popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
Because it's almost never worth it to be the hero to enforce low level rule breakers. Ah, some "teens" are acting obnoxious on public transit? What are you gonna do, speak up? What if they stab you? What if some activist records you, edits the video to make you seem suspect, and gets you fired? In what universe can the rational incentives ever be right for an individual who's not a superhero to intervene? The problem is that once everyone acts rationally, the low level rule breakers take over public spaces, and everyone is worse off.
You touch on the answer just below this, but it's a cousin phenomenon to Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs: social policies that are harmless in high-IQ high-SES bubbles but disastrous when broadcast to wider society. Our elite-set public morality frowns on small rule enforcement. For those with six figure incomes and degrees from top forty universities, chances are you do antisocial things so rarely, and your peers do antisocial things so rarely, that whenever someone confronts someone about a small rule, the confronter is a petty tyrant looking for an excuse to hurt others. The enforcer of small rules becomes a much hated figure — a Mrs. Dubose yelling at children for saying 'hey' rather than 'good afternoon' or a Mr. Neck pulling rank on free-thinking kids he doesn't like, bigot that he is. To the high-IQ high-SES bubble theatre kid who grows up to write popular media, such small-minded harassment is what 'rule enforcement' is.
Shuttled from private school to Harvard to cushy marketing gigs, they never experience the zoo that unregulated low-IQ low-SES spaces become. A few might donate a year to Teach For America, and then tell horror stories to their friends, only to shut up when they sense their 'friends' don't approve of this line of thinking.
A year or two ago there was an execrable ad on TV about a black young woman paying for college by running a beauty salon in a library. She clacks nails on a desk, and the furious, nasty-looking (and, of course, white) librarian hisses SHHHH at her. A reaction shot, if I recall, shows library patrons recoiling in disapproval at this fascist imposition on a girlboss running her business. The librarian is depicted as pure villain.
Break this down. The ad takes place in a library, a space specifically delineated for quiet study. Distraction-free is the rule. The librarian is an authority figure; she has prerogative to enforce rules, and is enforcing one that benefits every library patron except our young entrepreneur. And she's "bad" because... why, exactly? Because she's enforcing small rules. That's it.
High-IQ high-SES bubbles, where members have been filtered for agreeability and conscientiousness since birth, function without the librarian. Other spaces cannot. But the people in those bubbles set the tone at the top, and they teach proper (read: destructive) values of permissiveness to the lower orders. Thus the world we see around us.
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.
popocatepetl
1yr 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
1yr ago
"Don't tell your parents."
Feels like this could easily be an off-hand gag in the genre of the chemistry teacher telling her class "We're going to be playing with fire today. Don't rat me out!" Such quotes, said every day, can look monstrous in print when a personnel decision needs to be justified.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
The implication being that women are less likely to be in authentic friend groups?
Anecdotal thought. I've noticed that parasocial relationship shows for young losers — usually podcasts — emerge and grow wildly popular with all-male casts. At some point, the viewership numbers make them something of an institution, rather than a garage-band operation. They feel compelled to include a female co-host. The show then reaches cultural eclipse.
Prototypical example: Giant Bomb
There's some level of tension and inhibition that comes with mixed-sex groups. It's not universal and it's hard to prove, because no will admit "I'm afraid of saying something creepy in the presence of a female", but I'm convinced the dynamic is real.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I think spending time in a legitimately republican space, like, oh I don't know, Gab for an online example, will cure you of the notion that The Motte is regular conservatives. I don't know whether this is a libertarian space anymore, either. Personally I have my heart reflexively beating libertarian but the blood runs slow, so to speak. Everyone everywhere is more of a conflict theorist since 2020, and I have been awed and dismayed by the power of collective action.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
An NSA analyst who was in debt sold the secrets of this multi-billion dollar program to the Soviets for a $5000 payment. (The analyst received a total of $35k for other secrets as well.) The analyst wasn't even recruited by the Soviets, he sought them out because he was in debt.
"Pelton was tried and convicted of espionage in 1986 and sentenced to three concurrent life sentences plus ten years. He was also fined $100." Real life continues to beat comedy skits.
So how do you feel about Napoleon's legacy?
Morally, Napoleon strikes me as what Spengler characterized as a Caesar: no strong ideology, ambitious, a pragmatically minded autocrat who sweeps into command of an exhausted society. Men like that do not fight for a cause; viewing them in "good" or "evil" terms is a mistake. Had Napoleon not foolishly killed the Duke of Enghien and invited another coalition against France, the right would view him with the vague favorability they do with Salazar or Franco, because he set a house in order after a decade of chaos. His concordat with the pope, rehabilitation of the emigres, and rationalized law code were just what the doctor ordered for France.
