nand
1yr ago
Do the relationships between crime and economic equality get any more interesting when you break crime down into subtypes? Somehow, my naive imagination is that poverty would primarily motivate material theft, while wealth primarily enables psychopathic crimes (murder, rape, etc.).
nand
11mo ago
For small countries which do well, this leads to a different sort of jadedness where the national broadcaster is trying to ensure that their country loses deliberately for financial reasons (but is generally not able to say this to its viewers, who like winning). Ireland is the most famous example where eventually the cynicism got through to the viewers.
Can you elaborate on this point?
nand
1yr ago
I disagree with your assessment of the situation because to me there is a significant distinction between "weak, injured or malformed" and "psychopathic, murderous, criminal". In a crude analogy with another important system of life, the immune system, the former represent damaged cells that need to be repaired, and the latter represents cancerous cells that need to be excised.
Side note, I don't think dwarf fortress is a representative simulation of the social dynamics at play, because it doesn't model what it's like to have, say, an asshole boss whose coworkers actively suffer because of his ongoing existence.
nand
1yr ago
I mean, I was formally diagnosed with a psychosomatic pain disorder because I kept claiming I had stomach cramps to get out of going to school. This whole thing strikes me as a bunch of adults becoming genuinely confused that somebody could legitimately fake illness to get out of unwelcome chores, and lie about it with a straight face.
Teenagers are monsters whose moral compass has not yet developed. There is no "mass sociogenic illness" being "spread" via social media. Infohazard? Seriously? Just don't pretend to be sick to get out of work and you're immune.
I want to call this a "reference class fallacy". Any logical conclusion derived from treating something concrete as a typical member of a larger reference class.
To analyze it from another angle: the narrower the reference class you're arguing based on, the more statistical power your argument has. If I can prove something about everybody named /u/georgioz, I have proved quite a lot about you as an individual. But if I'm proving something that only holds in a statistical aggregate of all humans, I have gained almost no knowledge about you specifically. All I have gained is a tiny probability.
A reference class fallacy is when you pick an absurdly big reference class (e.g. all individuals) and then use reasoning based on the big reference class to infer knowledge about a potentially very small, distinguished subset (e.g. yourself, or even just humanity) of that reference class.
Since the reference class of individuals in the grabby aliens argument is potentially massive, the uncertainty of whether statistical statements over the entirety of that reference class applying to us specifically becomes quasi-infinitely high, thus making the argument vanishingly unlikely to be valid.
How many and what variety of women have you dated?
I used to be skeptical of the ideas presented in GP's post until I started dating a lot and experiencing all of these dynamics for myself - from the "losing interest quickly in women that are too open to having sex" to the mad, head-over-heels attraction to excessively coy women that nonetheless give off ever so slight hints of their sexuality. I can wholeheartedly agree with this characterization of gender roles and human sexuality.
Hell, even the women I speak to about these topics basically confirm the picture: their dream man, overwhelmingly, seems to be a high-status, independent and adventurous psychopath who turns into a sophisticated poet and lover in their arms. But you have to sell that image to maintain their interest. The moment you actually give them too much affection, they genuinely lose interest - a prize easily obtained is a prize worth little. (This goes for both sides, of course)
The net result is that the only relationships which end up lasting for a long time is one in which neither party is too interested in the other person, only just enough to be worth the effort. (And also why I think the best on-ramp to a relationship is a friendship with somebody you didn't particularly plan on fucking)
nand
1yr ago
Women being more susceptible to cults is an obvious example that comes to mind.
nand
1yr ago
Language exchange platforms.
Incidentally, I have never gotten a single match ever on dating apps. Just shows you how rigged they are.
nand
1yr ago
Those four examples have something in common which is completely unlike the defense missile example, though. A defense missile is a defense mechanism.
