kky
1mo 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
1mo 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.
kky
1mo ago
Looks to me like Trump imagined that because the US is large, it has magical powers to compel others to do what it says. I’m getting a strong feeling that this is the same exact thing as happened with Russia and Ukraine. Wasn’t he supposed to end that war? What happened there?
kky
1mo ago
That would be a good top-level post, in my opinion, if you ever feel like fleshing it out. I suspect I personally disagree, with some caveats, but it sounds like you have something interesting you could argue for, and which would be well worth seeing the light of day.
Ping me if you do. I’d very much like to read what you have to say.
kky
1mo ago
Oh, I didn’t do anything bad there, I just didn’t have any of the experience I needed to enjoy it. Going back much later and speaking the language well enough to hold a (simple, very patient on the part of my interlocutor) conversation, I’ve had a much, much better time with the country. And in retrospect, I would have liked to explore a less-overrun Kyoto more using those skills.
kky
1mo ago
“The damn commies mind controlled our women!” is a pretty lame excuse, given that women are well-known to be more little-c conservative than men (which is why so many of them are big-L Lefty these days).
The actual problem was exactly what I said: the suburbs were deeply deracinated and undermined two of women’s deepest sources of stability and happiness: connection to their (non-atomic) families and to a strong network of peer women, especially including older ones. Those connections provide material support for the primary duty of childcare and serve as a stabilizing factor for emotional distress, as well as being simple entertainment and fulfillment. Being locked down more to her husband made a woman more fragile and increased the aspects of her life which she required from him in particular, proportionally lowering her own self-reliance and alienating him (as the demands put upon him grew ever more conflicting and severe). In the edge cases the relationship fractured in some dimension or another, and this fracture in turn alienated daughters from their mothers’ way of life. The most determined and hot-tempered became feminists and started changing the tradition from the top down.
Properly big-c Conservative cultures give women the strong same-sex support groups they need, typically through something as simple as a village gathering or an extended family.
kky
1mo ago
Disagree. Historical evidence is strong that being a housewife in deracinated, suburban 1950s America was pretty damn miserable. Consider that it was their daughters in particular who became second-wave feminists - in open repudiation of their mothers’ lives. Why would they do that if it were something to look forward to?
kky
1mo ago
I only went there as you describe once, some ten years back. I was very young and dumb and spoke none of the language so most of it was wasted on me. Most of my experience is of the hellhole sort… oh well. At least I met some very nice people each time I went!
kky
1mo ago
Personal intervention? Not unless I was literal family to the kid, or similarly close due to other events. Adults trying to slyly undermine a parent’s agenda is a nasty thing even when well-intentioned. The kind of bond needed to trust that from the kid’s perspective is significant. Otherwise, it’s either not going to stick, or you’re gonna have erratic results because the child has no training or instinct to defend against grooming. From what you say, the parents do seem to be abusing the poor boy, but being quite frank, child abuse is a fairly common thing in various gradations and breaking out of the abuse is usually going to happen in or after puberty if it’s going to happen at all. Trying to break a five-year-old’s trust of his parents sounds like it could lead to some much darker places.
As for the state. Essentially never, outside of truly bright lines, like permanent mutilation or death. The state is so ponderous and ignorant that bringing its power to bear on something as delicate as personal relationships is incredibly unwise and guaranteed to yield destruction. So forbidding hormone poisoning and surgical mutilation of a minor who cannot consent to such things (which adult consent would lower them to merely, in my eyes, deeply unwise self-experimentation) well within the state’s purview, with little possibility of overreach.
Of course, this is from the perspective of one who would rather other moral busybodies and the cruel state stay out of the serious business of how he does good for his children and is willing to yield some theoretical power over the families of others for political consistency on that point.
kky
1mo ago
That sounds like it would only be enforced in major international tourist destinations - which could be a lynchpin argument for my long-term goal of never going to Tokyo or Kyoto again in favor of the places I actually like.
kky
1mo ago
the CDU/CSU/SPD coalition is basically trying to enact the AfD program, as far as migrants are concerned.
Mass deportations are on the table? This is news to me. Anything in particular you’d recommend I follow to learn more?
kky
1mo ago
C’mon, “was a nutjob” is the free square in any impersonal murder outside of actual government assassination or gang violence (but I repeat myself). They’re always nutjobs! It’s in the job description! There’s nothing productive that can possibly come of random violence. In order for it to be productive, it needs to be highly regular and difficult to prevent, but random lone wolf killers are never regular and can’t convince people to change their actions outside of getting better security detail. And that’s assuming the killer even has a putative political agenda and isn’t just lashing out.
