Despite being generally very pro biodeterminism, I actually feel like this is a product of western culture moreso than innate biology. Have you ever talked to women from a non-western nation? They often have a completely different mindset. I'm currently dating a Russian woman and I can talk quite freely with her about political matters, even sensitive topics like HBD or feminism. It's not just her, many Russian women I've found are far more open to criticisms of the values that Western women hold sacred.
Of course, you can make the argument that Russian culture is still designed to suppress the opinions women would otherwise naturally tend to have, and that it takes a liberal nation to reveal their true colors. But for once, I think the blank slatists actually have a point. What you believe is largely a product of the society you were born in, and the west has simply gone off the deep end with feminist/SJW/woke theory. If anything, you can argue that women are merely more naturally susceptible to whatever the prevailing dogma is in the nation they grew up in.
nand
1yr ago
Just like introversion-extroversion or sex drive, gender is a spectral trait which follows a Gaussian distribution: occupying the extremes is rare, most people fall somewhere in the middle.
I could not disagree with this more. Gender absolutely does not follow a Gaussian distribution. By this claim, you would have a hard time determining what gender most people are. And yet I can assure you, that barring cherry-picked exceptional cases, the median human will have an exceptionally easy time sorting photographs of people into "male" and "female". What gender is, is a bimodal distribution.
Incidentally, the same criticism applies to your forced normalization of all of the other labels you are criticizing - for people's usages of terms like 'ambivert' to to make sense, it is sufficient that they believe its a bimodal distribution, not a discrete one. (And this goes doubly for sexual attraction, where 'bisexual' is definitely not the majority category)
Finally, knowing that somebody is average in a trait is useful information, because it collapses your uncertainty about that person. It's not the same thing as describing an elephant as gray.
nand
1yr ago
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.
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
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 would actually double down and assert that 2+2=4 is a fact deeper than arithmetic. If 2+2=4 are elements in a modular ring, it holds true. If they are vectors, it still holds true. If they are abstract discrete topological spaces, it holds true. I have not encountered a situation in (non-joke) mathematics where the symbols '2', '+' and '4' are overloaded so as to not make this equation true.
There is an underlying concept of "twoness", "addition" and "fourness" that holds this property even as you generalize it to systems beyond integer arithmetic, almost like a fundamental structure of mathematics. This is not even about notational trickery. Even if you decide to use different symbols, it does not change the underlying mathematical relationships. You would just be expressing the same undeniable fact differently.
nand
1yr ago
We have way more access to safe, 'consequence free' (not counting the emotional component) and pleasure-oriented sex than ever before
Do we really? Then why is every generation having less of it, and people taking longer to lose their virginities? Why are the most developed countries the most sexless?
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
10mo ago
There are orders of orders of magnitude difference in probability between a 10-ton fighter jet arising from pure chance, and a microscopic DNA (or RNA-based) protocell with a few dozen to a few hundred nucleotide bonds.
If the latter took all of the universe to create, the former would be outrageously impossible.
In dating, if you're ghosted, do you a) always move on stoically, b) always give it one more shot, or c) go with a mix of the two depending on circumstances?
Always a) without second thought. If she ghosts you, she's not worth your time. Either because she's the type of immature bitch who gets a kick out of emotional manipulation, or because she's just plain not interested.
Overwhelmingly likely, the latter. You have to remember that women feel attraction in a way fundamentally different from men. They are fickle, extremely selective, exponentially more hypergamous, and basically all-or-nothing. A woman can't be half-interested in somebody, she is either head over heels or wholly uninterested. If you get ghosted you are already in category two, and trying to flip her back into the other state at that point is fighting a losing uphill battle.
So what do you do? Do you have a system for deciding if and when to follow up after not hearing back?
Play the numbers game. If landing a relationship is one in thousand, you have to churn through a thousand mediocre semi-interested women before one will work out.
If you're even at a position where you have the free time and mental capacity to spare thought for somebody that ghosted you, I'd say you're not yet seeking out enough opportunities. I sometimes have days where I chat with 5-10 new people in a single day, something that takes a lot of time and effort. Effort I no longer have left over to worry about some girl who hasn't responded in 3 days.
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?)
