raakaa
2mo ago
Regarding demographics: I’m well-aware of who the target audiences of CGDCT series are, versus the target audiences of shounen mags. The point I was making that your median, “normal” guy is probably going to be watching/reading shounen series rather than CGDCT. Even if P(adult male | enjoys CGDCT) is high, I imagine that P(enjoys CGDCT | adult male) << P(enjoys shounen | adult male). The latter distinction is what I was originally referring to. This matches my experiences in real life (albeit in the West), although maybe statistics collected on manga consumption in Japan across a broad demographic would differ.
As for your latter point, I agree! My vision of an ideal life contains a lot less oneupmanship and putting-your-friends-down-when-a-girl-walks-in-the-room than real life does; to that extent, it’s more similar to CGDCT. But I’m unsure that I can speak for the median man in having this vision.
raakaa
4mo ago
I’m not Catholic, don’t know one whit of Catholic theology, and what I am about to say is therefore pulled directly out of my ass. But one possibility — to me — is that when the Eucharist is consecrated, Jesus consciously experiences sense data through Eucharist in some way analogous to how normal humans experience sense data through their bodies. So when you touch the Eucharist, Jesus feels it as if you’re touching his body. This concludes my exercise in developing what is most likely a new brand of heresy.
But if you are using these websites to share your views, then you are engaged in shaping the opinions of others. Maybe you’re not being paid for it, but you’re still doing it—and if your opinions are racist or hateful, then you are thus contributing to a more inequitable society. Beyond this, even if you weren’t participating in public discourse, simply harboring toxic and harmful views cannot help but leak into your everyday interactions with others. That’s how implicit bias works.
This is why your average Joe ought understand that it is not the case that he is safe to spew toxicity and bigotry simply because he doesn’t have a five-figure-follower Twitter account. Hence the cancelling of the OK-sign truck driver, or that of Justine Sacco. I predict that once AI gets powerful enough to scan through petabytes of Amazon Alexa data or conversations surreptitiously recorded by TikTok for bigotry, it is precisely “average normal people” who will face a wave of cancellations. Once the current barriers of inconvenience that prevent general members of the public from being cancelled en masse crumble, all that pent-up energy will be released.
ETA: Actually, a potential counterargument against this vision of the future is that we don’t see people getting cancelled en masse currently based on voting records. Of course, counters against that counterargument include the arguments that many people are listed as unaffiliated, that being a registered Republican is still within the Overton Window, etc….
raakaa
16d ago
Couldn’t this stat just be explained by members of the Chair Force brave pilots having far too much time on their hands at the airbase? I’m not incredulous of the idea that political or governmental actors are attempting to manipulate consensus via botting and astroturfing (it’s been confirmed that the feds have done this in quite a few cases IIRC), but I don’t think that that’s what we’re seeing in this particular statistic from 2013.
raakaa
1mo ago
So the Index or the Vive Pro is the best headset? Got it. As for the “VRChat Newbie Flowchart”, is it something like this?
-
Hang around out-of-the-way places (public worlds with low pop. count) and events
-
Meet the occasional fun person
-
Join the friends/friends+ worlds that said fun people are hanging out in
-
…
-
Profit
I also bet that in general, the wheat gets separated from the chaff pretty quick in these sorts of environments. People who put up with trolls and screaming children eventually find others of their sort, and they end up coming together. This sound about right?
(As for the Asian languages point: thankfully, my 日本語 is not nearly good enough for me to feel confident about barging into some JP world and mucking up the place. Unfortunately, I fear that your timeline for when Western culture war cancer metastases to Japan is probably too optimistic. Already, there are hints in various places of Western culture-war concepts being imported to Japan. I might make a top-level post about this at some point, but I probably won’t.)
raakaa
1mo ago
Yeah, I’ve heard of DSL before but never got around to looking into it. Probably worth at least a lurk given your description. Thanks!
raakaa
1mo ago
Yeah, VR has been on my radar for a while as something that would be really cool to get in on the ground floor of. (Well, maybe not the ground floor any more, but it’s still relatively early in the game (to mix metaphors), as you note.) I think it would be really fun to develop for it as well. The main thing that’s been keeping me from going for it has been analysis paralysis over which headset to buy. Last I remember, the Vive was the best?
