faceh
25m ago
it's about recognizing that in the immortal words of Patrick Swayze "nobody ever won a fight.
Bingo.
And for many I've noticed that realization doesn't kick in until their first big injury. Hopefully not a permanent one. Young dudes have that innate sense of invulnerability, and they bounce back from minor issues so quickly that the idea that they're one bad fall or headkick away from brain damage or
I have been insanely blessed to have been doing it as long as I have without being sidelined by a serious injury, but that would be because I've been very cognizant of that possibility, and I train accordingly. I have "let" guys with less experience than me win simply to avoid a situation where one of us would probably get hurt, or to not escalate the intensity to unsafe levels. Most of the time they simply don't have the knowledge to realize how easily they can get hurt. On rarer occasions they lack the self control to rein it in where needed.
Likewise, the worst injuries I've doled out are broken noses. I felt HORRIBLE about that in both cases, but in the grand scheme those are easily recoverable.
On the meta level this means finding a gym that selects for high conscientiousness.
faceh
2hr ago
I truly do not envy the lives of those whose paycheck and general live trajectory is dictated by an algorithm that is constantly and aggressively being tweaked but uncaring corporate interests to maximize eyeballs on ads, or whatever they call the actual metric they care about.
Arbitrary-seeming changes that often wreck your previous strategy, or even diminish the viability of the very style you prefer to express in.
Your work output dictated by constant compliance with a disinterested (not malicious, but it'd be hard to tell) program that remains, to you, a complete black box which you can only appease by offering up your best efforts and seeing which get rewarded with views and money, then adjusting from there.
It is true that we ALL live under someone else's algorithm (and, if you wish, EVERYONE is living under the meta-algorithm known as "the market"). But it'd be particularly maddening to me when there's a corporate entity that owes me no allegiance, and refuses to disclose the most important standards by which it judges 'success,' meanwhile it doles out the rewards as it sees fit with seemingly no regard for the quality of the creative work.
faceh
3hr ago
Ding ding ding.
Its easier to put out volume if you happily compromise on quality, and I have to assume the Youtube Algo doesn't care about quality over minutes watched.
So there's some 'optimal' amount of information/minute that pads out the video without losing the viewer.
Just so happens my preference is on information density is higher than the average youtube viewers. Which is unsurprising.
faceh
14hr ago
Feels like it used to be that a 'video essay' was mostly guaranteed to have some insights and interesting commentary on a topic you cared about.
The videos are just as long but less 'useful' information, lazier editing, and even the entertainment value has gone down.
Plus certain topics are getting recycled pretty often, so I'd just as soon go and rewatch older classics.
I just don't watch 'em anymore.
Don't have time for a full response but my point would be that Martial Arts Gyms are one of the few places where MUTUAL respect is both expected, observed, and enforced.
Because the only thing that actually gains you respect is competence, and competence in martial arts can be tested very objectively, and corners can't be cut. Yeah, a McDojo can hand you a belt, but abilities can be tested and frauds identified with a simple sparring session. And generally speaking, people who are capable of actual physical violence, but also understand why you want to avoid it are going to be more respectful of each other, both from recognition of the shared skill AND the avoidance of conflict.
I dunno, I keep coming back to this point. If you're not training some kind of physical skill, even if it isn't a martial one, why would you expect to get respect from those around you. Crossing you has no cost if you are incapable of doing them any harm. And on the flip side, if you are training a physical skill but the others who train it don't offer respect in return, why would you want to train it?
Although the Cobra Kai model does exist in some places, where people prefer to be verbally abused and consider that the mark of quality instruction.
I don't think we need to return to a full on honor culture... but I do think that social etiquette might improve if (nonfatal) dueling were allowed.
Also I think my baseline experience is that most people show certain respect to each other since I've grown up in the South.
Yeah.
It used to be comprehensible. You more or less knew the sum total of your realistic options. And presumably knew your approximate position in the rankings.
I did undergrad on a small campus, and thus it was generally known who was dating whom, who was available, and you crossed paths with potential partners a lot. For better or worse.
Did law school on a MUCH LARGER campus, which felt like jumping from a fish tank to a large lake. Couldn't track everybody, but could at least know where to look for potential partners.
And while I was in law school, Tinder became a thing. And over the next couple years it was like swimming out of the lake into the Pacific Ocean.
