fuckduck9000
11mo ago
Yeah, reactiveness is underestimated – when they’re mapping out dramatic scenarios, they tend to ignore possible responses in their extrapolations. So climate change may well increase mosquito penetration, tornadoes or whatever, but if they ever reach a critical threshold, we can wipe out all mosquitoes, build tornado-resistant houses etc. If an AI decides to kill us with a virus, we will have an AI pumping out defense proteins too. Explosive mini-killbots => body armor. Energy ROI sinking => all in nuclear. Plus all the good responses we haven’t thought about yet, unknown unknowns work both ways. No doom scenario survives contact with the enemy.
I’ve always found the Cassandra story strange, as it seems the opposite is far more common : enthusiastically believed doom predictions left and right, and nary a storm in sight. I think people are incentivized to be doomers as a haggling tactic. Things are bad => I’m unhappy => give me stuff. Optimism is for suckers, even if it is more accurate. You can’t get a good deal if you advertise your satisfaction.
But while it started as a negotiating tactic, lately people have started believing the lie to an unhealthy degree, paralyzing them. Here in germany half the news stories are about the ‘climate apocalypse’ that seemingly awaits us. Everyone's hysterical, I can't tell which of my friends are naturally depressed and which take this stuff at face value anymore. And here on the motte, a large amount of comments find it necessary to add an asterisk saying ‘if we’re not all dead from AI by then”.
Some of it may just be neuroticism or some other evolutionary residue like you say, better safe than sorry when you used to live among venimous animals. The slave morality/ Oppression olympics/Whining Contest regime we’re currently living under doesn’t help.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
Maybe I'm just way off? My suspicion is that there are very, very few atheist rationalists.
We do have surveys. The five most common belief systems on that question in /r/themotte were, in order:
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Atheist (humanist) 27.8 %
-
Agnostic 23 %
-
Other atheist 13.6 %
-
Atheist (antitheist) 12.7 %
-
Catholic 4.8 %
The remaining 20% are mostly theists of various faiths, they'd have trouble putting the same name on the ballot, so challenging even the third runner-up atheist subgroup would be a tall order.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
I usually stay out of trans threads, and I don’t consider myself a blind partisan (oh really), but I think reed’s account is completely credible, no need to hedge. I don’t see how the articles and pmmeclassicmemes’ post constitute debunkings. Why is it absurd that kids say weird shit, or that most patients at the clinic have mental health problems? Just ask if you have a problem, and medical science will find one (very affirming).
So on one side, plausible allegations by an old bolshevik, on the other, the 50 stalins crowd. They are incapable of reigning in their excesses internally, so obviously the criticism will come from a disgraced party member or an enemy.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
In France, for example, profitable companies are literally banned from laying off large numbers of workers.
Even unprofitable companies, they won’t let die. My uncle worked for a company that hasn’t made a profit in years. They got ‘bought’ repeatedly by the company that promises to lay off the least people. From what he hears from former colleagues, a 300-man workforce looks at their shoes all day because there are no clients left. For years. Why don’t they leave? Their salaries and, eventually, severance pay is guaranteed to be payed out by a state-level insurance fund, because obviously the company has no money. Plus they would miss out on the generous unemployment insurance if they leave of their own accord. They aren’t even having fun, they spend their days in a mixture of gloom and excruciating boredom, this is a pure societal loss.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
Noblesse didn’t oblige them to anything. They treated commoners like they were ten levels of shit below friendly human contact. They’d steal from them every day of the week and kill them for a slight. And when this degenerate elite was finally replaced, economic and, ironically, military performance instantly improved ten-fold. The leadership they provided, if any, was of very low quality. They didn’t produce anything. The people were starving. In what ways were they giving back?
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
Nato isn't an automatic doomsday device that gets triggered by anything that could resemble an attack. Actual people have to say: yes, let's go to war over this. And two dead will never be enough. They shot down a plane full of dutchmen to no response.
fuckduck9000
6mo ago
Technically Hlynka's salad also lumps in all of the center, social democrats, neoliberals, classical liberals, in with the wokes and reactionaries. Basically it's just him, the ghost of hobbes, and the soul of america, versus everyone else.
Our east asian and european immigrants are also doing great. Don't need any advice for them, they took to the forceful assimilation well. I know a son of vietnamese immigrants, he was almost too patriotic. Funny, smart kid, but when he asked for the french flag to be flown on bastille day at the school, people rolled their eyes. He's a tank officer in the french army now (he's short). The french do not have a problem with this kind of frenchman, they love him. Whatever 'ethnic french racism' there is has never made him burn a school.
