One thing that rolls around in my head when talking about the rise in transgenderism is the complexity of comparing outcomes. Now I don’t personally think this topic should be primarily judged through an outcomes lens, and my position isn’t based on it. However, it inevitably gets tossed around, and it’s also related to the question of how much a rise in transgenderism is revealed preferences vs changed preferences, so to speak.
It shouldn’t be controversial to say that a person who transitioned in the past, say even 2003, would have poorer outcomes on average than a person who transitioned today, due to both medical progress and social acceptability etc. Consequently, the baseline unhappiness for a person to transition should end up being higher in 2003 than 2023.
Thus there’s a lot of argument that the rise in transgenderism is at least partly due to a lot of people who would have transitioned in 2003 in a 2023 environment. And I think that’s straightforwardly true.
But I still think that doesn’t show the whole picture Consider the difference in comparing the level of happiness of a person who transitions today as compared to…
• If they didn’t transition today vs
• If they didn’t transition in 2003.
I think social contagion is certainly partly responsible in cause. [There are certainly some people who would never have felt gender dysphoria if they weren’t socialized into this, and I think it accounts for a lot of ROTD in young women, but I suspect it’s also less so in men with AGP, though I definitely suspect things like porn as @2rafa suggest also cause an increase in amount of AGP.] But I think it is also responsible partly for degree of dissatisfaction. How many people in a social context where transition wasn’t an option, would have been happier not transitioning than people not transitioning in a social context where it is an option? Again, the answer seems obviously a lot.
A person tempted to drink, but trying to remain sober is probably going to have a harder time at a party where they’re being encouraged to drink than in an environment where everyone is sober and encouraging them to stay so. So the real comparison is how much happier is a person who transitions in 2023 than that same person would have been if they hadn’t transitioned in 2003.
Obviously it’s a difficult if not impossible measurement. But I think there’s reason to believe that the answer on average is less happy. And if that were true, there’s an argument for a society that is less accommodating, knowing that the person who transitions is less happy, but on average the individual doesn’t transition and is happier for it.
Consider it a related thought experiment that could be measured:
Take a group of children and divide them into four blind groups. **Groups A and B **are given an enthusiastic conversation about and shown advertisements etc for Disney World and told they might get to go there this weekend. Only Group A is taken. Group B is brought to a local playground for the day.
Group C is also shown the advertisements and get the topic presented, but not told that they have a chance to go, and are told upfront they will be taken to a local playground, which they are. Group D is also taken to the local playground after being told they would be, and not shown any adversement for Disney, even though they are likely aware of it.
Even though we might expect that the kids in Group A might have a better time than the kids in group D, it’s reasonable to assume B will have the worst time of it.
Now suppose one wanted to make an argument that A’s overall satisfaction was not great enough over D’s or even C’s to be worth the expense of taking them there, and that C’s and B's satisfaction could be most effectively increased by including them in group D (avoid showing them DW promotions), rather than A’s (taking them to Disney World).
Now imagine that your opponent’s response was to compare A to B (the group who was told might go and then denied) and used B’s dissastisfaction to argue for making D’s into C’s, dissatisfied C’s into Bs, and then arguing it’s human decency to make A available to all Bs.
TLDR, my, not particularly unique point, is that I bet there's a lot of people with a given level of dysphoria, who would have lived a hardly affected life untransitioned 20 years ago, but would suffer much more for it in today's context, and that should be accounted for in extending social permissiveness.
Since many here will already agree with me, I'll go ahead and make the more controversial: The same argument above but for divorce, extramarital sex, and religious participation.
What's your take?
My take is that I've never seen so comically insane of an instance of Goodhart's Law (When the measure becomess the target, it ceases to be a meaningful measure).
Having values you are willing to die for is getting badly translated into Being willing to die for something gives it/you value. Dude you are way off base, and you should take it as a sign of your ultimate disappointment and disillusionment that everyone EVERYONE has told you so, and you stubbornly refuse to adjust your perspective even a little.
I approve of setting goals and taking on endurance challenges etc, so I have no reason to talk you out of that, generally. But you cannot allow yourself to go do something until you've cleared yourself as mentally competent enough to take on the risk. So here is a quick sobriety test:
1. You do fully understand that completing the Hock will not make you not awkward? It won't directly or indirectly help awkwardness at all.
In fact, I would bet it will make you feel slightly more awkward in social settings because it will be another point of distance between your inner self and those around you. "These people have never been through what I have been through" will become a resentment crutch, when you realize it did nothing to directly affect your social awkardness.
2. Do you understand that it will make you only slightly more attractive to women? Slighlty and in a very limited way, which will be quickly undone and reversed if you try to milk it.