It’s what bugs me about every manifesto. People are fidgeting in their seats waiting for the PDF to drop, but I can tell you what’s behind door number one through infinity of this particular game show: nothing but lunacy. The only suspense is whether you’re going to get literal nonsense schizo ravings, a poorly-hacked-together litany of grievances against various parties who were all but assuredly NOT shot in the event, or personal impotence carefully disguised as a political theory with sweeping claims about Western Civilization. But that’s just picking favorite flavors when it’s already a given that the nut has cracked.
I believe this is near where you stand on the issue too, but trying to make sense of motives for random killers is like reading tea leaves from a cup of drip coffee. These people say things, but the sheer baffling idiocy of the crime makes it clear that whatever they say is absolute drivel and the real reason is that their brains are broken, they are not capable of making up sane lines of reasoning any longer, it’s just a matter of how much horsepower is left to pretty the diseased thoughts up. That’s why Ted Kaczynski has such staying power: his writing is so good and his rhetoric so strong that he can distract you from the obvious fact that his natural conclusion to the question of getting a controversial book published was to mail bombs. Insane, insane. My crank of a grandpa just self-published instead, and they’ve both had the same effect on actual mainline theory.
So yeah, the guy’s a nutjob, the next one will be too, and the one after that all the way down to the last man. It’s always been this way, but I guess there’s lurid pleasure in reading something really bent. And maybe it’ll wind up being suitably specious cannon fodder in this or that culture war, as a treat.
kky
1mo ago
If you want my opinion, keeping your IT job is mostly about working for the right company (responsible, hasn’t overhired, good market prospects) in a critical and productive, usually backend, capacity - not on puff projects funded by zero interest debt. Easier said than done, I know, but the team I’m currently on has survived multiple rounds of layoffs at my company completely untouched. In software, boring is extremely good. Management is not immune to cuts, on the other hand.
You’re right that domain knowledge transfer is a serious problem in tech. The one thing I’d say is: the best people tend to be good by virtue of their ability to learn fast and learn as a function of general principles over rigid specifics. I personally haven’t had much trouble moving into new jobs or domains. Then again, I wasn’t even a programmer initially - I learned on the job. So maybe I’m not the best example, since my case is already weird.
Overall, I empathize with pretty much any cynical take on big industry and tech in particular. Industry leaders have not shown great judgment over the past couple decades. That said, the best advice is always some combination of work on your skills and build good relationships, and be prepared to pivot if it comes to it. The one good thing about the modern industry is that your individual labor does have value and you can take the value of your labor where you want - it’s fundamentally inalienable. Keeping that idea close to heart helps you stay sane.
kky
1mo ago
I’m going to ignore most of your comment, which I agree with and have nothing to add to, and focus on the part that deserves elaboration.
'Explain this gap in your resume' being met with 'I was a SAHM when my kids were in diapers' will not stop normal average jobs from hiring you. It's only awesome girlboss career track progression that will be derailed that way.
I’m a white collar worker, and a member of a specific skilled trade - namely, a programmer. And it is a craft, or trade, for what it’s worth. There’s a huge amount of trouble in learning to program the right way, where “right” goes from the seemingly-trivial “works without bugs” and “runs pretty quickly and cheaply” out to the trickier “can be easily maintained and extended” and “can be deployed without taking out double digit percentages of the world’s Windows servers.” That’s what I do, and what I aim to be good at. If I do my job right, nobody notices a thing, and their systems run as smoothly as sci-fi.
The reason I bring this up is to add some context on white-collar work and why what you say is so.
The biggest costs to cutting yourself out of white collar work are:
- Needing to re-familiarize yourself with the subject matter.
- Losing contacts within an organization and having to build a promotion bid from scratch.
- Missing the slow, natural growth of abstract and industry-specific knowledge needed to rise.
Going through these in turn.
White-collar work - the real stuff, not lesser clerical roles, usually called email jobs - is knowledge work. And that means your job involves a hell of a lot of learning and recitation. Obviously a skilled craftsman also needs to know his stuff, but the amount of specialist, company-specific, novel, or downright esoteric knowledge you are expected to have in a white-collar role is massive.
