popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
11mo ago
The specificized success criterion was preventing infection. The stated effect was preventing infection. Anyone that now tells you that the scientists were only testing whether it made individuals less likely to die is badly misinformed or is telling a whopper.
Underlined. I was wrong on this one. They didn't study "transmission", because stopping transmission would be unnecessary if the vaccine stopped infection.
popocatepetl
11mo ago
Does what we know about microplastics/estrogenics justify making lifestyle changes to avoid them?
Do people on both side of the debate actually care about women's sports, or is it just an excuse to wage the culture war?
Why do crocodiles ambush prey crossing the river instead of coming on land to snatch them?
Sports is where the weakness of the "trans(wo)men are (wo)men" is most visible, and where the apparent moral highground of progressives defending the weak against bullies is reversed. It's the ideal terrain for conservatives. So that's where they choose to fight, hoping victory there translates to victory elsewhere.
popocatepetl
11mo ago
Exactly, which is my point in general. It's not about sports, it's about using sports as a pretext to attack trans people. This is why I'm not as quick to dismiss progressive claims of racism, or sexism, or various phobias as I used to be.
No, that's not my point. Sports is the best terrain to attack the idea of transgenderism. The fact a man is not a woman is never more manifest than when you set trained men and women against each other athletically. For anti-trans activists to choose the most favorable situation to make their case suggests nothing about their motives. Some may be motivated by phobia, others by reason or tribal affiliation or whatever; for anyone, it's the best place to set the battle lines.
Noone needs to face anything, just increasingly automate weapon systems and let the peasants die. If they're not needed and can't use violence to effectively overthrow the system then why would anyone need to pay any attention to them whatsoever?
The forum is replete with obvious violations of the rules. The mods obviously won't mod comment like this, because then they'd be modding like 30% of all the comments here.
"Elites", "AI companies", and "governments" are not the outgroup. They're stand-ins for Moloch. "Progressives", "woke PCMs", or "democrats" are the outgroup. If @Azth's were writing about them in this way — or implying anyone reading this forum or talking to him thinks it's fine if peasants die — he'd be modded within a few hours.
For an alternate example from the left side of things, it's possible to write extremely mean things about "capitalism" or "corporations" without getting modded.
popocatepetl
11mo ago
The comment you chose in particular is as clear an example of outgroup bashing as its possible to be.
Hardly. He's applying the Dictator's Handbook hypothesis that the powerful don't need to (and can't) care about the population in countries where the workforce is economically irrelevant to the AI automation problem. Unlike @astrolabia's comment, @Azth's isn't more inflammatory than the underlying idea, so I disagree with you lumping them together.
And this is how she is treated. I used to think that I got treated badly in the US because I was a nerdy, low-status white male. But maybe America is just an absolutely horrible place to live?
Viral social media shaming leading to getting fired is like being struck by lightning. It shouldn't much effect your evaluation of quality of life in the USA, any more than mass school shootings should.
popocatepetl
10mo ago
Aliens make no sense because the stars still shine.
Belief in aliens can survive this narrow point. Forests are making a comeback in North America because post-industrial economies don't bother burning wood for heat except as a nostalgia larp. It's plausible Kardashev Type II civilizations pass through their dyson sphere phase fairly quickly and then stop bothering with that low density energy source.
If you generalize the point to them being totally invisible, yeah, that's the Fermi Paradox.
evolution is, for all we know, vanishingly unlikely, so unlikely that our existence is only enabled by anthropic principle
This is also my view. Drake's original rough guesstimates (100% of life-capable planets develop life, 100% of life-hosting planets evolve intelligence) are almost comical in failure to account for observation bias. Our existence tells us nothing about these probabilities except that they're not literally zero. It's like a government inspector going to different factories and noting that 100% have a government inspector in them, himself. Mechanically, the probability of amino acids coming together to form a protein should inform our highest plausible estimate for fl.
Realistically, the vast majority of abiogenic proteins would just die. Said protein must also have energy-seeking and self-replication capabilities from the jump. And that's not getting into evolving intelligence.
It's also possible that fl⋅fi⋅fc comes out to something like 10-24, in which case we're not literally alone, but our handful of fellow travellers did not manage to metastasize across the cosmos.
