faceh
2hr ago
I mean, I did study it.
Hume kind of demolished the idea that we can ever achieve certainty regardless of how airtight our arguments seem.
You still get some brave souls trying to swap an ought for an is, and acting like I wouldn't notice.
faceh
2hr ago
Personally I think we're going to see (are seeing) a bifurcation in those who are hopelessly taken in/addicted to the AI's sway, and those who do see it more as a mere instrumental affordance for achieving certain goals, that they can still turn away from to enjoy real world activities and interactions.
I don't know which of these groups will end up being larger, but I'd bet that the AI-vulnerable are around 60% of the U.S. population.
I also was looking forward to a team of maybe 10 people making a legit billion dollar company and this paving the way for groups of 3 - 5 friends running thousands of $10 + $50 million dollar companies.
This is a very nice dream, and maybe for a brief period of time it will be possible, but alas we are all but training data for the model so by running such a business via their systems, we'll be teaching the system how to run the businesses without us. I don't see how it ends up any other way.
faceh
3hr ago
My generalized advice for finding a friend group: learn to fight.
That's your best chance at finding physically fit, socially active, yet potentially nerdy male friends out there. 28 is a fine age to start. That's where I found the core of my current social group.
Online friend groups can be great but you really need to be having gatherings in physical space, where a woman can actually see you in person and you can actually monopolize her attention for a while if you want.
I'm speaking as someone who has had to completely rebuild/reform friend groups like half-a-dozen times over the years, and may have to do so again soon, since most of the dudes in my current group have gotten into stable relationships and... predictably, are putting less time in being social. And the guys who are still around are, unfortunately, the ones who've had bad luck with women.
All that is to say that it will work, but you might have to be the guy who does most of the hard work up front.
faceh
3hr ago
Funny, one large reason I post is to poke holes in 'mindblowing' arguments or to just point out some glaring counterexample that demolishes up a convenient narrative if acknowledged.
I've come to learn that the way the world 'really' works is messy and on the fringes is quite unknowable, and I've come to gain an instinctive skepticism towards anyone who claims to have a insight that explains large, abstract phenomena.
I like people who engage with the messiness and admit to the limits of knowledge over those who claim to have it all reduced to smooth lines and platonic ideals with certainty.
I'll pop in a week late to say he's giving excellent advice up there on the general strategic level. And the only way to get better at the tactical level is to do it, over and over again.
The "Get a friend group and stick with them and build until you start running into attractive single women" is a workable strat, and avoids the main miseries of the current dating market. Pre-screening women before actually investing in them saves much grief.
There's a couple failure modes to avoid:
(1) Selection effects rule everything. Notice if the friends you're hanging out with are 'losers.' If your other friends aren't in relationships, or actively and successfully dating, or at least managing to bring women around to your social gatherings, and its usually just you all hanging out with each other... your hunt is not being served by sticking around. Indeed, its pulling you off course, and you'll get into a bad comfort zone that will be harder to leave the longer you stick around. Worst case these guys sabotage your attempts to find a mate out of jealousy or somesuch.
(2) The opposite problem also arises sometimes. If your male friends actually pair off and get married, the friend group will disintegrate. Its just what happens when a guy gets a serious relationship, can't do as much socialization (doesn't need to either). And I can say that being the sole single dude with a bunch of married or seriously dating guys kinda sucks. And unless those guys are still actively trying to get you hooked up, it will again start to run counter to your goals, since those guys aren't aligned with your goal of socializing with single women.
Basically, you may have to remake the social group a couple times as some members pair off and drop out or it becomes clear that they're dead weight. And unfortunately the longer a group persists, it can tend to be the losers who stick around b/c they can't pair off and they don't have much else going for them. You'll notice they're the ones who ALWAYS show up when you suggest something to do, as they don't have anything better going on, ever.
