He judges a relationship with a significant age gap as ethical if Older Gay Guy leaves the Young Sexy Twink no worse or, ideally, "better off" at the end of the relationship. If you use a younger, inexperienced person for young, sexy sex, then don't leave them homeless, friendless, and drug-addicted at the end of it.
That's approximately my take on age-gap relationships. But the question of better off can be 'squishy' because its hard to really imagine the counterfactual scenario where they didn't have the relationship.
But it seems that ethically the older person should be actively trying to leave them in a better position, financially, career-wise, or at least creating a more stable life-path for them so that when the older guy exits, the woman's life isn't immediately thrown into chaos.
For heterosexual women, there's the issue of their eventually waning fertility, where a dalliance with an older man that lasts a year or more is inherently decreasing their chances of having kids. Or if they do have kids and the guy leaves, now they're really up a creek, and the kid is probably worse off too in ways that giving them financial support probably won't make up for.
So I think there is an inherent cost to a powerful man using his status to string along young, possibly naive women and making it much harder for said woman to end up in a stable, happy life situation, and those costs often are NOT internalized by that man.
If a woman wants to curry favor through sex with a powerful -- in this context -- guy that may help her career, then she has to use her judgment of his character and cross her fingers. If she wants to curry favor with a powerful guy that is known to be a womanizer that should enter into her assessment.
The objection here is that its often hard to know when a guy is a 'known' womanizer and exactly how bad his proclivities are. Sure there's an obvious baseline for most guys, but unless other women are taking down detailed notes of their experience and sharing it with other females (sometimes happens!) there's a clear information asymmetry there, and one that a woman may not even knows exist.
faceh
7mo ago
I expect the rate of satisfaction from these encounters to be in excess of the base rate of satisfaction per encounter for normal sexual relationships, which for reference averages around 69%.
Now THIS is the sort of argument that keeps me coming back to The Motte.
Seriously. Asking about the base rate of 'satisfaction' with celebrity sex encounters is a 'fun' and relevant question.
I can't actually disagree with your estimate, either. I'd guess that the glow of having someone you idolize giving you the most intimate of attention and (one hopes) pleasure is a particular kind of ecstasy for the monkey brain. Like, imagine a teen boy who was fantasizing about, I dunno, young Christie Brinkley for his entire adolescence, then after he turns 18 he has a chance encounter with her where she gives him the thing he'd dreamt about and he has an incredible story to tell for the rest of his life. Hard to imagine the guy having any regrets.
But I also expect that the same idolization leads to expectations that necessarily exceed the reality of human capabilities, so there's likely to be some amount of disappointment upon realizing that well-maintained celeb is but a man and thus has finite stamina, makes awkward sounds and smells during sex, and may not administer amazing pillow talk. So the delta between expectations and reality is probably where some of the 'regret' can be found.
Yeah, its a bit hard to compare Apples to Apples with regard to marriage when the concept used to be a set of mutually reinforcing obligations/responsibilities to the other party that were considered ironclad expectations of each party under penalty of literal hellfire in some cases.
And since connubials included an expectation of regular sexual relations (although with the intent of conceiving children, I suppose), one of the parties denying that to the other was a clear breach or default of their obligations, and enforcing 'specific performance' on the party in default... rather makes sense as a solution?
I get that it's a squishy question, how much sex is it 'fair' to expect from a partner, but it is weird that we still have the general ceremonial trappings of marriage as an ironclad 'contract' ('til death do us part!) and yet have tossed away almost any 'enforcement' mechanisms and let people breach and exit them at will.
I'm glad someone did the write up on this so I didn't have to.
I have to update some previous thoughts from six months ago on this matter.
A lot of the described behavior is bad enough to absolutely deserve moral approbation.
I'd still argue that the contributions the man makes to the culture 'outweigh' the harms he's caused, so its simply not economically efficient to lock the man out of writing stories, but maybe do lock the guy in his house and don't let him leave, and any ladies who visit should be fully informed of his proclivities and signing off on a very explicit waiver so they know what they're getting into.
