Before getting to the stealing, I'm more stuck on my aesthetic distaste to the vignette of a man on an early date telling the woman he's cold, and her giving him an article of clothing to comfort him (among the more feminine articles to boot). It's too perfectly set up as a subverted cliche, that I am 50-50 (edit on reflection, 70:30) that it's made up. I suspect many if not most of the people defending it are doing so on those very aesthetic grounds, and it's not remotely about agency, morals, or consequentialism. This is basically a manic pixie dream girl scene that crossed with light 'gender swapped' tittilation.
There's a very real trope about a certain kind of proclivity toward strong female to femdom fantasies, that is disproportionately represented in ratty kind of spaces, and people who like this stuff are likely to make up, hyperbolize, or latch onto real anecdotes online as a substitute for the actual paucity of it in the real world. The high agency stuff is just a laundering of a titilating fantasy about a strong female, playing provider to a meek guy with 'low agency', aka the sub.
OK
Regarding the lying and stealing, yeah morals aside, there's a russell's congugation here: My: high agency, your: unscrupulousness , their: low impulse control
To the extent that this is a real story, yeah run buddy. A girl who casually lies and steals for immediate time preference satisfaction (even (maybe espectally) if charitably done by proxy to near empathetic aquaintances) is bad news.
iprayiam3
30d ago
Re: the not allowed to give out a cup of water, it’s likely related to some general ups and downs in their loitering policy drama over the past several years.
I don’t recall the ins and outs and may be getting timing wrong but basically around George Floyd, there was a lot of bad optics around not letting people loiter or use the bathroom without being paying customers. This was seen as racism and bad. But meanwhile there were a lot of people taking advantage of such open doors policies, and basically loitering junkies we’re driving away customers.
Not giving out free water is perfectly reasonable way to discourage freeloading loiterers who might disrupt the appeal of the space for paying customers.
If you let that policy happen via discretion you risk the cancel mob highlighting perceived inequity, and wage workers don’t want to get plastered on the internet for that shit.
Blanket ban is much safer for the establishment as well as the workers to have blanket policies like this.
15 years ago I worked at a fast food restaurant right next to a college bar and we had similar policy because otherwise drink college kids who spent no money filled up the place and interfered with the business
iprayiam3
30d ago
Academics sound extremely lazy and whiny about trying out the most obvious solution: ditch all course-work based grading in favor of oral examinations and comprehensive graduation exams. This would immediately solve the whole problem (it would even align the incentives to get students to use LLMs for studying instead of cheating)
I don't think you even need to go this far in summative evaluation. You can still have graded, proctored tests, as well as essays written in class during a timed window.
You don't have to jump from aysynchronous homework -> graduation exam. You can go from current state to in-class, real-time testing. No reason for it to be oral or 1:1.
The short story is that his life since writing the Benedict Option has turned out exactly the way the BO is meant to avoid. I don't mean that he's turned away from his positions or been hypocritical or anything. (I'm not trying to calumny his character). Just that literally the trajectory of his circumstances, undermines the credibility of the book as an efficacious endeavor, rather than an intellectual LARP.
Rod is currently an expat divorcee, rootlessly gliding around Europe without any 'home' left in America, somewhat disconnected from his family. Whether begrudgingly or not, he's living an almost cartoonishly rootless cosmopolitan lifestyle, pretty much only possible in the world of liquid modernity, the BO has rejected.
Even if you want to argue that Rod didn't Ben-Op hard enough or something, it just strengthes the LARP point, when if the trope-namer himself couldn't implement it effectively.
And again, I don't know all the ins and outs of how Rod got here, or whatever, this is not a character-attack in the slightest. It is just an observation about the BO and the topic of whether it's serious or a LARP for a certain class of people.
Relatedly, I have general issue with Rod's 'research' approach, and question the kind of 'study' made up of carefully curated vignettes of the point you're pushing, rather than a more rigorous approach to forwarding such a social theory.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
Hmm, there are lot's of possible criticisms, some less valid than others, and if you are encounting folks calling it a LARP soley on some un-earnest enough mindreading, then your counter is fine. But I think the more germane LARP criticism is not about 'intention', but the fact that a LARP is by definition, not real, superficial, and thus unsustainable.
