kky
12d ago
What happens after that, though? So now you have a fourteen year old who has completed the school requirements up to age eighteen and can graduate four years early. Maybe they get into college four years early. But now they're fourteen on a campus with eighteen year olds who are theoretically their peers, and unless there is someone there to act in loco parentis they may not cope well.
If I were managing a school like this, I’d send the kid to the local community college with night school classes and have them start farming up two years worth of college credits and do something like productive wage labor on the side to drag things out. Possibly I’d see how challenging it would be to get my own school thus accredited.
At 18, apply to a four-year with two years of credit and plan to graduate at 20, which is not that far off from the larger cohort and is a fine time to go for the first rung of a white-collar job. Most American four-years permit this. It’s something I did myself, with the ages shifted around somewhat (I got my two years of credit while working starting at 18, and went to an ordinary high school).
kky
14d ago
The deal with children of wealth is: if they turn out rotten, now it’s everyone’s problem. You never hear about the poor kid who blows a 1k inheritance in a strip club in one night, but the dumb company heir who goes bankrupt brings a lot down with him.
kky
15d ago
kky
15d ago
I like your examples of face-reading and 3D visualization. Doesn’t it sound a lot like these are distinct mental capabilities that certain people have distinct from their other capacities? And the idea of using your visualization skills to understand other mathematical realms suggests that your “general” intelligence in this case is informed by your ability to generally apply a more specific talent - and this works for students in proportion to their capacity with that specific talent. Presumably the students who don’t get it but who are still good at the subject are channeling a different underlying ability.
Flipping it around heavily, the memory example is also great. I’ve seen this as well: pretty much everyone I’ve met who was not heavily brain damaged has had some category of thing which they remember quite a lot about, corresponding tightly to their areas of interest. Presuming that “my results on a test” can be an area of interest, does that mean that the means of measuring abilities can identify divides in capacity when it’s really just a divide in focus?
My biggest sense for IQ and intelligence is that we just don’t really have a good idea of what’s going on. We’ve found certain capabilities which are confusingly harsh yes/no values, like the internal monologue and the ability to envision things, considering that there is no evidence that someone is one or the other without asking them: you would expect the difference to be night and day, like it is for children and adults! But we’ve also found certain capabilities that appear to be a single thing, like memory, but which express themselves in such radically different ways that you’d be forgiven for thinking they were entirely different capabilities, and which differences are immediately obvious upon meeting someone. That is, our intuition struggles to break intelligence down into real atoms, and naive external analysis carves at awkward joints.
To the extent I have a point, it’s that intelligence is way, way more complicated than the IQ test model makes it out to be, that we know effectively nothing about it, and that we should be really, incredibly humble about our proclamations about it. We’re all out here debating the four humors; that’s how bad it is. People back then would talk very confidently about the humors, and now they look ridiculous. They may have been smart, but the reality was that they were fools, and they could have been less foolish by being honest on what they didn’t know.
kky
15d ago
That’s a story for another time.
This sounds like the most important part of the story.
kky
15d ago
Of course! That’s what’s screwy about the whole manosphere take. And not to be crude, but it hurts if she’s even just insufficiently oiled. Not interested in experiencing a total lack of it. It’s hard to view even as an I-win-you-lose deal. It starts to sound like nothing but malice.
The most I’ll say is: having shared expectations for the fact that the man is probably going to want sex more than the woman and that he does in fact deserve a little above and beyond what she’d have of her own accord, as part of a mutually loving relationship where he takes care of her disproportionate emotional needs too, makes it much easier to have the nuts and bolts conversations about what each partner wants. Treating sex as something that arises out of desire or not at all is going to miss out on the fact that there is an obligation. Marriage books often have advice in this vein in them, and it is useful advice for all the mere mortals who care in principle but for whom the logical correlates are not so vividly obvious.
kky
15d ago
If I were to put it from the point of view of someone who does not hate women, it would be: a woman who says no, rather than not right now, is a woman who has no right to her marriage.
It sounds like the rape enthusiasts have something else going on, but I think the above description is a pretty reasonable standard for marriage, leaving out the man’s parallel duties.
kky
15d ago
That’s hard, man. I’m sorry to hear it.