One thing that did jump out though, some of these women attached themselves with clear hopes of career advancement or increased fame thanks to his influence. It seems like none of them got any of that.
So here's an out-there question: Is Neil's conduct arguably worse than Harvey Weinstein's? Weinstein, at least, had the juice to make the women he abused into stars once he was done with them.
Is it worse to NOT actually do a quid pro quo when using your status to get women to sleep with you for favors? Especially with the more painful stuff he inflicted.
I guess I'd call it a bifurcation.
I read the material that suggests all the pieces are in place to achieve superintelligence.
But I'm also reading reports that the most recent training runs are seeing diminishing returns. So making the models BIGGER isn't giving the same results.
Which certainly explains why OpenAI hasn't pushed ChatGPT5 out the door, if it can't demonstrate as significant an improvement as 3-4 was.
So improvements and tweaks to existing models are giving us gains in the meantime, it isn't very clear to me where the quantum leap that will enable true AGI/Superintelligence is hiding. Which is more a me issue, I'm certainly not an insider. I'm just seeing two sides, those who think moar compute is good enough, and those who think its going to take some tricky engineering.
And Altman sure isn't telling us what he's seeing. So my question is whether he's playing cards close to the vest to avoid popping the hype bubble or because he really thinks he's going to blow us away with the next product. Possibly blow us away in the most literal meaning of the word.
Yep. I may be wrong but I seem to recall that there was a brief period of time where a lot of folks in the space did genuinely think improvements would continue to follow the exponential curve even if individual jumps between new models were a little smaller.
Or at least were willing to hype it that way. I'm prepared to be corrected if my memory is faulty there.
There was certainly a 'vibe' that we might have activated the fast takeoff scenario.
faceh
7mo ago
I think it's probable that AGI/ASI is less than 10 years away. The critics increasingly resemble the critics of evolution, worshiping the "god of the gaps" for the increasingly small things that AI can't do. The progress in the last year alone has been staggering.
What's currently stopping AI from contributing to improvements in AI tech, do you think?
faceh
7mo ago
Ironically, this would also describe the writing of AI/LLMs themselves when you prompt them to show any sort of character or express a "personal" opinion.
It does, but at least with some prompt engineering you can get them to distill down to the actual informational content.
At this rate Sam could get replaced by an actual AI halfway through the singularity and literally nobody would notice.
Perhaps that's the joke. This is him asking the latest GPT model to spit out his annual report and see if anybody calls him on it.
If I had to guess they feel the AGI competition, current Claude is near-strictly better already and the recent Deepseek V3 seems quite close while being orders of magnitude cheaper (epistemic status: haven't tested much yet). If I had no big-dick reveals in the pipeline I'd probably look to cut and run too.
I already got suspicious when they released SORA to the wild, which is an impressive model but is now arriving late to the table in terms of publicly-available video generation capabilities.
OpenAI had what seemed like a 'comfortable' lead for about a year there, but if progress had remained exponential or even linear from the past models they should be running away with the game. Instead the other close competitors seem to be chomping steadily away at their lunch.
I think one of the points of near consensus on The Motte is a general hyper-suspicion to this kind of disingenuous koombayah style of writing.
I'd mostly agree.
It personally sets my teeth on edge to read something that clearly wants to inspire strong emotions in the reader or perhaps persuade them of something but doesn't actually speak of anything that is happening to be excited about.
Its the difference between saying "We've received and analyzed the test results which have provided us with an unparalleled depth of understanding regarding the intricate nuances of your overall health and physiological dynamics. The insights gained from this process are both illuminating and inspiring, offering an exciting roadmap for continued progress and optimization. We are deeply committed to partnering with you on this transformative journey, leveraging future interactions to refine our approach, enhance the granularity of our feedback, and will ensure you remain in top condition in the coming decades!"
(ironically, I used ChatGPT to generate the most corpo-speak version of that sentence possible)
vs. "The test came back negative. You're cancer free, congrats!"
