popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
2yr ago
In that class, if someone commits a sufficiently grave faux pas you are unfalteringly polite to their faces and then quietly disinvite them from your social circle. (And if enough people do this to you, you fall out of the elite). You never shame people in public. [...] Getting fat is not acceptable in Blue Tribe elite circles. Public fat-shaming is even less acceptable. These are not inconsistent.
Yes. It's frustrating that progressive ethics seem to tear down formal rules for what a person has to do to stay in good social standing (eg no hat at the dinner table, dress appropriately, no taking the lord's name in vain, tithe 10%, no extramarital sex) while erecting a gridwork of invisible, informal third rails that cause you to lose face if you step on them.
People on the spectrum/systems-focused people skew anti-woke. Self-flatteringly, I think, anti-wokes like me say this is because wokeness is irrational, and so people with rational minds see straight through it. But the old religious rules were also irrational. Maybe autistic/systems-focused people skew anti-woke because we're annoyed that the "new way" is so implicit and requires social saavy to navigate. For example, an autistic teen girl may start putting on weight while getting supportive feel-good messages from everyone; only when her social circle shrinks and she starts getting cold-shouldered does she realize she violated a norm no one spelled out for her. You can write the same story for a person who transitions and then never gets a boyfriend.
This leads to bitterness from the systems-focused person, who would prefer explicit rules.
Personally, I'm in my early 20s and would love to hear your advice. I had a crisis and dropped out of college senior year, but instead of using supernormal stimuli, tried to punish my 'bad' self by rejecting media and pleasure, and ended up just wallowing in pain under the covers with occasional food, internet browsing, or masturbation binges. I think what really brought me out of it was reading a terry pratchet novel and laughing for the first time in a while. When I was younger always having a comedy or fantasy novel was immensely helpful in dealing with the pressures of school. Personally, I'm taking classes again vaguely connected to what I actually care about, though eithout a clear path, and trying to make friends irl, but I still have days I hide from everything. Any little bit you can give helps!
Hm, let me give it a shot. Sounds like you're doing better than me at that point. It's worth linking Scott's survey of anxiety interventions from back in the SSC days, which ranks common advice by effect sizes. That said, if my story sounds familiar, I may have some tailored advice.
Getting better is about putting yourself in the best position to experience the gift of grace. What is grace? Sometimes a baby bird warbles in its nest for a long time, but mother never returns. Eventually the baby bird stops making noises. It does not believe mother will return. The bird may grow to believe warbling is pointless and it really ought to be learning to fly. If you do not warble, though, you're unlikely to experience grace.
If you're like me, your problem is a socialization defect from early childhood that leads you to create walls between yourself and others. Everything else wrong with your life is a second order effect. Sometimes your problem manifests "positively", such as when you work fiendishly hard to show a respectable face to the world. However, when respectability seems impossible, you retreat and attempt to become invisible. It may feel strained to say "You failed to complete your coursework because your couldn't form close and genuine relationships", but that's what it is.
First, something important to understand, at least intellectually. A person's ability to be loved does not spring from arete. Although arete is a good thing to cultivate — indeed, it may come from a healthy self-love — excellence is orthogonal to human worth. You may agree with that, or if you're a cynic, deny it; but either way it's not the way you feel in your bones. Developing the notion that your "core" is pure and can be touched, and feeling it deep down, is the gift of grace. In it, you are able to glimpse yourself in the third person, and feel naked compassion.
Upthread @Ioper suggested turtling and delayed adolescence come from young adults with unrealistic expectations for themselves. They deserve to be famous artists, or have a super hot girlfriend, be rich, etc. I would say he's a little off. A young adult who turtles has convinced themselves they must be remakarble to compensate for what is defective; they must be so remarkable that no one could accuse them of being useless, rotten. This leads to alternating cycles of feverish preening and quiet despair.
Getting better is about assembling evidence that you're wrong. You need to compile this evidence that you are lovable in a currency your limbic system understands. A few approaches:
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Practice pitying yourself. This is usually frowned upon because it reinforces learned helplessness, but for this issue it may be useful. Identify the ways in which you were set up to fail, and where you had a hard time. It's fine if the only thing you can think of is that you're weaker than others. Practice might take the form of journaling or structured meditation. Alternatively you could read fictional or non-fictional stories about people like yourself and experience vicarious pity.
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Find the people who you know (logically) are nicest and/or closest to you. Speak to them in an unvarnished way about yourself. Go from smaller less threatening truths to bigger one, in a structured progression.
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If the above is impossible, try imagining it. Invest the time in filling in and visualizing the interaction.
