rae
A linear combination of eigengenders
User ID: 2231
rae
5d ago
In a fair fight, I have approximately 0.1% chance of losing a fight to the average street harasser in an objective way.
What’s the likelihood that it will be a fair fight though?
I am a bit confused by your mental model here where you think normal men confronting homeless creepers is not a thing because they fear to lose the fight.
I’ll admit I’ve never lived in a city where I’ve encountered the kind of aggressive, mental ill homeless mentioned here. Maybe that population is sufficiently malnourished that you can easily beat them with little effort, but the street harassment I’ve seen has mostly been from young men who looked in normal physical shape, often in groups.
Its not a thing for me. Its not a thing for my brother or anyone else who was on the wrestling team at our high school.
Well we come from different backgrounds I suppose, my high school did not have a wrestling team and the men I know are middle class guys working office jobs who have never been in a real physical fight.
rae
7d ago
How can we bemoan the loss of honor, while this thread is full of criticism of honor cultures and the violence they lead to?
Because honor cultures are objectively awful. The states where honor culture dominates, like the Middle East, tend to be poor, violent and oppressive places to live. I personally have no desire to live in a society where men are quick to resort to physical violence when their feel their honor threatened, and I'm happy blood feuds, honor killings, and even schoolyard fights are no longer accepted or commonplace.
The reason why "respectable" men don't beat up street harassers isn't just because of the legal risk, but because you might very well end up losing. Even if you're in peak physical condition and a trained martial artist, what if the vagrant pulls a knife? What if you win this time, but he comes back with 5 of his buddies? What's the point of risking potentially a life-changing, even fatal injury, because of what, a comment? The risk of escalation is too great compared to just walking on, ignoring the catcall, or just sticking to more middle-class areas.
It used to be well understood that a bum or a vagrant or a drunk catcalling your wife or girlfriend or daughter or sister was ample justification for you, as a man of honor, to smack him good and hard. Bums and vagrants and drunks learned to keep their mouths shut. Now they feel no need to restrain themselves, no citizen is going to risk a felony arrest, becoming a felon over it. Or a civil lawsuit that will drain their bank account.
And what if a woman is walking alone? Needing a male chaperone seems like social regression, it's a good thing that women don't need to rely on an individual man for protection. I'd much rather have a well-trained police force and justice/health system that is allowed to do its job.
rae
7d ago
I ask these people: how did our ancestors ever manage to live? They must have been dying left and right from unlucky punches. That doesn't seem to be the case, it's an almost unattested to phenomenon before modernity.
As @FtttG said, those deaths are mostly from people falling and hitting their head on concrete after getting punched, so it makes sense it was more uncommon in pre-modern, more rural times.
But regardless, I think you're romanticising the past. Even if they couldn't easily slip and die from slipping on asphalt, our ancestors absolutely died left and right from stupid, violent deaths. Just look at the homicide rate over the last 750 years. Or further back, how 21% of men in Amazon hunter-gathered tribes died violent deaths.
Getting in a fight (outside of the well-regulated environment of combat sports, although even then some like boxing are needlessly dangerous), has absolutely no benefit and is associated with impulsive, low-IQ criminals, drug addicts and drunks for a reason. What do you get from escalating it to a violent fight that words couldn't express? And you have no guarantee, especially if it's a stranger, that your opponent won't suddenly pull a knife (or a gun) and kill you.
The rare possibility of physical violence is a good thing for social regulation. So much of obnoxious behavior we see today is the result of its lack. Over expansive definitions of self defense that effectively make any form of physical violence a justification for homicide will make this worse, not better.
What obnoxious behavior do we see today that would be fixable by violence from random citizens? If you're talking about say, mental ill or drugged addicted homeless people roaming many western urban centers, if the government's solution is to let anybody punch them as opposed to putting them in mental hospitals or homeless shelters, that would be to me an abject failure of government and I would not feel the least bit safer. Vigilantism is never a good thing and is a sign the police and authorities are a failure.
rae
9d ago
Let's not forget that in The Boy Who Cried Wolf, the wolf did eventually come and eat everyone.