Like if someone 'LARPed' the middle ages by conquering and setting up an actual feudal state and ran it thus, but on their death bed they left a note saying 'tee hee, twas a LARP', it falls kind of flat. But this is quite different than actual LARPing, which involves temporary, superficial escapism, that's fundamentally facilitated by the non-LARP. Armor that looks cool, but can't stand up in real combat, forts and 'castles' that you couldn't actually maintain, all funded by an email job.
To this point, accusastions of LARPing, rather than mindset, should be accusations against rigor and of fragility, and serve as predictions about sustainability.
I think bringing up the Benedict Option is a bad counter-example, since the trope-maker, Rod Dreher is a pretty damning case study of all this. There's nobody who publically committed themselves harder to this idea, yet he failed to even superficially create even sustainable parts of this project in his own life. The book he wrote, was a cherry picked set of anecdotes, cobbled artificially into a picture he wanted to paint, not an examination of the concept in earnest.
This is dumb bait. But I think the Bill Maher discussion of his dinner with Trump soundly puts to bed any arguments here. Bill Maher, is about a raving of a TDS as almost anyone, coming away and praising his sharpness and conversability is not something that can be shrugged off with gestures toward nothing like this.
Trump's quoted point at the end is completely coherent, just ideosyncratic and favoring his point over debating the minutia. I'm not defending either the content or point of view, but it's entirely coherent, and the demential complaint is dumb as hell. Here's a summary of the not even subtext of that clip:
Interviewer starts to try a tu quoue about some Biden tactic analogy to Trump. Trump doesn't want to take the bait, so pre-empts with an reverse objection about a double-standard of critique. He uses that to launch that into an attack on Biden's competence. This single sentence has tons of intent:
- The media's critiques of Trump are invalid double standards
- As evidence by the media's protection of Biden
- Biden was not just bad, but incompetent, and the media / deep state covered for him/ controlled him.
All this could be disagreed with, but rather than being incoherent, its a very tight conveying of meaning.
The interviewer then tries to dodge the question of Biden's competence by arguing whether Biden actually did an interview with them or not in some given timeframe.
Trump first starts to engage, but then decides he's not going to lead the interviewer to any Socratic point, so just throws out the idea that he didn't do an interview into being a well informed that he 'barely' did an interview and it was terrible.
Is Trump lying that he's familiar with that particular interview? Yeah probably. (or else he was lying that Biden didn't do an interview and lying or mixed up about the length). But that's not really evidence of mental acuity. The lie makes complete sense in context of the picture he's trying to paint.
The interviewer then gives a sarcastic praise. Trump takes it straight-faced, and uses it to restate his thesis: Biden was incompetent, and any appearance of power-grabbing from him is just hostile coverage from the media
Again, without any bias here (tbh I deeply dislike Trump), Trump's entire bit in that last exchange is tightly governed by a specific frame and defense against a percieved hostile frame. He just favors rhetorical point over detail consistency.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
it's ok to generalize when giving general advice. generalization isn't a synonym for absolutes.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
As soon as you feel comfortable going out of the house with the baby, take full advantage of it. While the baby is young enough to be content sitting/napping in their stroller, you can savor the last bit of dinkiness allowable. By 8 months, your baby will be restless and the pleasure of going out to eat or do other adult oriented activities with them will take a deep dive for the next several years.
Spend months 2-7 going out and socializing with a baby in tow.
iprayiam3
2mo ago
A lot of me thinks this is just reverse 'population bomb'-ism. I'd like to compare the certainty of those worried about underpopulation today with the opposite in the 70s. AI and robots are going to overturn so much, I don't think these negative bombs are particularly predictable for much.
iprayiam3
2mo ago
Basically my thinking exactly. While I'm not myself MAGA, I was very disappointed that what was good about it was going to sell itself out to slightly less woke technocratic liberalism, and that this was going to work on the masses.