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Try expressing your admiration for people you respect or feel a debt towards. Cards and birthdays are an excellent chance to do this without it seeming awkward. Carefully observe their and your own reactions.
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By hook or crook, get a circle around you at least that knows you exist. Worming into an existing group is ideal, but it's also fine if it's just 'The people who come to Panera every day around 6pm.' You will not connect with them properly, but it's important that such people are around if the miracle of grace occurs.
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Practice identifying times you are comparing yourself to others. When you notice these comparing thoughts, think about what you observed in 1-4.
You may realize this closely resembles cognitive behavioral therapy. Yep.
While you do these things, you may want to engage in /r/getdisciplined or /r/fitness style self-improvement. I won't dissuade you from that, per se. I actually recommend nutritional tracking a lot actually. However, it's important to remember you are not doing these because you "must", that you will be a loser if you don't improve yourself. You are doing them because you wish to be happy.
Best of luck!
popocatepetl
2yr ago
My complaint is the following.
Meta-debate is when you speculate about the motives and character of the other party rather than addressing their points. /u/trexofwanting wrote that he thinks The Motte is dead because he saw a post where someone calls a woman a slut. Instead of counter-arguing — for example, that trex is mischaracterizing the post, that one post does not represent the state of discourse, that speculating about female sexual nature is within bounds for The Motte's mission statement — you said he was only saying that because he was narcissisitic, lacks tenacity, and was unable to keep his emotions in check.
Even if that's 100% true (and trust me, I have an opinion on that) it's the lowest level of discourse. To the extent The Motte becomes dominated by meta-debate and social shaming, I'll find it less fun.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I've never read a more pathetic diatribe of self centered nonsense. [...] Absolutely pathetic.
Meta-debate. I disagree that The Motte is anything like what OP is portraying, but that's just a difference of opinion. No need to morally shame them for disagreeing and thinking we're Voat... the sphinx is the least interesting part of a debate even when what he says is true.
The Motte is just a parlour game we all play. Barring the astronomical chance that someone here is a future revolutionary a la Lenin who reshapes the world according to theories they read here, The Motte provides zero external benefit and therefore people have zero duty to engage. There's no point if they're not having fun debates.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
People under 20 or so rarely have much interesting to say. This isn't a judgment I apply on posters, just an observation. I suspect it's the same reason there are child prodigy chessmasters and musicians but not child prodigy novelists.
Otherwise I don't find age or life stage particularly relevant.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Gas stoves are the perfect meme for our place in the culture war, akin to paper straws a few years ago. The blues get to broadcast virtue without painful honest signals like commuting by bike, going vegetarian, or not flying to vacations. The reds get to clutch pearls about the absurdity of the modern progressive hivemind without it being twisted into them looking heartless or X-ist.
Politics are a hobby like any other. This is two NFL fans arguing whether low QBR is a good stat for evaluating Kirk Cousins; the Vikings fan says no, the Packers fan says yes.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Apologies if this is rude, but do you exercise/get outside much?
These days, I work out about five hours a week early in the morning, and try to go to at least one social event on weekends. I am very well these days. In the period I'm talking about, though, entering a gym or party would be like a normal person entering them in the middle of a five alarm fire.
Exercise, sleep hygiene, etc is a good solution to moderate problems. Not everyone's problems are moderate. (For the record, I saw a therapist during that period but didn't benefit from it, in part because he sucked and in part because I bullshitted threatening questions.)
In my case, I have a high predisposition to social anxiety, and the structure of life set me up so that I had invested many tens of thousands of dollars, including a good deal from my parents, and at the eleventh hour I went from a 95 percentile student to someone who was on the verge of flunking because he could not do what society required of him. Getting out of that mindset, years later, required defeating self-loathing despite a lot of external evidence that I was lowlife. Were I to meet my mid twenties self today, I could give him good advice, but I guarantee jogging wouldn't have done the trick. (I tried self-improvement projects, sometimes successfully, but they never touched my feeling of worthlessness.)
I won't tell you drugs ruined him, but I think it's plausible they prevented him from getting better. [...] I'm sure that both events (substituting for suicide and substituting for exercise) happen so it's kind of a bravery debate how much we should encourage these less healthy pastimes.
This is a good point. I certainly won't discount vicious cycles; at minimum, my second cousin nuking his brain precludes him reaching a normal life. Lucky for me, Azumanga Daioh didn't have the same effect. I would just suggest that he entered the vicious cycle because of the hyper-bleak nature of his life, rather than superstimulus leading his life to become bleak, which is the way people usually talk about addictions.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
You pretty neatly covered the possibilities, although I might phrase a few differently. My guess is 50% glass floor, 30% male variability, 20% women are wonderful bias.