Maybe increase welfare, since the root cause for senseless destruction must be poverty and lack of chances? It's already higher than yours.
Furthermore, this in fact doesn't really contradict my original point. Groups that are treated as the US treated voluntary immigrants do fine and assimilate great. Groups that aren't don't.
Are you sure you didn't reverse your reasoning process here? You first look at which groups do badly, and then assume their treatment must be terrible.
Consider the possibility that they were treated the same - they had access to free school and university, generous welfare, a passably functioning job market - , and yet still behaved in a dramatically opposite manner as the vietnamese and europeans.
fuckduck9000
11mo ago
Aren’t you tired of accusing rationalists of not caring about the things they care the most about? I can’t think of a group less prone to appeals to authority, more aware of the replication crisis .
And again with an anecdote where your counterpart just comes off as obviously wrong. The guy doesn’t understand, then he lies about it. No one is encouraging this behaviour, so what lesson is there to be gained here.
As long as you’re free-associating: the russians are quokkas apparently, while 0HP and co, the edgy panaroid hysterical pessimists, they’re wise. Why then is there such affinity between them?
They’re very similar, and wrong in the same way. They systematically overestimate the likelihood of defection. Cooperation and honesty appear impossible, and lies are all they ever hear. What should the russians have done? Assume everyone up and down the chain of command was lying even harder than previously assumed? You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.
Past a certain point of skepticism/assumed lies, you ‘ve sawed off the last epistemological branch you’re sitting on, sink into the conspiracy swamp, and you become a blackpill overdose/russian type, confused and afraid of your own (possibly fish-like) shadow.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
Landlords in poorer areas earn “basically double” those in more affluent districts — an extra $50 per apartment per month, after expenses. The outperformance, calculated from national surveys, held even when researchers factored in faster price rises in richer areas.
Congratulations, you've rediscovered the relationship between rental yields and desirability. It holds everywhere: a new apartment in the capital will be at 2-4%, while a dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere is at 10%+. As the landlords say: 'location, location, location'. It's free money, just buy the crappiest real estate and sail to the bahamas with your ill-gotten gains. If only you could find the tenants.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
And the threshold for adulthood creeps up another decade. Life under gerontocracy, I guess. 20s, that's a long grown man. Not that I care about someone being 'outed as HBD enthusiast', or the rest of the gossip.
fuckduck9000
3mo ago
The way I heard the story, a warlord in the somalian civil war attacked UN troops distributing aid – and so the US obligingly went in because they didn’t have anything else to do that day. But you reckon this was a machiavellian exploitation of the third world that now justifies a somalian revenge ?
To be fair, many US nativists are actually in favor of a less interventionist US foreign policy.
Yeah, and they say: 'I don't care if foreigners kill each other, even if we could prevent it easily'. Are you ready to stand by that statement and policy, or were you just using US interventionism as an excuse for foreigners to not be bound by any standard of decency?
She rejected a power-hungry suitor. She outmaneuvered a wicked prince to become sole queen. She dunked on her annoying little brother constantly (same guy). She wrapped the most powerful man in the world around her... finger, twice. She nearly put her kids on the thrones of the entire east. Perhaps even rome, although that kid likely wasn't long for this world in any scenario.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
I think it literally means there's far more white (mass) shooters than black or asian shooters. Their proportion is greater, as in, 58% is a greater number than 17% . It's just flatly negating the previous point about percentage of the general population, returning to the beginning, to the thesis of the article: there's a lot of white shooters. It's not very elegant.
Your post was high quality. One can always disagree on substance, but their criticism of the form doesn't hold water. Partisan complaints based on impossibly high standards shouldn't be rewarded with edits, let alone apologies and bans.
fuckduck9000
3mo ago
I don’t recognize this guy anymore. He thinks people should refrain from searching for the truth because the search is not fair/random enough for him. Who cares? That which can be destroyed by the Truth should be, immediately. Whether you personally dislike Gay or politically oppose Ackman or just want clicks, I am thankful for any skeleton you happen to find in their closets. Scott is willing to let lies fester until such a time when they can all be revealed impartially, or something.
fuckduck9000
3mo ago
How do men ‘get’ women drunk? Do they threaten them, do they syringe them in the back? No, women voluntarily pour the inhibition-reducing liquid into themselves. Are they capable of making their own decisions or not?