Let me unpack that. I recall you said previously that you used to do competitive downhill skiing in high school. I'd put the Hock at objectively 30% as attactrive as that, but with the compensating benefits of recency. (If, you're say, under 35, I imagine the skiing will remain more interesting). Thriving in a competitive social and physical environment is far more interesting to women than pursing a loner hobby.
For another comparison, it will register as about as attractive as if you've recently completed a marathon. Maybe slightly more if the "I put my life on hold for 3 months" registers as financial secuirty. So, I'd say about as interesting as recently completing a marathon during a trip to Europe.
Now here's why I say it is limited and will be quickly undone, and listen closely because it has everything to do with the awkwardness issue: To present it attractively, you can only bring it up briefly once or twice, and should mostly act uninterested in talking about it, like it wasn't that interesting, so mundane for your life that you're amused she's even interested. Basically, if you harp on it in any way like you have here, you'll be repelling the ladies like youre name is Pepper Spray. Thus there is a hard and very low cap with the usefulness of this bit of 'proof of value' that can be used with any given woman. (Unless she is herself an autistic survivalist, which is fine. Maybe even seek those out after this)
If you in anyway try to: Go into long details about the trip, get too enthusiastic, present any philosophical musings, bring it up regularly, make it obvious that your sense of identity or self-worth is connected to this, call yourself a Hockist etc, you will be flagged (unfairly or not) as weird and unattractive by the average woman.
EDIT: By way of analogy, overall I feel like you're a guy trying to prove he isn't autistic and directionless by... building a giant model trainset in the basement. The harder you go all out on this, the more counter-productive it's going to be.
Don't get me wrong, a giant train set sounds fun and cool, and I endorse it. Just be clear about what it is and isn't going to accomplish for you.
iprayiam3
7mo ago
Paging @2rafa, but I share a similar meta-hurdle with her that prevents me from getting too worked up about these cases, or at least tempers my emotional reaction to this kind of injustice.
I can objectively agree with you about the apparent stretching of judicial reasonability, the fear of impossible to defend against, the growing assumption of guilt until proven innocent, and the clear threat of these ideological kangaroocifixions creeping into other aspects of crime-and-justice that might actually threaten me. And I can agree about the campus-rape crisis from a few years back, and more recently Me-Too, etc.
Nothing that follows, dismisses the abstract principled disagreement with these judicial outcomes.
However, I can only laugh at the ideological blindspot from the 'liberal' crowd at these kinds of outrage-at-sex-scandal-outrage. The Motte is the same population, intimately familiar with the I never thought the leopard would eat my face meme, no?
These solution here is not to hook-up, not to have causal sex, not to get drunk and fuck people you're not married to. This is all a bunch of liberals pissed that we couldn't stop the ride somewhere between 1/2 and 9/10ths down the slope. Boo-hoo.
Maybe the progressive's impulse that there's something wrong with a lecherous 31 year old celebrity fucking a 16 year old, their inclination to beleive the legitimacy of her later feelings that she was prey-on and harmed, or their belief that going to a party and fucking drunk people, whether or not you are drunk is an excerise in poor judgement, aren't wrong. Maybe the progressive's judicial response is warped and fucked up, but maybe it's because the people who came before them tore down all the scaffolding and vandalized all the blueprints for a functional paradigm, and those same people are all outraged that those who came after aren't happy standing exposed shivering in the wreckage and be told all about their fReEdOm.
From where I stand, everything MeToo is people trying to put a roof back over their head, while the same people who tore down their original house criticise them for not enjoying the fresh air, and the people who built the original house are too busy tell them they're rebuilding it wrong, instead of telling the wreckers to fuck off.
iprayiam3
9mo ago
You'll be shocked to hear then when two students meet and marry in med school (another common practice), they will try to keep them together or compatitble when assigning their internships and rotations.
I can't imagine a more sympathetic to human realities to this concept, and am really baffled by the person who would put 'liberal fairness' on such a pedestal that they would get remotely worked up at the idea of supporting marriages / families, the fundamental social unit of society.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
I posted, but deleted this in response to a previous AI thread, but I think it actually aged better with Elon's signature to the letter yesterday and Yud's oped:
I am not a Musk fanboy, but I'll say this, Elon Musk very transparently cares about the survival of humanity as humanity, and it is deeply present down to a biological drive to reproduce his own genes. Musk openly worries about things like dropping birth rates, while also personally spotlighting his own rabbit-like reproductive efforts. Musk clearly is a guy who wants and expects his own genes to spread, last and thrive in future generations. This is a rising tides approach for humans Musk has also signaled clearly against unnatural life extensions.