Predictions:
-
95%: Reddit does not back down, defined as offering free API to Apollo and RiF
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80%: After two weeks, no top 100 subreddit is still blacked out. (99% no more than two are)
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60%: At least one case of admins stripping modding privileges from blackouters occurs
Bonus:
- 70%: Assuming my preferred app stops working, I personally will cave and still be using Reddit on my phone this summer despite it being the perfect opportunity to quit.
I use the term "person" to refer to a being who is capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future. As I have said in answer to the previous question, I think that it is generally a greater wrong to kill such a being than it is to kill a being that has no sense of existing over time. Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living.
I respect the infanticide-justifying position because it takes the reasoning of abortionists seriously. A fetus is a clump of cells. Rephrased, it lacks a thinking mind, and therefore it is morally irrelevant. So if a newborn baby lacks a thinking mind, it should also be morally irrelevant, or at least morally inferior to organisms of greater mental complexity like, say, pigs and rats. Why reject this? The difference is that humans have an instinctual disgust mechanism against blendering a cute little baby that they don't for livestock or vermin or 0.7in tall fetuses which can't be seen without advanced technology. Unless we want to talk about the potential of the baby, in which case, yeah, the anti-abortionists agree entirely. Maybe backport that insight by a few months.
Most of the pro-choice crowd, it seems to me, reason backward from the perceived social necessity of not mothering a child at an inopportune time. This is exactly what Heian-era Japanese mothers drowning their newborns in midwinter thought. Abortioners do not apply the reasoning fully, just to the specific area they psychologically require to excuse themselves in. Singer is taking the logic all the way.
popocatepetl
10mo ago
But freedom requires virtue, and the particular virtue it requires of you right now is the virtue of mercy and forbearance. Ancient Athens could do what it did because it was geographically and spiritually right on the productive edge between the German barbarians on one side and the decadent Oriental despotisms on the other. We’re trying to do the same thing here, surf the tiny space between civilization and barbarism where freedom can flourish.
This sounds right, but from what I've read Athens didn't have freedom in a sense an Icelander or most moderners would recognize. Freiheit of the German warband is about individual autonomy, libertas of classical civilization about group autonomy. The latter would look at the Puritan colony with its rigid social regulations and say they were free. Athens sounds like a regimented society that happened to be democratic.
The quote is more apt for our present situation. Behind, poverty so vast that only the nobility had freiheit. Ahead, Moloch.
popocatepetl
10mo ago
Why does a bunch of subreddits going private for a few days prove that it was a good decision
Personally I question whether I could bring myself to use Reddit (and by extension /r/themotte) if the official interface were the only option. I suspect the axe will fall on https://old.reddit.com next. So you'd be deprived of my company for whatever that's worth.
But yeah, as far as I can tell, censorship was the first, second, third, fourth, and only reason we left. This cringe compilation tier revolution and insta-capitulation by reddit mods is amusing but ultimately irrelevant to us.
TheDonald and, sigh, watchpeopledie.
Also: gendercritical -> Ovarit, ConsumeProduct under the auspices of the .win network
Took a look at all of these. They look to be pale shadows of their former lives as subreddits. The Motte has taken a hit but at least still gets comparable weekly comment numbers to a year ago. I don't think you can cite any of these other four as success stories.
popocatepetl
10mo ago
I'd guess some moderators, at least, would have noble aims of service and making things better/keeping things running in mind, motivating them more than the feeling of being in power?
For a real community, like here, there will be people who love the forum and want to maintain it.
A place like /r/pics, on the other hand, is not a community, it's a dumping ground. Anyone selfless enough to do the thankless work like curating it out of pure civic mindedness would have glommed onto a worthier cause instead.
popocatepetl
9mo ago
I don't see it on Bump sort (my default), but do see it on New and Hot.
popocatepetl
9mo ago
Ever since Scott ran an article on social contagion in anorexia and how anorexia wasn’t common at all until females herd about it.
