philosoraptor
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User ID: 285
Look, way back in the 70s, D&D players were raising questions about the "Always Chaotic Evil" trope. Just why should every single Orc be born evil?
I don't understand why Orcs have always been the go-to example for this. First of all the "Always Chaotic Evil" terminology only goes back to 2000 and was gone again by 2009 - it originates with the 3rd Edition Monster Manual introducing a bit more nuance into alignments, with the usual alignment now preceded by "Always" (for things like demons where that alignment was part of their nature), "Usually" (where it was more a case of strong cultural associations with that alignment), or the rarely-used "Often" (like usually but the association is much weaker). I think humans got "Often True Neutral" but I can't remember another case where "Often" was used.
And Orcs were firmly in the "Usually" bucket. You even gave some of the reasons for this. All over the Internet people talk like they got tagged "Always Chaotic Evil" and it's just not true! In both editions where that terminology exists they are "Usually Chaotic Evil". The problem they are referring to (EDIT: insofar as it ever existed, which wasn't very) was already fixed in the same book that originated much of the terminology used to discuss it.
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
2yr ago
Not that there weren't recognizable proto-wokist streams within leftism at the time, but it wasn't nearly the all-encompassing thing it can seem to be now. In particular race was nowhere near as central to North American leftism before about 2014 as it is now. In fact one of the many things I (pretty leftist at least by current Motte standards) lament about the rise of wokism is the near-total absence of, not only anti-war sentiment, but of any consideration of foreign policy at all, from 2023 leftism.
philosoraptor
2yr 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
2yr ago
But I don't recall ever seeing dating advice, even from feminists, suggesting that any woman wants a proposition like "How about being my no-strings-attached fuck buddy?"
Not directly, and certainly not specifically about that topic. But there is quite a bit of "always be honest about what you want" messaging out there that, on the surface, seemingly points in that direction. Which does indeed seem disingenuous, because following that advice will rarely if ever work out well for the kind of guys who need dating advice in the first place. I don't really believe that "shit tests" are something anyone does in a conscious, deliberate way, but advice like that makes it easy to see why some people find it tempting to believe in them.
philosoraptor
21d ago
Rarely do these things turn out to neatly fit anyone's narrative. I think this or something like it is very likely indeed.
philosoraptor
1mo ago
Yes, I was like "left identifying what, and why did she in particular need to identify it?" until I read it a second time.
philosoraptor
3mo ago
Thanks, that gives me a fair bit of the missing context, though I'm still no closer to understanding (among other things) the title!
philosoraptor
3mo ago
Besides being a big move of the goalposts, you seem to have some weird-ass misconceptions about both Canadian demographics and Canadian politics. Toronto is about 17% of the population, not anywhere near 60%. That's not quite as weird as thinking the Territories are 95% of the land mass, but it still seems to be massively skewing your perspective. Things are certainly weighted heavily toward the East but it's nowhere close to all-powerful.
philosoraptor
4mo ago
I think the person you're replying to is talking about within the US, where supposedly most "African-Americans" have at least some white ancestry, and they seem to be comparing against the largest genetic difference you'll find between white Americans, not the average or most common case. Certainly the context of the larger conversation is about something that primarily applies to the US.
philosoraptor
4mo ago
Look at the recommended charities on GWWC (GWWC is recommended as the best overall resource for charities on ea.org). GiveDirectly spends 95% of its money on charitable expenses. For AMF it's 99.4%. Malaria Consortium is at 12% and HKI is at 16%.
If I'm understanding your links right, you flip what the numbers mean in mid-paragraph here - the first two (in the 90s) are the amount spent on actual charitable expenses while the last two (in the teens) are the amount they spend on overhead. This makes it look like the last two are really terrible wheras I take your intended point to be that they're nearly as good as the first two.
philosoraptor
1yr ago
I understood most of those individual words...
philosoraptor
2yr ago
Generally, I've seen a lot of women indicating both that is easy for men to get casual sex, and also women who indicate that it's not super easy for women to do that.