“I certainly would like to maintain health for a longer period of time,” Musk told Insider. “But I am not afraid of dying. I think it would come as a relief.”
and
"Increasing quality of life for the aged is important, but increased lifespan, especially if cognitive impairment is not addressed, is not good for civilization."
Now, there is plenty, that I as a conservative, Christian, and Luddish would readily fault in Musk (e.g. his affairs and divorces). But from this perspective Musk certainly has large overlap with a traditionally "ordered" view of civilization and human flourishing.
Altman, on the other hand has no children, and as a gay man, never will have children inside of a traditional framework (yes I am aware many (all?) of Musks own children were IVF. I am no Musk fanboy).
I certainly hope this is just my bias showing, but I have greater fear for Altman types running the show than Musks because they are a few extra steps removed from stake in future civilization. We know that Musk wants to preserve humanity for his children and his grandchildren. Can we be sure that's anymore than an abstract good for Altman?
I'd rather put my faith in Musks own "selfish" genes at the cost of knowing most of my descendants will eventually be his too than in a bachelor, not driven by fecund sexual biology, doing cool tech.
Every child Musk pops out is more the tightly intermingled his genetic future is with the rest of humanity's.
In Yud's oped, which I frankly think contains a lot of hysteria, mixed among a few decent points, he says this:
On March 16, my partner sent me this email. (She later gave me permission to excerpt it here.)
“Nina lost a tooth! In the usual way that children do, not out of carelessness! Seeing GPT4 blow away those standardized tests on the same day that Nina hit a childhood milestone brought an emotional surge that swept me off my feet for a minute. It’s all going too fast. I worry that sharing this will heighten your own grief, but I’d rather be known to you than for each of us to suffer alone.”
When the insider conversation is about the grief of seeing your daughter lose her first tooth, and thinking she’s not going to get a chance to grow up, I believe we are past the point of playing political chess about a six-month moratorium.
I'm unclear whether this is Yud's bio-kid or a step kid, but the point ressonates with my perspective of Elon Musk. A few days ago SA indicated a similar thing about a hypothetical kid(?)
I once thought about naming my daughter Saffron in its honor. Saffron Siskind the San Franciscan, they would call her. “What a lovely girl in a normal organic body who is destined to live to an age greater than six”, the people would say.
In either case, I don't know about AI x-risk. I am much more worried about 2cimerafa's economic collapse risk. But in both scenarios I am increasingly of a perspective that I'll cheekily describe as "You shouldn't get to have a decision on AI development unless you have young children". You don't have enough stake.
I have growing distrust of those of you without bio-children eager or indifferent to building a successor race or exhaulting yourself through immortal transhumanist fancies.
iprayiam3
2mo ago
He's not sneering. People really are this stupid.
Making fun of stupid people for being stupid is sneering.
If you fucking lie to my face about stupid shit that I know is a lie, and moreover this is a shitty dumb lie that harms your case, then I'm still going to do my job, but by God I'm not going to give you the benefit of the doubt or try and help you out of the holes you are digging for yourself.
Well this kind of proves the point that you're going to give a different service based on your perception of the person you're dealing with.
Now of course, lying is a stupid and self fulfilling way for you to lower your esteem and because they're stupid, they're stupid liars. But the premise that OP immediately dismisses as deluded, is proven out here.
My biggest problem here is the claim that it's deluded to suspect one might be treated differently based on perception of sympathy.
I know ymkeshout enough to believe that he wouldn't consciously do that. But have no reason to extend that to any given professional wouldn't. And I don't believe that ymkeshout or anyone doesn't unconsciously. Replication crisis and all that, but the principles of influence and persuasion aren't totally false.
Of course lying to your lawyer is the wrong way to deal with that, but the premise as argued is wrong.
This article is 1 part dismissing as delusional to suspect you might get difference based on perceived sympathy. 1 part the fact that non Lawyers don't know ahead of time what is or isn't a lever in the legal process and 2 parts laughing that stupid people make stupid decisions.
And consider that this whole discussion exists in a world where lying about something as obviously stupid as, your gender can get you put into a better prison. So...
iprayiam3
1yr ago
I am going to wade back into the motte for a sec and respond to part of this. Bear with me, as my tie in will take a few detours. TLDR, I grow weary of the cult of “data-driven decision making”
There’s a difference between non-falsifiable theories , an non-demonstrable theories (unlikely the right term, I’m sure some rat has a real term for this).
The Sagan’s dragon is non-falsifiable, but the Russell’s teapot, even though it’s considered exemplar of unfalsifiable, is only non-demonstrable. It could be falsified, but we don’t have the tools to do it. People play these two interchangeably (often they can be), but too much and it causes a lot of soldier arguments. I think most of Caplan, who is correct a lot about education, a lot of his arguments play on a motte-and-bailey between these two.