Regarding socialization in VR, I heard online that most of the fun is going on in private worlds, the public ones having been overrun (as you note). So then how does one find these private worlds? Just wander around in public until you meet an emissary from the walled gardens who will let you in?
raakaa
1mo ago
Judging from the links, I don’t know if -1 is correct — it seems that 0 is the correct value for monochrome display. But I’m just going based on those two pages, not based on any actual experimentation with a real device, so YMMV.
raakaa
3mo ago
Your view regarding memetic antibodies is far more reasonable than my initial knee-jerk take; I repudiate my original comment (since although I don’t doubt that it’s happening in parallel, that’s not the correct reading of the tweet posted).
raakaa
6mo ago
I feel like the attitude of Americans, a few decades after the Civil War, might be summed up in this picture.
To steelman the progressive position here, that picture can be analogized to this meme: sure, those two groups of Whites are able to amicably reconcile, but isn’t there some other group that they forgot to ask? What “Reconciliation” means, in this context, does not include reconciliation between Blacks and the Whites who subjugated them for centuries and then continued to do so for yet another century after the conclusion of the Civil War; rather, it’s just two sets of oppressors shaking hands while their victims remain subjected to their combined racist legacy. The recent wave of statue-toppling and iconoclasm, on the other hand, is true reconciliation: racist Whites being forced to acknowledge the consequences on their actions on Blacks whose considerations were left out of all previous farcical attempts at so-called “reconciliation”.
Do I buy that this noble idea is fully responsible for the recent push for iconoclasm? I wouldn’t say that I do (I wager that a good deal of it is, at least subconsciously, motivated by plain-and-simple outgroup-targeted antipathy in addition to any purer moral concerns). But I believe that it is a very reasonable explanation of the progressive opposition to the “truce” that’s existed for so long.
raakaa
10mo ago
It looks like on Firefox, there’s this extension that supports Google Translate and DeepL. Never used it, though, so I can’t vouch for its quality.
raakaa
10mo ago
In the article is a quote from the LARPing group’s own self-description:
"Our LARP explores the mythos of the American Dream - or more so the Broken American Dream. Players experience human stories, portraying characters with unique backgrounds. They face their daily life and the issues that come with it. Some are universal or similar to the ones in Poland (such as struggling to provide for your family or combating addiction), and some are specific to the U.S. (such as reliance on private health care or the prevalence of firearms). We wanted to create an immersive experience about facing those hardships both as an individual and as a community, about making impossible choices, about finding your place in your small homeland.
Emphasis mine. Whether it’s outright mockery or something more sympathetic isn’t so easy to tell from just the article (the quoted description makes it seem the latter, the donut-wielding cop provides evidence for the former), but even if the LARPers talk about the universality of the American redneck struggle, I still don’t read this as an identification with redneck culture itself. And it’s certainly not a celebration.
raakaa
11mo ago
I don't have a good grasp of what would be necessary to demonstrate qualia
One key point in the definition of qualia is that there need not be any external factors that correspond to whether or not an entity possesses qualia. Hence the idea of a philosophical zombie: an entity that lacks consciousness/qualia, but acts just like any ordinary human, and cannot be distinguished as a P-zombie by an external observer. As such, the presence of qualia in an entity by definition cannot be demonstrated.
This line of thinking, originated in the parent post, seems to be misguided in a greater way. Whether or not you believe in the existence of qualia or consciousness, the important point is that there's no reason to believe that consciousness is necessarily tied to intelligence. A calculator might not have any internal sensation of color or sound, and yet it can perform division far faster than humans. Paraphrasing a half-remembered argument, this sort of "AI can't outperform humans at X because it's not conscious" talk is like saying "a forklift can't be stronger than a bodybuilder, because it isn't conscious!" First off, we can't demonstrate whether or not a forklift is conscious. And second, it doesn't matter. Solvitur levando.
raakaa
16d ago
It’s addressed in the link. If I understand correctly: if you reply to a comment, then you “endorse” it by default, allowing people who whitelist you to see the comment. But you can also choose not to endorse a comment you reply to (in which case neither comment is seen, I think).
raakaa
2mo ago
It's not possible to have female utopia without this either
I don’t disagree — but whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent, so Lord knows I’m not gonna try and pretend that I know enough to speak about women. A fortiori, I don’t know what kinds of series women watch, although I suppose that this does match up with my intuitions regarding otome games (e.g. replace the bumbling male foil with the unlikeable villainess rival).