I still don't think we're out of the woods, but am happy about the direction here.
iprayiam3
2mo ago
From what I hear, a lot of teachers who require written essays in their classes are pretty near to giving up because they can't ever be sure (or prove their suspicions) either.
Giving a takehome essay should be given up on for sure at this point. Graded essay writing should be something that happens entirely under supervision at this point, if the goal is to measure learning in the area of creating coherent, written point of view.
Were I a teacher, I'd do this:
- Give a generalized form of the prompt or subject. Students can then use AI to help them create notes, do primary research etc.
- Students can bring some limited selection of reference material to class to turn in. On the day they turn it in they have to write an ad-hoc explainer of what they've coallated and why.
- The coalation is reviewed before the day of the essay. On the day of the essay, each student is given back their packet (less unjustified material), and the true prompt is given (Therefore preventing what's turned in to be a straight draft).
- The student writes their essay during the test period, ala blue books.
- Bonus: Another assignment could be letting the student use AI to refine and turn in a final, more comprehensive draft of the essay at a later date
iprayiam3
2mo ago
You are being nonsensical in your handwaving of complexity. Chess has 32 total pieces each with an extremely contrained potential action across only 64 positions. You can't just handwave knowability there into the real world. There's no reason to believe enough computational power exists to be able to have 'omniscient level' understanding of the world. You are just speaking pure, unfounded fiction.
iprayiam3
3mo ago
But here, the argument that these means, based on voluntary exchanges, are morally wrong, has not been sufficiently defended.
But if this is your issue, then the ‘simple question’ you posed is irrelevant or insufficient. Of the moral argument comes down to whether there is a valued life at the other side, then we have to include consideration of those other scenarios. If it’s more complex than that, then your premise that it’s a simple question is one you don’t even agree with. So which is it?
iprayiam3
3mo ago
The question is simple: do you want people to exist, or not to exist?
That’s not the simple question; starting there sneaks in the contentious axiom that the ends justify the means. You’re arguing past the actual objection.
By reduction to that simplistic question, you can justify any that produced a loved child including rape, infidelity, incest, and more.
Maybe that’s a conclusion you come to, but it’s built on a mountain of disagreed assumptions that you can’t simply assume past
iprayiam3
3mo ago
I think the 'Star Wars future' is a best possible outcome here. The internet is ruined, in person interactions is the norm and AI is a lot of ideosyncratic robots who have to talk to eachother and the internet for us because it's all so incomprehensible for an average human.
Thanks to a competency crisis in IT that's been outsourced to robots, nobody really programs anymore, but we can rely on AI/robots to do that for us. Simultaneously that also forces more things back into a more mechanical world and skillset as people spend more time interacting with their high tech environment materially rather than digitally / through pixels.
iprayiam3
3mo ago
Another is google ads. There’s an apocalypse brewing here for companies that rely on adspend for inbound driven pipeline. It’s falling off a cliff
iprayiam3
3mo ago
Someone said in a lower thread the internet will be the first casualty of AI and I tend to agree
iprayiam3
3mo ago
AI is already imploding the white collar world in other ways than just job replacement. Let me give an example.
AI BDR (business development representative) is one of the roles that most AI agent companies are rushing out because it’s (seemingly) low hanging fruit.
What is a BDR? It’s the lowest sales role that fields inbound requests and does outbound prospecting (cold calls, emails etc).
Cold calling used to be the best way to do outbound until 3 things happened: 1. Email, 2. decline of the office phone, and robo calling + smartphone with contacts making answering unknown calls a scourge.
Now phones are just broken as a concept. I never pick up unknown numbers and now miss all sorts of important calls like drs appointments etc.
So emails.. that worked for a while, but it’s been an arms race of attention against spam. In the last 6 months it’s broken completely Why? Because there was a really short period of time where AI BDR was a super power, human like messaging, custom not templates, even personalized to company / contact research at scale.
But the pipe has already been clogged and it’s ruined for everyone. A world of perfect AI, every company who can maybe sell me something can send a handcrafted message to me every single day. That’s millions of messages. No one AI can get through the other. Email and marketing on both sides of the equation is over.
