haroldbkny
1yr ago
I don't know enough about the economy to argue this one way or the other. My general laymen impression had been that the stock market represents and is intricately tied to the health of the economy. After all, the stock market crash in 1929 is what kicked off the Great Depression. And besides, what had impacted me the most strongly has been the fact that all of my pretty safe investments have tanked, combined with the fact that inflation is still completely horrible and has decreased all of my savings by 8.5%, meanwhile I prepare for a winter that will cost me thousands due to fuel prices being bonkers.
haroldbkny
1yr ago
I don't know, I just feel like I heard so much about it the first time around, and now no one (around me, at least) is talking about it. It just feels like an "old news" effect. People have come to accept it. I think I even heard people praising Biden, that he made the gas prices so much better, brought them down from $5 to $3.75. And it's like if you compare it to under Trump, it's still way worse. And inflation may not have gotten worse, but my salary and savings are still worth 8.5% less than they were 9 months ago. The lack of things getting worse for a few months, or things getting slightly better, may have an IMO undeserved ameliorating effect in people's minds. Like if life is generally at a 7, then things go down to a 4, and everyone's horrified. Then it goes back up to a 5, and people are cheering for it. But to me, I'm wondering why we had to go down from a 7 to a 5.
haroldbkny
1yr ago
My evidence is that inflation this year has been massive, and has not been reversed, which has resulted in all of our money all being worth less, screwing a lot of people over on their plans and ability to pay their bills, along with the fact that the markets have been tanking resulting in further loss to our savings, and fuel prices are ridiculously high (which also plays into inflation, but is high even considering that).
haroldbkny
1yr ago
At some point you have to ask if life is worth it if you have to avoid hanging out with friends or ever eating anything made by someone else.
I'm married to someone who is pretty progressive. It's very hard, but you can make it work, if both people are committed. We can each talk with each other and understand where the other person is coming from, even if we don't agree. Some progressives would simply write off anyone who thinks differently, and if you were with someone like that, it may never be able to work.
While the ability to talk is important, probably the most important thing is to understand that people are compartmentalized, and to learn to compartmentalized politics. Sure, it'll come up every now and again, and it should, but for years the wife and I just argued at each other over and over until we were both sick of it and miserable. We've been much happier since we both agreed to just not talk about politics as much anymore.
I really really hate the progressive messaging over the past half decade trying to imply that anyone who thinks differently is evil, and you can't get along with them. I think it's so illiberal and probably doing lots of damage to society. But these memes, like the "human rights are not politics, so therefore if you disagree on what I think are human rights than you're human garbage," are pervasive. There are others like this, too, trying to, if you ask me, unfairly change the rules of politics in society. If the person you're seeing cannot understand that these memes are probably not accurate, and that you can be a good person despite holding different viewpoints, then no matter how much effort you put in, it sadly would be unlikely to work out.
Yes, but they're not old enough yet. We know we may encounter some issues like this someday. I generally don't want to ever tell my kids what to think in the first place, and I don't think my wife does either. I plan to do a lot of Socratic questioning, and explaining how I think while also not pressuring them to think that way. My wife and I believe in the tactics of not arguing about this stuff in front of the kids, not ridiculing each other's viewpoints, and not undermining each other.
That said, if trans issues come up, that in particular will probably be a very difficult thing to deal with, though I do believe that my wife is sane enough to not believe in puberty blockers and actually hormonal transition for children. I know she does understand that there are some decisions that children are not old enough to make.
I really want to move to a more purple area, so my kids are exposed equally to diverse messaging which is exposed to scrutiny, not just drinking progressive Kool aid. My wife understands this desire of mine and is also up for moving. But picking a location that I believe is diverse enough, while also finding jobs that fit certain criteria for each of us is a challenging enough prospect that we have not made significant headway in this regard yet.
haroldbkny
1yr ago
A counterargument would be that no one will align with you on all values. At some point, you're not the other person, so you will disagree on things relating to how you deal with the world. Where is it you draw the line? It may not exactly matter. When you're living with someone and sharing everything with them, you're bound to have disagreements that can drive you crazy that you need to learn to live with.
