philosoraptor
No bio...
User ID: 285
philosoraptor
3mo 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.
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
3mo ago
he does not indulge in masturbatory stylistic flourish
Maybe if you're used to his non-standard spellings and such. He reads like an arrogant 15-year-old to me (albeit a very clever one, though not as much so as he seems to think).
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).
philosoraptor
4mo ago
I tried like 8 times to write a long one and it all seemed absurd.
That's telling you something.
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
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.)
Okay, that at least makes it understandable. I'd still say that information is more background context than it is a feature of that conversation in particular, especially in a normal, healthy social dynamic. I mean, look at Walter's text message example. The power dynamics, if that really is the most salient thing, are just as present in a text with no body language or tone involved.
Additionally, even in person I'd say far more of the information about power relations and such is conveyed by the words as by the nonverbal parts. There's understanding of subtext involved (that even neurotypicals with long experience dealing with this shit get wrong with some frequency!), but that's got less to do with body and tone than it does with reading another level into the words. (Not nothing, mind you, but less.)
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.
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
5mo ago
This is nice. I always assumed the intended meaning must be something related to this, until I learned the real origin. IE, something like "Okay, we admit this is an exception (points at really weird special case), but look how far we had to go to come up with an exception - clearly the rule is going to apply the overwhelming majority of the time."
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
5mo ago
Canadian here, and I'd never heard it until this year when it was suddenly popping up all over, and never for a school or daycare located anywhere other than Ireland or Faerun.
philosoraptor
5mo ago
I took the point to be adjacent to the one Scott made - wow, is it really that long ago? - last December about how the media rarely lies. I don't agree with how Scott frames the observation, which I would have phrased in terms of how the ways they lie are relatively subtle - but the observation itself, as distinct from the debate over the best language to characterize it, is solid.
Skilled liars make as few statements that are straightforwardly false in a plain, literal way as they can and still spread whatever narrative they want to spread. One of the many advantages of this is that there's rarely a clear-cut smoking gun someone in the board's position can point to. Instead it's a matter of which facts they emphasize and which they omit, what they juxtapose with what in order to imply connections that may not actually exist, how they manipulate your emotions around aspects of their narrative, how they take advantage of people's trust in them, or at least willingness to give the benefit of the doubt, in situations that really are ambiguous.
So while I can see how the statement you quote is poor optics, I have no trouble imagining how it could be true.
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
5mo ago
Upper 20s is also pretty bloody hot for "room temperature". Try 20-21. Of course the basic point still stands.
philosoraptor
5mo ago
Sex positive feminism maintains women should be free to engage in sex, in pornography, in sex work, etc without being shamed or otherwise punished for doing so. That seems to be by far the most prevalent form of modern feminism to me. This is completely separate from whether or not men should be able to take advantage of that freedom to satisfy their own desires.
That seems incoherent to me, or at least to have some obvious and serious internal tensions in practice. What, women should be free to engage in sex work but shouldn't have any customers?
I don't think anyone self-describes as "sex-negative", and I kind of agree with the "skinsuit" theory on what "sex-positive" means in practice, i.e. feminists feel a need to publicly identify that way whether or not it actually fits. Even from feminists who self-describe that way, the overwhelming majority of the messaging seems to be "sex hurts" and ideas about "rape culture" et al that I would characterize as extremely paranoid. (Granted, I'm mostly around people with upper-middle-class values where sexual violence is quite rare and any appearance otherwise is largely an artefact of expanding the definition beyond reasonable limits. But so are most feminists. These are mostly academic-adjacent notions we're talking about here.) When I deal with these people I'm constantly asking, or at least thinking, "If you're so sex-positive, why do you never seem to have anything positive to say about sex?"
philosoraptor
5mo ago
More to the point neither one directly states support for YEC claims other than the narrow point about human evolution, so reading either one as "X% support for YEC" is running ahead of the evidence. (Even if we assume these polls directly measure people's literal beliefs, which per jeroboam, they probably don't.) Elsewhere in the thread, results from polls that did directly ask about the age of the Earth have been mentioned that got much lower numbers (30% at most, less if you change the wording of the question a little).
philosoraptor
6mo ago
I mean, there's tricky questions (both practical and philosophical) about what probability statements even mean when we're talking about singular events. But that doesn't change the fact that (a) they do sometimes help us make useful predictions, at least in the aggregate, and (b) there's a tolerably clear sense in which Silver was less wrong than someone who had Trump at 1%.
philosoraptor
6mo ago
Reporters don’t typically have the statistical training to understand the intricacies of concepts like “correlated errors”, so all they saw was an election nerd trying to make headlines by scaring Democrats into thinking the election was closer than it really was. They too were eventually forced to eat their words when Trump won.
I mostly remember them doubling down and implying that Silver was somehow super-extra-wrong and had lost credibility by saying Trump had only a 30% chance... never mind that most other pollsters were much further off (many had it more like 1%) and didn't get the same treatment.
philosoraptor
6mo ago
"Radical feminist" doesn't just mean "strong feminist", it refers to people like Firestone or for a relatively low-key example Greer who root their feminism precisely in biological differences between the sexes (and tend to find current trans ideology repulsive and/or incoherent as a result, thus the TERF abbreviation). It could not be further from the truth to say they are unwilling to consider biological differences. Though it would be nearly as far from the truth to suggest they're a significant part of the "woke" social movement you're deploring.
philosoraptor
6mo 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
6mo ago
most or second most populous
Second, behind Ontario, and it's not remotely close.
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".)
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