You are using four examples of retaliatory attacks, not defensive maneuvers. I think that is a very crucial difference. Compare the analogy to manslaughter in self defense vs murder. Nearly every nation agrees that it's legal to use lethal force to defend your life, but not to seek out your attacker and kill them in retribution.
nand
1yr ago
Imagine if a democrat arrested 20 republicans for possessing an illegal firearm because they misunderstood an ATF statute and the ATF webpage said that particular modification / accessory was legal. And when Rs got mad about it, a democrat said "think on the meta level - from a pure signaling standpoint - if we want to prevent people from knowingly committing gun crimes, we have to arrest people who commit gun crimes, even if they possess a defense.".
This argument makes complete sense to me. Otherwise, you get exactly the implication that people will start intentionally violating gun laws because they know that "I thought it was allowed" is a valid legal defense.
nand
1yr ago
This kind of proportional retaliation would likely reduce the amount of "cheating" in the game because people would be less likely to cheat in the first place if they received some sort of punishment for it.
My own experience and reading on this subject leads me to believe that this is an absurdly wrong conclusion. Retaliation tends to be disproportional, because people tend to underestimate harm caused to the other in doing so. This is the reason behind the common saying, "an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind".
I think the interesting nuance comes to considering the possibility of both of these things being true:
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Social reinforcement is a real effect, significant enough to be worth counteracting, and disproportionately hurts women.
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The upper end of the merit distribution naturally skews male, due to biological differences alone.
In such a world, which I have strong reason to believe we occupy, the meritocratic solution would be to enforce male/female quotas that are tuned to counteract 1 without negating 2. In other words, we want to find the correct ratio p of men:women that cancels out the evaporative cooling of women in tech but without lowering the resulting quality of tech workers as a result. (In other words, we want a policy that correctly identifies and counteracts any time a more skilled woman is usurped by a less skilled man because of gender bias in hiring/exposure, but without ever hiring a less skilled woman to replace a more skilled man just to fulfill a ratio)
The combination of my two assumptions leads to a correct ratio that's somewhere in between 0.5 and 1.0. For example, say that 90% of tech workers are currently male, then perhaps a '20% women in tech' quota would be net beneficial for overall merit. I think we would arrive somewhere fruitful if the discussion was about where on this scale that figure lies. But this is a discussion that can't happen, because insinuating p>0.5 is extremely taboo in the blue tribe, while insinuating that quotas could be beneficial at all is taboo in the red tribe.
nand
1yr ago
For somebody mostly ignorant of politics: How come Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea was largely ignored by the west, or at the very least, did not receive such widespread popular culture support (e.g. Ukrainian flags everywhere)?
nand
1yr ago
Baltic Pipe is also scheduled to start operating at the start of October, delivering gas from Norway to Poland (via Denmark). So the destruction of Nord Stream doesn't hurt Poland much and puts them into a good position to sell gas to other countries.
A far more symmetric view: Leftist inclined people want to create racial equality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the achievability and justification of such equality. Rightist inclined people want to preserve racial inequality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the unachievability of equality and justification of inequality.
Don't you arrive at these desires merely by adopting meritocracy as a core value? (In addition to different beliefs on the object-level question of whether or not racial differences in outcomes are primarily the organic results of natural differences in group abilities or primarily the result of societal oppression)
Are you suggesting that meritocracy is fundamentally a dishonest viewpoint? Or are you suggesting that most proponents of blank slatism vs HBD are not arguing as a result of an innate desire to see people justly compensation for their work? (If so, why? Isn't it just as infuriating to see people being unfairly elevated/oppressed from either point of view?)
nand
1yr ago
And then of course, there's the virus itself. It's easy to say the world could have reacted better, but it's hard to imagine we could brush off covid as a bad flu season. It's difficult to avoid both a large number of deaths and borrowing from the future.
But the majority of the people killed by the virus were negative GDP, so the first-order effect of the virus should have been to improve the economy.
nand
1yr ago
It only works because those websites censor everything that offends American puritan sensibilities. This is sort of why fansly exists, it has much laxer content policies than OnlyFans.
Know what Fansly also doesn't support? My credit card provider. (German national bank, via MasterCard)
if he lied, or even was misinformed, Ukrainian credibility will take a hit.