If they genuinely think that it's because they're comparing themselves only to the top few percent of men - the ones they'd actually consider for casual sex, that bar being far higher for most women than most men. At least in that context, virtually all men outside those few percent are invisible to them. It may literally not cross their minds (again, in that context) that other men besides those few percent exist.
philosoraptor
2mo ago
Well, according to the progressives, everywhere, including at least some of what you'd call the "progressive" states.
One screen, two completely different movies.
philosoraptor
2mo ago
Except this is literally the first time I've heard anyone include the "to do", and the extra two letters were just enough to make it look weird and unfamiliar even though I thoroughly lurked the recent discussions of it.
Their three paragraphs here and replies elsewhere in this thread can be summarized as; "even if the populists are sucessful (which they wont be) it will be for reasons outside thier control and thus not count."
All three specify circumstances under which he would update, and some of them aren't even all that demanding. None of them require things outside the government's control or at least not wildly more than your list that he was replying to. Reading "here are three ways I would update" as "I wouldn't update" is... certainly a thing someone said on the Internet today.
Honestly, you're not making much sense. You don't seem to be reading what the words in front of you actually say, but what your opinion of the person posting them leads you to expect to be there.
philosoraptor
3mo ago
One solution might be to make a territory, not a state, so they wouldn't have the right to vote.
If this was the proposal, there's no way in hell it happens in a voluntary way, like Trump seems to want at least according to the video.
Not that I give much odds of that in any scenario, but especially that one.
Trump's pretty bad at debate too. People considered him to have lost most of the debates he was in.
I suspect the people who say that are missing the point, from the Trump campaign's perspective. Perceptions of how Trump does in debates seem very polarized and, even moreso than normal for such things, watching him in debates mostly seems to intensify whatever the viewer already thought about him. And, a small minority are swayed by this charisma he apparently has (which is completely invisible to me) and do switch to him. Maybe not a lot, but it seems to be a lot more than I've heard of moving in the other direction, especially post-2016. So from his perspective they do their job regardless of who the Serious People think won.
Any chance that they'll actually change that system? It seems ridiculous. Until now it mostly benefited Conservatives at the expense of labor and third parties, right?
The problem we keep seeing with this in Canada is that changing it is almost never in the interests of the sitting government, i.e. whoever actually won the most recent election. After all, they just won under the current system, and therefore probably think that system is pretty swell. So no-one proposes any serious electoral reforms who actually has a chance of pushing them through successfully, even if they might have made some noise about it during the election campaign. (The clearest example being none other than the sitting PM.)
philosoraptor
1yr 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
1yr ago
Upper 20s is also pretty bloody hot for "room temperature". Try 20-21. Of course the basic point still stands.
philosoraptor
2yr ago
I fold in the spots where I'm 60% fave for all my money to save it for the 75% spots.
???
What does this mean, or have to do with the discussion? It's formatted as a quote but I can't find it in OP or anywhere else.
Like seemingly a lot of people, my initial guess was 80 mil.
The thought process was something like this, though less articulate. (Coming up with that number took me less time than it will take you to read this, and much less than it's going to take me to write it.)
"I know it's big. Like I'm positive it's over 50 mil. On the other hand, if it was US tier, much less China/India tier, I'm pretty sure I would know that. I wouldn't be completely shocked to learn it was over 100, if it wasn't by too much, but if you made me choose I'd bet against it. But probably closer to 100 than 50... 80 seems in the right ballpark? Maybe 85? More likely 85 than 75, but probably around there somewhere."
I don't quite count that as a win, but I guess I could have done a lot worse.
philosoraptor
3mo ago
About (aboot?) 40%, but what's half an order of magnitude between friends.
As a last resort, perhaps. They're much more comfortable just implying that detransitioners don't exist and trying their best to keep them out of the conversation entirely.
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