precise objection leveled by the main character of the first book, actually.
I had a young guy in my office last month, with his dad (the client), who was apparently been accepted to Georgetown Law and was pretty hyped to be going.
I couldn't bring myself to tell him how badly I expected that to turn out for him in the end.
Important detail: he's black, so my guess is that he's getting some financial support.
Yeah, which is indicating that there needs to be some policing of that subset of men too.
But the logic of the sexual revolution is that women get to choose whomever they want, so ipso facto restricting the access of those top tier men to the wider female population is verboten as it directly restricts female's 'choice'.
Like imagine a rule that, say, banned professional athletes from hooking up with random girls they see on Instagram in their hotel room while they're in town for a game. I'd go ahead and guess that the women would howl harder about this restriction than the athletes would.
More options
Context Copy link