octopus_eats_platypus
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User ID: 334
On a personal level, has anyone else noticed just how much Covid broke people's brains?
I don't mean this in a cruel or offensive way, but the usual way things go is that people simply don't care about the thing that happened a year or two ago. We move on, we change focus, and we find new things to be offended or enraged (or perhaps happy) about.
I know a couple of people who would likely be avid users of r/MasksforAll, and a higher number of people who are perpetually incensed about vaccines and vaccine mandates. Oddly enough lockdowns are a huge thing here (I have never met a single person angry about lockdowns in real life, but here the number of people persistently furious about lockdowns is pretty large), but in my personal life there are still people utterly incensed that other people are no longer taking safety measures - I wear a mask on the train nowadays after A/B testing it in Excel for the better part of a year and finding I was drastically more likely to get a cold when not masking, but not anywhere else.
Ordinarily even the most politically vehement people I know really do shut up about politics, but two of my friends will no longer shut up about Covid. We catch up for a phone call (we live a few thousand kilometres apart each), and it invariably turns back to vaccines or Covid and so on. One of my aunts is frustrated that she can't get people to reliably mask when catching up with her (she's not immunocompromised or anything along those lines, and she's in her late 40s) without asking them beforehand.
I feel like being, well, a normie throughout this has inoculated me to these feelings. I never really got mad at people not wearing masks or taking vaccines (largely because by that point it was pretty clear Covid was far less dangerous than initially thought), except to note that the people who generally didn't mask back when mask mandates were a thing tended to be the sort of people who committed publically antisocial behaviour to begin with (playing loud music on the train, harrassing people for smokes, etc). Likewise, the more worried people seemed similar to me - I was happy to take a RAT test or whatever to see someone if it assuaged their anxiety.
It's not everyone, and the majority of people seem to have returned to normal. I guess this is a culture war issue in general which is why I'm posting here, but I can't help but feel a large number of people will be relitigating Covid for years, whether it's their anger at authoritarian monsters trying to destroy their lives and enforce the injection of experimental biological matter into their veins, or their fury at antisocial plague rats who were unwilling to take even the slightest measure to try and keep people safe.
I'm not trying to judge these people or look down on them, we all have our issues and our pain points. I'm not going to pretend I don't have mine. But it just strikes me as noticeable that there's a substantial chunk of the population now seemingly stuck on Covid issues.
Does this gel with anyone else?
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
I downvoted because it seems like a gross denial of reality.
"I can't see why a political leader who had every chance to flee his country while his city was being attacked and live in comfort at the head of a government-in-exile as opposed to staying and risking very real death might be heroic" seems like someone deliberately failing to understand something very obvious.
Imagine if I came in and said "I'm unsure why abortions are considered evil by some people.". The answer is very obvious, oft-repeated and you have to work very hard to avoid hearing it. The same is true for Zelensky not fleeing Ukraine.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
I think you're being somewhat deceitful, I'm sorry. It's quite clear the revisionist poster is arguing their case more successfully because of Motte norms, not because of some inherent virtue in their argument. The line in question was asked several times and notably never answered, and yes, the other side eventually acted offended and signalled disbelief - this is the point of a Gish Gallop, to induce a failure state on the other side. The goal is never to prove anything, merely to clog the argument with so many extraneous facts (or simply introducing doubt into facts somewhat removed from the central point) that they cannot be all effectively refuted, leaving you the 'winner' in the debate.
If the original poster asking the question ended up being downvoted, why do you think I would fare any better?
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
Yes, in hindsight decisions always look low-risk because the the other outcome didn't happen. I'm not a Zelensky stan (and in all honesty I don't care that much about the war in Ukraine despite being very surprised by the sheer Russian inability to win), but I'm not claiming he's considered heroic because of what he did today.
Staying in your country when the West is offering peaceful and safe asylum at the point where your enemies are bombarding the city you're living in and nobody (and if you personally called the course of this war back in February I apologise, but you'd be just about the only one) thinks you have any real chance of victory is brave. By the standards of modern politicians I'd say heroic. Perhaps Zelensky somehow knew they'd push the Russians back, but considering he apparently didn't even believe they were going to invade I find that unlikely. Staying and fighting in what everyone - including likely Zelensky - thought was a doomed effort to repel the Russians and save his country is genuinely admirable, and even if you disagree I don't see how you don't get that other people consider him heroic.
The fact that Ukraine went from 'doomed' to 'holding out exceptionally well and pushing the Russians back in a major counter-offensive' is true, but how could he have known that?
Has anyone else noticed how, well, schlubby other men in their 30s are?