Women do, by objective measures, seem to be doing better at not becoming losers. Whether this is more about the intrinsic nature of women or the structures of society is a lot like asking why a lake exists: is it the hole or the rain?
I've wanted to create my own tribe for quite a while, one which could probably best be described as a conspiracy.
(1) Build a highly successful business to get crazy amounts of money
Step 1 is the hard part, of course.
Step 0 is actually the hardest part. Step 0 is finding the right group with the right shared memes that they won't defect, even when the tribe has lots of capital that can be siphoned off for individual ends. An unbelievable number of starry-eyed do-gooder organizations have completed Step 1, but became corrupt, full of sinecures, and spent most of their energy on self-perpetuation rather than their sticker goal.
Take Christianity in the second century, which looks like a kind of confederacy of tribes. Christianity took over the world because it instilled an ideology on its members where they would not defect, where they continued to tithe their spare income, spread the good news, and obey their pesbyteroi no matter what. They refused to compromise on doctrine. Even when Diocletion and Galerius forbid Christians from careers, tortured them, killed them they did not defect. This is the nature of conspiracy that completed Step 0 successfully, then took about 250 years to do Step 1.
I would recommend, if you want a tribe with the level of cohesion to change the world, you must first become a prophet. As for making such a tribe out of The Motte, that may be like herding cats. Contrarianism is good for perceiving truth, but it makes for easy defectors.
That said, tribing up with rationalists is interesting idea. But they're very spread out and tend to have good things going where they are.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Thoughts about the last two episodes. (Great show by the way!)
There is a story that comes up a lot on the topic of superstimuli. It goes something like this. 40th percentile person Joaquim Expemplar uses media and drugs in his formative years. Because games, porn, and weed satisfy Joaquim's basic needs, he feels okay about his life and is unmotivated to pursue achievements and authentic relationships. Over time, by indulging himself in peace, Joaquim stagnates into becoming a 20th percentile person, then a 10th percentile person, and then one day he wakes up and finds he's a big failure who is compulsively using superstimuli to distract himself from the squalor of his life.
This story makes a lot of sense. But recently, I think the causal chain is getting reversed here. Mine isn't an original hypothesis, but it's worth restating.
People who are living even mediocre lives don't fall into the trap by playing more and more videogames, taking harder and harder drugs, and watching more and more porn. Every teenage boy is trying drugs and playing videogames and watching porn a lot. Nine out of ten times, this behavior decreases to a healthy(er) equilibrium after the boy grows up, gets in an LTR, joins the workforce, etc. Now, it could be that the other boy was genetically predisposed to get wrecked by superstimulus. But it seems to me the only people who ultimately became addicted are those whose lives were already decisively moving in the direction of FUBAR before they started dosing.
n=1 sample. I spent five years in a pit after college. The need to write an 100 page capstone threw me into an anxiety crisis that spiraled out of control. I just barely finished the required task a year after graduation. I was too afraid to interview, so I ended up staying at a dreary dead end job as an on-call substitute teacher. I actually inbox-ignored a good job offer from a professor because I found myself too humiliated for him to learn what happened to me. I couldn't bring myself to go out and socialize, visit family, etc. After work I would religiously play Europa Univeralis III (for the sense of an interesting job), then watch a slice of life anime (for a sense of friendship and going outside to do fun things), and of course masturbate to porn afterwards.
You can say that, if I hadn't had access to these things, I would have been more motivated to get out of the pit. That doesn't seem right to me. I have reflected on this and I'm convinced that, all those years ago, had there been a fitocratc revolution in the late 00s and a public health inquisition shut down all the porn sites, arrested the hosts of Nyaa Torrents, and installed firmware in my computer to block eu3.exe from loading, I doubt I would have formed healthy habits to fill the vacuum.
I was like a mouse caught in the airbubble of an upside-down cup. The mouse treads water without knowing which way to swim to reach the big blue sky again. Sometimes, the mouse may try treading water even harder, elevating its body momentarily out of the water. But this can't work, so the mouse eventually tires and collapses, back to bobbing its nose to breathe.
Realistically, I was in the pit because I was terrified, not because I was unmotivated. Without these replacements I likely would have exited stage left.
That is my personal experience. But I also think I pretty sensitive to changes in people I've known in life longitudinally, and I can't think of any cases of people who were doing okay in life, and then went off the deep end into a superstimulus rabbit hole. For example, a second cousin I know who's been in and out of rehab for years was a marginalized weirdo, friendless, and withdrawn when he was eight. You can't tell me drugs ruined him. He was already ruined.