Suppose Jon argued hard that learning Shakespear in middle-school paid off in various interpersonal interactions later in life. That is certainly not non-falsifiable, but it is almost a teapot's difficulty to measure empirically. Any study bound by real world constraints that attempted it would be insufficient.
So you say, it’s non-falsifiable, and Jon says No, I don’t think so. Jon goes out and interview a lot of people and puts together a nice phenomenology or narrative or whatever, and finds lots of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence of a phenomenon that appears again and again that many people seem to be able to draw a connection between their Shakespear and communication benefits. Suppose it is gold-standard qualitative research. Now I still think that it’s perfectly valid for you to stop here and argue, it’s not compelling enough to convince you.
But say you respond by pointing to several studies that went looking for these benefits but weren’t able to reject the null hypothesis of no connection. The first looked at learning Shakespeare and life outcomes with no relationship. Jon responds that of course the effect of a single course in shakespeare on life outcomes is going to be tiny, all other influences considered, that no study would be powered enough to find that signal. You find another study that looks at learning shakespeare and recall of his plays in college students, and finds very small retention. Jon again disagrees that it’s looking at the same thing. And so on.
You accuse Jon of refusing to update on data, and of holding a non-falsifiable belief. Here Jon admits that the whole logic model and all the influencing factors are somewhat unknown, but that there is connection as seen in his field research. Jon argues back at you that studies that don’t show any connection may be evidence that they aren’t designed properly since the phenomenon does exist and seems to in a nontrivial amount. He argues that if your data is correctly measuring the construct, it would predict that he wouldn’t have found the qualitative results he has.
He concludes that even with the unknowns, the benefit-cost is worth including it in the curriculum.
I’m not suggesting that Jon’s logic is air-tight, but I think it does show cracks in worshiping empirical ‘data’ in complex, longitudinal experimental problems, and the weakness of dismissing theories about difficult problems as unfalsifiable.
I think when someone like Megan says they won’t update on data, they’re essentially saying this. She has observed an actual and significant (not statistically) phenomenon that influences her epistemic and ethical view of the situation, enough so that when data that fails to capture it, her priors don’t rule out under-powered or poorly operationalized designs that aren’t measuring the right thing.
Another example. You ask me what data would change my mind that there are thousands or more faithful Catholics in the world, I would say none. Because I know several dozen myself. The alternatives that I live in a completely anomalous space and happen to know a large percentage of all faithful catholics, or that I am so bad at modeling others, the people I think are faithful aren’t, are both so ridiculously improba
It will potentially make me more conscientious: the attitude that lets me survive the Hock might let me pay a shitload of attention in social situations so I don't miss anything.
There is no reason to think it will do anything like this. if you want to become more conscientious, go do something extremely social for 3 months. Go be a missionary in Uganda.
If not net 0, the Hock will make you more detached and withdrawn in social situations. Consider the soldier who comes home from war, and has trouble adjusting back into civilian life. If not nothing at all, you're going to mostly experience a wall between you and others.
Imagine you're at some social event, say some meet-up at a bar. You're standing there, drink in hand, watching everyone else, seemingly mingling effortlessly. Why not you, dammit. You're hyper-conscientious about your own milling around, you try to stand next to others talking to eachother, but feel unsure where and how to jump in naturally. Damn you feel awkward. Still! What's more, now you feel resentful, angry even at the frivolty of it.
3 months ago, you were struggling to get a match lit with your half-frost bitten hands. It was a race against the cold and wind, and you were losing. Once that fire was roaring, your body was still in freezing agony sore all over, but hell, the relief and triumph was simultaneously better and worse than anything you'd ever known.
Back to the room. Fuck these people. You survived that night, and so many other after it. Something significant, something none of these people will ever know. What are they talking about now, some twitter drama? So shallow, they have no idea. Your triumph would humble them if only, anyone cared to ask. If only there was a way into the conversation... fuck it, these people have nothing in common with you. You've been through so much.
This is the optimistic way of it playing out.
Survivormanning alone in the woods will not address social competence in any kind of a positive way or provide any useful frame for engaging social scenarios more healthfully.
Yes. The Hock is going to freeze most or all of the hypocrisy off of me,
I don't know what this means, so I'll reiterate. In small, very temperate doses, it will make you slightly more attractive to women, but not anywhere near proportional to the effort you are putting in.
I'll end by granting you that on some deep level, it's quite possible this will improve your self-possesion and perspective in a way that will manifest much deeper into a relationship in a much more nuanced way. But these effects will not appear (and may appear counterproductively) on a group-level or in initial and high level interactions.