This is the table of contents for the Arch Linux wiki. Scroll up and down - pretty long list. Now note a little number in parentheses by most of those - this is the number of subpages aggregated under one of those keywords. And while Arch’s wiki is known to be pretty exceptional, it is not exhaustive of Linux knowledge, and Linux knowledge is not exhaustive of computer science or IT skills.
So dropping out of that world for a time means you will concretely be missing skills when you come back. The longer you’re gone, the worse it will be. In the best case you’re simply going to be making the same money as before you left. Worst-case, you’ll be making less. Some of this, in software, is honestly just dumb churn. I’ll admit to that. But it’s the
Moving on. Analyzing a white-collar worker on the merits, especially in a large (bureaucratic) organization, is challenging. It usually doesn’t have obvious and measurable parameters, and if it does, those are guaranteed to be gamed and inefficient elements will rise to the top. So your ability will be in no small part judged by superiors with good reputations. Is this potentially cliquey? Can it keep good workers who are bad at networking down? Hell yes. But it’s roughly the best of a bad set of options. So if you drop out, you have to spend X amount of time proving yourself when you get back and giving some concrete evidence that your superiors can use to support you when you’ve won their trust.
Lastly, and this is probably the most important. Learning to be really good at a trade takes a lot of time and focus. You need talent, and then you need to put effort into it daily. This is doubly true for anything with poor feedback cycles, and the feedback cycles in white-collar work are typically slow and lossy. There’s a long, long way from the choices I make to my company’s revenue, and so telling the difference from a good solution and a bad will take some abstract reasoning and really good evidence. This usually boils down to time in the industry deeply engaged. And if you want to rise above a certain position, this effort and growth is required. On top of that, the vaunted “soft skills” are indeed quite important, since your average white-collar worker is navigating a human-dense and political environment. Dealing with them effectively is just another part of the job, and you only get better at it with time.
I’m aware none of this really undermines your central point. In fact, in a sense I’m supporting it. None of these points are actually fun things about white-collar work, at least the high-skill variants. And the low-skill variants aren’t much different, they just tune down all the knowledge about real things in favor of trends and politics. But the problem of returning to work isn’t just getting past the HR screen, and I wanted to convey a little about my own vocation.
kky
1mo ago
For what it’s worth, there is good historical (and contemporary) evidence that people have always learned cultural practices from one another, instead of it being purely transmitted by conquest or force. A fairly elementary example is the extremely rapid spread of crops in the Columbian Exchange, a slightly deeper cut is Japan’s conscious and discerning importation of Western norms post-Meiji Restoration, and a perhaps controversial take is that cargo cults were (are?) an ineffective attempt to learn Western practices.
This would roughly be your “virus” case of horizontal transmission. But what I think your model misses is how and why people transmit cultural knowledge, and how the selection effects work mechanically. I believe that this is through conscious recognition of tangible outcomes that can be hypothetically correlated with the practice for positive selection, and implicit comprehension of norms on their own terms for retention of behavior. In plain language, you pick a practice up either because it’s doing something good for someone else or because it’s just the way things are done. Let’s call the first case adaptation and the second retention.
Every practice has its price. There’s a cost for following it instead of doing something else, including doing nothing at all. It also has a certain legibility to it. Using a certain spice in one’s cooking obviously and visibly changes the flavor, but increasingly complex crop rotation schemes will only show their merit on the order of years. Superior military practice can only demonstrate its worth in the event of a war. Finally, there is a magnitude to what the practice will do for you. Diminishing returns are always an issue.
So for adaptation to occur, you need the perceived advantage of a new practice, inclusive of how confident you are that the practice causes the advantage, to significantly exceed the cost of adapting the new practice.
Meanwhile, retention just works like any old social pressure. If you don’t do this, you aren’t cool. The power of retention is in proportion to the power and influence of the normative group over you.
Back to the actual meat of the subject. Right now, I would argue that the following propositions obtain:
- Our economic system, bolstered by explicit and implicit welfare schemes, is so powerful that most immediate needs are filled without any real effort.
- The worst risks of sex and solitary lifestyles have been massively mitigated by birth control and welfare.
- There is an ascendant class of tastemakers with historically unparalleled reach, influence, and power. They have displaced most of the small local tastemakers that preceded them.
- Points 1-3 have only been in effect for a very short period of time.