Interesting; actually, that reminds me of something.
Man, that’s a fascinating writeup. Although that one reply seems to call into question the extent to which this is universal.
The only gender-swapped CGDCT series, Free!, is about a sport that isn't really competitive in this way.
Yeah, but men aren’t watching Free! from what I understand. (Now, if the idea is that female-targeted gender-swappped CGDCT exhibits this same “lack of competitiveness” as normal male-targeted CGDCT (which, interestingly, is often written by women), then that’s an interesting cross-gender commonality.)
No, I think it's because a zero-shot response to the genre is "wow, this has definitely got to be for people attracted to little girls".
Tomayto, tomahto.
raakaa
4mo ago
Yeah, you’re right—it was inaccurate of me to characterize it as a “Hamas propaganda machine”. I have no reason to believe that a priori Hamas has an extensive propaganda operation targeting Anglophones (and quite frankly, such an operation is far more in line with Israel’s modus operandi).
But to say that he isn’t influenced by propaganda is false. I know the guy, and when he takes out his phone at a meal, I see the Instagram Reels that he scrolls through: in between basketball videos and the like, there’s inevitably some girl exhorting that the Gazan Genocide be stopped. Just about everyone I know is pro-Palestine, and to the extent that I’ve seen their information diets, it’s much of the same. The only exceptions besides myself are Jews.
As for me: I wouldn’t characterize myself as pro-Israel, so much as I’m “anti-anti-Israeli Westerners” [^1]. To the extent I know anything about what’s gone on, it’s from lurking threads here. Prior to October 7, I was generally sympathetic to Palestine. Sure, shortly after the attacks, I did lose a lot of that sympathy, but I remember still lamenting the inevitable Palestinian carnage that would follow. But my tune started to change a few days later. I was chatting with someone I had just met, and jokingly said “inshallah” in some context, only for her to get offended: “How could you make jokes like that with everything that’s going on?” I was confused, since she didn’t look Jewish or anything, only for her to continue: “Don’t make light of the Gazan Genocide!” Huh? Hundreds of Israelis were murdered Bronze-Age-Style a few days ago, their corpses were dragged through the streets and spat at on by the populace on video [^2] — and the first thing on your mind is Gaza?
This attitude, which seems to assume that Israel, one day, for no reason at all, started invading Gaza, is what really turned me against pro-Palestinian Westerners. And it’s everywhere. It characterizes the dominant views of most of my friends. It’s what you see in articles like this one, recently posted in a comment in another thread, which conveniently neglects to mention why Israeli officials on October 8 were saying (admittedly genocidal-sounding) statements. It’s what I’ve seen in person at a pro-Palestine protest where people hold signs calling for an end to the genocide next to signs with hangglider iconography [^3]. The best phrase I can think of to characterize this situation is, ironically, “The [pro-]Palestinian cries out in pain as he strikes you.”
Admittedly, I do get fired up when dealing with pro-Palestinian Westerners like this. The reason why is because I can’t help but pattern-match to situations like the Rittenhouse case, where all that everyone knows is that Kyle Rittenhouse CROSSED STATE LINES to MURDER SOMEONE at a RACIAL JUSTICE PROTEST (and not that he was a second away from being fired upon by his attacker). I can’t help but pattern-match to the George Floyd case, where all that everyone knows is that he was MURDERED by a RACIST COP (and not the fentanyl, counterfeiting, armed burglary, and all the rest). It’s just such a dishonest manipulation of information, and seeing even right-wingers whom I would normally expect to call this sort of thing out fall for it especially grates on me.