Again to the soldier analogy. The things he learned and survived in the hellishness of war may make him a demonstrably better father, with deeper values and worldly detachment. But those are mostly going to come at the cost of social grease and 'gracefullness' and connectedness to the people around him.
As I was telling @Meriadoc yesterday, if I ever meet the Omnibenevolent loving Creator who created ichthyosis vulgaris, I'll kick them in the Holy Nuts.
I've heard this sentiment before, and I think Tony Robinson has a bit about this. My question is, would you really? I get that this sentiment is meant to emphaisize the incredible apparent irreconcilability between a Good God and the suffering in the world, which in turn is evidence against the former.
But, as someone on the other side of the belief equation, it screams emotionalism compromising your sense of 'rational' skepticism.
Like I'd take the atheism/agnosticism of someone more seriously who said something like:
"If faced irrefutably with God, I'd be incredibly humbled! My very strong prior against Him would be shattered, and I'd have to acknowedge that a significant part or more of my epistemological model led me astray. I'd like to have that clarified before making any further decisions. Consequently, it's very difficult for me to predict how I'd approach any other pre-existing greivance past that epistemic event horizon."
In other words, if you were faced with being absolutely wrong about your agnosticism, you really wouldn't stop for an instant, temper your contempt for a moment, to scratch the possibility that your view of the problem of evil, of theodicy, was also incomplete?
To be certain that in the event you are wrong about God's existance, you'd simply move down to your next argument - grievance against His supposed benevolence, comes off as a tell against epistemic hygeine.
TLDR; I am always puzzled by people angry at a god they don't believe in. I think the anger and disbelief undermine eachother.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
So overall both parents of a child get half an extra vote that they can use to vote as they wish. Then we can just count the votes after the election, giving 1/2 weighting to the green ballots.
This is the part I disagree with. Much of the benefit of giving a parent the extra vote weight is the investment and stability. Only married parents should get the extra vote.
If you want to get a divorce after having kids, you've proven your future planning unreliable enough. and if you're kids are already harmed by your (or your spouse's) bad decisions, you shouldn't have the benefit of sharing that with the rest of the country.
I think stable marriages is probably a stronger lever than number of children, and would largely mitigating @Walerodim 's hesitation.
My proposal would be something like:
-
No voting under 26 unless you are married.
-
If you are married your vote counts 1.5 extra
-
If you ever divorce your vote reduces to .75, and remarriage doesn't affect this
-
After age 40, if you are married and did not have children with your spouse, your 1.5 reduces back to 1
-
After age 60 your vote reduces to 1 regardless.
Obviously that's too complicated to be realistic, but why not throw it out there for fun.
iprayiam3
8mo ago
I've never heard anyone suggest that it was a moral failing. That sounds like a completely made up strawman to victim oneself against.
Obviously the reverse causality makes sense: bad people should be less datable. But i e never even heard anyone suggest this should is an is as it's plainly not real.
Where are you getting this moral failing narrative from? You need to justify the premise, because it sounds like extrapolated wallowing or self-loathing.
Ultimately, I was mostly driving at "Even if I don't like when I see what I believe to be undue hatred of fat people, I think the fat acceptance movement is primarily a bunch of hatred-filled people who want to control other people's desires and shame everyone else in order to fill the empty void in their own lives". My wife (as she usually does) was going with the argument of, "...". I basically replied that I believe she is sanewashing a movement that primarily works based on hatred, not love and reason, and I suggested to my wife that people like her are "laundering credibility" in social movements like this.
So you begin by acknowledging and distancing yourself from people on your side of the debate that seem hateful, then immediately turn around and accuse your wife of sane-washing when she does the same? Holy Russell's conjugation, Batman!
I have pure motives, unrelated to those on my side who are motivated by hate.
You are sane-washing the haters on your side.
He is a hater lying about his motivations.
yes we can all play that game. There is plently to criticize about the fat-acceptance movement, but pinning them as the side more prone to being motivated by hate / disgust is just lulz. I am sympathetic to an argument that hate of the person has nothing to do with it / one side is objectively correct / detraction is the appropriate response to unhealthiness, even if it's expression should be tempered etc / that shame can be a powerful way of patrolling unhealthy social contagions, etc. But the frame that it's the other side who is hate-filled is more DOA than Dems are the real racist type of rhetoric
iprayiam3
1yr ago
personal perspective: I've listened to the first two Eliezer interviews and part of this one. Yes the guys, presentation is horrible etc, but I'm actually suprised at how receptive I've been to hear him out. I have always had very negative view of most ratsphere things, and Eliezer was prime example.
He does not present well outside of his fanbase in writing. Twitter to lessWrong, to HPMOR, he's always come off to me as insufferably arrogant, weird, and over concerned with how clever he is. (Anything SA has ever written on AI has been much much worse, his regular simple penetration of issues falls apart on the subject of AI, and has done more to make me (wrongly) dismissive of the whole thing than anything else.)