The win for the left here was to house the migrants for a while, refuse to raise a fuss about it, quietly find new accommodations for them and send them along
I've seen progressives in my facebook feed saying that the left did just that. I don't think it was specifically the people in Martha's Vineyard, but maybe other people from MA mainland. I see leftists on facebook saying that this just proves that republicans suck and are cruel, and leftists are compassionate. So if you're saying the opposite came to pass, clearly there are two different worlds happening, and that means that no one is going to learn anything, and everyone is just going to stick to/create their own narratives to satisfy their own worldviews.
For the record, I haven't followed this story at all, so I have no clue if your account or the progressive account is closer to the truth (and I also don't trust very much the specific progressives on my facebook who said this, I know them personally and they're brainwashed people). But what exact actions are you referring to when you say this:
The actions they're taking seem to be revealing that they REALLY take it personally when the GOP manages to slip a trick by them that doesn't get leaked in advance and so puts them on the defensive.
haroldbkny
1yr ago
There was never a female president of the USA, so an accurate model shouldn’t generate one.
Just an aside on this: the model is trained on images, not real life. So if there were ever representations of a female president, then it'd still be accurate, even without debiasing techniques. This could include art, woman playing the first female president in movies or TV, etc. I'm sure there have been many instances of those things. Also, if the image generation models do some sort of semantic embeddings (I have no clue if they actually do), then they may know that "president" is similar to "leader" or "politician", whatever, and can then leverage images of female leaders or politicians in figuring out what a female president might look like.
I'm not sure how to think about this sort of thing. On the one hand, I don't like that society and feminists find so many ways to police and label immoral some aspect of just about every avenue men have to find partners, and I wonder if they would be so consistent if the sexes were reversed. I think it's possible for people in these situations to have an organic and balanced romance that forms over time, without any coercion. And really, I do think that most women in subordinate situations like this probably wouldn't fuck someone if they didn't want to, and would sooner quit and go to the press if they felt coerced.
At the same time, I've always been pretty against teachers and students hooking up. My high school had a ridiculous amount of male teachers that everyone knew were fucking some of the senior girls, or recently graduated senior girls. This always struck me as pretty wrong, in that I felt it was crossing a boundary. To be clear, I don't really think those girls were coerced into sex, but I do feel like a good person and teacher would have turned down the opportunities. I guess I'd always been more concerned about the other people in the situations, the other students in the class, and that this situation makes everything weird for everyone. And I've felt like it's the role of a teacher to be a role model, someone to look up to and aspire to, and that known romantic entanglements with students just shatters that, makes him just some sleazy bro.
I'm not sure I can exactly articulate how I've felt about this. Maybe these viewpoints are contradictory and hypocritical.
haroldbkny
1yr ago
I may be wrong, and others may contradict me, but I feel like the predominent view in society is that once a girl is 18, it's not wrong to have sex with her if she so chooses. I generally subscribe to that view. My issue is primarily with the high school teacher student relationship
haroldbkny
1yr ago
The teacher example's got a lot to do with the proximity to the age of consent, though?
Maybe. Though let's say for the sake of argument that we knew all these girls were 18. I'm generally fine with people sleeping with 18 year old women, if the women want to. But in this case, I think I'd still have an issue with it, due to the relationship. It could be that my disgust response is somehow downstream and influenced by the proximity to the age of consent, however, though I don't think so.
haroldbkny
1yr ago
I live in a very very progressive part of the world, and I went to a small local craft market event today. Near the event, there was a 65ish year old woman waving around a GOP tote bag at cars and people passing by. Everyone was ignoring her, but I went to talk to her.