If I have one real qualm with women these days, it’d be a certain lack of fortitude or resilience. Something goes wrong? Obviously that sucks, but it’s critical to find a way to get yourself back on the right path. Nobody’s emotions are so important that the world is gonna stop for them - and it’s incredibly callous to let them undermine the people you’re close to. Sure, there are genuinely awful things that take precedence, like a death in the family, but most of life’s little insults aren’t a big deal. Some women get it, but a lot don’t.
Same category as bringing your work home. Yelling at the wife or kids because the boss is a dick. Just not right.
kky
15d ago
Practically speaking, what I’ve found works is pretty simple: make sure she gets enough rest, provide ordinary and regular affection, and (this is the big one) start warming her up WELL in advance. Get a little more touchy, flirty, make it obvious what you want, and that it’s her, but don’t demand it right then.
Later on, when it’s a better time, she’ll remember.
kky
15d ago
Women used to provide much, much more in terms of money, back when spinning was a thing, and “wife-selling” was a well-known Anglo practice of soft divorce for when things really weren’t working out.
Plus, consider that the law back then was basically decided on a village-by-village basis, and you can see that for a woman to straight-up defect would not be to her benefit.
EDIT: reading back, you didn’t mention historical aspects. So take this as color as opposed to rebuttal.
kky
15d ago
There are at least three pieces at play here: first, the question of deterministic heritability of mental characteristics; second, the question of how genes as we currently understand them map to mental characteristics; and third, the question of what, precisely, IQ is measuring in relation to mental characteristics.
As far as mental characteristics go, I think it’s fair to say that some are pretty clearly innate and inherited and others are not. There are a lot of children out there who pretty obviously derive their mental abilities from whatever their parents have. However, that’s not the whole story. There are habits of thought that can dramatically improve or sabotage a person’s performance. A simple example is just whether someone cares or not. When I play chess, my level of play whiplashes severely based on how focused I am, on the order of a few hundred Elo. When I’m not focused and don’t really care, I just play moves. I believe this replicates across most fields of activity, and that caring has a very strong cultural component. Of course, a few hundred Elo is not multiple standard deviations of performance, but I think it could explain half an SD pretty easily, which is actually quite a lot.
Genes are a stickier question. My rough viewpoint is that our current understanding of genetics is far too coarse to pick up on anything but the simplest behaviors, where a gene encodes a pretty straightforward protein with one real use case. But in real life, all of the body’s systems are expected to interact quite intricately, and we should expect some novel properties to emerge at the intersection of genes. I’m far from an expert here, so this is all I’ll say. I’m not surprised that efforts to reverse engineer the hack job that is evolution are hitting difficulties, but all it proves is the lingering inadequacy of our science.
IQ is the fun part. On the one level, it’s quite simple: IQ is just a measurement of how you do on a specific batch of tests. But those tests claim to be an imperfect measurement of intelligence, and that intelligence is a singular value. This I am not remotely convinced of.
The typical argument is that because different mental functions correlate, there must be some underlying characteristic that powers all of them, and that they’re all secretly linked. But this doesn’t hold much muster with reality. If our various mental abilities were merely outward expressions of a single underlying scalar, we would expect to see people at the far reaches of intelligence be great at everything. In reality, we tend to see them be amazing at one thing, and somewhere between good and terrible at the rest. Another personal example: I am >3SD on the right for analytical intelligence (measured, in this case, by visual puzzle solving) and dead middle on “processing speed”, which means the rate of quickly mapping trivial inputs to trivial outputs, as measured by a professionally administered adult IQ test. This is irreconcilable with the notion that both are just expressions of an underlying “intelligence.” How could that intelligence be both perfectly average and massively out of the ordinary at the same time? It’s nonsensical. What actually makes sense is that these are different capabilities of the mind, and for whatever reason I am much stronger in one than the other. That leaves the question of why these disparate capabilities correlate in most cases, to which I’ll just leave two hypotheses: first, adverse circumstances that lower all abilities, like how being severely obese will undermine pretty much all athletic performance; second, that humans are sorted into classes in a social hierarchy and that these traits are then selected for in groups based on what the class does. Those are explanations that are plausible and do not require a general intelligence.
Anyway, interesting topic, and I do agree that too many of the opinions here come down to faith over examining what’s going on and flexibly adjusting based on new information.
kky
15d ago
Apologies, friend - I switched out the pronoun for a noun. Does that read better?
