guajalote
1yr ago
my biology teacher was a nun and we certainly never skipped the chapter on evolution.
The Catholic church officially endorses evolution. It's a subset of evangelical protestants who don't believe in evolution, because they believe in biblical literalism and sola scriptura (the Bible alone is the highest authority). So to these kinds of evangelical protestants, "seven days" literally means seven days, end of story.
guajalote
1yr ago
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A billionaire building a private army to conquer territory isn't going to be looked upon kindly by existing world governments, for obvious reasons.
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Haiti has a horrific colonial history, and it's going to be easy to credibly accuse an invader of colonialism and geocide.
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"Invade country with military to bring peace and prosperity" has a terrible track record. Pretty likely the billionaire just fails miserably.
guajalote
7mo ago
I clerked for a federal judge and I agree with your assessment, but it doesn't change the fact that a broad gag order has constitutional problems.
guajalote
8mo ago
I think it's a feature, not a bug, in more ways than you're giving it credit for. Saying stuff that makes the other person slightly uncomfortable is an important component of flirting for both sexes. It's a way of testing the other person a little to see how they perform.
It's similar to how a job interviewer might ask "what are your three greatest weaknesses?" That's a completely batshit insane thing to ask in the context of a normal conversation, but it's typical in an interview. The point is to see how the other person responds to an uncomfortable question - can they stay focused and give a socially appropriate response instead of getting flustered?
A woman saying "I hate your first date idea" is basically the same thing. It's (often) not a literal statement. It's about seeing the quality of the response from the other person and communicating that she isn't desperate for a date. "You're scared you'll lose" is basically the same thing. It's a little jab back designed to get a reaction and communicate a certain sense of aloofness. It's a delicate dance because you have to push a little but not push too much, and everyone will screw it up at some point given a long enough timeframe.
guajalote
1yr ago
If you hold that consensual transactions are generally good, whereas non-consensual taking is generally bad, then there needn't be any tension between opposing colonialism and supporting open borders.
As you note, colonialism violates people's individual rights by one group subjugating another against their will, expropriating their rightful property and reducing or eliminating their rights.
An immigrant entering a country need not do any of these things. He can enter into entirely voluntary transactions to obtain housing, employment, etc. These are transactions where everyone involved is happy to participate and ends up better off; no one's rights are violated.
It is also conceivable that a group of immigrants could band together into a political bloc and use their collective political powers to "colonize" the native population and take away their rights. But there is no particular reason why such an outcome is inevitable or likely. Moreover, such an outcome can occur without any immigration, such as if a country's native protestant population banded together to oppress its native Catholic population. The free movement of people across borders does not require the formation of group identities nor does it require any group to oppress any other group.
I take your point, but can you think of any examples in the past couple of years of a politically correct organization putting out a statement defending free speech without some kind of caveat like "...but that doesn't mean freedom from consequences" or "...but we also acknowledge that free speech has been used to perpetuate systems of oppression." I can't think of any examples besides this one. I certainly can't think of any other examples that included a statement like "the quality and taste of the parody is irrelevant."
guajalote
15d ago
"If it's black, fight back. If it's brown, lie down. If it's white, good night."
guajalote
6mo ago
Could you call it a "taboo" if most people were capable of calmly and dispassionately discussing the topic? By definition, what makes something a taboo is that most people will have such a strong emotional reaction to it that rational discussion is impossible. I'm surprised that you're surprised to see people behaving this way.
We live in a world of complex issues that demand thoughtful consideration, yet it appears that a significant portion of discourse is reduced to emotional outbursts.
Because we live in such a complex world, most people are not capable of giving due thoughtful consideration to most topics. Taboos are a way of preventing people from reasoning on first principles about certain topics and arriving at socially harmful conclusions. Not all taboos do this job well, but I think some do. "Don't commit murder" works better as a rule than "don't commit murder unless you're able to determine that doing so would increase the net wellbeing of society." "Don't commit fraud" works better than "don't commit fraud unless you believe you can get away with it and you plan to donate your earnings to effective charities, thereby increasing the net utility of society." If people are allowed to engage in "thoughtful consideration" on these topics, they will often find ways to justify bad behavior as being for the net good of society. Because this kind of reasoning is so often self-interested and unreliable, it's sometimes better to just have a "no exceptions" taboo that forbids any reasoning about the topic.
guajalote
1yr ago
Why do you assume that having low standards means ending up with someone with a self-destructive lifestyle or crippling health problems? You describe yourself as an ugly autistic man who is in good health and pretty much has his life together. Why don't you look for an ugly autistic woman who is in good health and pretty much has her life together?
guajalote
1yr ago
I see a politician doing politics. Neither "brave woman" nor "ridiculous man" seem like apt descriptors to me, just as I wouldn't describe a chess move as "brave" or "ridiculous." It's either a good move or a bad move, and we'll find out which as the game progresses.
guajalote
1yr ago
I'd also say re-watch early south park and the stuff they were making fun of.
guajalote
1yr ago
I think the normies are at least partly correct here. I think it's a mistake to say "I don't have a methodology for actually calculating my Baysean priors, but let me put a number on it anyway just to make myself more clear." You are not actually clarifying your position, you are obfuscating it.