It started out just fine. I told her (in a friendly way) that she's unlikely to change any minds here, and she replied that that she's just trying to show people that there are others out there who have had enough of the progressive orthodoxy, citing CRT, transgenderism, etc. She felt like maybe this might just convince some young people to even question whether there's another viewpoint out there, or convince those who are hiding their views to speak up more. I definitely respected and agreed with that.
Then, her stream of consciousness-style insane ramblings started coming out. She went on for like 7 minutes without pausing, about so many topics I couldn't even keep track, jumping from one to the other. I recall her mentioning that leftists want to harvest and sell fetus organs, and somehow she started talking about slavery and pre-civil war America, waving a book around trying to show me underlined passages trying to liken the practice of slavery to what progressives are doing today, maybe implying that leftists want to return to pre-civil war America in some way. It was pretty hard to manage to get away.
This comes in the wake of being at my wife's family event where her crazy uncle kept bringing up conservative talking points apropos of nothing, shoehorning them into conversations which everyone tried politely to ignore, and was a total conversation killer. I'm usually only used to leftists doing that.
These experiences were pretty disheartening to me. I spend so much time here on The Motte that I end up feeling like people who are anti-progressive are probably more thoughtful and less crazy than progressives and more in touch with reality. But that's probably not true. I guess a lot of conservatives really are in their own echo chambers just as much as leftists are. Probably a good number of them really take seriously the conspiracy-style theories of talking head personalities in the style of Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. The true disconnect on both sides, from each other and probably also from reality and the true values of most people, is a very sad state of affairs.
I truly believe that the way we tend to talk about things on the Motte and in rationalist-adjacent spaces makes sense, and seems like far more logical discourse than I can find anywhere else. But of course I would, I'm part of this specific world. Any leftist would say the same about their progressive reddit subs, and most republicans would say that about the comments section in the Daily Wire. Is there any evidence that we're not just rambling buffoons in our own echo chamber, just like I'd find on either end of the spectrum?
haroldbkny
1yr ago
commonly, historically and almost necessarily any virus allowed to replicate freely would turn less deadly with time since killing hosts is not conducive to spreading rapidly
I bring this point up with a lot of non rationalists. I know nothing about epidemiology, myself, but the point you said makes sense. However, I get a lot of push back from people. People who claim to know more than I do about this stuff tend to think that there's no predicting whether a virus will become more deadly and spread less well, or become less deadly and spread better. They think both are likely, and I'm not sure why. However, they do agree that a virus that is less deadly will necessarily be more contagious and vice versa.
Maybe they're not thinking about the fact that both new variations might arise, but only the one that spreads easier one will outcompete, which will result in the quick demise of the other. Is there any merit to what they're saying? On what basis should I argue back against them? Are there any papers which show this phenomenon, or is there some scientific principle I could point to about it?
The Motte uses Patreon? I harbor a grudge against them for deplatforming Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) after they swore, just like a year before, that they were deep free-speech advocates and would remain so. I still don't want to give any money to them.
I'd been meeting these people in the wild since at least 2014. I remember, for example, when I mentioned this particular technological breakthrough which allowed people to reconstruct audio in a room from capturing vibrations in papery substances on video. I mentioned that the tech wasn't always good enough to be able to actually hear what was said, but was capable of being used for figuring out whether the speaker was male or female, and then I got yelled at from 5 different directions saying that some women have deeper voices than men, and you couldn't generalize about such things.
haroldbkny
1yr ago
My 5' 4" female self looks around at all the guys around me, who are between 3-6" taller than me at a pinch.
Gosh, wherever did they get that idea from? 🙄
I've legit spoken with women (granted at least 5 years ago) who claimed that men are taller because women are malnourished, because of societal beauty standards leading to women being given less nourishment.
haroldbkny
1yr ago
I'd forgotten, myself, and I just looked up some of the details to remember. It wasn't just that Patreon said they were free-speech advocates, it's that they said unequivocally that they will not ban people for content that isn't hosted on Patreon. And then they banned Sargon for content that wasn't on Patreon, just cause they don't like him. Here's relevant excerpts someone did on a rundown I found in Quora
On the 31. July 2017 the CEO of Patreon, Jack Conte, is interviewed live by Dave Rubin. In the interview, one of the things that are discussed is none other than media censorship. Jack explicitly states that the Terms of Use of Patreon apply only to content that is on their site or is directly sponsored by patrons.
