nomenym
5d ago
Phenotype includes behaviors. Dams are a phenotype (or extended phenotype) of beavers, but I would presume aggressive selection could produce a breed of beaver that looked very much the same but did not build dams (or perhaps only built very weak and ineffective dams) in a few generations.
nomenym
5d ago
Perhaps they're like a dog breed. Genetically, they're quite difficult to distinguish from other dog breeds, but phenotypically very distinct due to small genetic differences having an outsized influence. Intense selection pressures over short time periods can have interesting consequences.
nomenym
6d ago
In most places, inflation has effectively repealed minimum wage laws. However, other indirect regulatory and legal costs have accumulated that make people more expensive to hire.
nomenym
9d ago
I think Newsome said he had like a 960 IQ. I don’t believe that so perhaps he’s actually much smarter and just pretends to be stupid like Bush.
That's some extreme humble-bragging.
I think this is exactly what is happening.
For most of human history, the selection of cultural memes and biological genes has been more or less aligned. The most successful cultures were those that produced high birthrates, because creating more people was the best way for cultural memes to propagate themselves. Horizontal transmission of cultural memes between separate lineages was relatively rare; most cultural replacements were accompanied by population replacements. In this environment, cultural memes and genes were more or less symbiotic, and what was good for one was good for the other (with the exception of some edge cases).
Over the last couple of hundred years, with the development of mass communication technology, the alignment of memes and genes has been breaking down. Today the most successful memes are those that transmit horizontally using technology, and so the selection pressures have shifted. The memes are becoming parasitic, because they no longer need their host to reproduce. In fact, the host spending time and resources trying to complete its life cycle is now directly opposed to the fitness of the memes, and so arresting development of its host in such a way that renders it literally or functionally infertile is now being selected for. These hosts then have nothing to live for except spreading the parasitic memes, and those memes then outproduce the older more symbiotic memes.
We have no psychological immune system adapted for this. It's too novel, too powerful. It's like we're North Americans being exposed to European colonist diseases for the first time. However, this cannot go on forever. The parasitic memes are burning through hosts, and the remaining hosts are being selected for resistance to the parasites. The psychological immune system is beginning to take shape, but the process is too slow.
nomenym
1mo ago
Objection 4: As a half-black, half-white person, you shouldn’t be the one doing this.
It's so revealing that he chose to include this objection. There are layers of assumptions one must ascribe to before this even makes sense, and yet he doesn't feel the need to explain anything.
I don't think he's going to get the same female attention as Mangioni.
The great thing about Reach is that it ends with the beginning of Halo 1, so it forms an infinite loop. The correct game to play after Reach is Halo 1 again, and we can go on pretending no other game in the series exists.
nomenym
2mo ago
The UK is careening toward authoritarianism, but it's hard to predict what flavor it will take, or whether it will quickly disintegrate into a failed state. Looking at the political, demographic, economic, and fiscal cliffs the UK is teetering upon, it's hard to imagine that this wasn't by design. The left won either way; they will have torn down the old order and replaced it with chaos. It's ironically not unlike the Wiemar Republic, though perhaps even worse. Imagine if the Jews were actually as bad as Hitler said they were, except the degenerate elites sided with the Jews and won. Accelerationism might be the least bad path forward, because it's too late for anything else. Whatever remains of the British peoples after this, I'm pretty sure they're going to find their religion again.
nomenym
2mo ago
over time
But it is already too late. Brexit was the last chance, and it was not just squandered but completely betrayed.
nomenym
2mo ago
Could be just because we've had at least a century or more of dysgenic population policy. We treat genetic capital like an infinite resource. Dysfuctional people dysfunction in many ways all at once. Infant mortality was load bearing, sadly.
nomenym
2mo ago
Are there no circumstances where something like ethnic cleansing is not the least bad option? I think I'm in favor of ethnic cleansing the same way I am in favor of abortion.
nomenym
2mo ago
America still has some of the residual vitality of Western civilization, and that's just so cringe.
nomenym
2mo ago
The problem is that evaluating the trade-offs here is very very hard. There are many moving parts and many possible outcomes, and I simply don't know enough and probably can't under the current circumstances. I am highly ambivalent about these current events and don't have much to say other than the obvious, e.g. the inevitability of collateral civilian deaths justifies neither action nor inaction. At this point I'm crossing my fingers and hoping for the best.
nomenym
2mo ago
Most people don't care nearly so much when bad things happen to their outgroup, and indeed they often enjoy it.
Selective empathy is ordinary human psychology. Unselective empathy is a mental disorder.
nomenym
2mo ago
With the march of the ents, "doom" should be interpreted to mean their destiny, not necessarily their destruction.
nomenym
2mo ago
Fundamentally, modern capitalism rewards childless women with status--higher incomes, more prestigious jobs, bigger homes, more fame and attention. If you're status-maxxing in the modern world, then family is an impediment to success. This competition favors women who eschew femininity and childcare, and so women predisposed as such increasingly set the pace in the status race. Other women, even those who merely seek to settle into the middle of the pack (to feel "normal"), marginally shift their priorities and goals in the same direction as the childless workaholics. This extreme shift in the female status hierarchy is relatively recent, and it is unsustainable over multiple generations for obvious reasons.
Children are a public good that is being under supplied because women now have fewer ways to internalize the benefits in the short run. Status is not the only motivation to supply public goods, but it's a big one, perhaps the biggest, and it is likely necessary to get over the hump of replacement fertility rates.
nomenym
2mo ago
The immediate question that comes to mind is how functional is the market for this kind of insurance? It may be a market, but it might already be a market beset with perverse incentives that prevent prices from tracking reality.
nomenym
2mo ago
There is no likely future where women retain their rights and privileges. That which cannot go on forever, won't. Correcting the problem now would lead to a softer landing, but it's politically impossible, so hard landing it is. Do not mistake this prediction for a preference.
nomenym
2mo ago
It's not just a lack of socialization, but a kind of mal-socialization that seems to now go on in schools and institutions. You don't just have to learn the basics, but you also have to unlearn the bullshit ideas and habits and norms you've been acculturated into. It's like having to move to another country and integrate into a foreign culture.
The tribute that vice pays to virtue. We should want them to keep making excuses, because a world where no excuses are necessary is even worse.
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