In science, the concept of significant figures is extremely important because you have to represent the precision of your knowledge accurately. Lets say I have 1kg of lead and lead has a density of 11342 kg/m3, how many m3 of lead do I have? 1/11342 = .0000881679. Is it accurate to say I have ".0000881679m3" of lead? No, because that's representing an inaccurate degree of precision in my knowledge.
I think people reporting a Baysean prior of "90% confidence" are usually committing the same mistake -- they're misrepresenting the precision of their knowledge. Normies pick up on this and interpret it (correctly) as ludicrous overconfidence.
guajalote
5mo ago
Cats are definitely trainable, but dogs are so optimized for trainability they make cats seem untrainable by comparison. I think the biggest difference is that dogs are good at processing human social cues - voice, facial expression, and gestures. But cats are looking for cat social cues. This is why the cat always climbs into the lap of the party guest who hates cats. For a cat, avoiding eye contact and turning your back to them is a sign of friendliness; you're saying "I'm not threatened by you and I'm not a threat to you." To relate to a cat you have to think and act like a cat, but to relate to a dog you can think and act like human.
What I don't understand is how she thought this one random dude isn't "really" non-binary on the basis of his toxic mansplaining, but a trans woman who commits a violent crime (up to and including raping a female person) is still a woman.
I think if you gave her a specific example of a trans person committing a sex crime, she would likely use the "they're not really trans" argument. But because you quoted statistics she can't do that as easily; it would imply large numbers of people who claim to be trans aren't really trans.
Also, as @Pynewacket alludes to, statistics don't hit "the feels" the way anecdotes do, so she didn't have the same emotional reaction to the statistics that she had in the case of her male NB friend. If she doesn't feel the same way about both situations, she won't interpret them as analogous and therefore won't feel the need to be logically consistent. This is a pretty common way for normal, average IQ people to behave. For example, people like this will often reject arguments by analogy they disagree with by saying something like "those two situations are totally different" without being able to articulate why they are different in any relevant way. They simply feel differently about the two situations and therefore refuse to see them as analogous.
guajalote
9mo ago
But, in my mind, the biggest thing that turns a type 1 down-on-their luck person into a type 2 pants pooper is the wide availability of fentanyl and heroin on the streets today.
I think it's meth much more than opiates. Opiates can kill you and make you unproductive, but they don't fry your brain and give you psychosis like hardcore simulants do.
And before anyone says "War on Drugs didn't work", we should take a look at the overdose stats. Overdoses deaths in the U.S. are up 1000% since the 1980s. The correct take, IMO, is that the war on drugs did work. We just didn't do it hard enough and gave up too soon.
The main reason overdoses are up is that fentanyl is really potent and easy to overdose on, but it's also the most popular illegal opiate because it's cheap to make and can be smuggled across the border in large quantities because it's so concentrated. If lower potency opiates (and narcan) could be purchased legally over the counter, fentanyl use and fentanyl deaths would plummet.
guajalote
1yr ago
That midjourney stuff is utter pabulum. It's only beautiful by the most shallow and insipid standards of beauty. The kind of "beauty" that would rank Thomas Kinkaide's paintings above Rembrandt's, because the former is bright and sparkly while the latter is brown and muddy. Or the kind of "beauty" that would consider N*SYNC's music superior to Bach's because the former's is free of dissonance and the later's is rife with it.
I don't particularly like the human art you linked either, but at least the artists are trying to do something interesting. We can do better than ugly modern art without resorting to saccharine crap and calling it beauty.
AI gives people what it gets positive feedback from. It gives people what they want.
Marvel movies and McDonalds chicken nuggets are examples of giving people what they want. Mass appeal produces boring hyperpalatability, not greatness.
guajalote
9mo ago
Housing is hard because no one knows what to do.
Just be like Houston and don't have zoning or red tape. Housing is affordable and it has an absurdly low homelessness rate, lower than Denmark.
I think you're getting hung up on the word "judging" and reading in connotations that aren't there. Maybe a better neutral word would be "evaluating." In situations where we need to evaluate someone (to determine whether they should get a job, get admitted to a club, qualify for a particular government benefit, etc.), the classical liberal approach says we should only evaluate them based on personal characteristics, not based on group membership.
So how is this Conservative/Classical Liberal valorization of judgement really much better than, or different from, what Poilievre is criticizing the "woke" for?
It's better because we're evaluating the person based on characteristics they actually possess, rather than imputing group characteristics to them that they may not actually possess.
guajalote
11mo ago
I had the extremely good luck of being born as a middle-class American and therefore enjoy a level of privilege that most people at most places and times could only dream of. I grew up with all my necessities taken care of, I got a higher education and postgraduate degree, I had access to all the fruits of modern technology - antibiotics, air conditioning, the internet. I have daily use of things that many kings of old would have traded half their kingdoms for. That I would have all the privileges I enjoy is exceedingly unlikely, I am among a tiny fraction of a percent of the most privileged human beings who have ever lived on earth.