(3) Once you find someone attractive DO try and get a date relatively quickly and then ask for exclusivity relatively quickly after that because holy cow the friendzone does exist, and you can find yourself there without even knowing it happened. I define it mostly as a relationship position where any attempts to advance it romantically and/or sexually is 'awkward' due to the lack of sexual tension and overfamiliarity with the other person, and yet cutting it off feels inappropriate since neither party has done anything 'objectionable.' And then of course the girl in question might show up with a new BF without much warning and now you're in a pretty tight spot, emotionally speaking.
My only advice on that is definitely try to remain 'mysterious' as well as displaying your value and competence. Don't let a girl ever think she can just call you up and ask for favors, or do 'buddy' things with her (go out shopping, do brunch, binge watch shows without intending to bang), or understand your true motives. You want to remain in a superposition of "I could ask you out at any time/but I don't want to" until YOU make the decision to collapse the waveform.
(4) And a parting thought: If you have a good group of friends, don't ever leave them because of a woman. If both you and she are integrated in the friend group, and you break up (for relatively innocuous reasons), don't just let her have the friends and you move on. SHE will have a much easier time plugging into a new social group, so stand your ground to the extent you are able. And if your bros won't back you in that play, they're probably not your bros (or you did something horrible).
If this sounds like a lot of work, yes. It is. But its generally fun and rewarding and the skills are cross-applicable. It won't rip out parts of your soul like online dating or other rote relationship-seeking strategies.
faceh
1d ago
Sudan
Guess that one counts, definitely slipped my mind.
Kurdistan feels like cheating a bit, but good point.
faceh
1d ago
Where in the Middle East, at this point?
The Taliban 'officially" controls Afghanistan, ISIS doesn't have much territory to speak of, the Petrostates are pretty much uncontested in their borders. I guess Syria is still chunked up after the rebels actually got Assad to leave.
faceh
2d ago
Right, the thing that stands out to me is that the Cartels very actively prevent the government from ever becoming less corrupt by literally murdering anyone they can't buy out before they can attain public office. Back before reddit banned /r/narcofootage it was actually crazy to see vids of Drug Kingpins rolling around in massively up-armored pickup trucks with gold-plated AK-47s. They get away with absolutely absurd amounts of violence on a daily basis, and while individual acts don't get punished, most of 'em eventually get got in the end. Except El Mencho.
So one can correctly say that the Cartels as a whole are a "parallel" sovereign occupying the same territory. Which isn't really true of anywhere else that I'm aware of. The primary government isn't really able to oust this force, unless they get outside help. Now, if they did get outside help, and they committed to it fully to the extent that El Salvador did, I bet they make good progress.
Notable, on the topic of European corruption, that is how Fascist Italy broke the Mafia for a period of time, which might have led to the strengthening of the Italian Mob in the U.S. thanks to displacing the leadership.
Russia seems to have fully intertwined its organized crime with its state apparatus.
The U.S. at large seems to have managed to keep its violent criminal element from comingling too much with its political class, AND has relatively low levels of "Politician being handed cartoonishly large bags of money in secret" type of corruption. I'll grant "insider trading out the wazoo" is a factor, of course. MAYBE that's a distinction without a difference. Of course, in my local area, the Sheriff got hit with a Federal Investigation for literally taking a cash handout. And he's Italian (his name is CARMINE MARCENO), so maybe its just a culture inclination.
Also, our politicians do seem to have a weakness for sexy foreign agents.
faceh
2d ago
Also, strong argument that almost all the well-known Sea Shanties are directly derived from Irish musical heritage.
Does this melody sound familiar?
(About 6-7 years ago I went on a kick researching European Maritime culture and learned a lot of interesting stuff).
faceh
2d ago
I specifically requested an Irish accent for maximum dissonance.
I haven't played too much with asking it to do different languages with different accents, but it does a pretty good job of adding Indian-accented English to songs.
faceh
2d ago
Generally American corporations have spread to everywhere they are allowed.
Hell, even some places they weren't allowed!