The first just desperately wants you to feel good without delivering the information you actually would like to hear that would make you happy. The second actually gives you the reason to be happy because there's a tangible fact about the world that is 'good,' and you just needed to hear it said.
I also note that there are no concrete examples of how their products have improved productivity for any companies already. Either the examples they have are underwhelming or maybe they aren't allowed to discuss it? Otherwise why not talk about tangible achievements?
I'm increasingly annoyed when the AI 'insiders' will speak reverently about how they're instantiating a Godhead that will relieve us of all the miserable burdens of our mortal existence in the near future, but will get hugely cagey about how that's actually being done or why we can trust them do to his correctly. They talk about things in religious/spiritual terms when telling us what the future holds, but hew to corpo-speak and remain businesslike when asked about present status.
It reads like a particularly opaque sort of intentional hype cycle that might be mostly designed to inspire us to transfer tons of wealth to them before AI progress stalls out for a while.
I think that most people my age and younger have embraced this sense of being musically and culturally omnivorous.
This rings very true to me.
The phrase "I like everything but rap and country" had proliferated in the past 10 years, and I think now rap and country have snuck into respectability for the majority of people.
So the subcultures can survive, but maybe people prefer not to pigeonhole themselves by saying they only listen to certain genres because they damn well know they're missing out on great music elsewhere.
At the same time, I think the 'mystique' of the performers has been dissipated in the current era, and there's now a real layer of irony over 'antisocial' lyrics and 'edgy' genres because everyone knows that the vast majority of popular artists live cushy lives in gated communities and do normal people things with their families when not performing, so much like professional wrestling, we all agree to accept the kayfabe for purposes of enjoying the product. Although I'll say that Ronnie Radke might actually be living his music. Although irony of ironies his partner is a pro wrestler.
K-pop, hyperpop, synthwave/vaporwave, drill rap, rap-country, and, as you named, phonk.
Being MEGA controversial, I don't see any of those aside from Phonk as a notable 'new' genres in that they aren't forging new paths, but following ones that are rather well-trodden already. If I wanted to piss a bunch of people off, I'd argue that drill rap is a regression to a less impressive and sophisticated form of music, but then maybe that's the point; a lot of modern hip-hop is arguably 'overproduced' now. I just wonder at the fact that Two 70 year old Englishmen are arguably the best Drill rappers operating right now. Helps that they're not in prison or dead, which seems the most likely end to a Drill artist's career.
Rap-Country (I love the term "Gangstagrass" myself but alas) is a great innovation but its still two very identifiable genres mashed together rather than its own 'thing.'
Like, is Nightcore really a genre that stands on its own when its just pitch/tempo-shifted version of existing songs?
On that note however, I think there's a LOT of room to experiment with covers of existing songs and mild remixes.
I keep a playlist of metal/hard rock covers of songs that I think are arguably superior to the originals. Its gotten larger as of lately, I think artists have noticed you can get attention for skilled but surprising new takes on popular songs
When you run out of novel material, why not try mashing up existing stuff to see what comes out.
Now with AI, this is easier than ever. I managed to get Suno to produce a Spanish hard rock/metal song that incorporated the Marimba, that's something I haven't heard before ever!
This all reminds me of a time when I was in a random liquor store and the clerk sold me on "the future of brewing": Two different beers that were brewed and packaged with the intention of being combined and drank together by the customer. And after trying and enjoying what he gave me, I never saw such a concept again. I suspect they realized they can just mix beers together themselves and sell it as its own beverage rather than going with the gimmick of the beers coming in separate cans.
Huh. I just realized this conversation could relate over the issue of everyone's beer preferences converging on IPAs,, letting the various other 'genres' of beer suffer for it.
Maybe we can also analogize in how Mixed Martial Arts is no longer about actual competition between different martial arts practitioners, but has now led all fighters to cross-train muay thai, jiu jitsu, and some form of wrestling (sambo, nowadays) since that's simply optimal, so while the original disciplines still exist, its the blended/homogenized version that gets the most attention.