Superstimulus, in this story, is just bread and circuses for the broken-hearted. Things like porn and pizza are not existential threats. The existential threat is the mismatch between a technological society's requirements and human social and cognitive reality. This puts people in a position where porn and pizza really are their best option.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Thanks for the idea. That does get my blood flowing.
I suspect in the end @naraburns is correct that I'm pining for a family, but I feel I need some kind of... something to tide me over while that's in the hopper.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I'm thinking more and more I want a tribe, but as a grown-ass adult, everyone seems so atomized, I don't know where to look.
What I mean by a tribe is: a group of people with common identity who meet over and over again non-competitively to accomplish a shared goal. Traditionally, this would be foraging food, but we obviously don't do that anymore. Defecting from a tribal group ranges from forbidden to frowned on. I think this type of group is ideal for human, or at least my, happiness.
Examples that persist in modern society:
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Military units
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Musical bands / performance arts troupes
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School classes, especially if there are collaborative projects
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Sports teams
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Creative development teams (eg indie games studios)
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Informal groups of neighbor parents who take care of each other kids. This lasts while the kids are still young.
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Advocacy groups and volunteer groups.... sometimes. The ones I've been in don't feel like tribes because there's no shared rituals or pressure about backing out.
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Church.... sometimes.
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Work, but very rarely. For the most part everyone is gaming work for maximum personal gain, and are competing with their coworkers for resources, so it's not a tribe.
Am I mising any? Are there ways to predict which volunteer groups, churches, and working environments will be tribal rather than atomistic?
popocatepetl
2yr ago
[Neural networks] are a local minima in the research on how to beat local minimas.
Could you expand what you mean by this? I'd think neural networks would be a local maximum.
I remember in the 90s futurists thought machine translation would replace human translators fairly soon, because the simple algorithm of looking up target language words in a hashmap was producing results so fast. BabelFish could translate "El camarero anda por la calle" in 1995. This is probably 70% as good as machine translation needed to be for many usecases. Machine translation software just needed to "tidy up" edge cases like idioms, homophones, different grammar, etc etc.
This didn't happen. Until Google started using deep learning in the 2010s, progress stalled, because the last 30% couldn't be done with hashmap lookup. Now we are in another period of rapid advancement. But this approach will probably also top out eventually.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I'll add to the chorus of voices saying that HackerNews has been unwoke if not anti-woke for years — it's one of the few solidly gray tribe social media aggregators left. HackerNews has guidelines against political submissions, and culture warring in comments which should sound familiar to posters here. And while this is mostly a founder effect, the site is still run AFAICT under the auspices of Paul Graham, about as anti-woke a man as you can get. I don't think many dyed-in-the-wool antiracists ceasing to regulate harmful language would want to be caught dead on his platform.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
The late medieval French peasant had a decent gig if you don't mind bone crushing material poverty. As in, "the-roof-can-be-lifted-to-eavesdrop-outside" poverty. "Manure-on-the-floor-because-livestock-sleeps-with-you-in-winter" poverty. "Your-second-son-will-be-homeless-vagrant-shepherd" poverty.
It would be nice if Keynes had been right, and we could have collectively said "okay, let's stop the hedonic treadmill there and just chill more going forward", but that's not the way status competition works. The peasants weren't industrious because medieval society wasn't wired to reward productivity with status; ours is.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
This is how I see it. After "the moment", your future will be a binary of whether you're inside or outside the circle — whether you know or are related to Emperor Franz. The outsiders go extinct. But for the insiders, it's just a population bottleneck. They gradually dissipate their wealth among relatives, friends, and descendants, spiralling into an unthinkably vast inheritance and patronage network.
So the future is not 5000 tech bazillionaires cackling and drinking space wine served by butler androids. There will still be a society. Its population will have been replaced. A similar thing happened to English lower classes in early modern England, I've read; they were gradually replaced by descendants of the upper classes, excepting some fetching X chromosomes.
This is assuming human civilization doesn't shed humans like the outgrown husk of a germinating seed, of course.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Is there any way to interpret the text of the amendment that wouldn’t preclude denying a person the right to vote on account of their age being only 5?
Yes. But I imagine everyone will just ignore that knot, much like how Brown v. Board of Education wasn't interpreted to outlaw girls' bathrooms when it struck down separate but equal facilities. The law in text and the law in practice are two separate things.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I think it is poor etiquette to start a top-level post about this instead of just replying, especially given how extremely recent the original post was.
