philosoraptor
No bio...
User ID: 285
philosoraptor
4mo ago
Insofar as I understand Trump voters' motivations, "productive" is orthogonal, if not actively counter, to what they're looking for. Trump is essentially a big middle finger directed at (for want of a better term) the blue tribe, and many of them actively want to burn the government to the ground. This is not some rationalization I'm making up, it's a somewhat-close, if condensed, paraphrase of some of the defenses of voting for Trump that I've seen in this very space, or rather its predecessors.
Another of my most hated ones is the idea that only 7% of meaning comes from words (the rest from body language and tone). This doesn't even make any fucking sense, much less have any evidence that it's true. It's a terrible description (like, you'd have to be borderline-illiterate to go to the original source and have this as your takeaway) of a study that was making a completely different, much narrower point. (Specifically, that if your verbal and nonverbal communication don't match, people will generally believe the nonverbal portion - e.g. you say to your spouse "everything's fine!" in an angry, aggressive tone, this will not persuade them that everything's fine.)
Thinking for ten seconds about the last non-trivial conversation you had (roughly speaking, one where novel information was exchanged on a topic other than the participants' current emotional states) should be enough to disprove this idea decisively. How, you should ask yourself, could 93% of that information have been exchanged in a way that was independent of the words used? In most cases, you will find that the question not only does not have a good answer, but is hard to even make sense of.
This has not prevented the idea from showing up in training materials from major multinational corporations, not to mention the Web sites of universities that should damn well know better.
philosoraptor
2mo ago
The stolen item is just ... an item. Anyone can produce a backpack and say that guy stole it and my friend here saw them.
A backpack seems like an almost uniquely bad example. You just separate the parties and ask each a few questions about its contents and it's easy to figure out which one it belongs to.
philosoraptor
9mo ago
Or telling an American in 1980 that 10 years later, the USSR would no longer exist.
They'd almost certainly be neither surprised nor happy about this, because the assumption would be that a nuclear war had taken place. People seem to have completely forgotten the grip that threat had on the culture around that time.
philosoraptor
3mo ago
Also he needs to divest all but 100k in crypto and only keep that 100k so that if the guy does break in your friend has something to give him and his family doesn't get killed. I think the reason crypto is dumb doesn't really need an explanation beyond my comment being something anyone with a large amount of it needs to worry about.
Doesn't this argument prove way too much? Why doesn't it apply to money in any form? While I suppose crypto somewhat increases the available attack surface, it seems to me your argument applies to anyone known to be rich no matter where they have their wealth stashed, especially if they manage to make enemies with these kinds of resources.
philosoraptor
3mo ago
They certainly have Authority ("It's not my job to educate you" and the whole attitude of acting like there's already a huge consensus behind them that they can't believe you aren't aware of, what's wrong with you) and Sanctity (observe the frequent use of "Gross" as a term of moral criticism, often meaning nothing more than that someone disagreed with some prog shibboleth).
Loyalty is a weird one. There is an intense loyalty to the movement, and an expectation of same (e.g. exhorting people to be "good allies"), paired with a near-total lack thereof toward any of the individuals that make it up. I was particularly struck by this in their treatment of Germaine Greer. This attitude seems weird and almost incoherent to me - what is the movement besides a useful shorthand for the people who make it up? - but apparently they have no difficulty squaring that circle. Their whole shtick is reifying/anthropomorphizing abstract group identities in ways that seem weird and unhealthy to me, so I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was.
philosoraptor
2mo ago
What was this in response to, originally? It seems interesting but without the original context it's hard to know what to make of it.
philosoraptor
6mo ago
Upper 20s is also pretty bloody hot for "room temperature". Try 20-21. Of course the basic point still stands.
philosoraptor
2mo ago
I was envisioning a scenario where one person has it and the other says they stole it. But even in a scenario where there isn't a clear current possessor like this, in any such situation I've been even tangentially involved in, laying blame is a distant third on the priority list, behind getting it to the rightful owner and keeping the overall peace.
Frankly you're also overestimating the intelligence and planning of most people who do stuff like stealing backpacks. In my area, frankly, you're more likely to get drug-addled confusion about what's wrong with walking off with someone's backpack and why the fact that they don't own it is even relevant.
philosoraptor
2mo ago
they get hammered 10-1
In basketball? That's an improbably bordering on impossibly low score, even if everyone's just learning. Getting shut out except for one free throw (the only way you could get exactly one point) is particularly weird.
philosoraptor
1yr ago
Yankee Stadium has 12,000 seats
As perhaps an example of your larger point, this seemed implausibly low to me (it's about 20% smaller than the smallest full-time[1] arena in the NHL, a league with a much smaller following than MLB), so I did a quick Google and turned up a figure of 54,251, about 4.5 times your number. Where are you getting 12,000 from?
[1] I'm excluding the university arena the Arizona Coyotes are temporarily housed in, as that's not meant to be a permanent arrangement.
but 90% to 99% of Americans have spent more hours than that watching porn
I seriously doubt enough women watch porn on the regular for this to be true. Not that I care much about the larger topic (squaring Trumpism with the religious right is not a fight I have a dog in since I'm just like "A pox on both their houses!"), but that jumped out at me.
philosoraptor
10mo ago
If this took place in 2021, it didn't involve anything recognizable as the AIs people are currently concerned about.
Okay, this got me curious so I tried it for the second period of tonight's hockey game, as viewed on a semi-local feed in Canada. For the most part only the people most prominently featured are mentioned.