Back to adaptation. What people these days see is not a minefield of viscerally bad outcomes with cultural guardrails, or obviously superior external groups to learn from if one is not to fall behind. Instead, they see a more-or-less flat floor of outcomes with a huge amount of outdated rules that are visibly being broken to the pleasure and advantage of the rulebreakers. Cultural norms around how to get the most visible pleasure spread like wildfire, and there are clear reasons given for why the old ways are outdated. Nothing immediately and unignorably bad happens to the people who adopt these practices, so the change keeps spreading. Debt, drugs, sexual liberation, obsessive hobbies, and so on.
Meanwhile, a massive proportion of cultural practices are exported as part of a social-political program by the cultured urban elite. These have some basis in people’s preferences, but their spread is almost totally disconnected from these preferences, and is instead based in political maneuvering within this class. It’s effectively fashionable beliefs.
And finally, and most critically, most of the bad outcomes from these practices only manifest on a multigenerational basis. The fertility crisis will only really come to a head as the older people keeping the lights on retire or lose the capacity to handle their work. A life of solitude or sexual misconduct only really comes calling when you get old with no younger family to take care of you. Unproductive behavior only starts incurring costs when it spreads so far that bare minimum upkeep becomes infeasible and the pre-existing infrastructure crumbles - like an ill-cared-for house.
So my analysis would be, at this very moment we are coming down the tail end of a very unrepresentative and culturally dysgenic era. The selective pressures were encouraging bad behavior for around sixty years, and have incurred some major costs. Some of those bills are already coming for repayment, and the younger generations are starting to flail around for superior cultural practices. Some will likely not come fully due for decades to come, and will cause their own crises. But there is some intelligence behind this, and it can be directed. People are already trying to direct it. The problem is just that the outcomes we need to see are another sixty years away. So until then, the best we can do is proceed with discernment, wisdom, and most of all, faith.
kky
2mo ago
I’m gonna be real with you here. This specific relationship is probably not gonna work out. However, that doesn’t mean it was a mistake. It’s learning how to be in a relationship, and most centrally, that women can be attracted to you. I get that it’s new, but it’s probably going to keep happening, especially if you keep hanging around places with women (hopefully offline soon enough).
@FiveHourMarathon is on the money with the specifics. Women love feeling special and attended to. Something he didn’t mention, but I should, is that some women experience this in the form of a fight. This is the borderline case in a nutshell. Women who get into relationships online are fairly likely to be borderline, if not maladjusted in other ways. The pattern to watch out for is volatility. She will draw away, try to make you mad, try to make you jealous, and start a fight in some capacity. Then, after the fight, she will get much more clingy and attached. Even otherwise normal women will do this from time to time, to a minor extent, if they’re feeling understimulated or stressed in the relationship, as a sort of way of venting and then getting affection, but in borderlines this is extreme and constant.
If she has concrete things she wants out of you, and providing them makes her happier, then you’re in a good spot. If she’s impossible to satisfy, see the notes above, and bail when it gets to be too much. I hope it’s not the case, there is a very good chance that it’s just the kind of ordinary fighting that men and women get up to (note: NOT a bad thing, my now-wife and I fought a ton when we were first dating, things got way better), but it’s the kind of thing that can waste years of your life and hair off your head if not handled right.
Also, love is not really best thought of as a natural expression of deep and abiding emotions. Save that for the chicks. Love is about day-to-day duties of caring for and about another human. That means doing things that feel artificial until they become second nature. Why? Because you care about the person, and you want them to be happy. It will feel good too when you get it just right. So don’t lose hope on that front, and don’t forget to ask for what matters to you, too.
Finally, for the whole “how can she like me” thing, never forget that a woman’s heart is ever a mystery to men. Frequently to other women, and themselves, too. Even if there’s an explanation, there’s no way you could ever get it, not least because you’re not gay. (I think.) So don’t stress it. It’s just how things are sometimes.
kky
2mo ago
If we're talking dating in specific, the eternal challenge is that, like a job search, you have nothing to show for it until you have something to show for it. It's a binary; zero or one, success or failure. There's no obvious progress, it just doesn't work until it does work.