But now there was literally no way my tiny little guppy brain could appreciate the entire biodiversity I was being exposed to, and eventually you have to collapse everyone down to their shallowest representation. "Oh that's a rainbowfish, a clownfish, a barracuda, a tuna... and oh so many whales."
At which point I could genuinely FEEL myself unable to care about the people flashed in front of me. Rather than a comprehensible set of people I sort of knew and cared about... it was an endless stack of nobodies and whatever infinite 'opportunity' these represented was overwhelmed by pure ennui/apathy of any individual connection becoming meaningless.
Only exception was early OKcupid, which let you go "spearfishing" for the exact types you wanted to see. But that didn't last.
I've just met too many ordinary, average people in what appear to be genuinely happy relationships to be able to entertain this model of the world.
I've seen too many statistics from the last ten years about the rapid decline in relationship formation (among the young) and the womens' constant complaints about a lack of men worth marrying to pretend there's not an actual trend that mostly swamps the anecdotes.
The women will tell you this themselves:
EDIT: @erwgv3g34 found a working Archive link
Like I said, the hypergamy is baked into the culture. Women aren't 'hiding' it per se, but don't like being reminded that its their choices creating the outcomes.
Dating apps and social media in particular have led to a situation where the local 'social system' a woman is observing is no longer her school, or even her local village, but every single guy in a 20 mile radius.
faceh
3d ago
High status males DO need to be reined in since they're the ones setting the social trends for most everyone below them in the totem pole.
If they are deigning to eschew monogamy and go around banging and impregnating various women with no intentions of marriage, guess what norms end up ascending?
Of course, we could just let those new norms dominate.
faceh
4d ago
There would be ways to monetize it, but yeah, you'd have to accept losses unless you want to be subject to the exact same pressures that lead to influencers putting out braindead, controversy-baiting content.
faceh
4d ago
According to the wiki he's a Cinematographer that's a bit more prestigious and less blue-collar coded than just being a camera guy.
Still, she's been with him for 20+ years, not bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Moder
Bit more research shows that she met him while she was working on a movie that ALSO STARRED BRAD PITT so yeah, good on him for outshining the most chad actor in modern history.
faceh
4d ago
This is probably a solid way to put forth a pro-marriage, pro-natalism agenda.
But happy people in good relationships ostensibly don't feel much need to flaunt how good it is, and talk about what makes things work.
Would definitely need to be an outside observer intentionally tracking them down and publishing their observations from the outside.
In general, people react negatively to anything which is unflattering to women as a group.
Take it one level deeper.
Why would it be 'unflattering' for women to actively seek out the best specimen as a potential partner/mate? Not very romantic, granted, but its not like that's a BAD strategy!
Part of it is because it DOES lead women to stray, cheat, and betray 'good' men due to perceived better options.
The other factor, I think, is that their instincts for what to look for in a guy, which were honed in the ancestral environment, run into some massive issues b/c traits that are adaptive in the modern world are different than those that were necessary to survive the ancient one. This unfortunately leads to them getting into abusive and one-sided relationships because a guy who is physically aggressive, risk-seeking, craves power, and flouts social rules would be very appealing on an instinctual level... and is less likely to care what an individual woman feels about him... and will likely want to have more than one woman. Modern prosperity likewise makes it easier to fake those traits long enough to knock up a woman before she figures out the truth.
Not that I would want to cull high-T males from the population.
So I'd argue the 'unflattering' part arises because women's instincts, even if pointed in the correct direction, lead them to sub-optimal choices when applied. We've given women almost full discretion to pick who they screw, who they marry, and who is even allowed to interact with them. And their choice-making has left much to be desired, even to themselves. And some large part of this is due to the actively deceptive males who are optimized for getting laid with minimal investment, who have figured out how to attract women while having few of the actually desirable traits.
In our modern society, which option is more palatable? Obviously the second. As I alluded to, there is a taboo against saying anything negative about women as a group. And that's why people push back against hypergamy.
Oh I know.
I've put up too many comments reflecting on and arguing that pretty much every single problem in the dating market today can be traced to women's behavior shifting, whilst mens' has remained largely the same... except to the extent they have to interact with women.
faceh
4d ago
I mean, a huge portion of women who get enough wealth to be independent just end up never settling at all, is the observed outcome, with large downstream impact on TFR.
faceh
4d ago
The crass side of me wants to know how big that guy's schlong is. He isn't just a blue collar type, he had kids from a prior relationship, he got the bona fides.