Politically, Napoleon is fascinating to me. He successfully defrocked something that looks suspiciously what the online right calls the Cathedral. People who see only the vague outline of history sometimes say that Napoleon tamed the French revolution after its Jacobin excesses. This is incorrect. After the Thermidorian Reaction, France endured a relatively bloodless period under an oligarchy masquerading as a republic, which historians call the French Directory. The Directors held to the ideological center of the French revolution, using press censorship, anarcho-tyranny, and election fixing to ward off their strong left and right flanks. Napoleon staged a coup with the help of a few Directorate insiders who thought him their pawn. After Napoleon got rid of those 'friends', no one stood up for them.
Provoking another war with Europe afterwards was a dreadful mistake. If not for that, he'd get good marks in my book, but he did do it.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I tend not to blame Ford for pardoning Nixon. When your chief executive fears legal annihilation if he ever transfers power to enemies, there's no telling what can happen. For one, it's the proximate cause of the death of the Roman Republic. Caesar knew he would have charges brought against him once his proconsulship in Gaul ended, so the price of crossing the Rubicon and of letting his term expire were the same.
This is a stupid escalation of precedent.
In most of human history, people didn't live long past the age of 35. India's median life expectancy as late as 1945 was something like 36 years if memory serves.
This is a misunderstanding of fat tailed distributions. The mean (can't find the median) life expectancy was even worse, but this is because child mortality <5yo approached 30%. I can't find the adult mortality rate in India then (that is, the chances of dying between 15-60) but generally in history those who escaped early childood had a reasonable shot at gray hairs.
However, from evolution's perspective, it's true that the psychology of the female past the early 40s is likely pretty irrelevant. She has raised any offspring past the critical period. Maybe there is some selection effect from her acting as a wise grandmother.
Male psychology, though, remains important until old age. The male "mid life crisis" coincides with his wife's menopause, so you could infer evopsych is working specifically against lifelong monogamy.
EDIT: Lmao we're such pedants around here. I'm only the fifth person to just have to correct the life expectancy thing
If you don't care about race there is no reason to care about Aragorn being black any more than that there is reason for you to care that the hero is destined to become king.
It's a problem of people wanting to hold on to the whiteness of the world without any institutional power to back it up. Sorry, you can't.
You're being a little too glib in dismissing "we just don't want the character changed" and "we want verisimilitude in a medieval western european setting" as motivations. For the first, I'd love a test case where hollywood whitewashes an iconic black character (say, Morpheus) to see if it inspires the same indignation in me. Hollywood has yet to indulge.
As for the second.... it's a turnoff to me that modern fantasy depicts societies where the ethnic makeup makes no goddamn sense. A well-realized setting is the draw of the genre. I want fantasy settings where the creator has designed the entire history of their world, far past what could possibly be useful, and then writes a plot set in that world. Back in the day Morrowind had relatively few white people, and none in the uncolonized bedouin interior, and I loved it; everything in the world was carefully considered. Modern studio fantasy writers, though, don't write like this. They reason backwards from the requirements of their story. Aragon must be black, not because the creator thought of the migration patterns of the Numenoreans coming from the tropics of whatever, but because... he's just black, okay? End of story.
The fact they don't care about the internal logic of the setting bleeds into everything else in worldbuilding. Rings of Power was not shit because Harfoots were racially diverse; it was shit because the writers were the sort of people who didn't care why the Harfoots would be racially diverse.
Do you think Google's attempts at ideological sculpting are effective, neutral, or counter-productive? Why are they doing this?
Search for any social topic or event that a conservative cares about, and Google will list progressive news sources and fact checkers denying its validity or, if this is impossible, condemning political weaponization of the facts. Google's information sculpting seemed to reached its apex mid-2022, when PM of Hungary Viktor Orban made a speech with inflammatory takes on European history and EU policy, and Google would not give a link to the speech. Trying all sorts of keywords, one could find page after page of thinkpieces with two-word scare quotes about what a horrible Nazi speech Orban had made, but it was impossible to read what he actually said. (Yandex gave an English transcript as the second result.)
Putting aside the morality or fairness of this: Do you think Google's efforts prevent people from being radicalized? Do they increase political capital for the establishment left? The recent Gemini AI debacle shows a hilarious tin ear for the company; no one could fail to see the tight ideological corset around the image generation squeezing the AI's intestines out its throat. And personally — though I am not normal — the information sculpting I get from search results doesn't make me accept the sources as presented; it just makes me angry.