...Except that's not true, as far as I've been able to tell. The most romantically gifted men, starting from puberty or even before, don't see things that way, as evidenced by their actions. I'm talking the playboy type, casual and friendly and involved with women without any aggressive need for sex, natural at swinging that into a relationship when and as he pleases. He keeps score in a totally different way: by how he enjoys talking to women, being friendly or flirting or something more as the case may be - and if it isn't anything more, who cares? He's already on the board. And, as a matter of fact, those are the elements of cross-sex engagement that form the foundation for actual dating, the awareness of what women are like socially developing into a sense of what excites them and how to win their hearts. Put another way: imagine your average kissless virgin were to happen to get a girlfriend. Wouldn't he struggle massively until he was able to fill those same elements back through his experience with her? Wouldn't he have trouble satisfying her romantic needs, keeping her excited and attached, and even interacting with her on the banal dimension of the everyday? Even if you can skip the tutorial, there's no replacement for the basics. And obviously, the same applies to women, just in a different form. And I don't think that's just true of dating. Every one of the seemingly binary outcomes in life actually have concrete elements that constitute the potential for the correct outcome. The job search is a good example: people who are really, really good at careerism are always cultivating their contacts, they enjoy networking, they get a kick out of an interview just to learn what a certain place is like. And, in fact, that is the baseline for finding a good job and navigating upwards in it. Even trying to beat Magnus has concrete prerequisites - to have any chance at all you need to be at least 2500 ELO, for example, and that in turn requires you master the various basics of chess, and so on and so forth, and whether or not you get remotely close to your goal is of course founded in your native talent but also in how much you can appreciate and pursue those lesser accomplishments. And, for what it's worth, I think that merely becoming quite good at chess can be a great outcome, even if your initial goal was foolishly to score a point off of Magnus Carlsen.
So much for the practical side. How about theory?
Deciding on what to pursue and why to pursue it is the unsolvable question of life. Some things we get more or less for free, like basic drives for hunger, sleep, etc, and some things we get socially, like the sense that a girlfriend or a white picket fence should drift into frame at some point. But what exactly one should do, what marks success as distinct from failure, is inherently a value judgment and has no absolute scientific answer. Of course, that doesn't stop people from waffling about evo psych or some such if it's their wont, but we all know about the naturalistic fallacy. But knowing what your destination is, even in a rough and sketchy sense, is an absolute requisite for navigating life. Imagine the captain of a ship who does not know where he is going or what he hopes to do when he gets there. What would the point be of such a voyage? He stares across the horizon not knowing if open sea or visible land is preferable; he adjusts the steering and the rigging not knowing if he should go this way or that or faster or slower; he comes across a beautiful island or a vibrant port and stares dumbfounded, even coming in to dock briefly, but soon leaves again as he has no idea what to do there; and in the end, he develops a sense that storms are to be avoided because of their unpleasantness but little else. But a captain who has a goal, even a vague one of "find what lands there are in this direction and what they are like," is grounded and guided in his ventures, even where his knowledge and ability might be vague. He can learn and adjust as he travels, become a better captain, and eventually have something to show for it.
And this sense, as it applies to life, is one of the central pillars of the old liberal arts education: the aesthetic. Aesthetics, the sense and study of what is beautiful and what is not, is the fundament for all subsequent judgments. When we say we want a good life, what I believe actually obtains is that we want a beautiful life. We want to be surrounded by what is beautiful and meet, to have the cadence of our lifestyle bear a harmonious rhythm, and to have our life story tell itself a lovely tale. But telling the beautiful from the ugly requires some education. In the old days, this was done (for the common folk) through repetition of folktales and religious extracts or (for the elite) through explicit indoctrination into a specific tradition. This, I think, holds across the entire world, as a pattern. But these days this story is weak. Postmodern perspectives refuse to judge beauty if they do not actively attack the beautiful. The common folklore is shared through advertisements and popular media, and peppers vague platitudes into the central message that the good life involves a credit card. Finding the right thing to do is harder.
But, of course, it isn't impossible. The prescription is simple: engage with art, especially older and more spiritual art, and decide on what is beautiful enough to pursue. Just imagining that one is obliged to find a girlfriend is insufficient. What does a romance mean, what kind of woman does one want, what kind of man does one have to be to be a partner to that woman, and what kind of woman would want the kind of man one would have to be to be a partner to the kind of woman one wants? And given that, where might she be found, approached, attracted? That's the real question for our imagined incel. And even then, the answer doesn't have to be concrete. A failed search for the East Indies can instead yield the West Indies, although I guess that's not really a positive analogy for the ladies in this scenario, given what happened next. But a lifelong pursuit of the aesthetic and a vague goal to motivate can help one hone in on a real set of goals, something real to accomplish. And that accomplishment has to start with the notion that there is something worth accomplishing.
kky
2mo ago
I dunno, am I the only person who hasn’t noticed performance issues with VSCode? I keep myself to a pretty tidy set of plugins, and the thing lets me edit files just fine. I’m not running an overpowered rig or anything.
