I think this is a very valuable change. There are certain users I would personally auto-minimize, not because I find their posts bad, but just because I find their choice of submissions personally uninteresting. But I definitely wouldn't block them, and if somebody I have "blocked" responds to one of my own comments I'd definitely like to know.
I don't see a reason for a block functionality to exist on this site, except as a short-term spam mitigation feature (e.g. for PMs).
nand
1yr ago
Birds have more neurons in their prefrontal cortex than humans (relative to brain size).
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
Something I thought about extensively at the date of the last iPhone launch was that this entire situation comes down to archaic pricing practices and a dearth of seemingly obvious technological solutions.
For example, instead of selling phones at a "first come first serve" basis and forcing people to suffer through stressful virtual queues and server overloads, why not just introduce a sort of "dynamic auction"? Give people an X-day grace period with which to register their blind bids. For each 'batch' of products that come from the factory, take the top N bidders at that point in time, and have them all pay the price needed to outbid the N+1th person in the queue. Break ties by number of 'batches' the person has been in the queue for, and break sub-ties by random chance.
Easy to understand (the more you're willing to pay, the faster you get your phone), simple, stress/DDoS-free, and all of the profit goes to the company making the product - not middlemen scalpers.
nand
1yr ago
I guess the part I'm confused about is how it isn't an obvious foregone conclusion that it was an accident, just based off the complete absence of plausible motive. Why would they deliberately attack two random farmers in the middle of nowhere?
A Ukrainian false flag would make more sense than a deliberate Russian attack, but even so, why would you false flag with something that looks like an obvious accident.
nand
1yr ago
I suspect (and nodding to the other post downthread) there's probably a gender angle to this; under the lens of rational self-interest it makes more sense for women to be progressive-conservative (PC for short), because reinforcing power structures is their evolutionary specialization (being the supply-side gender, they want their prices as high as possible), and more sense for men to be liberal, since they prosper when power structures flatten (more available and accessible ways to pay said price). Which is probably why that's what we see borne out in opinion polls, voting splits, and chosen professions.
This is an intriguing framing and something I'd like to learn more about. Do you have any references to recommended reading?
If I felt a non zero unit of empathy for every dying child in this world I'd be emotionally crippled by the weight of the world's suffering.
Not necessarily. This just requires the distance-related empathy function scaling sufficiently slowly so as to sum up to a manageable amount of suffering.
Although admittedly, even one cent is too much for this argument, because one cent multiplied by a population of ten billion is still orders of magnitude more than I would even be capable of feeling compelled to provide. As a counter-perspective, if I would be happy donating, say, a grand sum of $10,000 (after factoring out uncertainty) to raise the quality of life of the world as a whole in a utilitarian way, this maths out to a millionth of a dollar per person even if we assume a completely even distribution. Or, you know, a tiny fraction of a cent. (Of course, in reality, I would prioritize those $10,000 differently, so the proportion of it allocated to remote africans would probably be less than a millionth of a cent)
So not valuing an african at even a cent seems quite realistic. It's actually an absurdly high price to put on an anonymous life.
I have empathy for people in west Africa dying of malaria. But I also have empathy for the children that will be spared a life of misery as a result of not being sired due to malaria, or for the more environmentally adapted people that could be inhabiting their lands were they not already occupied.
It's not that I want Africans to suffer, it's just that I think saving the lives of somebody not capable of sustaining themselves actively decreases net utility due to second- and third-order effects.
Or, to put it into more industrial terms - there's no such thing as insurance without paying your insurance fees. What insurance fees has sub-saharan africa been paying to us, exactly? Their gracious donation of workers from the social caste currently responsible for the highest crime rates?
nand
1yr ago
Why not use the Bible as the obvious example? It seems to me to be, essentially, the most widely and universally disseminated body of work in existence - not only in translation and availability, but also in preaching, outreach, education, ...
Whatever Christian missionaries were doing, it worked.
nand
1yr ago
Out of context my first instinct would have been to assume this is a smear campaign designed to make feminism look daft. But I doubt such a smear campaign would have been authored by @UNWomen, unless there is some serious levels of internal fuckery going on.
nand
1yr ago
We can see this in cases like Kyrie Irving mentioned below, and Kanye West, where if anyone says anything bordering on Jew-illuminati conspiracy theory, they are pounced on and labeled as fascist and far right.
Major nit: There's a difference between saying something "bordering on Jew-illuminati conspiracy theory" and saying something that can, without much interpretative effort, be understood as literally meaning "I want to systematically kill Jewish people".
Using Kanye West's outbursts as an example to prove a point about how you can't criticize Jews without being deplatformed is at least as misrepresentative of reality as claiming you're being victimized by somebody's (unwitting) use of the 'OK Sign' hand gesture.
nand
1yr ago
Isn't that what NeoVim did? Some group of devs were unsatisfied with the BDFL, they the project, and now it's basically the main fork. I don't think that at the time it was forked they were majority (tho I'm not sure).
NeoVim didn't kick out everybody's commit access and steal the name and website of the original 'vim' project when they decided to fork.
WDYM by 'deplatformed'?
Brought to awareness that the thing is no longer what it used to be and that everybody should switch over to whatever new repo they were forced to use as a result of the original one being taken over.
nand
1yr ago
Female sexuality is about being defensive, elusive and making men chase after them - to catch the best, most dedicated fish in the sea. Female porn actresses are depicted somewhere along the spectrum from 'sexually aggressive' to 'total slut'.
nand
1yr ago
In my own experience, there is a vast disconnect between perceived consensus on the "public internet" and perceived consensus in real life and private correspondence with people. (*) I think that what has happened, at least in part, is an internal schism caused by big tech's stranglehold on public spaces drowning out all dissenting opinions from the public face of the internet.
What you're left with is an illusion of progressive consensus, but the reality, to me, seems more like people are just moving on from publicly blogging their political opinions.
(*) Heavy disclaimer: I live in Germany, but primarily engage with the English-speaking Internet. So this rift is amplified by cultural differences between the US and Germany.
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".
nand
1yr ago
I'm with you. I've been locked into the technophagus practically since birth, and everything in that piece has resonated strongly with my own waning interest in the Internet. The past year-or-two for me has been demarcated by an increasing desire to withdraw from online interactions and disillusion with big platforms inevitably turning to shit. Hell, even Google Search these days feels like a cheap advertising gimmick - nowadays, if I have a question I need answered, I use the Reddit site search instead of google.. because that way I find responses written by humans instead of soulless, mindless auto-generated "blog posts".
In a way, it is my understanding of technology that precisely is what makes it so awful for me. Because I know what technology is capable of. And instead, I see it used for.... this. Another skinner box designed to make humans miserable. I'm sick of it and want it to die, for the real life to be revived.
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.
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.
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
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.
I can be accepting of other people's preferences while not sharing that preference myself. I publicly accept the existence of pistachio flavored ice cream, even if I do not like it myself. Maybe only a few people do, I do not know. But I have no reason to disapprove of it, because I do not think there is anything fundamentally wrong with pistachio flavored ice cream. I just don't like the taste.
If I find myself unattracted to people of substantially difference race, that doesn't mean I find anything wrong with the concept. As long as two people are attracted to each other, I don't see the issue. I'm just not personally attracted to certain people, for reasons that include physical appearance.
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