I feel that calling corruption incompetence is disingenuous. Most European nations were equally impossible to operate in legally a few centuries ago. That's just how poor economies and politics tend to mingle.
This doesn't seem accurate if you exclude the Eastern European states.
Corruption in the U.K., France, and Germany was/is generally carried out by non-state actors. Organized Crime, Mafia, and maybe international corporations. I'll certainly grant Italy is up there. And I think the BIG sign you're in a true Kleptocrat state is if your military is taking bribes and/or selling equipment on the side, which I do not believe is happening in Western European nations.
Scandinavia as a whole has no reputation for corruption that I'm aware of.
The prevalence of corruption of State actors themselves seems more common in Russia and the Post-Soviet states, any given Middle Eastern or African Country you could name, And Central and parts of South America. I'm excluding Mexico because that whole situation is 'complicated' by the existence and influence of powerful Cartels.
At the very least, 'civilized' countries have formalized the process for bribing the government so its mostly done in plain sight and with an air of plausible deniability. That said, individual cities/local governments in the U.S. Certainly read third-worldy in their approach to graft. I wasn't aware of it being common practice to bribe cops even in Chicago but a quick Google search turned up this recent story lol.
So maybe the correlation between corruption and competence can be seen in how 'naked' the bribes and graft are or if there are robust detection and enforcement mechanisms that aren't themselves hopeless compromised.
faceh
2d ago
Yep. That was the 'trap' I laid in that argument, if someone objects that Ottomans weren't representative. The other examples are worse. Just look at what the Moors did to Spain. Although Christians ultimately returned that favor.
There's some parallels to be drawn WRT to English/American conquest of various Native American tribes... but you can note that once the victory was secure the Americans permit the tribes to continue to exist and maintain a distinct culture as best they can, which has persisted to this day.
faceh
2d ago
Yep.
But then you look at Russia.
Part of the reason I limited my point to "The Anglosphere."
My favorite ways to use the tech thus far:
-
Producing truly weird Genre mashups. Japanese Folk Music + Bagpipes? Mariachi Sea Shanties? Oops, almost forgot: Heavy Metal Ska.
-
Producing novel content in the vein of certain genres or bands of the past that I miss/wish had more content.
-
Converting songs between genres with as few changes to the melody as possible to hear how the emotional tenor of the song changes even if the lyrics and melody (mostly) don't.
Strange sense of nostalgia to hear something that very easily could have come out during your childhood, even though you know with 100% certainty that you never heard it before this moment.
faceh
2d ago
Bit of a chicken and egg problem there.
Having 'perpetual multiple ongoing civil wars' seems to be a feature of places that have low human capital.
Hypothesis: if the local genetic stock is selected against intelligence, then the odds of a Napoleon or Charlegmagne-esque unifying figure with the competence to hold the region under their thumb arising by chance is just lower.
Haiti is a useful example, since its not even in conflict with any nearby enemies, and has been independent of colonial forces for centuries. Indeed, it should benefit from proximity to the U.S. and South American economies. And still can't hold its shit together.
Zimbabwe fought a war to oust its own european population and then once it succeeded got involved with wars in neighboring countries almost immediately, and also attempted Genocide.
It does seem that the ability to wage brutal campaigns of destruction against your peers, then come together and bury that hatchet and actually abide by the peace for a few decades is rare in history, and seems more prevalent in the Anglosphere. Australia and Canada have made it for Centuries without civil warring.
I'm imagining a Captain on a British East India Company ship catching a crew member shaking a spoonful of nutmeg onto his rations and looking on in indignant disapproval as he orders 5 lashes. "Hands off the product, lads."
I mean if we're being fully clear, Somalis aren't Arabs either.
But its not a stretch to say they'd identify closer with Muslim Turks, or Muslim Palestinians, than Egyptian Christians. Ilhan Omar is a notable example there.
