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
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
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
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.
raakaa
9mo ago
Cancellation (political persecution let’s be honest) relies on the vast majority of people believing they’ll be okay if they just stay quiet. With the invention and deployment of a sufficiently powerful heresy detector, this no longer holds true.
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.
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
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
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
11mo ago
Wouldn’t you rather be valued for your skills and abilities rather than your success be based on how much men want to have sex with you? The latter is quite dehumanising.
Here's a claim I'll put out there: men are already largely valued by how much women want to have sex with them. Or speaking more precisely, there are certain markers of social fluency / status / desirability that matter more, when it comes to making snap social judgments regarding a man's value, than his skills and abilities. This is where you get anecdotes like this one related in Chapter 3 of Volume I of Feynman's Lectures on Physics, in which the nuclear scientist's girlfriend laughs at his attempt to demonstrate value through his (scientific) skills and abilities. Or alternatively, all the scoffing and schadenfreude-ing at Minecraft creator Notch for leading a life of loneliness despite creating the best-selling video game in history (although that can be argued to be driven by sour grapes ("I might not be friggin' rich like him, but at least I get poon!") and general antipathy towards his politics). Actually, it might be more apt to say in men's case that they are devalued by how much women don't want to have sex with them.
[ Note, by the way, that I'm talking about "value" here rather than "success" (the latter of which I'm taking to mean "success in a corporate / academic / career context", given that words like "skills and abilities" and "success" tend to be used more in that domain these days rather than, for instance "skills and abilities as a parent" or "skills and abilities as a Little League coach"), because I don't believe that career success and the like for women is all too tied to sex appeal. Here's an anecdote, but most high-achieving Women In STEM that I see are not lookers, to say the least. I've heard similar from people in other "intelligence-heavy" (so to speak) fields such as law. Now, maybe the situation is different in more public-facing or "soft-skills"-heavy roles like marketing or management - but frankly, we know that men in those areas are also selected for attractiveness. So if the claim is that women are only able to advance in their careers to the extent that they're attractive, then that's a claim that I personally don't buy. (I'm open to being persuaded otherwise.) ]
But returning to the original idea: if women value me because they all wanted to have sex with me - well, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world by me. Of course, one could note that sex is for men what commitment is for women, and say that a fairer analogy would be to say "how would you feel if women valued you to the extent that they found you emotionally useful?" In that case, I wouldn't be quite as happy; but to say that this analogy would be fairer would be to ignore a key component of what it means for a man to be sexually attracted to a woman. It's the same component that's ignored when women get mad at guys for asking them on dates after a long period of friendship: "Uggh, he only wanted to use me for sex?" No: for a man (going by my own experiences and those of other men I know), when you're attracted to a woman sexually, then everything about her becomes more attractive. Her jokes become funnier; her insights more profound. It leads to a self-reinforcing feedback loop of attraction (because when these other qualities become more attractive, then this raises the level of physical attraction as well). Take that into consideration and being valued as a woman because a guy wants to have sex with you seems pretty nice, given that it comes as a package deal with him valuing you as an intellect and a wit.
Then again, this entire post is largely a "grass is greener"-type situation, now, isn't it. I do stand by the claims that "men are devalued by how much women don't want to have sex with them" and "being valued as a woman for your sexual attractiveness is pretty nice", but I understand that it's not necessarily all peaches and cream.
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.
raakaa
9mo ago
I think a huge part of the negative reaction to the movie as being "man-hating" is due to people with incredibly poor media literacy who seem to think that the filmmakers' farcical representation of Barbieland is a straight-faced endorsement of their idea of a utopia, which I think it pretty obviously is not.
Unfortunately, if you are making media to be consumed by the public, then you must be considering how the public is likely to interpret your media, regardless of whether they live up to your standards of media literacy. If I take a flight to Germany and wave around a flag emblazoned with a certain symbol auspicious to Buddhists, then I’ll likely be arrested anyway despite any claims of benign intentions on my part.
I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve heard both the “men bad” interpretation and the “it’s actually a satire” interpretation from others who have watched it. Maybe my friend with the former interpretation, who took offense to the film, is simply lacking in media literacy. But for every one of him, there’s a woman equally lacking in media literacy who also interprets the film as professing “men bad”— and is inclined to agree with this message, and modify their behavior in life accordingly.
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
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
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
5mo ago
Can you imagine 21st century Americans behaving like the Palestinians if the Chinese decided to occupy their nation? I can’t.
