popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Too early to say. The early months of themotte.org were dominated by USA election season, which has always spurred heavy traffic in the CWR, and the early months of 2023 have been big dry spell for the culture war. (Of course, 2020-2022 was probably the most intense culture war period of my life, so maybe we're settling into a new equilibrium.)
I expect us to whither and die but I'm not sure I'm seeing that yet.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
"My outrgroup are uniformly engaged in a crime" is a position you can definitely hold and argue in good faith. I think all culture wars in history have basically been about that.
I suppose if the true goal is numbers, your proposition would work. But I consider fertility to include "successfully raising children into adulthood so they have more children". If people are having kids, but their children are dying early due to poor health standards and abuse, is that raising the fertility?
The most extreme far right of social conservatives seem to want to return the world to about 1919. (The year before the nineteenth amendment.) In that year child mortality was about 180/thousand, compared to today's 7/thousand. (Let's assume that this is 100% the fault of economic and social institutions, rather than medical technology.) At that same year the fertility rate was 3.3 compared to today's 1.8. The math definitely works out in favor of 1919.
Of course, the "sweet spot" seems to be during the baby boom in the 1950s, when the fertility was also about 3.3 and the child mortality was 30/thousand.
If you think I am playing dumb and lying, I am confused about the tone of conversation your response has. Why would you want someone who you think is playing games to respond to you?
Why should I be an asshole unless I'm entirely sure you're picking a fight? Even if I were sure. It costs nothing to be civil on a semi-anonymous internet forum.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
?
I'm just bored enough to have checked this, but a simple search indicates the mean is 2058 and the stddv is 361 excluding the thread that dropped today.
No, I am not done with ya'll. I just don't know what you mean by "wait and see".
There's a bit of a pattern among left-leaning users who depart here that, before they leave in a huff, they'll start posting provocative inflammatory things that parody the tone and style of the people they're fighting with. @PmMeClassicMemes is a recent example, but unfortunately they deleted their profile so I can't show you.
"Wait and see" means that, if I see you continuing to debate in good faith, I'll know I was wrong and your blaming social conservatives for low fertility rates was a sincere belief rather than a dig at redpillers who blame feminists.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I double checked, and they did not show the ad I thought they did during the SB. However, they did air this ad which shows (among other things) BLM protesters confronting police, lockdown protesters, and a MAGA-coded white bearded guy and a black man yelling at each other. A QAnon Shaman cosplayer even makes an appearance. I really think they are who AOC was referring to as fascists, not Christians per se.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Would probably need to be limited to married couples to do that
This seems to suggest the political correlation with fertility rate holds even if you include unmarried fertility. But putting that aside, by the pure math of the thing, the more children you have the older you must be, and older folks skew conservative.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Purely economically speaking, points #1 and #3 are common. But if you read past that, each of the points has an element of "conservativism is the root cause of low fertility", which seems to me like a frustrated parody of "feminism is the root cause of low fertility", something people do unironically believe. I think point #5 in particular stands out as something even the most progressive of progressive would not blame on low fertility rates. "The problem is, religious bigotry such as my parents subjected me to is supressing birth rates" is an argument that is both bizarre on the surface, and one I have never heard anyone make. Even very very anti-religious people will concede social conservatism tends to pump out the babies.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I believe you're misreading who AOC is calling fascist. She's probably referring to this ad, which depicts a family torn apart by vicious political arguments. The ad puts both sides on equal moral footing and implies they should still respect and love each other. AOC's implication being that the "left" of the family is justified in hating and emotionally excommunicating the "right" side of the family (fascists).
I do not believe any of your complaints are relevant because they not only apply, but apply much harder, in countries with high fertility rates.
If anything, a blind adherance to the data would show that the exact opposite of your prescriptions would be useful, if increasing fertility is the only value we're optimizing for. Make people poorer, more conservative and intolerant, add corrupt and dysfunctional governments, remove welfare and social comforts, etc.
EDIT: I should clarify that your complaints may be valid for other reasons, but in terms of increasing fertility, the variables you're suggesting tweaking not only are unrelated but inversely correlated with the desired effect.
EDIT 2: Actually, to avoid being guilty of the same thing I suspect you of, I should clarify that I think you're playing dumb and are putting forth spurious arguments to passive-aggressively poke the bear here.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
This is more controversial, but you could also let parents exercise kids' voting rights before they turn 18. Essentially give another vote for each kid your family has - maybe make the parents agree on where to put it?
Congratulations. If I ever find myself as the dictator of America, you've given me the exact approach I'll take with our Neo-Sullan constitution to kneecap progressives in a way that might actually stick.