But I choose to accept it as the feel-good story about finding true love in unlikely places that it appears as.
I've wondered if having a hard-working, weathered-but-handsome, otherwise well-put-together tradesman for a beau might become a status symbol in its own way, but that doesn't seem to have panned out.
It sometimes amazes me that there's anyone who actually pushes back on the redpill observation about "Hypergamy."
The idea that women are selecting for the highest status male in their local social system is integrated into virtually every aspect of human culture. There are exceptions in media (Disney's Aladdin had a princess fall for the street rat rather than an uber-powerful, and not bad-looking sorcerer sultan who wanted to keep her as his slave).
I would argue that reality is more exacting than fiction, here. Find me a real life story where an attractive woman with the option to pick between a handsome, reliable, but only moderately wealthy Blue Collar worker, and a high status millionaire minor celeb, and intentionally settled for the former.
And biologically its perfectly sensible. I don't think there's any other way for a woman to operate if she wants to ensure her offspring's success and her own long term security. Completely fair to acknowledge and accept this biological imperative.
The "blackpill" is that this factor doesn't get turned off if a woman gets married and has kids, so a guy is never fully safe from being supplanted if he loses status or a higher status male sets eyes on his woman. The high status males need to be reined in as well!
There is actual research showing that women who acquire more wealth use that to acquire independence, men who acquire wealth use it to start families.
But we are currently seeing what happens when all cultural guardrails and guidelines that limited that factor are removed:
Approximately, women will start demanding outsize displays of wealth, status, power, physical fitness in exchange for mating privileges, and thereby controlling more and more actual wealth, which leads to further inflation of demands.
This is at least one explanation for why females have gotten less satisfied with their status, even as they've been given more wealth and power.
Women's satisfaction dropped 15 points spanning the emergence of #MeToo, while men's fell five points. The latest reading among women, 44%, is the lowest on record, although it is not statistically different from the 46% readings in 2018 and 2020. At the same time, men's satisfaction with the treatment of women has remained flat at 61% to 62% since 2018.
Find me a single person who can argue with a straight face that females are on balance worse off, socially or politically speaking, than 2002.
And so China is rapidly plunging down this dystopic slope and trying to aggressively re-establish the guardrails from the top down.
Interesting to see if they can get to any sort of agreeable equilibrium. At least they are willing to do things that might upset women.
I would still guess that South Korea is the one plumbing the deepest depths of how far things can fall, but even they are showing the slightest glimmer of things turning around.
faceh
5d ago
Its something I noted a few months back, OpenAI is screwed for lacking any supporting infrastructure for their core product.
They're up against companies with unlimited cash flow (Google), integrated social networks (META, xAI), or a noticeable edge in performance (Anthropic), or maybe all 3. And China.
They literally only had first-mover advantage. They gained a tiny edge by throwing out somewhat undercooked models that were nonetheless marginally better than others and got name recognition. But the cost of switching is, basically, zero.
Sora was their attempt to build some infra from scratch, a very dubious proposition. And then Sora got eclipsed by other SOTA video models. This keeps happening to them.
It looks like the Pentagon deal might have saved their bacon for the time being.
faceh
5d ago
Yep.
I'm not that big of a boomer, I get "the kids will find ways to smoke/drink/have sex regardless of the rules."
But flipping the valence from "this is something you do in secret in the abandoned shed out behind the football field" to "This is something actively advertised and facilitated, including for children" basically portends the complete capitulation of your society to this particular vice.
And I do suggest that the revealed preference is that anyone who has the funds/capacity to escape these things and move to a place where they ARE more restricted/marginalized does so. There are no places that are considered "nice to live" that also have strip clubs on every other corner and THC gummies available over the counter at the convenience store.
This is also why I think "YIMBYs" aren't really a thing. They may claim and honestly believe they want to have affordable housing units built in their neighborhood, but they also know all the disorder and additional nuisances that will come along with these things so in practice they'll oppose it when the rubber meets the road.
faceh
6d ago
Ding ding.
It is underappreciated how there are a good number of ways to irreversibly lower your quality of life and prospects for success without dying.
Certain drugs, getting paralyzed, losing a limb, and of course, outright brain damage.