I think the answer to this is just 'yes.'
In that I believe that any world where Nvidia stocks are tanking, there's probably a lot of other chaos and you will be seeing large losses across the board.
The only inherent risk factor is that their product is dependent on thousands of inputs all around the world, so they're more sensitive than most to disruptions.
faceh
8mo ago
Well, Defense companies.
But I sure as hell don't want to try to actively invest during a hot war with China.
faceh
8mo ago
I'm a little suspicious, they released Sora to public access even though its only slightly better than other video production models after introducing it in February, so it reads as a way to keep the hype train moving because they don't have a new model worthy of the GPT5 moniker yet.
faceh
8mo ago
The thing is if you joke that the thing can effectively help students cheat you still imply its somewhere around the intelligence level of average college students, which certainly implies it is useful in ways that college students or recent grads can be.
Have you actually been to any metal shows lately? I have, and I assure you that there are still tons of people there who are very visually-identifiable as “metalheads”. Sleeve tattoos, facial piercings, black band T-shirts, etc.
I'll push back on this some. Yes, if you go to the events specifically for this group, you'll find people dressed up for the occasion, and you'll get the impression the culture is strong and the fanbase is numerous. Doesn't really tell you how many of them are actually consider it a significant part of the identity.
I'll also ask, what's the median age of the members of the crowd these days?
As far as I can tell, sleeve tattoos and facial piercings don't necessarily mark you as any particular subculture anymore. A sleeve tattoo could be a biker, a veteran, an SJW, or a handful of other types. And part of my point is I haven't seen people wearing those black band shirts out in public very often.
I don't think the kids these days are falling into the 'standard' categories where they define themselves in large part by the music they listen to. I'm also guessing they don't attend concerts with the same regularity as previous generations.
both new entries in genres you’d recognize, and totally new genres you wouldn’t know anything about unless you sought them out.
What are some examples? Because every so often I DO go seeking out new genres because I get bored with music pretty quickly these days. I've found spinoffs of known genres, like Argent Metal or Folk Metal. I discovered The Hu in 2020 and Bloodywood in 2021, and more recently Gloryhammer.
But none of those have achieved much 'mainstream' cachet, they're simply not known beyond their own subculture, and they aren't playing at large venues, although occasionally they'll be the opener for a larger act.
The only genre I can think of that seems 'new' is Phonk, which is pretty interesting on its own and gets more interesting when you combine it with metal
Perhaps you are just out of touch with what’s new and hip among the new generation? There’s no shame in that; it happens to everyone.
I'll just point to the part of my comment where I said "as someone who hasn't really changed my personal style in about 20 years." I have literally never been in touch with what's 'new and hip,' so my exposure to it was usually what percolated through to everyday life. And my point is in 'everyday life' I'm not seeing the folks who are obviously identifiable as metalheads, goths, emo, or hiphopheads as often as it feels like I used to.
I don't want us to talk past each other. I hear you saying "These scenes are alive and well! There's dedicated fans and active bands and there are regulars shows at many venues!" And I'm replying "Great. Awesome, but their penetration into the overculture appears to be virtually nil."
Although I have heard from friends in Nashville that the current scene for Country and Blues is on fire right now, as old as those genres are.
faceh
8mo ago
RE: the authenticity point, I noticed sometime in the last decade that whole subcultures seem to have mostly died out and there certainly seem to be no new ones arising.
Has anyone actually seen a 'hipster' in real life recently? Is anyone still seriously going around trying to live the Goth or Emo lifestyle, are Metalheads still a distinct, recognizable class of music fans? And this is going to sound weird, but even hip-hop/urban culture seems to have reigned in their stylistic excesses. I haven't seen sagging pants, spinning rims on blinged out Cadillacs or absurdly long chains with absurdly large pendants in a long time. OCCASIONALLY some slightly new music genre spins out but the vast majority of popular music these days seems to fall into about 4 genres.