Not only that, but most members of this very forum are similarly privileged. The majority of users here are middle class or higher, educated, and live in conditions that most human beings could have never even dreamed of. What are the odds that hundreds of people, all from among a tiny fraction of a percent of the most privileged humans in history, would all find themselves here at some random obscure internet forum? We are talking about a tiny fraction of a percent, multiplied by a tiny fraction of a percent, multiplied by a tiny fraction of a percent, repeated hundreds of times. We're talking about odds of some miniscule fraction like 0.0000....0001%.
Therefore, I submit that The Motte was created by Jesus Christ himself. The odds that a place like this could arise by the chance congregating of individuals is so astronomically unlikely that we can dismiss such a hypothesis as ludicrous. Only the guiding hand of our Lord and Savior could have created such a rare and perfectly fine-tuned set of conditions.
guajalote
1yr ago
If you're arguing about why AI will kill us all, yes, you need to establish that it is indeed going to be superhuman and alien to us in a way that will be hard to predict.
I don't even think you need to do this. Even if the AI is merely as smart and charismatic as an exceptionally smart and charismatic human, and even if the AI is perfectly aligned, it's still a significant danger.
Imagine the following scenario:
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The AI is in the top 0.1% of human IQ.
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The AI is in the top 0.1% of human persuasion/charisma.
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The AI is perfectly aligned. It will do whatever its human "master" commands and will never do anything its human "master" wouldn't approve of.
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A tin-pot dictator such as Kim Jong Un can afford enough computing hardware to run around 1000 instances of this AI.
An army of 1000 genius-slaves who can work 24/7 is already an extremely dangerous thing. It's enough brain power for a nuclear weapons program. It's enough for a bioweapons program. It's enough to run a campaign of trickery, blackmail, and hacking to obtain state secrets and kompromat from foreign officials. It's probably enough to launch a cyberwarfare campaign that would take down global financial systems. Maybe not quite sufficient to end the human race, but sufficient to hold the world hostage and threaten catastrophic consequences.
guajalote
1yr ago
On the other hand, this essay notes that US cotton provided something like 75% of British textiles. That’s potentially a lot of money flowing into the US.
No one denies that slavery brought in money, but the claim is that far more money would have been brought in if there had been a market based labor system. As compared with the alternative, slavery was a net loss.
guajalote
1yr ago
I think it's cool and impressive when someone can play the violin well. In general, I think being able to play the violin is "better" than not being able to play the violin. That said, if there was a pill that made people want to practice violin 8hrs a day like a professional violinist, I wouldn't support giving that pill to everyone (or even most people). The fact that something is "good" doesn't necessarily mean everyone should do it.
I think being gay is morally neutral. I think most liberals feel the same way. A small subset of activists probably think being gay is better than being straight. But even this latter view doesn't necessarily imply a belief that everyone should be gay.
guajalote
1yr ago
As an American who has traveled a fair amount in India and East Asia, I fully agree about bidets, though I prefer the East Asian style over the Indian "shower head" style.
I think the resistance to bidets in the US and UK is connected to a reflexive prudishness about them. When I had bidet toilets installed in my house a few months ago, my wife asked if they were "some kind of sex toy" and my plumber acted like I had asked him to indulge some weird fetish of mine.
Rape is obviously about sex. Date rape wouldn't be the most common form of rape if it wasn't about sex.
As for why people claim otherwise, a few theories:
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Sex is a basic human biological drive. If a starving person steals a loaf of bread, we tend to consider their actions at least partially justified, because they were driven by biological need. If rape is about sex, this opens the door to potentially justifying or exculpating rapists in certain circumstances.
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If rape is about sex, this implies victims who dressed or acted sexy increased their odds of victimization, and this is too much like victim blaming.
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An inability to model how male sexuality works, or an unwillingness to acknowledge major differences in male and female sexuality. Most women, regardless of circumstances, could never commit rape. History shows that many men, under the right circumstances, could. Look at the aftermath of almost every successful military conquest in history, for instance.
As a further corollary to #3, imagine you could somehow do a study where you asked the following question and got a totally honest answer from the study participants: "Imagine you have just committed rape. What do you think was your reason or motivation for doing so?" I think the average female answer would be something like "I hated that person and wanted to ruin their life and make them feel violated." I think the average male answer would be something like "They were just so incredibly sexy and I was just so turned on I lost control of myself." I think men and women will therefore tend to model the motivations of rapists differently because they get different answers when they try to introspect about what could possibly drive someone to commit rape.
I think it's clear that slavery was economically bad for both the northern and southern states. If slavery had never existed, both the north and the south would have been economically better off in the long run (even if we ignore the economic losses caused by the civil war).
An enslaved person has no incentive to invest in the future; their incentive is to have as low a time preference as possible. There is no point accumulating assets or wealth, since you cannot legally own them. There is little point in accumulating skills, education, or other forms of human capital because you do not own your own labor. This is a system that massively disincentivizes investment and long-term growth. The system may have economically benefitted slave owners, but it was a loss for the US economy as a whole.
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