He didn't make the connection explicitly, but transgenderism was surely on his mind when he wrote it. "Looking back on the debate, it seems as if acceptance of neurasthenia had been so successful that psychiatrists felt obligated to restigmatize this mental disorder in hopes of limiting its adoption. [...] He who has ears to hear, let him listen."
It's disappointing how chickenshit Scott has become in his ACX days. He's effectively cancelproof so there's no need to be this cagey.
I check in on the branch covidians at places like ZeroCovidCommunity from time to time, but my emotions towards them have softened over time from disgust to pity.
I guess that now their faction is out of power and not actively trying to degrade my life, I don't really bear any hostility to them... but if they started gaining power again I'd probably revert to hate.
The people in those spaces are not the same people you were disgusted with three years ago. Be careful not to succumb to outgroup homogeneity bias. The people who still take Covid seriously in July 2023 are in many ways kindred spirits to those who were done taking Covid seriously in July 2020; they applied their own reasoning to the problem and came to a conclusion that, right or wrong, they'll cleave to whatever society says. Wearing a mask and social distancing is low status, where before it was high status. Covid Hawks of current year are admirable even though imo they're wrong.
By contrast, some of the people occupying the same space in 2020 were (a) parroting high status positions (b) looking for an excuse to hate the outgroup (c) looking for an excuse to exercise petty authority (d) authentically responding in fear to a perceived crisis by looking for a witch to burn or Jewish quarter to loot. Now that those groups have moved on to something else, they've left the principled core of the pro-lockdown movement behind.
popocatepetl
8mo ago
popocatepetl
8mo ago
But it’s remarkable to me that no one seems to have given the original meme meaning someone who does not possesses an inner monologue.
I think that's implied in many of the definitions I've read.
That said, slurs have a gravitational pull towards incoherent raw disdain. Karen went from "Entitled middle-aged woman who abuses lowly customer service employees because she thinks she's important" to "Woman I don't like" in a couple months. NPC is well on its way.
popocatepetl
8mo ago
Someone whose views are the average of the media they consume or the friends they keep. They do not seriously evaluate a given topic or problem and come to their own conclusion on it, instead preferring to delegate to trusted figures of authority.
This definition is inadequate because it describes everyone. Do you think it's an accident that 99% of your objective beliefs and moral opinions are those of a 21st century educated westerner rather than, say, an 8th century BC Scythian herdsman? Did you personally validate your belief that Jupiter is a gas giant with several moons or did you trust an authority figure? Are you an NPC because you did?
IMO the litmus test of NPC is receiving "updated information" from trusted figures that contradicts previously received beliefs/values, and not experiencing any kind of cognitive discomfort. The 2020-2022 period was full of these sorts of War with Eastasia/Eurasia heel turns from the tastemakers, which is why the meme emerged then.
popocatepetl
8mo ago
Yeah. I'm sure you've heard this before, but you're overfocusing on negatives to the point of insanity.
From the tone of your writing, you'd think you were a middle-aged castrated cripple living under a bridge in a small town where everyone knows you as a registered sex offender. The facts of your situation that bleed through your wellness posts do not agree with the level of despair, at all.
Given this, improvement in your life situation will not improve your emotions. They're unmoored from one another. Seek help and/or try new medications.
INTJ, I would guess it’s INTJ’s that are overrepresented in here. Judgers are more systematizing than Perceivers, no? But the last letter isn’t as relevant as the first 3 anyway.
I'd be surprised if this forum weren't half INTJ+INTP, if not more. A Scott poll from the good old days had us 10x overrepresented in his readership IIRC.
The 2020-2022 period was full of these sorts of War with Eastasia/Eurasia heel turns from the tastemakers, which is why the meme emerged then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPC_(meme) the term was first used in a political context in 2018, it predates Covid.
I checked the Google Trends data. "NPC" had a spike in 2018, returned to baseline, and then was revived in late February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, and has been double to triple baseline since.
It's a bit like how "gaslighting" originated from a 1938 play. The term was lying around dormant and picked up later. In the case of NPC, it was the mass fast turn of online progressives from talking about covid vaccines to talking about Ukraine.
It accelerated existing trends: the security state, government regulation of social media, political polarization, the decline of small businesses. I don't see it as turning point in any area.
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