The only pimped out rides I notice these days are usually lifted trucks with underbody lights.
Its like, despite living in the single best possible era for people with niche, 'esoteric,' and bespoke interests and tastes, we seem to be homogenizing more than ever.
If we are maximally permissive, and there are no real social standards to 'transgress' against perhaps everyone just sort of gravitates to the nearest cluster of peers and just apes their style, with minor variations. You can't be 'counter' to any social rules if the rules don't actually forbid much. I suppose nudity is still taboo.
I say this as someone who hasn't really changed my personal style in about 20 years. So it felt like everyone was making things up as they went along either way, but now they're not even bothering to make it up, they just pick from approximately 3, maybe 5 predefined style palettes and buy the recommended brands and then they're good to go. Maybe they change a bit with the seasons. Pumpkin spice gives way to Peppermint Mocha.
faceh
8mo ago
The one question that may remain to be answered is if we can 'merge' with machines in a way that (one hopes) preserves our consciousness and continuity of self, and then augment our own capabilities to 'keep up' with the machines to some degree. Or if we're just completely obsolete on every level.
Human Instrumentality Project WHEN.
I think this is an interesting 'shot across the bow.'
We have language analysis technology that includes LLMs that makes these huge bills easier to search and catch the 'hidden' spending provisions tucked in there, and translate complicated legalese into mostly plain English.
This results in increased 'legibility' in the most literal sense. The text of any bill, no matter how large, can be instantly processed and made comprehensible to the constituents well before the vote is called.
Add in general anti-FedGov sentiment, and the fact that Elon is popular and has an uncensorable platform, and this could change the game.
Where before the mainstream news might have picked out like 3-5 of the provisions that would piss off one side or the other, while ignoring the really egregious stuff in the bill, now there is no 'safety through obscurity.'
Not clear what congress' counterplay is, honestly.
If Elon wants to, he can set up PACs to fund primary challengers for any Republicans who defect, to make sure that there are consequences locked in for later, to prevent any politicians from relying on the public's short memory.
faceh
8mo ago
I think authors should almost never do it. It immediately stakes a claim that the author 1. knows in some cosmic sense, that the alleged misinfo is false, and 2. knows that the intent of the alleged misinfo was to deceive or bullshit. Even if they know the first, how could they know the second?
Yep.
"Misinformation" is a label that should really only apply to statements that intentionally mislead with regard to facts that have been heavily empirically tested and can be 'independently' verified by the listeners if they chose to do so. In most other situations, you can just say "lies."
"The sun rises in the west" is misinformation, in that context, even if the speaker ardently believes it. "The earth is 6000 years old" is arguably not.
There's a distinct difference between expressing skepticism over someone's statement and taking it upon yourself to declare that statement is untrue without further elaborating on your argument.
And sneaking your conclusion (this statement is false/this speaker is unreliable) into your description of the person or statement is, itself, a very misleading thing to do, if you haven't done the work to back up the description.
So, when we are trying to decide who the liars are, it seems likely that Trump and Vance were speaking closer to the truth, even if the specifics were off, than everyone else screaming "THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE!
I think this is an underappreciated point, and I suspect it even reflects a psychological difference between the right and left wing's approach to empiricism.
I'll even 'steelman' Pizzagate, for that matter.
We've seen plenty of credible reports and even some actual convictions showing that Politicians do in fact get up to all kinds of sexual deviancy, up to and including in the halls of congress.
And now we're seeing the various dominoes falling with Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell (remember they found her hanging out in New Hampshire surrounded by armed guards?), Diddy, and Jay-Z, and we can be all but certain there's celebs and politicians caught up in all this. The biggest hit song of the summer was by Kendrick Lamar accusing one of the most popular musical artists alive right now of being a pedophile.
Pizzagate gets the specifics wrong (there's probably no child dungeon underneath a pizza restaurant) but is still getting at the 'shape' of the truth. And if they kept fumbling around in a very misguided attempt to uncover these truths, they'd probably grab hold of the actual conspiracies eventually, and bring some heinous stuff to light.