I'm not particularly fit, nor was I exceptionally handsome in my 20s. But the amount of guys who are halfway to bald, wear a ratty t-shirt everywhere and have a beer belly you could sit an actual beer on is astounding. All of these things are controllable (there are those will who go bald completely even with the total minoxidil/rollers/finasteride, but those are smaller numbers than those who just don't bother), and yet the number of fat, underdressed, balding middle-class white-collar professional guys in their 30s - compared to the same for women - seems absurdly high.
I was attractive in my 20s because I hit the gym a lot. A nice face and a ripped body made it easy to meet women. Post a motorcycle accident big weights are risky for me, so I swim or use an exercise bike instead, keeping myself reasonably trim and fit. I use hair loss products which have slowed my hair loss to a crawl and restored some of what I initially lost, returning me to a 'slightly high widow's peak' situation. I spend a few hundred bucks a year to ensure my wardrobe is updated and I look okay when I leave the house.
I'm not looking for accolades, as I don't feel like I do much beyond the absolute bare minimum, but I'm curious if my experiences are more 'my corner of Australia' or whether they're more universal. It definitely feels like beyond the whole 'wall' meme for women, men are the ones hitting unattractiveness faster. Not intrinsically, but because they're doing nothing to slow or mitigate the signs of aging. I definitely feel like your average 35-year old man is less attractive than a 45-year old who has worked to keep his hair and stay in good shape.
Does this track with anyone else?
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
While I find the subject a little outside of my wheelhouse and not interesting enough to spend time and effort to decipher, "guy obsesses over something for a long time and writes a lot about it" is pretty much the core of what made /r/themotte fun to be in. While writing twenty (!) essays in a row on the topic is definitely weird, it's not as though Alexandros is chasing Scott around or constantly emailing him (to my knowledge). And, well, that sort of weird is almost what this space is for.
If someone here dedicated themselves to a massive personal research project to disprove statements that they figured to be harmful from someone they saw to be an influential public figure and wrote essay after essay on it I think the reception would be somewhat less cold if the figure weren't Scott.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
One thing rdrama does well is use upvotes/downvotes as actual currency.
I'd love to see an implementation of awards in a similar way if possible - not the actual awards themselves (we don't want Mottizens banning or ruining threads), but for instance reporting an AAQC costing, say, 50 or 100 upvotes would be a good idea in part because it'd . A community currency that lets long-established users spend their reputation to highlight things they find good or interesting is a great way to make standing in the community count for more.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
I don't quite understand how we'd even begin to program a deontological or virtue ethicist AI. We're capable of giving things functions that they try and maximise, and we can call the subject of that function 'utility'. Whatever the flaws or virtues of utilitarianism, it does have the singular advantage of being computable. Compare to a virtue ethicist AI - how on earth do we begin building such a thing?
Even if it would be better, it seems like we're much closer to getting 'AI with a function it seeks to maximise' than we are getting 'AI who desires to fulfill virtues such as honour and charity'.
I agree that having an AI that believed in being virtuous according to human standards would be far, far better than one with a complicated mathematical function we try and map onto human utility and hope it doesn't kill us, but I've seen no reason to think the first is even possible.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
If someone wanted to discuss the inns and outs of basic high-school algebra here I imagine they wouldn't get a great deal of buy-in. There are certain topics (usually around formal logic, math and computer science) that the Motte is drastically overrepresented in demographically. You can probably discuss a lot of very low-level things on a number of different issues that aren't well-known and get more interest.
Essentially quality posts on non-contentious trivial topics are going to be ignored by the community, the same posts on contentious trivial ones (trivial in the sense the majority of people believe they have an answer, largely culture war issues) will be feted, and quality posts on non-contentious topics that the community doesn't understand but has explained to them will likely be considered a standard for a quality contribution.
The world's best explanation on logical equivalencies and truth tables would be almost entirely ignored here, for example. It's a useful topic to understand but the number of people here who don't grok basic formal logic is probably very small.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
Savages in the hills last for decades, but the important thing is that Zelensky isn't one of the savages! He's one of the important people Russia would very much like to get their hands on. The obvious parallel is Saddam Hussein. America wanted Saddam dead and got it, even though the insurgency went in a completely different direction. That insurgencies last for decades doesn't mean the state does. Iraq took less than a month to be knocked out, Saddam went into hiding and was captured a couple of months later.