There’s no quick fix. AI being good didn’t improve outbound sales for the seller or recipient (except for a short period inside 2024).
It just broke it. AI didn’t replace jobs, it didn’t increase efficiency. It clogged a channel with so much junk it collapsed.
This will happen in other places.
iprayiam3
3mo ago
Sounds like you should move the base forward and go back to underhand pitching
iprayiam3
4mo ago
I get your point. On the other hand, rehiring this guys is probably the strongest at to say, no we don’t do cancel culture anymore.
Somewhat ironically, the more transparently fair and judicious about this stuff the less power you actually have. We’ve seen this play out over the last half decade enough to known for sure. It’s why apologies don’t work. Unfortunately you can’t push against the tide with small reasonable discernments. You end up just breathing more power into the controlling frame.
The best thing to do would have been to not hire this person to this position in the first place.
The second best thing to do is to use the oppprtunity to tell activist journos to shove it.
This way the next time we can ignore them, and the time after that we can fire people justly in an understood isolation from the noise.
The among the worst things to do (in terms of efficacy) would be to tell the journos they’re right this time with their cancellations but not next time we promise!!
iprayiam3
4mo ago
In the meantime it would be nice if people would avoid poking this obvious sore spot. I'd be fine letting you get away with doing it once. But you are doing it twice as a top level post.
Twice? This implies that the below top post (which I stressed was unrelated) is poking a sore spot, rather than earnestly calling for the BLR return. You can look at my Reddit history to see I’ve been calling for its return since immediately after its retirement. There’s nothing wrong with using the recent AI developments to recontextualize such a call. thus you’ve over counted my ‘poking’ by 50% and by your own justification should have let it slide.
I’d like my ban stricken from the record
Unrelated to any other post of mine, I would like to submit a suggestion that this forum consider a Bear/Lynx repository, where folk could post various links, thoughts, and essays about these two mighty predators. These could be concrete or metaphorical.
While some may worry that this would not be ‘culture warry’ enough, I am quite confident it would prove otherwise.
To demonstrate, I have posted a CharGPT prompt below, unedited with 3 ideas.
-
Environmentalism vs. Development – A repository focused on bears and lynxes could serve as a symbol of conservation efforts clashing with economic interests.
-
Symbolism in Political Ideology – Both bears and lynxes could be used as political metaphors.
-
Climate Change and Animal Habitats – Discussions about shifting bear and lynx populations due to climate change could produce some debates over environmental policy and whether concerns about species loss are exaggerated or valid
iprayiam3
4mo ago
Last week there were a few ‘performance piece’ top posts that utilized AIslop to demonstrate a Goodharts law adjacent concept about the problem with effort posts as too simplistic a concept.
My reading was an uncoordinated but aligned demonstration that AI can produce the facsimile of a top post while entirely missing the point of a discussion board by and for people.
Unstated as it were, I am quite confident that the implied intention of both was to make transparent through the remaining dichotomy, the need for a return of the Bare Links Repository (not to be confused with unrelated calls for an unprecedented Bear/Lynx Repository).
(aside - The original BLR was likely only retired because of jealousy at its success by a sore mod team and sock puppetrous smear campaigns by one Julius Branson.)
Of course nobody wants uneffortful top posts but a BLR, is something entirely different.
Without hashing through its obvious differences from AIslop, tldr they are fundamentally mirror cases of ‘low effort’, where the former is earnest in its low effort and point outward, the latter is disguised and points inward.
The fact is, the BLR in its return would bring necessary life to this forum and counteract the slow momentum erosion the site has suffered since losing Reddits network effect; all while not compromising the rules.
I mean sure in theory, yes. People don’t need to stick exactingly to red pill gender roles, but this anecdotes is so on the nose as a gender bent reversal of the cliche of all cliche examples of the ‘female comfort test’ with an outcome that digs into the gender reversal (he ends up with not just a scarf, but the “nicest” scarf), it has to be made up.
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