Whereas the lefty impulse seems to be to reject the existence of a given conspiracy simply because some aspect of it is debunked or proven false. "Haha silly Qanon thinks there's a Pedo ring operating out of a Pizza shop, how stupid to believe that politicians would be hiding an organized child sex operation." And thus they don't have to follow that thought any further and can return to blissful ignorance, which would allow whatever hidden activities are occurring to continue along.
This was especially blatant with the Hunter Biden laptop stuff. Its utterly obvious the Biden family is covering up some serious stuff, and the more recent pardons are almost tacit admissions of such, but the liberals have their head jammed so deep in the sand that they denied Biden's senility, let alone his potential corruption, for so long it may have just cost them control of government.
Likewise, maybe there are at best isolated incidents of Haitian immigrants taking animals they find outdoors and cooking them up in Ohio. But the larger point that they're causing, e.g. increased traffic accidents and increased burden on social services and possibly crowding out the locals for employment is likely more true than not.
it seems obvious that Haitians really do eat dogs and cats in Haiti (Those links are SFL, but there ARE videos out there if you wish to be convinced further), so the larger point the righties are making is getting at the shape of the truth.
The lefties, of course, will use the debunking of individual incidents to claim that Haitian immigrants are causing no issues whatsoever and we should be inviting more of them in.
faceh
8mo ago
The easiest thing he can do is transfer the IP rights to an irrevocable trust, and dictate that the IP rights are to never be transferred to any entity, nor should any new media be produced, and basically to preserve the IP as closely to the state it currently exists in until the copyright expires.
And fund it well enough that the Trustees can go after any entities trying to infringe on the IP. And it can produce revenue by making new printings of the comics (without editing original content too much) to keep that fund topped off. And I guess extra money over that amount can be kicked off to particular beneficiaries, but make it clear they DON'T get to dictate how the trust property is used or make demands of the Trustees.
And pick a law firm that's been around for 70+ years to act as trustee, and otherwise has minimal financial incentive to milk the trusteeship for fees.
The biggest risk at that point is the Trust depleting its liquid assets and thus being put in a position where it 'has' to start selling or borrowing against the IP rights in order to continue operations, since that is the main and primary asset of value it has.
Even if the trust's explicit purpose is to prevent C & H adaptations from being produced as long as possible, if the Trustees believe that there will not be sufficient funds to carry out that purpose, they can potentially argue that selling off one piece of the IP rights is justifiable since that is the only way they can continue to operations and that is still in the 'best interests' of the trust itself.
faceh
8mo ago
Yes, he can do a lot of things to try and restrict any use of his IP after his death. Most of those things can be circumvented if they're willing to bring freight trains worth of money.
I can say on a professional level that even an extremely well-drafted trust with 'airtight' language still fails if you don't have someone in charge who is truly aligned with your vision.
I sometimes point out what happened to The Ford Foundation which, after Henry and Edsel died, made it about thirty years before its original mission was fully compromised.
faceh
8mo ago
It actually saddens me that after he dies (sad enough on its own) that someone, somewhere is going to roll a freight trains worth of money up to his heirs and convince them to sign the rights over, then we're getting saturated with C & H content.
One of my favorite factors in the comics is that Calvin and Hobbes have no "voice" so every person has a slightly different version of them in their own head.
When they eventually make a CGI movie and they're voiced by Chris Pratt and Seth Rogen it will genuinely diminish the art, I'd argue.
Its funny, I'm an elder millennial, so I can remember a childhood without phones (and, barely, one without computers or internet), so I actually balk from blaming 'the phones' in the abstract. I was able to adapt from the old nokias to the slick flipphones to several different form factors for 'smartphones' and I think this gave me a practical view of the phone as a tool for organizing IRL activities and keeping in touch with distant friends. That's what we used it for originally.