This is an open request for horror stories if anyone has them; they’re always good fun.
kky
2mo ago
Russian history, perhaps? The Mongol domination was, if memory serves, fairly traumatic for their self-identity. Might be worth doing the legwork and going through a history of the Mongol period and immediately following.
Japan has an interesting postwar phenomenon where the masculine was severely repressed (i.e. pushed down from open representation) in favor of cute feminine and childlike appearances. But I’m not sure this was the American occupation so much as it was the fact that the previous ruling ideology was so overtly masculine and that it totally failed the country to the point of destroying their holdings and getting them occupied.
kky
2mo ago
I wouldn’t say so, no. Learned helplessness is more: I couldn’t, therefore, I can’t, starting with the paradigmatic example of the tethered elephant. A lack of traction is more: I don’t know how, therefore, it’s impossible. A major difference is that you should expect the former only after extensive cudgeling, but the latter can arise out of a simple lack of stimulus. After all, the default state is not knowing how.
Small example. When my daughter was learning to crawl, she was REALLY mad. She wanted to get somewhere, but had no idea how to make it happen. She wound up going backwards a lot of the time! If I’d let her onto incel forums she’d be posting about “walkchads” and “leg ratio” and that she was NGMI (to the rattle which we’d put out of reach). But then she figured it out and everything was OK. She was frustrated, there was a lack of traction, then things came together. But you definitely couldn’t call that learned helplessness. Where would she have been able to learn it?
kky
2mo ago
I’d disagree with you - your post seems to be entirely aligned with the blackpillers, in that it shares a central outlook on things. That outlook could be summed as nihilism, but the overtones of philosophical malice which that word implies are pretty misleading, in my opinion. If I were to give a real summary, it would be: the feeling that nothing one does is working. And to be quite clear, I think this is not about dating specifically.
There’s a particular psychological phenomenon, which I’m sure has a proper name but which I will term traction. Traction is the guttural sense that you are getting somewhere. It is the feeling that the things you do have a palpable effect on larger circumstances, and especially on your own fate. Traction is the internal representation of your own agency. Failing to find traction is, correspondingly, absolute torture.
Traction requires the experience of matching your own efforts to meaningful results. If you work hard, and do the right things, you will be rewarded. But there are two ways for this to go wrong: first, for a person to fail to find things to do which will yield tangible rewards, and second, for a person to get rewards despite failing. Both paths lead to despair, to the sense that what you are doing doesn’t matter. A person without traction is perpetually frustrated, in a sort of frictionless distortion of a world, all intangible images and no hard if painful reality. This experience is outright torture.
I’d argue that our immediate society is effectively set up to maximize frustration, starting from childhood. Schools have few avenues for real success or failure. If you are convenient for the teacher you will get approval, but excellence at the material has no outward effect. There’s no actual way to fail either, no real consequences to suffer, No Child will be Left Behind. And kids are stuck in that fake world for most of the day, leaving little time to go explore elsewhere. At home may be better, but a complacent parent will provide distractions for the kid that have no connection to their behavior (we used to call this spoiling the child) and make no real demands of them. College is little better, of course. And the political moment is so far against failure that even adults who should be failures are able to scrape by as if nothing was ever truly lost, and even collect Social Security as childless elders instead of facing their failure to directly or adjunctly reproduce the next generation who will care for them.
Anyway. Career trajectory is obviously part of this. If you can’t swing extra work into extra pay, or if that extra pay cannot visibly lead to things that concretely matter to you, then you have no traction at work. Why not skate by at minimum? Dating is as well. There’s a phenomenon where someone is trying to make a bigger leap, in terms of their own ability, than they think they are - usually because they’ve been carried past the point where they’d typically learn the elementary pieces. But making that leap in a single burst of effort is impractical, and the inevitable failure is frustrating. And if you keep getting your dole payments that bring the floor up on where you should be, such that if you were to go stand on your own two feet it would be a long and painful journey to get what you can currently get for free, then getting traction is a monumental task.