And to bring it back to the main point I was making in my original comment (which you ignored): those “missing person” posters are necessary, because large numbers of people genuinely don’t know what triggered the current bombings and the current war. To me, opposing the proliferation of these posters is opposing the proliferation of the information that Kyle Rittenhouse was almost shot to death, or opposing the proliferation of information that George Floyd, a career criminal, did attempt to use counterfeit money, and that the submission hold that killed him was specifically intended to be non-lethal. In all of these cases, there is an ideological reason for sharing this information. And yet, it’s necessary if we want to have an accurate, balanced view of the issue.
Anyway, I ended up writing quite a bit; sorry. I started writing this because I wanted to start addressing my bad habit of replying to comments and then not addressing people’s responses to me, and it looks like you were the victim. I hope that this at least clarifies my position.
[^1] I’m referring here to people who are fervently anti-Israel with regard to the current conflict. Those who dislike US taxpayer money being spent on Israel, or who disdain the influence of AIPAC, I’m more in agreement with.
[^2] From what I remember, unlike the claims of rape or beheadings, this was definitively verified on videos that the Hamas militants themselves recorded.
[^3] I am very reluctant to use this term, but this seems like a very rare thing indeed: an honest-to-God dogwhistle. If you’re like my friend, you don’t know what the significance of a hangglider is. But if you’re pro-Palestine and in the know, then you know.
But who doesn’t know about the kidnapped people?
You’d be surprised. n=1 here, but one friend of mine said something along the lines of “Who cares about October 7th, like, 8 people died or something.” He’s a young, relatively well-informed recent college grad, which just goes to show how effective the Hamas propaganda machine is.
This is a real problem that I have with western supporters of Palestine, who like to pretend that the whole casus belli for the current conflict (i.e. a massive terrorist attack in which videos of civilians being murdered were spread as propaganda for the attackers; contrast this with the general embarrassment from pro-Israelis regarding civilian deaths at Israeli hands [^1]) just didn’t happen. The removal of pro-Israeli propaganda posters that do point out “Yes, this actually happened” speaks to this desire to erase memory of the event that sparked the current war, in order to keep westerners like my friend in a continued state of ignorance.
I have far more respect for people like KulakRevolt, who, consistent with his frequently-professed intellectual stance, says “Yes, the Palestinians did rape and murder all those civilians, with the explicit intention of doing so, with the explicit intention of firing up their own side, and this was a good thing, a natural response to Israeli oppression, and a model for westerners facing our own tyranny.” It’s neither shameful nor dishonest, unlike the people who deny or minimize the attack on October 7.
ETA: There’s a symmetry here, by the way, between westerners who minimize the actions of Hamas and westerners/Israelis who minimize the actions of Israel. For what it’s worth, I assign equal moral blame to someone tearing down posters calling attention to dead Gazans as I do to someone tearing down the kidnapped Israeli posters. There are, however, a couple of symmetry-breaking factors here:
- Everyone knows that Gazan citizens are being killed; many (like my friend) don’t even know about October 7. (Even the pro-Israel news station playing in a lobby where I was waiting recently acknowledged civilian deaths.)
- The Israeli embarrassment regarding the blood on their hands is at least consistent with the attitude of their western supporters. But the embarrassment of western Hamas supporters is wholly incongruous with the attitude of the target audience of the grizzly videos coming out of October 7.
[^1] If you have any evidence of internal Israeli propaganda celebrating the deaths of civilians as a result of their current Gaza campaign, please keep me informed, and I’ll update my beliefs regarding the barbarity of the Israeli populace.
raakaa
5mo ago
Regarding your policy prescription at the end, I could easily see this backfiring if trustworthiness is also correlated with weakness or a people-pleaser disposition. It might be necessary to put scheming sociopaths in power and hope that your polity can direct their tendencies outwards—otherwise, if you just rely on honest and trustworthy leaders, the other guys’ sociopaths could just steamroll you.
One high IQ man abstaining from present society due to his disgust with it could come up with a new invention or idea that could create more value for society than 500 million working women. And how many high IQ men from the past who revolutionized society or matters of the intellect otherwise would have their productivity vastly diminished by modern feminized/gynosupremacist society (were they made to live in it instead)?