Thanks for the reminder to not let these posts get too stream-of-consciousness.
kky
16d ago
In all of this, is there any standard of duty, even to herself, that a woman could fail? Or is she always the one failed?
Of course - it's the duty to understand these dynamics and rise above them. Pretty similar to the duty on incels in that regard. Nobody can ever really help you but yourself. And in both cases, the fact remains that the typical support structures that defend adolescents as they try to work this out have been undermined.
There's one particularly salient fact for women, though, which is that they suffer increasingly severe setbacks as they fail to work this particular issue out. Your average man who can't work out appropriate sexual practice has a long runway. There's no real consequence, long-term, of virginity qua virginity. I was a late bloomer myself. It wasn't really a problem - I wound up coming into my own in my mid-twenties with no harm done. Women, on the other hand, are running down the clock of their fertility and the visceral attraction of youth, alongside the concrete health risks of sex and the severe consequence of an unintended pregnancy. A woman in her mid-twenties who only just starts to figure romance out is on a very tight clock, and has to get up to speed on the actual elements of romance, find a good partner, marry said partner, and then start having kids. This has to be a very matter-of-fact business for her to be able to start before 30. Any further errors, like getting stuck with a sweet but unambitious boyfriend and not knowing when/how to pull the plug, will potentially set her further years back. And if she's stuck with a kid, good luck; if she's had an abortion, then it may be easier to date, but it's a concretely bad thing that will stick with her.
And women get cast into this sphere much more aggressively than men, just by virtue of biology. A woman is sexually grown, to a great extent, somewhere in the realm of 18-22. At that point she receives full sexual attention and has to "debut," as it were, whether she's willing or not. Men aren't grown in the same way for several years past that point, when they start to get their careers in order. But wisdom comes at a year-over-year rate regardless of physical growth, and so women are thrown out into the open with some four or five less years of material experience compared to their developmental male peers. Compare how pretty much every woman has some sort of story of going through puberty in her early teens and immediately starting to receive open sexual attention from men, which they are nowhere near ready to handle at that phase. It's the same sort of problem, just at a different stage of life.
So I think it makes sense to say that, given the plain and simple disadvantage women have here, that society can stand to adjust itself a little to buffer women against the worst harms here. I recognize the typical term for this is patriarchy, or possibly paternalism, but it seems to me quite fair to say that people ought to go out of their way to stop men from obviously preying on women in the vulnerable range. The women from the story above are NOT in that vulnerable range - hence losers - but many women are, and do not benefit from getting tossed into the shark tank. For what it's worth, I'd say that men need a parallel kind of deference in childhood, mostly focused on their much delayed organizational skills. A boy who struggles with the rote elements of schoolwork is not necessarily delayed or misbehaving, and comparing him to a girl his age on those merits is quite cruel - and probably why college is getting so lopsided these days (which, in turn, feeds back into the ladies' problem from the start). Or for romance, boys tend to need a lot more mentoring and structure - the few outliers who "get it" tend to really overperform, or you get older men who swoop down to eat the boys' lunch, which is both problems rolled into one.
Maybe my view of the world is more strongly sexed than yours. But I hope I've laid it out fairly clearly, and shown that it isn't all a one-sided affair. On the individual scale, everyone always has nobody but themselves to blame. But on the larger scale, it makes sense to talk about the larger pressures, because those are what determine where the line between success and failure falls.
Oh, the women are idiots, rest assured. They've presumably been raised on low-quality romance literature and misinterpret the least effort towards a pleasant date from an attractive man to be a sign of deep and abiding love. So when some socially adept and quite rapacious men figure out that there's an ample supply of idiots out there who just need a meager offering of romance-lit aesthetics and who can't initiate or sustain a real romance from their own abilities, said idiots have no idea of how to approach romance from... well, not exactly an adversarial stance, but at least an active one, where you accept the base fact that life between man and woman (possibly man and man or woman and woman, not much personal insight there) is always a negotiation and you need to stake out your own ground to get what you want. And a relationship without disagreements or fights is either a temporary anomaly or an active con. But I won't say the men are acting in any way reasonable or just in this case. I can get a young idiot screwing up and breaking the heart of a woman, but doing it repeatedly shows that he doesn't care about them at all.