There's hardships that you overcome and make you stronger and more robust, then there's hardships that can drag you down to a lower baseline permanently, and we lack the ability, technologically or otherwise, to correct.
The latter tend to be less visible.
I think there is a stable-ish regime of "legal, but regulated so heavily that its only profitable on the absolute margins."
Zoning rules that keep them from being within 5000 feet of a school, bans from advertising on television, heightened liability for harms, special insurance they have to purchase, that sort of thing.
So the ultimate effect is that these activities are run by small outfits with limited capacity (i.e. not industrialized) and/or are pushed to the absolute outskirts of society. Just to keep them from proliferating, I guess.
But Capitalism will be continually seeking ways to route around these regulations and will probably eventually hit on a strategy or loophole that brings them out of hiding.
faceh
6d ago
Oh that's right, we still had Quantitative easing active during that time.
they thought they were seeing the baseline numbers for a new product instead of 'here is the once-a-century harvest'
This seems to be a common blind spot with large scale investors.
Even if they aren't literally killing the golden goose, they are biased towards assuming current feast conditions are a sign of how things will be going forward.
Same thing that happened with tech hiring during that time, although would have been hard to predict how AI would quickly rise to displace them.
I don't think so, but under current laws and norms, if the parents intervene, particularly in a physical way, to try to reign in their daughter THEY will be punished for restricting her autonomy. On one side you can say the state's role is to protect her autonomy. But to the extent she's susceptible to influence of others, on the other side, the state's role is to protect a malign influence from her parents.
The maximum irony is that a guy who spends months 'grooming' a young girl (as long as he doesn't actually solicit sex or touch her) then helps her set up an Onlyfans and publish explicit content the very day she turns 18 is legally protected from any kind of reprisal from the family if they find out. He has done nothing that the law can punish, and if he doesn't care about social judgment, he escapes Scott-free.
And I'd suggest that current technology makes the groomer's job way easier than the parent trying to keep the daughter out of sex work.
Everyone gets that its absolutely creepy and predatory behavior but the law as written will make it impossible to actually do anything to prevent it other than try your best to monitor the kid's comms.
faceh
6d ago
The point is that tattoos are, in fact, normalized and a far less reliable sign of dysfunction than they once were. The most basic bitch people get them, albeit if you see full sleeves and facial tattoos, I'd be cautious.
Yes, normalizing things means you get more 'normal' people doing them.
Which is often not good.
And of course pushes the actual deviants to ever more costly signalling to boot.
I'd suggest we are seeing the same thing with OF/sex work, and that's the broader reason why pushback would be good.
And I put up those sticky notes for nothing, let alone the permanent marker on our skin.
I spent an hour in the shower scrubbing those off last time, and I still had to wear long sleeves for the next two days. I'd prefer you just staple the notes straight to our chest.
Think of how tattoos used to be a strong sign of criminality, and how you can see grandpas and yuppies flaunting them in public.
Face tattoos and certain socially taboo symbols still work pretty well though.
And in fact, the proliferation in women getting stupid tattoos is ANOTHER point on which I'd try to dissuade my hypothetical daughter, since the costs of undoing it are substantial, but that's not one I'd be as aggressive about policing.
I am really annoyed with the fact that some women end up getting whole sleeves done very shortly after they turn 18, which again seems a bit too early for most towards grasping the long term consequences.
(Hard drugs also encompass a wide range of drugs, some of them MUCH worse for you)
Yes, the actual physical toll that such drugs take on the body is much worse, but in terms of eroding one's mental health and cutting off social networks, its probably on the same order, since the type of people who will keep you in their social network knowing you're a sex worker are probably not great as a support system. As a point, I'd imagine that other women wouldn't really want their husbands or boyfriends around you if your career is known.
So you'll be mostly stuck with other women who can't keep steady relationships... and men who think you're a potential lay.
Fine, once I'm asleep you can take over our advocacy, just remember to water the succulent and throw out the trash.
Wait, I thought that was a plastic plant. Oh dear.
I also noticed that the dog went missing from the last time I took over, please tell me she's boarded somewhere pleasant and not roaming the streets looking for more roadkill lasagna.
Yep.
Hence why if the video isn't leveraging its advantages as a visual medium to be more engaging/entertaining, I'm backing out almost instantly.
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