Carl Benjamin (a.k.a. Sargon of Akkad) wakes up one day and after logging on social media sees a lot of tweets and messages concerning his Patreon account. Naturally, he tries to log himself on and, lo and behold, his Patreon account has been deleted without any explanation or prior notice. Taken aback by the fact, he sends them an e-mail: the main question being why exactly they removed his account. A few hours later he receives an answer stating that his account has been deleted due to a violation of their Terms of Use. As he wasn’t aware of what exactly he did wrong, he followed up with another e-mail asking about the specifics of the violation.
A day later, they reply: he had said the N-word on stream and that’s why they are banning him.
He responds by saying that the ban is nonsensical on the grounds that: 1. The stream in which he said the N-word, wasn’t on Patreon; 2. The stream wasn’t on any of his accounts and therefore not sponsored by his patrons; and 3. That the manner in which he used the N-word was, first of all, against an alt-right group and second, to mock how people who are actually racist use it.
Thus far, they have not responded with how Carl can appeal the removal of his ban.
Following these events, Patreon, fully knowing what they’ve done, have contacted some of their users to “butter them up” in a way, their message being along the lines of: “Don’t worry, we won’t come after you. If you behave…”
I remember some of that. One of those people Patreon called recorded their conversation. And the patreon rep kept saying that they didn't really want to ban Sargon, they just wanted him to apologize for what he said, even though by their own terms of service at the time, they had no right to demand that of him. What a shitshow that all was. I really wish that people had banded together against Patreon at the time and that Patreon went under, but in retrospect, years later, it's had no impact on them, and they're still the industry standard for patrons. How sad.
haroldbkny
1yr ago
Even so, general population needs to be masked when around healthcare workers. That's still mandated, I think, to be masked in hospitals, doctors offices, etc.
I have absolutely no context on it, and I'm interested to hear what others say, but I thought it might have to do with women being the arbiters of social acceptability, women determine what ideas get passed on what ideas don't. Men tend to look to women for moral guidance on what is okay to think, okay to talk about, okay to do.
I think the idea that women are the arbiters of social acceptability is itself a controversial idea, but it's one that I believe is true, nonetheless.
haroldbkny
1yr ago
OP of last heat-pump discussion here.
Yes, I'm really interested in learning what you learned. I still haven't made any decisions yet, but I'm leaning towards going for a natural gas solution, not a heat pump, due to already having a gas line in the house, and also living in a place that I think is slightly too cold for a heat pump. But any further data would be really useful!
haroldbkny
1yr ago
It's also likely here, since my original heat pump thread OP is referencing had a culture war angle to it, namely that I wasn't sure whether to trust heat pumps, which are being talked up in my area only by green energy people, and potentially unrealistically pitched: https://www.themotte.org/post/56/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/7321?context=8#context
haroldbkny
1yr ago
Is the problem that the culture is dying, or just that the medium is getting stale and rote? As a parallel, let's look at the video game industry, which started a lot later than the film industry, and was doing novel and interesting things until a lot later. But more recently, games have felt more churned out and "by the numbers", at least from the bigger studios. I have a friend who works for Sega who tends to agree with this take. I think the problem is that we need new mediums, where people have to learn how to express something real again.
haroldbkny
1yr ago
I guess, but I also feel like it's terrible to have to make it painful for people. Ask almost anyone how they want to die, and they'll say something like "painlessly and in my sleep". How many people actually die like that? Very few. I don't expect most suicides are as painless as lethal injection would be.
This sounds just like a discussion we had in the Motte a few months ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/u66abs/comment/i5hi84w/
Here's what I had to say about it:
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