Dating is like this, I think. Porn, both for men and women (romance literature), gives a person sexual experiences they don’t really have a right to. Ditto the sorts of wish-fulfillment literature that lets a person self-insert into an infinitely pleasant and unchallenging relationship. Meanwhile, the actual starting point is obscured: the person who wants to date needs to start by learning to be decent around the opposite sex, what things they do or don’t appreciate, how to charm them and not offend them, and only then progress to things like flirting and courtship. An explicit dating relationship can only really happen on top of that foundation. And this applies to women too: if you’ve heard anything from the women miserable that they’re stuck in a “situationship” where they put out for a guy who won’t date them, it sure sounds like they’re the unfortunate equivalent of a guy who’s been relegated to simp orbiter. Neither knows what to do to get what they actually want.
The blackpill is nothing more than an expression of this condition. Nothing you do seems to matter; maybe nothing could ever be done at all? And it can apply to anything: dating, career, hobbies, even politics. We have a lot of political blackpillers on this forum, which I personally take as a sign that they’re trying to influence national politics instead of the more appropriate first step of coming to terms with one’s friends, family, neighbors. But national politics continues to deliver people political wins they don’t deserve, so we’re likely to continue seeing frustrated people for the time being in that dimension. And for you, friend, I have sympathy. I don’t particularly know what your struggles are, as your post mostly talked about generalities, but I’m guessing you’re from a striver background and are on the first or second rung of some or other intense career and feeling pretty lost. Or something else! I’m not a psychic. In any case, I wish you the best in finding something that is, to you specifically, worth the effort which you are capable of.
kky
2mo ago
Verifying the output depends on the use. Code gives you a pretty easy time verifying. Searching docs depends: if you’re trying to find some info in the docs, this can be sufficient to get keywords and navigate to the section you want.
Lots of current LLMs are pretty good at copying text out of prompts when told to, e.g. page numbers. That can help a lot, since verifying is very quick.
Hallucinations and other errors are still very common and you must account for them.
kky
2mo ago
I agree it’s complicated. My area is in fact building, if slowly, and localizes said building to defunct industrial zones. I certainly don’t oppose that, and even certain renovations to older areas. Obviously it’s better than unending penury for people on the margin. And just as obviously, new things need to be built for realistic amounts of money. You have my full deference on these points.
But it gets on my nerves a little, the YIMBY assertion that these population shifts are just a fait accompli, that there’s nothing to do but adjust. Because from my perspective, there are large companies which have an easy time justifying investment and expansion in these specific major areas which have generated the crisis as a side effect of their operations. Which, you know, I get, it’s just how things go, the strong will crush the weak without noticing, it’s just a matter of size, and at that scale you can’t care about every little feeling. Believe me, I get it. But at the same time, I expect more of our leaders, you know?
There’s one software company, out in WI, whose founder decided to just stick in the area. So they have, and have pulled money in. There’s a town close to me, fairly cheap, lots of universities, where you could probably stick a cool tech campus. Pull in some kids out of college for reasonably cheap, do good work. Short train ride from the big city. Why don’t we have that here? Is it just that this one founder was part of the Ubermenschen and everyone else is stuck with Last Men? Don’t we deserve more? Actually, don’t answer that last one.
I appreciate the conversation, by the way. You were respectful on the differences, brought receipts, and read what I wrote over just using it as a way to launch into polemics. It’s very much noticed and appreciated.
kky
2mo ago
I appreciate that you brought receipts! It let me look at the area you’re talking about. It’s about 2x as dense as the areas I’m familiar with, meaning the rules obviously change. Looking at Parkdale, it’s clear that all the antique shops cluster at the end of Queen Street where there’s a big parking lot. I’ve never been there myself, but this doesn’t seem coincidental! The rest of the street appears dominated by entertainment, like restaurants.
you are aware it's this exact attitude that is causing the housing crisis right?
Wrong, actually. The housing crisis is a migration crisis: from old factory towns in middle America to the cities where prosperity seems to cluster. Why is that the case? Is that an inevitable property of reality, or is that the changing conditions of American markets driven by “knowledge economy” interests? There is an incredible amount of land in America. Why can’t people make a living in most of it any longer? This was not always the case, but it’s easier to talk about spoils in the few areas people have decided to fight over than the destitution of the rest.
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?
Obsequious, disgusting behavior. What happened to manly dignity and self-reliance? Isn’t America supposed to rise above feudal Europe?
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