kiln
1yr ago
Does anyone have a good model for Elon's thought process here? I do not see him deriving any satisfaction from his current role at Twitter.
Investing effort as the CEO of a Social media product seems like a big step down from being known as a Tech Entrepreneur in the Electric vehicle or commericial Space aviation space.
Getting into fist fights on Twitter trying to squeeze non advertising revenue from a social media product seems like the least interesting and the most self-defeating thing to do. The general population is now accustomed to getting Social media for "free". It's a losing battle to make them pay for it with the glut of other "free" options.
kiln
8mo ago
Is it that while travelling she doesn't have easy access to low-prep, decent tasting easily eatable food?
As a financially constrained student, if I wake up in the morning and don't have stuff prepped the previous night, I am going to gorge myself on milk, cheap chocolate and cereal.
I doubt anyone truely cares about the actual proportion of various ancestries. What they care about is ethnogenesis, how their people came to be.
For this purpose, Y and Mt DNA shed light in some aspects that autosomal DNA only cannot, such as the type of intermingling that gave birth to your ethnic group, power dynamics, etc.
For example almost all Latin Americans have y-haplogroups denoting European paternal descent but their Mt DNA shows near complete Native American ancestry for Maternal descent.
Hence we can infer that Latin Americans of today originate from European men and Native American women.
What about European maternal ancestry? The conquistadors were almost all men.
Native American paternal ancestry? You can guess.
This pattern of ancestry turns up in many other populations.
Most modern Europeans attribute their ethnogenesis to such asymmetric gender mixing.
kiln
1yr ago
neutered the Hinduism of wealthy British Hindus (even of high caste
Minor nitpick on the "even of high caste".
From my personal experience current gen urban/wealthy higher caste Hindus are among the most deracinated groups in India or the diaspora.
You will find more genuine faith or adherence to tradition among the middle caste Hindus or Christians/Muslims of all castes.
kiln
1yr ago
What do you mean?
The rare few times QQ comes up on SB it's just mentioned as the place where people write NSFW stuff.
The colloquial dialect of Hindi and Urdu are very similar. But their more formal registers have sufficient differences in vocabulary to confuse a casual Hindi speaker a bit.
I remember stumbling on a news report in Urdu and finding that while I understood everything that was being said, I had to infer the meaning of quite a few unfamiliar Persian/Arabic origin words by context.
Possible reasons for a difference in opinion.
In the order of fluency, I can speak English, Kannada and Hindi with my grasp over Hindi primarily being through the Bookish register and some exposure to the colloquial one during undergrad. I also do not consume Bollywood movies/music which I've read tends to use Hindi that leans slightly more towards Urdu vocabulary.
While I cannot give any point in the support of "Men are funnier than Women" since that's not something I believe to be true.
I think I understand our point of difference better. You expect The Motte to be a forum for perfect rational debate. And I guess that's what many on themotte claim it to be.
But it's not that and that bugs you.
It doesn't bug me since I do not expect The Motte to be a forum for perfect rational debate. While folks here are better at stating and accounting for their biases than other spaces on the internet, I do think a lot of people end up venting their frustrations a bit. And that's fine.
I feel that mainstream progressive (and conservative) spaces impose binaries on topics and rule out discussion on domains that their binaries fail to explain.
The less restricted nature of The Motte helps to find arguments that may offer better explanations and would otherwise be banned. But of course you also get bad arguments that should have received more pushback. We all have our biases, I just see that as a part and parcel of the trying to model the world better.
kiln
1yr ago
What you are alluding to can be better explained by "not understanding something since their job depends on not understanding it".
For example, opinions that toe the line on gender issues, even if poorly supported receive no push back when expressed by women. Hence, they have no incentive to think about them critically when the conclusion may not benefit them in the short term.
Plenty of people including men have shown this tendency on other issues when their privilege hinges on not addressing it.
kiln
1yr ago
Depends on what spaces you hang out at.
In the past, the folks I followed on twitter were mostly in the Software industry. It was not a fun experience to find out that most of the well known and influential folks in the industry who I once looked up to would unplatform me if I ever tried to add some nuance into the whole spiel.
I very much had to filter out any culture war relevant topics or keywords from my feed to restrict it to the technical content embedded between the rants and snide remarks.
Now most of them are off to Mastodon and my twitter feed is healthier for it.
kiln
1yr ago
So, you're saying they weren't richer. What made them higher status then? Was there no material benefit to being in an upper caste?
If we consider being a rich landowner the epitome of status in a poorly-industrialised society like India, than the link between upper caste and status becomes a bit fuzzy.
In Punjab Jatt Sikhs tend to dominate. In Tamil Nadu I hear a lot of castes who are considered traditionally as Shudras dominate but this does not make Tamil Nadu the land of caste egalitarianism that some imagine it as. They have the highest rates of caste endogamy in India and have plenty of news worthy cases of discrimination among themselves, just that you cannot plaster Brahmin in the headlines. Different regions have different dominating castes.
From my own experience there seem to be as many rich Brahmin land owners as broke subsistence farmers. My extended family leans towards the latter. To make an analogy to the US, we were trailer trash and we sure felt privileged.
kiln
1yr ago
While I wouldn't go as far as to call it unethical, I agree that avoiding meat is more ethical. Many of the animals we eat seem to be able to experience suffering similar (enough) to what humans do. And for me at least the response to seeing animals suffer is very similar to what I feel when I see humans suffer.
But the current prevailing sense of ethics among most of my peers do not recognise eating meat as particularly unethical and meat is a decent and easy source of protein so I do not shy away from eating meat whenever it's available. In case the ethics of my peers changes significantly enough to start regarding meat as highly unethical I wouldn't mind stopping.
Ultimately, while I agree it is not very ethical, I don't care for it enough to act on it, especially when there are no social consequences for not doing so.
I can empathize that it's not a nice experience to face positions that you feel are an attack on your person or deeply held beliefs.
I pretty much feel the same in every corner of the internet. To give an example that should hopefully be at some distance from the American Culture War, I definitely do not enjoy people claiming that India being colonised by the British empire was good for us and civilized us unwashed barbarians. It is not fun to be spoken down to by Americans who believe my lived experience of living in my country holds no weight. Nor do I enjoy reading about what Americans say behind our backs about the Indian expats in the Software industry.
But as much as I would love to give objective statistics to prove people wrong, I doubt I will ever be able to satisfy those who disagree.
Now on whether "Men are funnier than women", it is a poorly supported argument since the only thing going for it is anecdata. But given the dumpster fire that is the reproducibility in Sociology, anecdata is probably the best you will get. Besides, how many people even base their social know-how on studies over anecdata from folks they know or can relate to?
Also is it that the argument is poorly supported that bugs you, or is it because you feel that it puts down women?
Would it feel any less offensive if someone gave "objective" proof for this?
It wouldn't be any less painful for me even if someone threw objective proof at my face by ripping open a portal to a parallel universe where India never went through successive stages of colonization and is still a cesspit of suffering.
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