Again, right now all the things you're saying seem obvious because they're being said with the benefit of hindsight. Of course the Ukrainians would hold the line (no matter that virtually nobody believed this six months ago), and of course the Russians wouldn't be able to land a knockout blow, but given that the entire world seemed blindsided by this, why should have it been obvious to Zelensky that it was true? It's one thing to assume someone will notice the very obvious, but if everyone misses it, perhaps it wasn't as obvious as all that?
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
I try never to invoke karmic irony by saying 'well, things can't get any worse' or 'at least we're finished with that problem', or so on. I'm sure it's coincidence, but in so many places my life has seemingly run on movie logic it's at the point where I don't believe it, but I alieve it very strongly.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
I think this is misguided because it's the opposite of what currently happen, with theorem provers doing so much of the evaluation work relative to the 'creative' work. I can definitely see AI expanding the search space, though, with mathematicians working with the machine to find more novel or interesting results as a consequence. Much like art, I think AI are at the present time both a job-destroyer for the bottom end of the market (want your fursona fucking a famous politician? No longer do you have to pay $50, you can just get the machine to do it!) such as commissions but will ultimately enable people who understand art (colour, composition, etc, and consequently how to more reliably get the machine to do the work you want) to create more interesting and varied things at the top end.
Academic mathematicians are towards the top end of what you'd consider 'stem jobs' IQ-wise, so I'd anticipate a similar effect there.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
Really what we need is an anthropomorphised castle
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
But that hasn't been my experience. The contentious trivial topics I've tried to talk about gather a lot of feedback, they are not ignored at all: they are lambasted.
Out of curiosity, what are your explanations (I presume you've thought about more than one) for the reception you tend to get in your posts?
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
This feels all over the place. Your title doesn't seem to be related with most of what you wrote, and your conclusion comes out of left field 'here's a bunch of examples about some jokes, this is why rationalists get scammed' seems more like nonsense than a coherent argument.
You also pattern-match badly here - Trump, Adams, Taleb and Musk are the kind of examples that intimate you aren't seriously thinking about this but simply want to dunk on the opposition.
Maybe take this one back to the writing board, and look for more salient examples that support the point you're trying to make.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
That was part of what triggered it. It wasn't just my personal life, but a bunch of people here (largely around lockdowns, though, which I haven't really heard concerns about in my personal circles) as well! But I figured the 'what broke your brain personally' question was worth following up with 'have you noticed this in your friend circles', especially because this is not exactly a normal place. Mottizens being angry about an issue doesn't necessary translate to much salience in the public at large.
I was thinking about edutainment from when I was a kid. We had Treasure Mountain to help learn words, JumpStart for a whole bunch of interesting stuff each year, and so on. From age 5-12 it felt like there was a massive array of edutainment products, which disappeared as I hit high school. I remember trying to convince my teacher at age 9 that Escape Velocity was educational as it taught you to buy low and sell high.
So as a teenager, nothing. Makes sense - teenagers are less pliable and enjoy this stuff less and want to go off and do their own thing.
But I am genuinely surprised edutainment never really took off, or doesn't seem to have surpassed its 90s-early 00s peak. I would've assumed there was a lot of demand for this sort of product for adults, but instead we just reverted to video games sans education.
Am I wrong about this? Are there a bunch of super popular products I'm just not aware of? Or if not, why did it never take off? Entertaining yourself while learning is a big market, but maybe it's not entertaining enough so unless you're choosing it for someone else (like a child) you don't? I'm not sure, but feel free to chime in with thoughts or the like.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
I had pretty mainstream thought on Covid all the way through, so I can give you an example of my thought processes.
From what I remember, the logic (over here) went like so:
1 - We're going to get a vaccine soon, so we're going to do lockdowns and hold out until then. They suck, but we can contain the virus with lockdowns because it's virtually not in Australia.
2 - Once we get the vaccine and everyone takes it, Covid will be over and we'll return to normal life. This sucks, but it is a temporary suck that we will swiftly overcome. During this terrible time everyone needs to band together and accept the shittiness.
I'm not sure I would've supported lockdowns knowing what we know now about the virus. People were talking about a 2% fatality rate (so, what, seven million people dead in the US, 500k or so here) which is much, much larger than what we ended up with. I weighed half a million dead in my mind against a temporary restriction on my civil liberties and thought 'okay, this is the sort of situation where I can accept restricted civil liberties'.
I'm not so sure I would've accepted it in almost any other country in the world. The United States didn't have a choice to not have Covid in its borders, Australia did.