- Grocery store - White family. Daughter (who looks about 13) firmly in charge, dad prominent but made to look kind of goofy (the mother is a bit of a space cadet too). Other ads in same campaign involve them interacting with the (white) president of the company.
- Building supplies - Everyone I noticed in the ad was white.
- Bank - In rough order of prominence, black guy I assume is a minor celebrity, black woman realtor, white family (only the wife is featured prominently).
- Pizza - Ethnically diverse group of friends watching a sporting event. There was a white male in there.
- Lottery (tied to one of the teams involved in the game) - White male celebrity (current captain of said team).
- Restaurant - Couple that appeared to be an east Asian but very Westernized male and a somewhat less integrated south Asian female.
- Quaker Oats (more their sponsorship of minor hockey than their products, though these get their spot) - No humans particularly prominent. Most people seen incidentally seem to be white.
- Grocery store (different from the first one) - No humans shown, only products.
- Sports team (one of the ones playing) - White male celebrity.
- Restaurant - No people prominently shown, only their food. (White hand briefly seen.)
- Apple iPhone - Black household that seem to be college roomies or something.
- Car - Centered around a white female/east Asian male couple, some similarly diverse friends are briefly seen.
There's actually less emphasis on diversity than I would naively have expected, though there's certainly more than there would be in, say, 1984.
Also, no ads particularly geared to farming and no ads for sports betting (though these get small spots outside actual commercial breaks, which I didn't count). These would have loomed large in a game shown on CBC, I'm sure.
EDIT: Much more notably underrepresented than whites were aboriginal Canadians and South Asians. When I look at my city, even in the expensive apartment complex where I mostly work, I see way more of these demographics than I do on television, even fairly woke television. I don't think I saw a clearly aboriginal face even though I'd expect there to be some among the construction workers seen in the second ad. Blacks are way overrepresented, no doubt partially due to spillover from the US. I'd say whites and East Asians are represented about right. "Hispanic" as its own distinctive group is barely a thing here.
There was one ad (not noted above) I'd characterize as very woke, but not in an obnoxious way. It consisted of a South Asian man talking about how Bell Canada's support had helped him move to Canada, learn English (and he was pretty well-spoken though he did retain a noticeable accent) as well as gaining technical skills, and build a new life here, over re-enactments of key moments in his early time here.
philosoraptor
5mo ago
If, in your experience, ordering dinner routinely turns into the kind of power play where these seem like the most salient questions, you have my condolences. All I can tell you is that I seriously doubt your experience is representative or, more importantly, in any way healthy.
With easily demonstrable skills or testable claims this is relatively rare. But with skills or claims that are hard to test I feel like this is relatively common.
If you've actually read the original Dunning-Kreuger paper, they make this point explicitly, using basketball as an example. The percentage of people who think they could go one-on-one with a top NBA player and end up looking like other than a complete fool is, I would imagine, statistically indistinguishable from zero. And those few exceptions probably really are mostly outliers in basketball ability relative to the general population, even if they aren't as good as they think they are.
philosoraptor
4mo ago
Very few people, especially ones who'd be considered "normies" by any sane criteria, think about the logical structure of their beliefs deeply enough for these sorts of questions to ever occur to them. This is true even if they are straightforward factual beliefs and not mere signalling (and I agree with a few others that what's going on here is more a complex mix of the two than straightforwardly one or the other).
Well the people on my socials most inclined to trumpet, and/or presuppose, the "born this way" narrative WRT LGBT+ people definitely don't apply that logic to pedos - think wood-chipper memes - regardless of whether that's consistent with other things they say.
Don't assume SocJus crusaders believe something just because you think it follows logically from other things they believe. They are, IME, almost all capable of compartmentalizing to an extent that makes my brain hurt.
philosoraptor
7mo ago
said any of the times he went to visit France he was treated better when he spoke English than when he spoke French with a Quebecois accent.
The reverse is at least sometimes true as well. I've had a French-as-in-from-France friend-of-friends complain that when she visited Quebec, people kept telling her, obviously meaning it as an insult, that she didn't speak French.
philosoraptor
4mo ago
or be defeated in a way all regard as fair.
I think people are judging such things in such a biased way that this has become impossible. This goes for all points on the political spectrum, not just the R base.
(Which, I suppose, might reasonably be parsed as "the nightmare scenario you're trying to avoid is already here".)
Taking a shower there is different.
Where I'm from (Canada) you routinely see the sort of thing JFKay talks about at crowded bars, concerts, and similar events, as long as the restroom in question allows for a reasonable amount of privacy.
philosoraptor
1yr ago
Even granting the premise of your whole post, I have to make this one tiny quibble: shouldn't principles make someone predictable rather than unpredictable?
Only to people who understand those principles. My read of the political landscape today is that even the possibility of having them is just invisible to a lot of people, much less the details of any particular set.
philosoraptor
1yr ago
Only 1/50 parents actually objected to nudity being shown (the other two objected to not being informed)
You (and others) talk like these are entirely disjoint concerns, but how separate are they really? Why is informing the parents required in this case in a way it isn't with, say, multiplication tables? Maybe it's a failure of imagination, but I'm having a hard time thinking of a plausible answer that isn't rooted in what some posters are calling "American prudishness".
philosoraptor
5mo ago
Most of what I watch on live-ish television are hockey games on Canadian channels, and I'd expect results much like yours except that ads for farm equipment would be a noticeable presence. (Which would show predominantly white farmers.)
If nothing else it forces you to stay internally consistent, at least on the specific topics the numbers cover. That's more than a lot of people seem able to manage without such tools. Nevertheless, you're not wrong that there can be an element of "garbage in, garbage out".
More options
Context Copy link