I don't think these are representatives of the average woman, either. At least, I really hope not. Although the simple fact that I haven't run into women like this is not any evidence of anything in particular.
kky
16d ago
The preferences are, I think, the big part. And the main of that is understanding what the desired end-goal relationship is, how that can be founded, how it can be maintained... and so on. Then the natural partner becomes more clear, and the virtues that a woman can cultivate beyond sexual attractiveness. But if you don't know what you want in the end, how can you tell the difference between a good partner and a bad partner, rather than simply an attractive or unattractive partner? And that in turn requires a vision or model for a stable romance, and considerations of old age, and so on and so forth. But it sounds like the women in question are, at best, thinking of the early phases of a romance. I'm not sure they're even looking ahead to something as minimal as moving in together, much less marriage or children. And if that's the case... yeah, I guess it tracks that when the author talks about how much effort her girlies are putting in, it's about getting the right outfit and putting makeup on, not figuring out ways to show off a loving and nurturing spirit (e.g. cookies, not that hard to make but very pleasing).
But on the other hand, I don't think it would matter to the guys they're currently dating how nice or not they are. Sounds like they'd tolerate a mean or dull woman just so long as she puts out, which is a pretty sad place to be. If those women are losers, then just imagine the guy who spends all his time trying to sleep with losers...
kky
16d ago
That's a pretty naive take. What is "it feels like we're falling in love" followed by "I did say that. But that’s also how all my good first dates feel. Like we could fall in love!" if not clear and obvious duplicity? That's straight from the top-level link. Haven't you heard of lying with implications before? You don't have to spout literal falsehoods to deceive someone as to your intentions. And intentions are what romance is about.
kky
16d ago
I’m not sure the author wants anything at all. I remember her from a while back, and get the same feeling of simple hatred from what she writes. She hates men for being wicked, she hates women for being stupid, and yet she’s still friends with them? Even though her darling mother is right, she frames it in a stupid religious way, and thus is not really worth closeness.
I don’t find a single piece of her writing that betrays an actual appreciation of a single other human being. Hell, she doesn’t even seem to like anything in the abstract. She’s happy enough to look data up, but only insofar as it justifies hate. And then there’s the OnlyFans deal on top of it. I suspect that the reason she’s still a virgin is less that there is something she is reserving it for, or out of a sense of chastity or self-denial, but instead that it’s a helpful way of hurting others by refusing herself to them. This, I’m guessing, is why she also is friends with the kind of men she explicitly hates. She has to understand they’re a very particular subculture, right? She could find men who aren’t like that. So why is she staying around lecherous men who only see value in having sex with women and then denying them - if not so that she can take her satisfaction by denying them first? In that light, this piece seems more a justification for why she enjoys staying friends with women who destroy themselves. It’s for a good cause, so it can’t be because she hates them. Right?
Enough amateur psychoanalysis. It suffices to say that I dislike this woman quite a lot. She’s not totally wrong on the specifics, but this bitter poison is better not tasted.
For the actual question: how does a woman avoid this? I think it’s much simpler than you let on. The men who get away with this nonsense only do because they get a truly disproportionate amount of female attention. A man who gets even modestly less attention will struggle to achieve the same feats. So: go for less popular men, more trustworthy men, or both. Less popular is sufficient to avoid this kind of behavior. More trustworthy gets what a woman actually wants.
One word that has more or less dropped out of common parlance is seducer. It means, roughly, a man who lures women in on false pretenses. What are those pretenses? In the olden days, it was marriage. Dickens’ Pickwick Papers has, as one of its droll episodes, the somewhat aged and unattractive landlady of the titular and rotund Pickwick misunderstanding a totally unrelated announcement of his to be a discussion of marriage. So far, so irrelevant: what matters is that the next chapter (issue) is her bringing him to court over the affair, on the grounds that he was leading her on, and as he did not intend to marry her, she was owed damages.
While the fictional event was intentionally absurd, we could not even write such a scenario today. There is no law that a woman can enforce on the basis that her seducer had promised marriage. The idea is nonsensical: sex is just sex, right? Love is free, so why tie it to marriage? And yet women still want commitment. But “boyfriend” is not something that can be legally enforced, and so a disappointed woman has no recourse.