We moved on to getting the vaccine. I think at the time the claim was that vaccines stopped Covid spreading. If the option was 'zero Covid, but you have to get vaccinated' or 'Covid kills ~100,000 people (Australia, so I'm reducing the US numbers tenfold) but we don't enforce vaccines' I am in fact okay with a vaccine mandate. Mostly I'm not okay with mandating stuff like that, and as soon as it turned out that no, we weren't vaccinating ourselves back to a no-Covid world, I changed course pretty rapidly.
Vaccine mandates lagged popular opinion here - they were popular because we thought vaccine mandates would make this all go away. Lockdowns were popular because we thought they were the precursor to getting the vaccine, and, again, making Covid disappear like a bad dream. Your average person doesn't support lockdowns or vaccine mandates now, but that's because they've been proven ineffectual. China is still locking down over Covid and can't seem to accept the reality of the situation.
I think '2% of the population will die if we don't do this thing' is a good reason to consider the temporary suspension of civil liberties, and I think I'm very much a normie in that sense.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
Every woman I've ever met who claimed this has been young without exception. I think it's just a filter you pass through as a woman - you're young, reasonably attractive, men want to impress you and using force on you that might make you feel unsafe or even inferior is verboten, even in a situation like sports where you might expect it. If you're middle class or higher, men using any sort of force is socially unacceptable so you can pass your entire life without realising how much stronger men are.
Eventually you hit the filter - hopefully in the 'my brother/cousin/friend showed me how easily he can manhandle me while wrestling' and nothing worse, and you realise the truth. I have a lot of sympathy for women who believe this and then discover it. I can't imagine finding out that you're almost completely vulnerable half of society is a pleasant feeling.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
This isn't true. Zero-sum means the overall effect of the peers is zero-sum - we have a number of children, and some offer bonuses and others maluses to the performance of their peers. This is the traditional argument for removing ability-streamed classes, incidentally, that we need to put the smarter kids in with the dumber ones in order to ensure that everyone gets a chance to get the adjacency bonus from the smart kids.
I'm not sure things function that way in reality - it runs up against obvious limitations like 'putting a mentally disabled kid in the accelerated class is going to badly screw someone over, or possibly everyone involved depending on how you run things' but the peer effects being zero-sum means your peers do have an effect on performance, but the positive externalities are strongly connected to better students who in turn yield said positive externalities themselves.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
I'm not American, but I do see this as a reasonable set of actions. In fact, it's almost what the right should've been doing from day one.
If someone else is saying 'we need to let in the migrants/refugees and care for them', but the burden of doing so falls entirely on you, it's more than reasonable to simply start moving them elsewhere. I think doing so makes you look unreasonable and unpleasant, but it's an unreasonableness and unpleasantness that forces the right people to put skin in the game.
I'm not sure about this particular move, to be fair, but overall? I think relocating migrants is fair and appropriate to the point of being effectively a win-win. If New York or Boston or wherever wants to functionally allow illegal immigration and Texas doesn't, New York and Boston should bear more of the costs associated.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
Their training reward functions were utilitarian, maybe, but it would be pretty easy to create reward functions that align more with virtue ethics.
I am absolutely keen to hear more about this, because everything I know tells me this is a close-to-impossible problem. The notion of 'pretty easy' seems intuitively wrong to me, but if you have any reading to offer on the subject I'd love to go through it.
I wrote one paragraph, I genuinely didn't think reading the entire thing was that big an ask, especially in this community.
To be more succinct: Gish gallop bad, should be unconvincing. Central question powerful and important - but not answered! Why mottizens fall for gallop but ignore important central question in argument between two people? Not good!
Alternatively: Meta-argument commentary on argument is in fact a valid part of the community, as evidenced by what you are literally doing right now. This tiresome sort of hypocrisy really deserves 'no one cares about your opinion, bring arguments' as a snide response but instead I think I made my point fairly succinctly and reasonably to begin with in the context of the original argument.
Unless your argument is 'community norms are not worth consideration to begin with', talking about them has as much value as our recent debate on the Holocaust.
Moreover, I'm not just talking about skepticism or opinions, I'm talking about voting habits. The 'this is a big wall of text, reflective upvote' culture doesn't necessarily cause all the cream to reach the top to be skimmed off. It makes me wonder to what degree mottizens see argument as won by walls of text over actual correctness, for instance.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
Entertainingly I did the opposite. Got 10/20, 7 out of the first 10 correct and then 3 out of the last 10.
The voting on the Holocaust threads has me substantially downgrade my opinion of the voting habits of the average mottizen, I have to say. The bizarre nitpicking arguments followed by the complete failure to answer the simple question of 'well, where did all the Jews go?' makes me suspect our 'simply upvote long tracts of text' culture would see us upvote creationism in fairly short order if faced down by Duane Gish.
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