And my historical knowledge on this point is spotty, but the Ottomans are pretty much the direct proximate cause for the Kingdom of Saud arising as a unified Arab Muslim state (yes, the British intervened, but the region's fate had long been shaped by Ottoman influence by then).
All this to say, we've got historical examples of Italian stock assimilating with competing cultures (although co-existence with Germanics has been spotty), and historical examples of various strains of ethnic Muslims absolutely refusing to assimilate with competing cultures, and then going to war with those cultures at the earliest opportunity.
With the huge gaping counterexample of Indonesia, but I've not learned enough of their history to competently comment.
(That's kinda why I chose to broadly paint "Arab" Muslims as the particular discussion point, since there are a few strains that don't have the fearsome reputation).
faceh
2d ago
My tongue is mostly in cheek when I say this, but those items are generally not on the menu when I venture into an English Pub (here in America, to be clear).
Also Irish food is quite tasty, maybe owing to the need to get extremely creative when potatoes make up 80% of the diet, so I do respect UK food if we include that as well.
faceh
2d ago
It also enables the people in their home countries to exercise some level of control over them that would otherwise not be possible.
The other big thing that comes up is Remittances back home, where the home country's denizens are actually dependent on their American relatives for a lot of support.
(didn't realize they were almost a full TEN PERCENT of Pakistani GDP!!!)
Which... that certainly adds a major incentive for the home country to keep the immigrants loyal so they continue to care enough to send the kickbacks, doesn't it?
faceh
2d ago
What does it matter that they can face time back to Italy when Italy is also watching MTV, eating at McDonalds, buying coffee at Starbucks, and talking about 21st century technology using barely converted English words? This same phenomenon makes traveling as an American simultaneously easier and more boring.
Uh, are the countries these particular immigrants come from also buying coffee at Starbucks, eating at McDonalds, and talking about 21st tech?
This starts to hit on the other argument against accepting these immigrants: they come from third world backwaters that can't even maintain the infrastructure necessary to keep a McDonalds operating, and this is likely because the people are just that incompetent.
faceh
2d ago
Always found it hilarious that they explored and conquered the entire globe in the hunt for spices then used exactly NONE of said spices in the food.
I'm trying to be maximally charitable to both Matts, and its a bit weird in application because Yglesias is clearly not being charitable to Walsh. Not that I'd expect him to be, Yglesias is a hack, whereas Walsh is more your standard grifter.
Walsh's argument appears to be "These folks do NOT share critical factors that make for idealized American citizens, and if they don't assimilate, this is clearly going to degrade the shared experience of other Americans in their area and make the country worse for everyone else, on net."
That is, having an entire (local) government run by people who don't share your ideals, and having their ideals prioritized over that of the locals is going to inflict some low level misery on the citizens who were there first, in the best case scenario.
Then Walsh pushes the scare line "if these norms become widespread it'll degrade the entire country from its founding ideals."
Which doesn't have to be an argument that it is going to happen, I interpret it as "imagine it happening to you and consider if you want to allow it to continue."
Same reason we're supposed to empathize with Iryna aruska. No, there's not going to be an epidemic of crazed hoboes stabbing people on public transport. But we should clearly not prefer crazed hoboes stabbing people on public transport as a public policy matter, right?
There is NOTHING in Walsh's post that actually implies that this WILL be America in 50 years.
In contrast, Yglesias is basically implying that Italians assimilated (although its such a spurious comparison for the reason the OP intimated) and it didn't result in America becoming Italian, therefore Muslim enclaves are objectively a good thing if we just let them become Americanized.
Which is great if you believe that American Culture is coherent and pervasive enough to overpower a culture that is much, much larger by geography, population, historical tradition, and, ultimately, successful resistance to assimilation/co-opting by outsiders.
I mean, yes, the local Muslim population is tiny, but would anyone argue they're NOT plugged in to the hundreds of millions of other Muslims throughout the globe?