It’s easy to forget, however, that the explicit law was far from the only protection against seducers. The first line of defense was the woman’s friends and family. There’s a rather enlightening scene in Tolstoy’s War and Peace - spoilers, by the way - where the delightful, young, and severely naive Natasha is seduced by a ne’er-do-well from another noble family. He plans on eloping out of country with her, which will bring him entirely out of the grasp of the law. Natasha’s bosom friend finds out, informs the powerful matron who has lately been exercising godmother-like authority over them, and the whole thing falls apart. The would-be seducer goes to the site of their destined meeting and finds the huge manservant of the house cornering him, deeply rumbling “My mistress would like to speak with you,” manages to slip away and elopes rather more individually than initially planned. I believe “hell for leather” is how we describe that sort of ride. Nowhere in this equation is Natasha having sex, finding out he only wanted sex, and trying to get recompense after the fact. In reality, her friends and family were deeply involved with her and protected her from her worst mistakes. True, the law which made them matriarchal guardians of her made coercion possible, but the mechanism was preventative.
So if women want to stop being disappointed, they need people to help protect them from seducers: people who can sniff them out, stop a dalliance going too far without commitment, and stand up for and to them. And I suspect where this starts is, in fact, recognizing that women have a reasonable demand in commitment and that the man who leads her on and gets what he wants while giving nothing in return is a waste of time. I suppose the Facebook “are we dating the same guy” groups are an awkward attempt at this, but frankly they’re sunk because it’s all women of the roughly same age, and the dynamics devolve to the usual gossipy mess of women’s worst elements unrestrained. What you actually need is a connection to older, married women and good men. They aren’t competing for men’s attention and can give some real advice. And probably, the women who wind up happy will be the ones who manage this in one way or another.
Anyway, things like this make me glad I ain’t a dame. Seems hard!
kky
16d ago
All that said, it seems very early to call the Dems permanent losers at all. They're in disarray but I don't think they've been dealt a killing blow the likes of which the Tories got. I can totally see a Clinton or Blair type figure come up with a novel coalition formula and reinvent the party.
This I would consider a hostile takeover in the same vein as Trump. Someone on the outskirts of the party enters the running and totally shatters the central machine despite its opposition. I do not think that such an individual can come from the party center, due to their excessive purity testing and effective shadow networks. See the top-level for evidence there. Secondarily, the party center is attached to a convenient notion of a coalition that simply does not exist, or which exists in irrelevant form: the nonwhites plus the women plus the gays who specifically want to organize against white men. In reality, each group and subgroup listed has internal priorities that have nothing to do with targeted resentment (except, maybe, some of the women - which is a different and serious issue), and therefore have nothing to organize around. Gays in particular have already “won” their battle as a group in a decisive manner. Gay sex is legal, gay partnerships are official, and so any gay man or woman has everything required to live a normal life - meaning their own priorities take over and they vote as members of different blocs. Meanwhile, there is no real effort or ability to reach uneducated white men and the people who do not reflexively hate them.
So, how likely is a hostile takeover? In my eyes, not likely. Sanders tried it ten years back and was effectively frozen out after a serious grassroots effort. I remember there being a serious attempt to primary Biden last election which was totally shut down and the instigator punished - before he was eventually proven right. So the party is very powerful at self-policing. A potential challenger would have to break through all that, including an increasingly ideologically concentrated and radicalized primary voter base (the less committed have been driven off - because why would you hang around in areas where people scream hate at you for disagreement), to win. They would need to create a parallel mobilization network to capture disaffected voters for the primary, to weather unequal debates, to get their message out despite hostile legacy media, and to possibly even attempts to procedurally take them off ballots, which has become an actual practice of the Democratic Party! I consider this fairly unlikely, unless some cataclysm befalls the central hierarchy and renders them incapable of organized resistance. I guess a civil war that shatters any unity between young and old could do that, or mass prosecution by Trump, but I doubt it. Thus, a slow continuation of decline ending in irrelevance.
kky
17d ago
and by nature people love rightful royal power.
I’m not so certain that the founders of this country would agree. Quite honestly this kind of attitude feels unAmerican. How did we get here?