Back to Yud, having never actually seen or heard him before, I am shocked by how much more I like the guy in video format. He seems a lot nicer and sympathetic and likable than I ever imagined him. To the point that for the first time ever, I'm honestly open to hearing out his concerns and combined with Musk's views on the issue, I am in medium to high medium support of any 'pause' efforts, but tentative to being done in a way that doesn't require nuclear war or a totalitarian world government.
It is very bizarre to me that every normie in the world may have to, in their lifetimes, decide where they stand on a 'Butlerian Jihad'. This is a possibility I would have mocked relentlessly 18m ago, and am depressed that I even have given thought to.
iprayiam3
6mo ago
I think the best answer to both @Ben___Garrison and @Frequent_Anybody2984 below is found in this recent NYT article:
New Normal or No Normal? How Economists Got It Wrong for 3 Years.
We can go back and forth one whether the underlying datasets were right or wrong all along, whether the forecast models were accruate within an exceptable margin, and how far out, whether your own prediction or post-hoc interpretation is vindicated.
But the fact is that the 'experts' in their communication, reporting, framing, advisement, and forecasting were wrong. It is plain, and clear and widely known. To disagree, is to disagree with the experts on what the experts believed.
To express confoundedness at this trickling down into people updating priors against experts' guidance or to make silly analogies that this is just 'vibes' from out-of-step, misunderstood lived experiences, is incorrect.
And to alternatively admit, that 'yes, yes experts were wrong for the past 3 years, especially in what they communicated to the public, and in ways very obviously and coincidentally partisan, but please believe the current diagonsis of the economy right now because it's what the expert data tells us', well sure, I'm listening, but you need to do better than make insulting hokey analogies about lived experience or tell me that your Muslim friend is smart, but jihadistic so, I should just listen to the experts now.
iprayiam3
8mo ago
this has been by far the most boring election season we've had since I started watching in 2008.
What in the world are you talking about? We have a guy out on bail vs a guy at death's door, who's fending off credible corruption allegations. anything could happen. You talked 'tension' in 2020? This blows that out of the water
Biden is running as an incumbent with no credible challengers. That only leaves the Republican side, which isn't much better.
I predict there's a very high combined chance that it is not Biden vs. Trump by the time we get to election night.
iprayiam3
8mo ago
So far his debate performance is reinforcing my negative view of him. Great ideas but way too much slick, fast talking car salesman suspicious overeagerness.
iprayiam3
8mo ago
You're just cleaving 'sides' conveniently. By your description, your wife described the positive aspects of fat acceptance. You only want to be associated with the positive aspects of fat-detraction. Neither is truly a 'side' in any ontological sense, but you're just throwing in a biased gerrymander to accuse your wife of sane-washing.
Calling the fat acceptance movement hate-filled, is just an ineffective "Democrats are the real racists". It might be objectively true under carefully drawn definitions of the central word, but you've just engaged in word-thinking.
iprayiam3
9mo ago
It's not the same, sure, but where you get residency can be very career defining, especially if you have ambitions at being something other than being a shopping center dermatologist.
I have medium experience wtih academia.
I sympathise with the aims of the system but even so I’m surprised people aren’t livid - I’d never heard of this system before.
My PhD chair was one of these. I found it entirely unremarkable.
And getting a position because of who you’re sleeping with is the dictionary definition of nepotism. This is word-thinking. I don't care that it's called, nepotism. It isn't just not bad. It's good. Liberalism should be subordinate to the family, not the other way around.
At least if they limited it to marriage or shared children there would be a higher bar to climb.
Sure No disagreement there.
You are describing what I used to criticize here as liberalism of the gaps: the theory that the solution to culture and institutions falling to progressivism via post-detraditionalization liberalism is MOAR liberalism!
No, the solution to protecting tradition and institutions is protecting tradition and institutions, both through fortification and legal protection. Libertarian solutions to protecting / building institutions cannot work in a legal landscape that makes a key component: free association, illegal.
OP is pointing this out with the fact that 'no politics' is subverted when you declare X value neutral. But the other side of the coin is also on display. When X is value neutral, anti-X is illegal discrimination / harassment. Start your own... cannot work without first winning back the neutral ground, which cannot be done when you spend all your time abandoning your institutions and fortifying elsewhere.
Show me an example where conservatives/traditionalists abandoned X to go build their own X-prime, where X-prime remains both not a ghetto and not actively infiltrated.
Your question about why traditionalists don't build their own X is easily answered in that they can't build their own X, and part of the reason is ironically because half their rank are actually liberals who keep telling them to build their own X.