You say the problem isn’t ‘men being interested in sex’, yet you assume ‘declining sex’ is the right decision. Your whole angle is: men are tricking women into this sinister deed. Let’s say I ‘got’ a woman drunk and used her drunkenness to… teach her spanish. Is that considered generally objectionable behavior? Obviously not. So like the sex-neg radfems which came up with ‘rape culture’ and ‘objectification’, in reality, you don’t object to the tricking, you object to the sex.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
For a moment there things looked particularly bleak for the working class, and coupled with their newfound ability to read about it and organize, heads (of government) were always going to roll. We’ve forgotten how plausible the criticisms of capitalism appeared when you had to send your kids down a coal mine so they wouldn’t starve. Now lefties have to contend with a relatively comfortable status quo, and the only ciriticism left is far more difficult to grasp. The few times they’ve tried alternatives, they’ve ended up reproducing company towns on a country scale, with scrip and tight, paternalistic control.
I said 'her egypt', as in, egypt was her posession. Anyway, when you've ruled a country for 10 generations, they give you a passport, it's in the UN charter.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
Nybbler’s comment was the opposite of content-free, it was an unhedged bet, and he deserves even more credit for it than the other wafflers who doubted the story. By adding confidence to the mere direction of the bet, it provided more of an attack surface.
Partisan hacks only think their attacks are sharp and to the point like nybbler’s. And I don't mean darwin. His laconic game elsewhere wasn’t too shabby either, and the people it annoyed argued much like you do.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
I don’t think SMV compliance enforcement is the parsimonious explanation . Simps will simp no matter how hot she thinks she is. If she thinks she’s a 3, they’ll say 7, if she says 10, they’ll say 11. Outside of simping, people just try to torpedo other’s status constantly, it’s the main social game, the way to gain status.
If a couple is beautiful, they’ll say they’re likely stupid and superficial. If a successful comedian makes some wanted sexual advances, they’ll say he’s a loser and a creep. The best way to get people to call you stupid is letting them know you tie your status to smartness. They will do so when it makes no sense at all (cf Elon Musk, the endless discussions on whether the people here are smart).
It’s the same if you claim to be beautiful or knowledgeable, the truth of the matter doesn’t enter into it. I don’t know aella from more than a few blog posts and tweets, but it seems obvious to me that by virtue of the scarcity of her attributes among women, she does indeed have very high SMV in her circle.
Otoh, you spend status by praising people, and we don’t see much of that.
It’s why even in a forum like this one, theoretically devoted to good faith cooperate-cooperate discourse, so easily devolves into snark. Because there is nothing that offers status benefits like telling your fellow man : I am above you. It’s always scorn and never hate, because as Eric Hoffer said, you cannot hate those you despise, it would convey the opposite status message.
fuckduck9000
11mo ago
Nonsense. Your writing is first rate, and deletion allows Hlynka to make stuff up. Then I have to remember and look for my replies to your comments, and play reverse battleship on your positions to correct him.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
Yeah, that's what I worry about, that they never liked alcolhol (and as the saying goes, you can't trust a man who doesn't trust himself with a bottle) , and those studies were always a thorn in their side, and they have finally found a fruitful line of attack.
From his next post:
It really is striking/shocking how completely this whole area of scientific research has collapsed. This is part of the generalized replication crisis that’s ripping through science. More to come on this. TLDR is it is no longer crazy or even particularly controversial to say that most of what we know as science is simply fake.
Oh boy, I sure hope they didn't dynamite the entirety of science to get rid of a few pesky alcohol studies.
fuckduck9000
1yr ago
Women have a lower threshold for offense, so the excessive policing of language can be more readily layed at their feet than black people's.
Clearly, what is obvious to a feminist is not obvious to the MRA-ish perspective that you find in a place like this. Originally, the discussion was about reproduction, and the unprecedented and total power women currently enjoy over it. 50% gametes, 100% power. This is an example of women getting their way, unimpaired by fairness. My "fundamental right" to decide if and when I become a father is not 'under attack', it is nonexistent .
Anyway, more generally about 'queens by political fiat', I remember this old irascible MRA, you might have known him if you've been in the game long enough (david byron I think), and one of his shticks was to ask feminists: what legal advantage do men enjoy over women? Because there are plenty of laws advantaging women.
What kind of statement would you like "I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the nazi party"? I'm not defending the plagiarism, but this is ideological witch-hunting. Does every reference to che guevara have to result in a groveling apology for the crimes of communism?
I don’t know why he bothered with the edgy jokes and dogswhistles. He should have simply called for the genocide of jews, then the presidents of harvard and co would find his behaviour compatible with a strongly inclusive code of conduct.
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