Disagreed. When someone makes a effortpost reply, with enough meat to be a toplevel post, I'd prefer it to not get buried downthread.
I don't pretend to understand the electoral details, but PredictIt prices for Republicans taking the senate seem to have dipped from 82¢ to 66¢ in the past three hours. (See the 24h tab.) So the early results are not as red as expected, or maybe bettors are reacting to Maricopa county situation.
EDIT: Down to 38¢ as of 11:13 EST. Obviously still a fluid situation, but it's looking like the DNC's strategy of drumming on abortion and calling their enemies semi-fascists basically worked.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I don't see your inference that a republican victory will de-escalate things. The last time republicans won on populism, partially on the back of "basket of deplorables" , left extremism (if that's even the right word) kicked into overdrive. The lesson learned in 2016 — based on IRL conversations, not just Twitter — was that the country is shockingly still full of dangerous racists who need to be suppressed. I predict a similar reaction if Trump-backed candidates outperform expectations.
If anything, a republican drubbing might lead to de-escalation, if that's actually what you care about. McConnell's concern about "poor candidate quality" risking a slam dunk GOP victory will come true, the populists will be discredited. The RINO wing of the party will resume control. Things will go back to "normal".
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I haven't read Moldbug except bits and pieces — he takes forever to get to the point, and that's as someone who enjoys Scott. But based on half of Ch. 1, Yarvin and I agree on this one.
I would like to think Dawkins is self-aware enough to realize his argument about memes as the new unit of selection applies to his own beliefs; to the gloss in childless futurists' eyes as they talk about Mars colonization, or a post-scarcity equalitarian future for other people. But maybe not.
I honestly think that's just presentism. Our ancestors had different magical beliefs than ours. The ancient mediterraneans believed the seas were controlled by fickle entities which could be assuaged with worship, sacrificing goats, etc. We on the other hand believe in an invisible property to human organisms which makes it evil to treat them in certain ways and which ties them normatively to objects. Both ancients and moderns become emotional and angry if you question these beliefs, despite not really being able to justify them.
Assuming our civilization continues to develop, future historians (probably no longer human) might consider this a change in religious fashion, must like how at various periods religions went from mostly animist (no gods there) to mostly polytheism then monotheist (in which gods and God share a word, but serve a different role), then whatever we have now. Changes in the manner of religion usually stem from changes in people's way of life. We post-industrials are in a similar boat to the Romans circa 200, who no longer really believed in the pantheon anymore and were primed to convert to something unrecognizable -- in their case, involving a benevolent omnipotent father surrogate.
EDIT: Ignore this, @Chrisprattalpharaptor is right. There are month-old comments implying the post was deleted at the time. The deletion has no bearing on recent drama.
The account is still active along with comments. I imagine PMCM specifically waited for this to delete their AAQC? It's a bit catty but certainly within their rights.
Does it ultimately matter what ideology this particular crazy was latching onto? Does it matter if he demographically matches what you'd expect? That sort of crazy drinks whatever extremism is in the water.
I don't expect any real consequences. This story is another of the many hundreds of stories that garner 30,000+ upvotes on /r/politics and similar venues where blue tribers tell themselves they're right about the populist right being evil, while conspicuously ignoring similar stories that suggest the opposite.
A huge part of the leftist advantage in the culture war is their control of bully pulpit to choose which stories the public focuses on. How many people who aren't conservative know that the Wakeusha murderer was a BLM anti-cop radical who called for violence against whites? If they know, how many times have they been reminded of it?
So yeah, that thing where the left gets an unfair boost in political capital is happening yet another time.
EDIT: I didn't actually address the theory itself.... rant over. I see people bringing up his sexuality (among other things) as evidence against him being a MAGA type, which I find unconvincing. (One of the most famous 'white supremacists' is Nick Fuentes, a hispanic.) He doesn't seem like someone who be connected enough or hot enough to smash with someone as rich and prominent as a Pelosi. Feels like a stretch, but stranger things have happened.
A minor nitpick. Ethnic cleansing traditionally means removing an ethnicity from an area, backed by threat of violence. By this definition, the Paris Peace Treaties signatories engaged in genocide by repatriating ethnic germans from Eastern Europe to Germany after WW2.
I'm not a fan of attempts to expand the definition of genocide, as it eventually waters down to "bad thing I don't approve of". (In the most extreme, I've heard HAES activists say Michelle Obama was engaging in an anti-fat genocide with her MyPlate program.) I'd prefer genocide just mean "an intentional attempt to prevent a category of people from leaving descendants, thus genetically eradicating them".
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