Example:
Jonny Vanheusterwhilton is a made up character who used to get picked on as a child for his ridiculous last name, but that is completely irrelevant to this story so let's call him JV and we don't need to spell out his last name again.
Jonny V (JV), has lived in his neighborhood his whole life, even buying his parents' house when they retired. It's June 1st, and bigot that he is, JV (Jonny) bemoans that the neighborhood is plastered in Pride Flags and preachy yard signs. He's saddened that his neighborhood July 4th picnic has been discontinued and replaced with a late June Pride Party.
Jonny's actually not even a bigot, not even by modern standards, nor even a conservative. He is very pro-LGBT right, a believer in letting people live their own lives etc. He's just a combination of patriotic, nostalgic, and finds pride to be tacky and over commercialized. Yet this gets Jonny labeled a right wing bigot, which almost frustrates him as much as getting picked on for his name as a child.
Eventually his friend, @Primaprimaprima encourages him to just build his own neighborhood. (+) Out of options and tired of being picked on JV sells his family house and buys some farmland with several others in a less desirable exurban part of the town to turn into a new neighborhood. Saddened by the lack of mature hardwoods, history, culture, or accessibility to the broader city, JB puts that aside and focuses on the upside: no more Pride Month.
Although JV is not a conservative, it took partnership with a lot of them, and some outright bigots to even get this neighborhood started. No worries, though, because they aren't banning anyone. JV has a simple liberal solution: Their HOA will just say, no value-messaging yard decorations.
The HOA includes a lot of other shit JV doesn't like. His old neighborhood didn't have an HOA, but now, just to get back to neutral JV has to accommodate regulating EVERYTHING, even the length of his grass. He hates mowing. Almost as much as he hates his last name. Or being called a bigot.
Trouble begins when some of their conservative neighbors put up a cross on their front door, or Easter decorations. 'Hey,' yell the libertarian sect. NO MESSAGING. The French neighbor, Le Prima, convinces everyone that secularism is the best they can hope for in this new arrangement, the conservatives mostly* sadly acquiesce, telling themselves, at least it's better than Pride Month. (*A few with conviction move away to an even shittier, further exurb, to find out what happened to them scroll up to the + above and start reading. Continue recursively.)
This satisfies JV until July 4th comes around, JV's favorite holiday. There will be no J4 parade, and he is forced to take down the American flag he hung must come down at once.... Oh well... at least in the name of fairness this is a compromise.
JV wonders how previous generations like the one he grew up in were able to use maintain communities with shared traditions, while keeping out the elements they didn't like without over-regulating everything. JV can't ponder long before his neighbor accusingly reminds him about the types of discrimination that happened in yesterday. Remembering quickly that nostalgia for any aspect of the past is for bigots, JV quickly stops his musing, and never follows his train of thought to the answer: The type of community JV is describing is found alive in the neighborhood he left, albeit with different values.
Well all goes well for 2 more years until, as the city grows, his neighborhood does too. His exurb becomes a desirable suburb, and now folks who would have simply ignored the neighborhood move in. Doesn't matter thinks, JV, they'll have to live by our rules just like everyone else.
Imagine Jonny Vanheusterwhilton's shock on June 1st of the current year, when after returning from a trip oversees, he sees PRIDE FLAGS everywhere and a flier for a neighborhood pride parade.
"But.. but...but...," stutters Jonny. "I thought we didn't allow value messaging!"
"We don't," his helpful, new neighbor replies. "But... this was brought up at the HOA meeting you missed. You see us new neighbors quickly explained that this isn't about value messaging. It's common decency. To suppress it wouldn't be neutral, it would be bigoted and hateful. They saw it our way.
There were a few hold-out undesirables, but our lawyers were there to make sure they understood this is not negotiable, it's equality. I mean, anything less would be like not allowing you to hold your wife's hand while walking around the neighborhood."
"I'm actually gay," says Jonny.
"And a happy Pride Month to you!," the neighbor replies cheerily, while handing him a school board voting guide for the candidates who most protect trans youth.
That night, JV's visiting his old friend distraught. "It's simple," says Primaprimaprima as he opens a beer and hands to JV. "Just start your own neighborhood."
iprayiam3
6mo ago
If you're tempted to disagree from your own emotions, then pray tell how Christians came around on IVF.