Addressing this specific part of the post: I think that your model of the motivations of scientific thinkers is off. The way I see it is that this sort of person, throughout history, is motivated by a combination of non-sexual social status (e.g. the desire to just friggin’ win that manifested itself in the mathematical duels surrounding the discovery of the solution to cubic equations) combined with an intrinsic curiosity to know things and solve hard problems. You could say that the former corresponds to the urge to prove people wrong on the Internet or accrue fancy academic titles, and the latter corresponds to a propensity to get nerd-sniped.
Even if scientist-types would appreciate scoring some poon as a side-effect of their labor, I imagine that very few have the willpower to push back against those very strong urges in order to protest any gynocentric society. N=1 here, and I’m no Newton to be sure, but even if I find it unfair that my tax dollars are going to fund a single mother’s hedonistic lifestyle or whatever, I simply cannot fathom pulling myself away from my research in protest. I would bet that high-IQ scientists feel similarly.
Conversely, if a NEET who watches anime adaptations of Kirara CGDCT manga all day were the kind of person who would be making huge scientific advancements if he just had himself a wife, then he’d probably already be making those advancements. (In fact, some of those NEETs are, although Haruhi isn’t CGDCT.)
ETA: Where you might have a point is in the case of NEETs who spend a full-time job’s worth of time writing SNES emulators or making furry VR games or what have you, who would instead, if they had a family to rear and mouths to feed, be forced to engage in more productive endeavors (if helping Google write better spyware is considered productive). But this strikes me as not a situation in which the NEETs consciously decide to opt-out of society to protest gynocentrism. I’m inclined to think that the autistic furry group is largely disjoint from the /r9k/ group (for example, the former group is more likely to be gay or asexual).
raakaa
10mo ago
Apparently, that extension doesn’t support Mandarin or Japanese (among other languages), so I refrained from suggesting it (in case the OP’s primary use case for Twitter translation is, say, understanding what Japanese artists are saying on their feeds).
Regardless, the fact that it works locally for the languages that it does support is still a testament to the pace of NLP research. How does it compare to something like DeepL, in terms of translation quality?
Indeed, the poster two replies up doesn’t seem to be stating this prescriptively, but others explicitly do. For instance, consider this famous speech delivered by Robert Heinlein at the U.S. Naval Academy to soon-to-be officers: he explicitly says that male sacrifice is a moral duty because a tribe deprived of men can survive, while one without women and children is doomed for extinction. (I’d provide an exact quote, but for some reason, pasting isn’t working on iOS. God bless Apple; it really just works.)
raakaa
2mo ago
Take this with a grain of salt, as it’s mainly something I’ve just heard floated around in weeaboo haunts, but apparently, a significant proportion of fujoshi are actually lesbians; supposedly, yaoi gives them a way to explore non-heterosexuality in a less personal setting. If this is true (again, absolutely no reason to think that it is), then yaoi would serve the role of “gay smut for lesbians” as well.
Interestingly, I’ve also heard (again, based on screencaps of Japanese polls posted on imageboards) that a significant number of yuri fans are straight women. This is a priori somewhat surprising, but fits with surveys I’ve seen of Japanese yumejoshi (women who enjoy things like otome games and other genres involving extremely handsome men romancing a female self-insert) highly ranking certain female characters (with masculine/“princely” demeanors) as among their favorite and most attractive characters. (To put this in perspective, this would be like various otokonoko characters (better known in Anglophone circles as “traps”) ranking among the most beloved girls in a poll of male anime fans. From what I understand, this is very much not the case, with traps largely being relegated to “niche interest character” status, although who knows, maybe some of those otokonoko characters who have achieved “meme” levels of status might fit the bill.) The common cause of these two phenomena (that is, straight female interest in yuri and yumejoshi interest in “handsome” female characters) probably is just the usual “women are all bisexual” theory.
I might just be missing something obvious here, but I’m having trouble seeing why that would be the case. Even in a world with an anti-heresy detector in every smartphone, as long as you don’t do anything too egregious—say, make racial jokes with your buddies, or talk about how you think feminism is harmful, etc—then you have nothing to fear. This would especially be the case if there end up developing clear answers to what would get you cancelled, in contrast to today’s situation where cancellation thrives on ambiguous boundaries.
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