BUT, I work with 20-21 year old Zoomers, and holy COW they treat their phones like an inseparable appendage, and you can catch them doomscrolling constantly. I can SEE that growing up with this influence leads to a qualitatively different relationship to/dependence on the gadget, which could be source of the other observable problems. Oh, and now they're used to having a semi-reliable AI assistant in their pocket at all times, so now they can use this machine to do a lot of their literal thinking.
And now there's been a couple decades of engineering and testing to optimize the apps for taking your money and sucking up your attention and otherwise making you dependent on various digital services that we previously lived without.
Tiktok being banned won't solve much, there are 50 other apps ready to jump in and replace it, but maybe, just maybe someone will produce reliable research to measure the impact of these apps and finally get towards some policy proposals aimed at cutting out the most harmful elements while retaining the benefits. I can dream, right?
Seen this issue a lot. You can't build a community without a core of dedicated people constantly showing up and doing the work to put together events, and that core of people will get frustrated and burn out or give up if there's too much turnover in membership or members are extremely flaky and unreliable. So hard to even get one off the ground.
My martial arts gym, which HAS an extremely dedicated core tries to hold social events every so often, with plenty of advance notice, and it still a crapshoot as to who will show up outside of that core group.
I've spent the past two years holding regular social gatherings at my house, which is cheap, low-pressure, and I can control the environment to 'guarantee' a pleasant experience. Wrangling adults to hang out together is HARD. Some can't find a babysitter, this one's busy with work or school, that one's just tired and wants to go to bed at 9. So you invite people on the assumption that there'll be a number of last minute dropouts.
Everyone has like 15 different commitments going on at any one time, so getting them to TRULY prioritize a commitment to one group over the other is nigh-impossible. And this also seems to have shifted how humans value individual relationships. There's billions of humans you can potential interact with, and if you aren't satisfied with the ones in your circle of friends, discarding them for new ones is easy. Even if you can't find local friends, your phone offers the potential to make 'infinite' friends! Parasocial relationships! You can spend all day chatting with an AI version of Hitler or Tony the Tiger if it strikes your fancy! Why value real-life relationships at all?
This becomes especially stark on the dating apps. Human connection is immensely devalued.
As somebody whose preferred method of making friends is to identify good people and then forge a deep, long-lasting bond with them (my best friend, whom I still talk to regularly, has been in my life since Kindergarden, literally 30 years), this world of ephemeral connections where people flit in and out of your life on a whim is a bit of a waking nightmare.
I can say for myself, I used to attend the soup kitchens, food pantries, and service to shut-in elderly folks to mow their lawns and such. It was fulfilling in its way.
But what I concluded is that this was basically burning up the manhours of competent people to provide modest benefits to people who simply aren't able to produce value on their own. It is literally more efficient to donate money to some professional org that will pay to provide these services than for me to go out and spend hours on a weekend mowing a lawn myself, and I could do something more enjoyable, to boot. I guess I was engaging in prototype effective altruist logic.
But I do think that engaging in activities that constantly expose you to the 'dregs' of humanity, and seeing that no matter how much money and effort is poured into these folks, at best you're basically just raising their standard of living by 2-3% temporarily, not dragging them permanently out of destitution and fixing the problems that put them there. If you're not a certain type of person, the futility of it probably burns you out. I even tried volunteering at a dog shelter, but that burned me out EVEN QUICKER because holy cow the problem of stray and abandoned dogs is intractable, and there will never be enough funds to shelter all those poor animals, just the few that we can locate, rehabilitate, and get adopted. Volunteering your time for such a sisysphean endeavor seems irrational unless you honestly do have a deep and abiding love for animals. Which some do.
Now, I'm not denying that engaging in acts of service is enriching, and exposing yourself to that side of humanity probably makes you a better-informed person. But its also easy to do it just for the virtue-signal points.
That might be another part of the equation. Sympathy for strangers seems to be on the wane, and this has pushed us ever deeper into our chosen ingroups, and built up a wall of suspicion against all outsiders who might want to forge a connection with us.
More options
Context Copy link