The three broad explanations I see for Google's approach are:
- It makes you angry, but ninety percent of searchers don't notice. The sculpting works.
- It's very stupid, but a culture of fear inside the company prevents anyone from dialing back. The sculpting is counterproductive.
- The purpose of propaganda is not convincing people but demoralizing them, etc. The sculpting works.
Is there a way to tell which of these is true?
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.
March 25 2023, PCGamer - crickets
March 25 2023, Kotaku - crickets
This is a momentous enough retraction for a famous cancelled figure that they'll have to make some sort of article about it. 95% one will, 60% both will. 99% I will hate their framing of the story.
EDIT: By the by, I checked back on the cursed motherland. In many subs the mods have locked comments on threads about this story. Can't have people developing any unapproved inferences.
"affirmative action double diversity hire?"
it just seems like a mocking sneer to me
IMO it meets the standard of least inflammatory way to communicate the idea. @No_one does not believe we should take this reveal from a seemingly impressive source as seriously as "Pfizer Director, Research & Development Strategic Operations for mRNA scientific planning" implies.
as though of course a black gay guy wouldn't get a job on his own merits.
Any company that engages in DEI practices loses the benefit of doubt in this regard. By their own admission, they disavow meritocracy in hiring practices, so I'll take Pfizer at their word that hires are not by merit.
popocatepetl
4mo ago
The statement isn't about the staffer not understanding why he's getting criticized. This is a classic case of a person in the midst of a scandal putting up the bat signal for their in-group, screaming that the out-group is attacking them just for being a member of the in-group. (See: Zoe Quinn in GamerGate). People do it all the time because it works.
I disagree. "Groomer", as I understand it, is a person who's making a covert attempt to directly modify a kid's sexuality in unhealthy ways. I understand that many people here disagree with this definition, but there's something you should understand in turn: when people like me use the term "groomer", we are not saying "I really don't like this person." We're saying that we consider the people so labeled, the officials supporting them, and the section of the public providing their ideology to be a direct, serious and immediate threat to our children.
I understand the analogy between teacher/parent trans activists and child groomers, but it's also the case that conservatives are "kidding in the square" here. Many are also darkly hinting that trans activists are pedophiles. For example, the Stonetoss comic about predators hiding in plain sight or the "Don't overcomplicate things, they're evil and want to fuck kids" meme. I don't have the data to evalute the truth value of this claim but it's definitely being made.
Virginia Democrat to Introduce Bill to Prosecute Parents Who Refuse to Treat Child as Opposite Sex
You're misreading this one IMO.
Democrats, America's party for social engineering, have naturally come into conflict with families over gender ideology, vaccines, school curriculum, you name it. This isn't a naked attack on the Red Tribe (though they do do that) but on the right of family — any family — to inculclate its children in values contrary to the state.
The family is the most enduring relic of pre-state humanity. How things work in your extended family is a good approximation of how a band or small tribe worked thirty thousand years ago. The family has long been the thorn in the side of states trying to engage in social engineering. Do I need examples? Attempts to fight civil servants and non-ruling class citizens from funneling resources to their family is, boldy, the entire project of the state.
About the bill, then. There was an interesting podcast over at Bennett's Phylactery about the relationship between Christianity and hierarchy. I link it (a) because it's a good response to Guzman's "The Bible says to accept everyone for who they are" quote, but also (b) in one part, he makes a good case for why preserving parents' arbitrary rights to discipline and educate their children is good, even if they may in fringe cases abuse it.
I think it's a good response to Guzman's attempt to impose gender ideology in the houshold, even if she can come up with one or two horrifying anecdotes. If our standard for abolishing rights and local institutions is "something horrifying was done" we will have no rights or local institutions in short order.
How do wokes/social constructionists/etc reconcile their views with the actual state of scientific knowledge or even basic logic? It seems clear to me that if one accepts genetics and evolutionary principles, it necessarily implies that 1: humans have a nature that is determined in large part by our genetics and 2: humans and human societies undergo selection on both an individual and group level.
Among woke-lite groups, AKA the gestalt that creates the Reddit frontpage, you're forgetting that they don't have the information you do. There's a lot of organic social infrastructure to prevent people from learning about group differences and the heritability of behavioural traits; you have to learn about them separately and then correlate the two sets of knowledge on your own. When I first read an internet comment saying the average black american's IQ was one standard deviation below average, my reaction was "Who did the study, the Klu Klux Klan?" For any academic who speaks about the topic openly, their reputations get dragged through the mud. Who wastes time investigating the claims of flat earthers?
Well, me. I investigated flat earth. I also investigated racist pseudoscience. And I didn't bail off any spurious offramps like iron deficiency in childhood or IQ tests being a measure of cultural knowledge that late aughts Google was eager to throw in my face.