If you asked me this question four years ago, I would’ve replied the exact opposite. In elementary school, we were still taught the version of the story of the American Revolution with Paul Revere’s Ride and No Taxation Without Representation and free men casting off the yoke of Albion. I thus always went through life assuming that Americans, even 21st-century ones, were freedom-loving enough to respond violently if necessary to any infringement upon our fundamental rights as outlined in the Constitution and its amendments. Oh boy, was 2020 a wake-up call. I like to believe that those fabled Americans still exist in states redder than mine, but I can’t say that I have the same faith anymore.
Anyway. Sorry for the unrelated blogpost; you just triggered a little thought.
raakaa
17d ago
Staunch feminist sits next to foreign guy on the subway. Guy completely ignores her. She tries to get his attention, he keeps ignoring her. She gets up and starts berating him for "manspreading," threatens to take his picture and put it on Twitter. Incident resolves when he threatens to take her picture and send it to the police for harrassment.
It’s like a darker, grittier version of this scene… [trigger warning: anime]
raakaa
3mo ago
Looks like another piece of evidence in favor of horseshoe theory: he, like Mark Fisher, thinks that the current world order needs to be upended because they stopped making the music he liked as a kid.
raakaa
4mo ago
In many of those extremely-addicting modern multiplayer games, it seems that in order for a beginner to be competitive with even other beginners (that is to say, not lose every single game), he has to spend quite a bit of time learning the “metagame”: the set of standard strategies widely used by players and the interactions between them. This learning process often takes the form of reading some wiki article that helpfully explains everything: if you have this playstyle, then you should use this character and use these skills at this point in the game; this can be countered by that character, who is in turn weak to some other strategy, yadda yadda yadda. These wiki articles are invaluable for newbies; reading them is the difference between having a shot of winning and getting steamrolled every game.
My question is regarding one of the most addicting, most important modern multiplayer games that there is. Here it is: is there any newbie guide to standard strategies for using dating apps (as a male)? I’ve finally resolved to take the plunge into the abyss (since even though I’ve always heard that they’re absolutely soul-crushing, I’ve realized that this is my only chance at this point for finding a 3D woman to date/marry), but I don’t want to make this dive without any equipment. If I’m gonna spend time (and self-esteem) swiping, then I should at least be smart about it, if I want to be competitive instead of yet another “0 messages in last 6 months” datapoint.
Of course, I already understand the basics, like
- Be attractive.
- Don’t be unattractive.
- Have photos of yourself with friends.
- If you are lucky enough to get a match, don’t just send “Hey”.
But this is more akin to the basic rules of the game (e.g. “use the arrow keys to move”, or even “your PC must have this much RAM to run the game”) than the higher-level strategy that I’m looking for. In particular, I’m looking for answers to questions like:
- What does a good bio look like? Is “name+career+hobbies” too boring?
- How funny should you be in your profile? What does good wit look like in this setting?
- If you do by some Act of God get a match, then what does a good opener look like? Are the proverbial “Tinder jesters” that you see on Reddit going about this in the right way? Is it instead good to start with a question about any hobbies that she indicated on her profile? What if she doesn’t have any good hobbies?
- Is there any way to select for “good girl” material on these apps?
I assume that millions of words have been written about this subject, and I also assume that 99.99% of them are pure garbage primarily intended to optimize SEO and get ad views. So I’ll instead ask a community which I understand to be pretty smart, and which I also understand (from lurking previous Wellness Wednesday threads) to contain some dating app connoisseurs as well. So for the sake of myself and any others in a similar situation: what’s the best way to do dating apps?
I recently read this article, which seems to have awoken some latent bleeding heart in me. As a result, it’s got me thinking about wealth redistribution, whence the following questions:
- What are some of the best “utilitarian” arguments against greater wealth redistribution in America? (When I say “utilitarian”, I don’t actually mean calculating out the utils involved— but I do mean arguments other than moral ones like “people ought be able to retain the results of their labor” (which argument I am particularly sympathetic to around tax season).) What are estimates of the argmax of the Laffer curve? Is there an inverse relationship between “innovation” and income tax rate that might explain why America is far more of a tech hub than Sweden? That sort of argument is what I would be looking for.
- Are there any low-overhead charities out there where you can mostly-directly send money to poorer people? Preferably with options to filter by criteria such as number of kids, marital status, etc.
I understand that this post betrays a real naïveté in both economic knowledge and worldly experience— so I’ll admit that I’m a decent bit embarrassed about making it, but I figure that a Small-Scale Question Sunday thread is the best place to ask this.
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.
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