I don't know how the medium version of this hypothesis could possibly be verified. It must remain in the company of models like historical materialism that may be true, seem like they could be true, but who knows.
There is some evidence for the weakest possible version. Take this story, where Whole Foods encourages ethnic diversity as a bulwark against unionization risk. There were also leaked emails from Amazon about strategizing to fight a union vote by dividing whites and blacks, which I'm having trouble finding. (TOMT? If anyone knows what I'm talking about please confirm I did not imagine this story.) So it has actually happened at least once. How many such incidents are required to infer that this is the true primary motive behind institutions embracing DEI?
For the strong version, no evidence of such coordination exists, and the idea of such coordination existing without us finding out is IMO crazy.
I assure you, there is not man on this Earth whose idea of a good time is taking you shopping for a makeover, eating out with you at an overpriced restaurant, helping you move all your shit to your new apartment, listening to you whine about how it's not about the nail, and, worst of all for a guy who is attracted to you, hugging and comforting you while you cry about what an asshole Chad is for pumping and dumping you [2]. Those are things that men do for their wives girlfriends, or for girls that they hope will become their wives and girlfriends; they are the costs of a romantic relationship, not the benefits.
Overly strong. I've had female friends with whom the dynamic was the same as with my male friends. (Of course, we did not do those specific behaviors, but I'd wager there's a breed of metrosexual male who enjoys such activities.)
In general, the thing that turns me off Red Pill/manosphere talk is that it's phrased in absolutes that I know from experience are false. AWALT being the repeat offender. To borrow an analogy from another part of this thread, there are in fact poor Indians in Varanasi who will not lie to you and would like to have a friendly conversation with foreigners. You just don't meet them very often.
Society is built on certain salutary myths. In Plato's Republic, commoners are taught that citizens are brothers, and that everyone is born with the tools that indicate their role in society. These noble lies are foundational to the polis. In the organizational meme we call society, members must be brainwashed into believing (a) morality is for all citizens, not just your blood relatives, (b) some people must do unpleasant, dangerous, and degrading work for the benefit of the superstructure.
Of course, some societies require many more and more rigorously-indoctrinated lies than others. But for sure societies where women have a public and gender-integrated role require the polite fiction that males aren't lusting after them around the clock.
The problem is, when you enforce a social fiction for long enough, people start to believe it. This is okay and society functions as long as the noble lies pay their keep for the cost of people doing insane things because they believe lies. Children's crusades, flagellants, etc were the price medieval christendom paid for Catholic doctrine. Lysenkoism, collective farms, etc were the price the USSR paid for Leninism. Social friction and loneliness are part of the price we pay for modern gender ideology and a bigger workforce.
One noble lie paid its keep for a thousand years, the second for a few decades, the third, we'll see.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
How is it that so many people who are in favor of criminal penalties for recreational drugs use also came to believe that the covid lockdowns were bad because they were an assault on liberty?
There's probably a way to square that circle and make the two positions cohere, but the better explanation of incoherent Covid stances on both the right and left is that it's just political tribes picking a side and circling the wagons. In March 2020 there were right wingers who were gungho on pandemic restrictions and left wingers who were blithe to the danger and also were anti-bigpharma vaccine skeptics. But a variety of factors pushed the median left winger to be pro-restrictions and the median right winger to be anti-restrictions. After that both sides rallied around the flag.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I quite like Scott's analogy of dating dynamics and being a well-dressed white tourist in Varanasi, India. In this parable, "street beggars" (males) and "tourists" (females) both have unflattering but mostly accurate insights into the psychology of the other. Game theory determines the shape of their interactions, more than the pre-existing personality of both parties. Any street beggar who is too reticent or tourist who is too open handed is sabotaging themselves. (The one flaw in the analogy is of course that our "tourist" is actually looking for a particular "street beggar", and the tourist:beggar ratio is more balanced, but I quibble.)
It's a failure of rationality, though, to be unwilling to concede that negative generalizations of both sides do, in fact, have a basis in reality. This goes for both the beggars and the tourists.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Man, I wish you were right, but it's time to give up the ghost. "Literally" is used for emphasis much more than for its original meaning. The fact @FarNearEverywhere assumed @Testing123 was using "literal virgin" as an expression of disgust shows that even highly literate people are using sense two as the primary definition these days.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
"Cool" (high status) people are usually exceptionally well-mannered and tolerant, they don't have much to prove, let alone waste time shitting on the personal attributes of a random online. The stereotype that high-status people are mean and catty is one of the stupidest copes/fantasies ever.
Especially in the schoolyard, bullies are usually members of the social precariat. Kinda dumpy girls. Kinda awkward guys. Sociopathic bullies also exist, but bullying is usually best understood as an attempt to shore up social standing through asserting dominance over an outcast. The bullied will inevitably be a safe target with some mark of cain on their forehead.