Oh, Catholicism certainly hasn't come around on that. I am absolutely one of those who welcome hurdle to your technological and human advancement both from within and outside of my Christian faith. I fully understand the animosity toward the religious from your point of view, and of course I understand the metaphorical (and cathartic) language about picking a bone with a god you don't believe in; I simply wanted ot point out that I still find it an offputting frame from the other side (though of course you're not appealing to someone like me when saying it). It's a sentiment meant for one's own side, I suppose.
iprayiam3
8mo ago
Consider how "incel" went from a morally neutral descriptor to a moral condemnation
I can't consider it because I've never seen it except in these scenarios where i'm assured it's true by its detractors. I especially haven't seen this in real life.
romantically unsuccessful men are about as low on the totem of sympathy as you can get.
Again, Ive never seen this. Get better friends people. Romantically unsuccessful men are to the contrary some of the most sympathetically talked about people I know. Even where it's not sympathetic and just pathetic, that's not the same as immoral.
Doing it on the meta level is pretty funny, I have to admit. 10/10
If you're contorting my comment into moral repudiation of someone for specifically being poorly undatable, I think we've found the disconnect.
This looks like nothing more than a victimhood mentality looking for a bully.
Even if it were somehow morally (I'm not) maligning the OP it's not for being single or unlucky in love.
If a Jewish guy stands up in a movie theater and shouts, 'AntiSemites are trying to silence me!!", His point isn't proven when people shush him.
Similarly, if you come in and say, 'how come I'm morally maligned for being undatable!", I'm not proving your point by repudiating that claim.
iprayiam3
8mo ago
But Freddie's approach actually makes total sense as an attempt to force people to have skin in the game.
There a lot to respond to here but this sentiment just seems backwards to me. Isn't the goal not to get people who have decision making power to have artificial skin in the game, but to put people with genuine skin in the game into a position of decision making?
iprayiam3
9mo ago
should be left alone.
No disrespect back at you, but that's not how Christian marriage works. you knew that going in, and you're wife knows that. If either of you don't know that, your respective fathers have certainly fallen short here.
Is there an underlying principle at work here that explains both positions (opposition to AA plus opposition to debt relief) that doesn't just reduce to bare economic or racial interest?
The quickest and imo most accurate answer is that it's teams, not principles holding the two groups of support together.
But for a more effortful reconciliation, I don't think you need to go all in on race or bare economics. Support or opposition to both rulings can cleave rather nicely into a broader philosophical disagreement of social responsibility and the purpose of education for democratic equality & social efficiency. The argument for both is a collectivist view that goes:
Education is a public good, which should provide broad social benefits. Universities and the government should maintain the right to press on the scale to ensure democratically available and efficient outcomes.
In other words, both are united by a philosophy of social responsibility to both sides of the college as a public good bargain: "access" and "outcomes".
The anti-side of both is one about individual / meritocratic fairness. In both cases someone is getting to skip the benefits line, not based on personal merit, but on a collectivist effort to balance some measure. Education is a private good, and proper democratic access is one of equal, unbiased cost/availability, not collective equal access.
EDIT: Other replies below are even more parsimonious about a dichotomy between clear interpretation of existing rules and activist creep. But the most parsimonious in terms of popular opinion, remains teams.
Help me understand more clearly why this is 'deluded'? it might be wrong but deluded? You talk about your clients' poor theory of mind later, but don't offer any reason why, in their shoes they should know and beleive that you work just as hard for clients you believe are guilty.
I know it is a light hearted article, but the whole spirit of sneering and literal anecdotes of mockery and sarcasm with these people is good evidence that you might treat them psychologically differently. Maybe you really really would never work a little harder, polish a little more, fight a little better for a client you were sympathetic too, but that hardly seems deluded to assume.
When I recieved a serious speeding ticket, which I beleived was somewhat in err, the exact thought was in my mind as I debated how to discuss it with lawyers. Yes, yes, they're all going to fight for me to get out of it, and yes it's routine boring shit. But with even a chance of outcome unpredictability in the air, and knowing that I won't be there when the lawyer negotiates with the DA, is it really, not just incorrect but 'deluded' to wonder whether the lawyer, who's not getting any bonuses for better outcomes here, might advocate a little better for me if he likes me? (also I, a PhD, wasn't 100% confident exactly what the rules were about incriminating yourself to your lawyer. I can only imagine some level of lingering uncertainty with an uneducated criminal, especially if their lawyer talks to them with sarcasm and playful mockery that goes over their head.)
Even if that's not a conscious thought, we all want to ingratiate ourselves to people who hold some sort of power over us. You might see yourself as 'working for' this guy, but every time I interact with a doctor, a mechanic, or much less often a lawyer, I have a strong pang of recognition that my outcomes are somewhat at the mercy of this busy stranger's scruples. I become over eager to prove myself worthy of their esteem and extra consideration. Is it stupid and often counterproductive, sure. But your sneering about it to strangers on the internet only reenforces my perception that professionals are contemptuous of a lot of the pleebs they have to boringly 'serve'.
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