For those who never investigate the problem to begin with, or get off one of the offramps, they "reconcile" it because there's nothing to reconcile. There's a reason why your side tends to be much better at passing ideological turing tests then theirs. They just don't know.
Now, there are a few "high inquisitors" like tenured critical theorists, internet moderators, or the SLPC who have to engage with this information enough to fight its dissemination. To steelman what they would say, the evidence for what you're talking about is not conclusive (iron deficiencies in childhood, shared environments, etc), and could have disasterous social consequences if the average idiot takes a simple conclusion from complex and mixed research. Could there be group differences? Maybe. Is there a genetic component? Maybe. Did Islam propogate through the world because it justified systemic violence against non-muslims, unlike other religions? Maybe.
But the impressionable average idiot has to be protected from fascists preaching radical ideology with oversimplified and deceptive statistics.
Does treating transgender people as their transitioned gender in X circumstance make those people happier with little damage done to the rest of society? Because if the answer to that question is yes, then who gives a damn what the Truth of their gender is.
My favorite Scott essay ever covers this better than I can. Forcing people to believe false things is inherently destructive, even if the truth doesn't matter at all. Sometimes the repression is worth the squeeze, because the falsehood is load-bearing for the functioning of society. Reducing suicide rates for perhaps 1% of population doesn't qualify. Meanwhile, the truth regime required to force everyone else to believe a man is a woman — or at least pretend they do while never ever letting the mask slip — boggles the mind.
Could you get me down with "Transwomen are men, and we all know that, but for therapeutic purposes we will pretend they are not"? Maybe. But that's not what they're demanding.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
A conservative man can go to a pride parade, just like in the blog post you linked, and not be threatened.
Uh... I strongly disagree with this analysis. Go to your next pride parade in a MAGA hat and see what happens.
popocatepetl
1yr 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
18d ago
"Communism" in the sense of "enslave rural populations to produce grain at gunpoint, and then use that wealth to centrally plan heavy industrial development" does indeed work. For a while at least.
However, there is a sense that certain factions or cultures of conservative men (of varying races and ethnicities) have created defensive silos of culture against the encroachment of gender non-conforming men. These places could be certain gyms, certain sales teams, certain blue collar unions, or certain bars. The shared sentiment is that there's enough spaces for gay or trans people (these men can't tell the difference) and so they need to batten down the hatches and keep their exclusionary spaces free from the taint of homo (no pun intended).
Then the conservative men start literally shooting cases of beer, and it becomes apparent that it's not really about protecting women and children, it's about establishing cultural silos of hatred towards gay and trans people.
Consider that there are semiotics to LGBT representation on a Bud Light can that go beyond the semantic meaning. Gay rites are civil rites. The red tribe can recognize a blue tribe religious ablution when they see one. Why do you think the red tribe failed to raise a stink about Milo Yiannopoulos, when he was a gay invading their "silo"?
Democrats used to get quite surly about Americana imagery and music in sports, brands, and media back during the War On Terror. This isn't because they "hated America" or "hated freedom". They correctly perceived extreme displays of the Stars and Stripes as a gang marker for the red tribe.
I'm willing to entertain the notion Alissa Heinerscheid didn't know what she was doing, but it looks a hell of a lot from the outside like a triumphalist blue tribe elite planting their flag on the reddest of red tribe territory. Imagine conservatives buying the largest mosque in Portland and erecting a big George W Bush statue on top of it. Are they doing anything wrong? What do you think will happen to the statue?
Is it possible to salvage a non-trivial version of the DKE?
The observation that low-skilled people overestimate themselves and high-skilled people underestimate themselves survives this criticism. Yeah, that's trivial. It doesn't reveal the psychology of skilled vs unskilled, just that, like @rae says, misestimation by the worst will be on average an overestimate, while misestimation by the best will be an underestimate.
The reason Dunning-Kruger feels so real to us is that dilettants outnumber experts by a ludicrous margin. It feels like "history buffs" on the internet are always running their mouths with questionable takes on the Roman Empire. In reality, specialists talk a lot more. There just aren't that many of them.
I think it's mostly lockdowns knocking people off their healthy extroverted life habits and hooking them on a NEET-ish lifestyle. This is akin to governments mandating that everyone try crack one year. For crack addicts, nothing will change. For most people, they'll go through one degenerate year and then resume their regular lifestyle on the other end. But for a portion of the population that were healthy but predisposed to become crack addicts, they will emerge in 2022 as crack addicts. That happened but for junk food, Netflix binging, and vidya.
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