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
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
The characterization of the New Right as being liberals but with added elite skepticism makes me wonder to what extent this demographic actually overlaps strongly with the supposedly far-left pro-communist anti-institutional "all cops are bastards" camp. Or, to put it more bluntly, I'm wondering what exactly about this 'New Right' demographic is even still right.
If the belief is essentially that free trade cannot work because 'checks and balances' don't exist, resulting only in centralization of power, corruption and impression - haven't you just made the case for the anti-capitalist / anti-market left?
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.
It should come as little surprise that the methods are different when the outcomes are, too - consistently, capitalism rewards IQ, while IQ is a trait selected against by natural selection - in every generation.
Edit: Incidentally, the first time I've heard it verbalized that way was by a woman. I literally quote her: "A girl cannot be only half interested, in her head it is always either yes or no."
To be clear, I'm specifically addressing the claim that women are somehow naturally more interested in "immigration, equality or similar topics", but also the concept of cancel culture, witch hunting and woke ideology surrounding it. (i.e. the idea that dissidents must be quickly rooted out and chewed to shreds)
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)
nand
1yr ago
Many of these people also seem to think that social norms themselves are arbitrary vagaries of specific historical circumstances, rather than being adaptive practices which were selected for through the process of survival-of-the-fittest. This view fails to account for many commonalities among civilisations, one of the clear ones being religion (one of the favourite woke whipping horses out there). Not only is religion completely ubiquitous in pre-modern society, you can generally see a shift from animist-type religions in tribal societies to the more developed and organised forms of religion mostly predominant in societies that achieve "civilisation" status. This clearly seems to suggest that religious dictates don't simply arbitrarily drop out of the sky - it indicates that some form of selection was occurring and that societies that adopted certain religions had an advantage. Even more than this, these "successful" religions that are common in civilisations share quite a few similarities in their dictates - selflessness, self-discipline, abstinence, etc.
This paragraph confuses natural selection of ideas with natural selection of the hosts those ideas apply to. It is entirely consistent with the idea of religion as a hyper-effective brain parasite / mind virus that spreads more easily in well-connected and organized societies.
nand
1yr ago
I have a slightly related tangent story from my days at a psychological clinic. To cut a long story short, one patient was convinced she was being gang stalked by her family (and associates). Whether or not she was actually being gang stalked or not, I don't know. The evidence I saw is consistent with both confabulation and reality.
In any case, this (17-year old girl) patient was terrified to go to school. So she arranged an escort to accompany her there and back. Cue me and another (female) friend of hers, a highly schizotypal, spiritual person who believes in quantum healing and homeopathy, and so on. On our way to pick her up from school, we noticed a man standing outside and smoking (in the no-smoking area). He could have been watching us, or he could have been not. (Having gone to the same school, it was certainly not unusual for older middle-aged teachers to be chain smoking during the breaks.) Our reports to the clinic staff?
"She was being stalked by a man who gave off a menacingly evil aura! He did not fit the setting at all, I'm sure he was up to no good"
vs
"Uh, what I saw was a man standing next to a door. He didn't do anything of note, and I'm not sure if he even looked in our direction. The end."
tl;dr, different people can interpret radically different things into the same observations. Women are generally leaning towards the schizophrenic, neurotic end of the spectrum, and also generally more receptive to propaganda. So it does not surprise me one bit that a world filled with feminist "women are victims!" messaging has women end up hallucinating terrifying delusions of persecution into completely benign events.
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.
Intuitively, it would appear to me that in the hierarchy of needs, a large chunk of the tech sector essentially falls into the highest bucket - entertainment, self realization and pursuit of curiosity. I would imagine that, as an economy suffers stress, we would see industries failing in a top-down manner, where the most abstract industries that are the furthest removed from immediate basic needs feel the burn first.
Is there any prior art establishing whether or not big tech is such an industry?
Unusually, for not being CW at all: Proprietary software, especially the type that takes control away from the user and keeps getting more bloated and awful with every version. And in particular, being forced to use it.
Probably because it's, at least in part, an attack on my core identity - a hacker, computer programmer and free software advocate. But also, because it's one of the most blatant forms of authoritarian oppression: Not being able to do something with my hardware that I know it's capable of drives me furious, because there's no technical reason for it. It's 100% due to a quasi-psychopathic desire by big tech companies to maintain an iron stranglehold on their users' rights.
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