The smaller irony is that we can look FURTHER back in history to compare what happens when Italians conquer a place vs. when Muslim Arabs conquer a place: the Roman and Ottoman empires, respectively.
As a matter of history, Rome's approach to ruling is quite permissive if the conquered territory kicked back its taxes and was willing to pitch in to defend the place from other powers.
Ottomans were a bit less permissive, up to and including Forced Conversion to Islam.
It turns out that the cultural norms a given nation or people hold dearest has huge implications for how these cultures will propagate and interact with other cultures they encounter, and you can't ignore that when predicting future paths.
(I'm not pushing this forward as a knockdown argument)
In other words, Matt Yglesias' flippant reduction of cultural differences to merely additional food choices is pretty laughable as a response, when the larger point Matt Walsh is making is that there are features of culture that are critical to a nation's cohesion, and cultural differences can include features that make assimilation less likely and co-existence less desirable.
Food choice is an utter Red Herring. Pun sort of intended.
Italians, via proof by demonstration, didn't have those assimilation-resistant features. It does NOT stand to reason that Muslims will thus assimilate too. Indeed, we can see from the example of Orthodox Jews that it is entirely possible to maintain a religious community very much separated from the larger overculture. But of course, Orthodox Jews don't seek to convert others to grow their ranks. Muslims do.
Yeah.
Assimilation is harder just by being constantly exposed to the home culture, let alone the fact that currently, there's almost zero formal pressure to adopt Western Cultural norms, since there's a whole industry of thought devoted to arguing that Western Cultural norms aren't better' and are in fact 'enriched' by adopting competing norms.
I don’t think this is some kind of groundbreaking point but why would presumably smart people like Yglesias make such a sloppy argument?
A) As you say, they're not as smart as they portray themselves (95% confidence) and these arguments genuinely don't occur to them and they're not going to consider them deeply even if they did.
B) They are indeed propagandists (which goes to the above point, you don't need to be smart to be one, if you can repeat the desired arguments 'convincingly.'), but they're independent propagandists and they're mostly in it for money and a crumb of status.
C) Sloppy arguments work when you are never, ever, ever forced to engage with the other side, or a smart interloper, or even acknowledge the holes in your argument unless someone with a higher status in your tribe points it out... at which point they generally snap into line and adjust their talking points as needed.
THAT right there is my primary objection to "public intellectuals" like Yglesias, Hanania, Noah Smith, they literally never seek out the strongest argument on the other side and attempt to debunk it by engaging with the strongest intellectuals who oppose them.
I watched Alex Nowrasteh get absolutely creamed because he wants to uphold the "Right wing violence is rewarded/celebrated by the right and generally denounced by the left" narrative, THE SAME DAY that the left is venerating the death of a violent lefty.
These are not serious people. They have to engulf their ideas in bubble wrap and display them behind six layers of plexiglass in order to keep them from being shattered by the whisper of an opposing argument.
I can’t help but think repeating a catechism has value to building political unity even (perhaps especially if) it’s fake.
Undoubtedly. That's the part they've monetized. Since a huge number of the audience you're courting is within one standard deviation of the median IQ, you just have to impress those guys to and keep them paying you to have an impact and make a decent living.
So a ~120 can probably impress the 100-110s enough to get them to accept him as 'one of them' and pay a bit of money to hear their preferred opinions blurted back to them with a bit of extra polish and a layer of respectability.
After that point, its just a matter of guarding your market share.
faceh
2d ago
AIs of all kinds really do seem to have a knack for creating nightmare-fuel content that is just barely, barely comprehensible but deeply unnerving for hard-to-articulate reasons. Like just under the surface, there's a psyche made of pure chaos. Really gets at the "Shoggoth with a smiley face mask" nature.
I agree.
But I also am aware that we SEE the group that is addicted to social media, they're the ones you encounter on the social media sites. People who avoid it are, almost by definition, less legible to us here online. I could be underestimating how many people are able to switch off.
More options
Context Copy link