The failure of popular culture to grasp this dynamic is why I think interventions against bullying have proved mostly ineffective, despite so much energy being marshalled against it.
It's even sadder that people bully for an imaginary audience that doesn't even see them, as on Reddit.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Is English your first language? 'Literally' these days is often used for derisive emphasis. "My boss is literally a jackass", "What a literal retard you are", etc.
To be clear, your English writing is perfect and I wouldn't suspect anything usually. But literally does not mean literally literally, literally.
It's interesting that people treat poor social skills as a moral flaw in these situations. Break this down. OP (a) guessed a girl might be into him, (b) propositioned her for casual sex, (c) got a 'no' answer and let the matter drop. This is, in broad outlines, what millions of young men do every day. The difference is OP was hamfisted in his game, and he misjudged his SMV.
But people treat this as immoral behavior, worthy of scorn, rather than him being an awkward moron in need of a life skills coach.
If anything, OP should be regarded as stupidly ethical. Other men dangle the possibility of LTRs to young ladies while hunting casual sex. Instead, OP was forthright. It should be adorable, really, like a fresh college grad answering a 'What's your greatest weakness?' question honestly.
Chalk it up to people being programmed to despise low status males, like spiders or snakes.
Download a calorie tracker (I recommend Macros but MyFitnessPal is the most popular). Estimate TDEE*. You want TDEE - 500 worth of calories for losing fat** ("cut") or TDEE + 300 for building muscle ("bulk"). The other big thing is getting enough protein, which your tracker will calculate. Here's how many grams/day you're looking for.
Everything else like nutrient timing is an advanced lifter's concern.
* You should expect to to gain/lose a pound of weight for every 3500kcal of surplus/deficit. If this doesn't go as expected after your initial water weight changes in the first week, adjust your TDEE estimation.
** If you're obese, make it 500 times how many BMI classifications you're overweight by
EDIT: If you want the math behind it, the rule of thumb is to have 30kcal~ of deficit for each pound of fat in your body. But that's a little complicated and it's hard to know the exact amount without an advanced body scan anyway.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
What books/papers would you recommend on modern AI research and machine learning techniques for someone who has approximately a CS bachelor's knowledge of computer science? (ie Programming, Algorithms, CLO, OS, Discrete Math, and AI on the level of Game Trees, etc)
I have an opportunity I'll likely have to fake in until I make in. I know the basic concepts of neural networks and deep learning but want a more rigorous background.
Yeah, I totally agree that monogamy enforcing / age gap shaming is propped up by mostly female interests these days. The reaction of men to Leo is usually, damn, what a lucky bastard. (I didn't think of it while writing my comment because I have a biased viewpoint.) DiCaprio as a model for successful males is the archenemy of unmarried women from the mid-thirties and up.
However, I do think the taboo is a historical feature of our society, not an eternal dynamic of sexual competition. Other civs have had different norms — I don't get the impression that Afghanistan, say, makes any bones about age gaps even for totally monstrous child marriages; and there are actually tribes where the sexual norms are that old men get all the young wives. Past the level of city-state, things tend to converge into a few sexual regimes that work. The legacy package of Western monogamy (no premarital sex, til death we part, no widowers chasing young wives) was selected and conquered the world because of how it changed the behavior of males. This is my background paradigm which I abbreviated in my reply.
In practice, females enforce the norms.
It's just that feminists - being handcuffed by blank-slateism - need to come up with some new justification beyond "it hurts our nonmoral interests" or "men and women are different" have had to lean on the argument that it's "abusive". Which has now become the canon explanation. **
Yup, that's what it boils down to. According to consent theory, there shouldn't be a problem with age gaps between adults. If you can sign a contract transferring $100k of your money to a college, you are definitely equipped to decide whose bits you want inside you. But people have to find some moral justification for their gut reaction, which is still rooted in values older than consent theory. This is what I mean when I say the taboo is irrational. (Not to say you couldn't justify age gap restrictions rationally)
Disagreed. They are the same.
But you are touching on the part where @curious_straight_ca errs. Smartness can be good because it allows you to navigate society better than non-smart people who don't analyze the world right/at all. On the other hand, it might lead to you inventing calculus, molecular wave theory, or special relativity while your non-smart peers go out to the club and flirt with girls. (Those guys ended up with 0, 2, and 3 kids respectively.) More likely, you could unheroically become engrossed in a useless but fascinating system like chess openings, futurism debates, or rationalism.
It's also possible smartness might make you piss off your tribe and/or develop mental disorders. Smartness is not an unalloyed good, probably because it leads to in depth discussion, introspection, navel-gazing.
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