He has the head of the longshoreman’s union and the head of NATO writing effusive love letters that wouldn’t be out of place addressed to a Chinese emperor.
Obsequious, disgusting behavior. What happened to manly dignity and self-reliance? Isn’t America supposed to rise above feudal Europe?
kky
17d ago
I think we are going through a Whig collapse, if much slower and less of a split. The party is sloughing off working-class voters and refocusing on the educated elite. The “small fractures” in the remaining party mean little; the core agrees on everything but whose ass should fill which seat. The real fracture is between center and periphery, and in the years to come I would predict an increasing muscular fringe of swing-vote Democrats whose real selling point to voters is that they do not fall in line in front of Trump or Vance or whoever, nor the Democratic apparatchiks. There will eventually be a showdown of sorts between that fringe and the party center, and the result will either be a takeover of the party itself or the founding of a new party. Either way, the principles of that group will steal voters back from the Republicans and re-establish the unstable equilibrium of two-party democracy.
That’s my prediction, anyway, or possibly my hope. I’m real damn sick of the current political divide.
kky
17d ago
If we follow your logic at its word, the natural conclusion would be the total collapse of the Democratic Party.
Right now, the fringe elements of both parties are wildly unpopular. The question for most elections is who comes across as the most repulsive and who successfully tamps down on their extremists in public messaging. Since Democrats are better educated and hooked into their politicians, this has turned into a real advantage for the Republicans. The Democrat extremists are able to effectively pressure and primary politicians into following their worst ideas, which have a lot of salience right now.
So we have a civil war right now, between the Democrats from the Reagan days who want to relive that heady sense of resistance like they were young again and the young progressives who have been educated into mind-meltingly unpopular ideas. Out on the distant fringes are the swing-state Democrats like Fetterman who are effectively untouchable by the party mechanism but equally have no sway over it. Whoever wins is going to win based on their ability to signal #resistance to the equally extreme base, as voters on the edge increasingly disengage with the party. But the party does not compromise on its least popular tenets, and in fact broadcasts them as a matter of principle, and the way things are going, will stand absolutely no chance in upcoming elections (only exception being the presidency if Trump does something dumb like defy the law to run for term 3 and scare the normies way too much).
So we should expect to see evaporative cooling concentrating the heart of the overeducated party, keeping seats where urban Millennials and Xers dominate and hemorrhaging the rest. And then, probably, the Blue Dogs try to create their own party and recapture the many voters who really don’t like Trump but can’t find it in themselves to vote D.
There was a moment, after this election, where I wondered to myself: is this when the Dems will figure out what’s happening? Is this where they Sister Souljah the woke out and start trying to win elections again? But that moment passed in a heartbeat, and the old party mechanisms reasserted their dominance. I think this is a general pattern, not just for democracy but for every kind of human organization, where the mechanisms of power become too cleanly rationalized, too stable, and the possibility of an internal coup vanishes. The existing order loses the possibility of making mistakes and being replaced from within, as they control all the needed feedback mechanisms and are not vulnerable to it. It’s at this moment that the levers of power cease to be representations or formalizations of the real sources of power, and become sources of power in themselves. When that happens, the power structure itself is in dire jeopardy, as it’s lost all connection to reality and has become a sort of ouroborus, swallowing its own tail and growing smaller and smaller.
I suspect that part of this self-consuming behavior is related to class divides like the educational alignment of the parties, but that’s probably enough on this for now.
I’m going to assert a couple points.
First, although I think there is a right and wrong way to have sex, I really, really do not want the government getting involved in it past the absolute brightest of lines (rape).
Second, the locus of the erotic is, for whatever reason, in the forbidden itself. Everyone knows that sex is dirty. If it’s clean, normal, and well-ordered, it’s not tempting in the first place. At minimum it must be private; the private side of someone which they would never show anyone else, but for you…
A practical middle ground would be to define a clear boundary between softcore (basically nudity and intense looks, no partners or penetration) and hardcore (intercourse, violence, unrelated obscenities), and put a lower legal age target for the former. There’s frankly not nearly so much that’s damaging to either boys or girls with just seeing naked people. Sure, unrealistic standards this or body image that, but it’s nothing compared to the implication of hardcore porn that women are supposed to experience sex in the manner of seedy porn scripts.
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