The one thing I have found consistently weird about the entire Western perception of this conflict is the universal mass-amnesia of the fact that Ukranian and Russian are birds of a feather. I personally tune out everything that comes from the mouth of a slavic leader as an obvious fabrication, and wait for the independent corroboration of events.
nand
1yr ago
Presumably the rest is coming from rare variants (the cutoff in this study is a minor allele frequency (MAF) of < 1% which is quite high), structural variants, or some genetic dark matter implying that our heritability estimates are too high or not being driven by DNA (?).
Or environmental factors (e.g. prevalent nutritional deficiencies)?
Incidentally, how do heritability estimates discriminate between genes that "causally" influence height (e.g. a gene that, when expressed, somehow biostructurally increases bone growth), and genes that dictate "unrelated" behavioral patterns which, in turn, affect the desired trait (e.g. craving/distaste for junk food)? Am I right in thinking that this is another major weakness of GWAS - even if you identify candidate genes, those genes might completely fail to transfer to, say, another population in which junk food doesn't exist?
So if you run a GWAS identifying N promising genes for affecting height on US citizens, you couldn't use that to reliably increase the height of European babies?
nand
1yr ago
The libertarians and fiscal hawks were saying we only had 30 years in the 90s, 20 years in the 2000s, 10 years in the 2010s... and now its next year or the year after.
Do you have a citation on this? (Especially the implied consensus)
nand
1yr ago
It's not altruism if I'm getting something in return (or have already gotten something in return and am therefore indebted).
Yet I've never met anyone who seems to have achieved quantifiable improvements in their lives due to it, or said that they've been "fixed" or "cured" from whatever was wrong with them and don't need it anymore.
I feel like I satisfy these criteria and I'm willing to discuss this with you in further detail, if you'd like. I can quantify improvements on the following metrics post-therapy:
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Self-assessment of life satisfaction and mood (measured daily).
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Number of friends, number of minutes spent engaging in meaningful social connection (by daily self-assessment).
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Sleep schedule consistency (measured by, for example, number of appointments missed due to sleep issues).
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Income and work schedule consistency (measured by my working hours, which I log).
As well as a similar number of harder-to-quantify but very personally noticeable improvements to my quality of life, such as my excitement and eagerness to try out new things, my decrease in aversion to social risk, and the fact that I can now stand in front of a mirror and admire my appearance instead of hating it. I attribute my decision to go to a therapeutic rehab for 3-4 months, as well as the ~2 years of follow-up talk therapy, as the major causal factors in arriving at these results. And while "cure" is a strong word, I previously satisfied the diagnostic criteria of three major mental illnesses (major depression, personality disorder, and social anxiety), and post-therapy I no longer satisfy the diagnostic criteria of any of them.
Specific factors that helped me:
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Being thrown into an unfamiliar social environment and having no other option but to learn to engage with the people around me and engage in unfamiliar hobbies (since I had no PC during all of this).
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Receiving encouragement (and social pressure) to leave my comfort zone and overcome fears.
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Better understanding my own emotions, wants and needs, through talk therapy and critical analysis of my behavior.
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Providing exposure to, practice on and familiarization with alternative behavioral strategies to deal with negative emotions.
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Literally just having a parental surrogate figure that cares about your well-being and is not themselves mentally disordered in the same genetically inherited ways you are.
But I will go out and say that therapy is not an abstract thing - the most effective interventions are also the most visceral and concrete. I would broadly speaking characterize it as the process of reprogramming my emotional reactions to certain stimuli. No amount of thinking will do that, you have to experience the world in a different way, to arrive at a different result.
I will also, quite frankly, propose that the success rate of therapy depends more on the individual receiving it than the practitioner, and that a better outcome is generally correlated with other good stabilizing factors - so ironically, those most in need of therapy are those least equipped to benefit from it.
This is an intriguing framing and something I'd like to learn more about. Do you have any references to recommended reading?
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