But when and how do you sound the alarm when a dictator is slowly installing an authoritarian regime over a country? American leftists warned everyone against this from day one, with poor results. Alarm fatigue set in, people became habituated to the steady erosion of democratic norms because there wasn't a single act to push them over the edge, just a slowly boiling of the frog of democracy.
rae
23d ago
I feel like the whole debate completely misses the point entirely. Political violence can mean anything from violently resisting laws, assassinating politicians, to murdering random civilians with opposing views.
When people say “just kill fascists”, is the latter one what they mean? Would they have considered morally acceptable to open fire on a train of Mussolini voters during Fascist Italy? To kill a random grandma for supporting Il Duce, even if she was retired, had no influence whatsoever and just believed it because that’s what most people did?
rae
1mo ago
I’ll keep this short because I’ve rambled about this enough on themotte in the past. As a younger gay man, I didn’t understand why the soft status game was so ungratifying. I could be Liberace with little to no effort on my part. But Liberace- and gay men like him- have little to no actual status among gay men. Even entirely destitute gay men aren’t charmed by the money of a rich man. Likewise, when you are the rich man, it is not gratifying to charm a man with your money. The average gay man may pay for sex once or twice in his twenties, or when he comes into money, but he’ll find that it doesn’t gratify the ego in any way that matters. It feels cheap, fake, and dishonest to wield power in this way. Only through hard power- and earning respect, love and status through hard power- can you feel good about yourself and your place among men.
I’m not a gay man but this seems utterly backwards to me. Liberace was the highest paid musician in the entire world, an immensely talented entertainer and genuinely skilled pianist. To achieve that level of status requires a massive amount of talent and effort and you’re saying it’s more gratifying and somehow harder to just be a generic handsome guy because… other gay men find you more fuckable?
For me, what you describe as “hard power” is the definition of cheap and ungratifying. You’re talking about the kind of “status” that a chimpanzee would understand. There is nothing deep about it, it doesn’t add any value to the world, and it’s not something you can build a foundation for a relationship on - whether that is a friendship, a professional connection, or a romantic relationship. I’d rather have a partner who’s a bit plain looking but smart, loving, ambitious and successful - once you’re 6 months into a relationship a chiseled jawline won’t compensate for the lack of deep meaningful conversations. When you’re old and grey, will your proudest achievement really be that you were hot in your twenties and thirties?
I am sure that, as a man, winning at hard status is gratifying, while winning at soft status feels dorky.
I am not sure of that at all.
But I want to know if women feel the same way or if the opposite is true. Do women feel more gratified being Ellen Degeneres or more gratified being Marilyn Monroe?
Marilyn Monroe had a tragic life, suffered from depression, alcoholism and probably committed suicide via drug overdose, while Ellen Degeneres is still alive at 67 with hundreds of millions of dollars and seemingly no real regret over having being a toxic bully of a boss.
I don’t know if the medication of MTF women can tone down this desire inside- perhaps it can, and perhaps that’s fine if you’re living it, but as an outsider to me it is sad.
I’m MTF and if anything I find it a relief to not have that testosterone driven competitive mentality. Explicit hierarchies always made me uncomfortable and the very concept of “ranking” people in status/attractiveness is something I find kinda icky.
rae
1mo ago
3-5% would be exclusively gay men, 37% would be the number that had any homosexual experience regardless of their orientation. It might actually have been more common in the past because there were more male-only spaces and since being gay was so taboo, there was paradoxically more leeway. Friends I know who went to single-sex schools reported a lot of “gay stuff” happening despite most participants being straight, with the motivation being hazing, power dynamics, sexual frustration due to lack of women, etc (see what goes on in prisons).
rae
1mo ago
I’m really struggling to understand how having a hard time finding a girlfriend can make someone want to dress up as an anthropomorphic animal and have sex with other men in similar costumes. I can understand having those urges, getting into a relationship and it being too embarrassing to share so you just suppress it (although I’m sure many still explore them in porn), or being single because you have non-standard sexual interests and can’t find someone that fulfils you.
I do get that the internet/porn amplifies underlying fetishes and makes you seek more extreme stimuli, but I don’t think it can make a straight man gay or vice-versa, or a vanilla person interested in furry fandom.
rae
1mo ago
I think the opposite explanation is far more likely, until recently the pressure to be in a hetero relation was extremely strong and any “divergent” behaviour was kept tightly under wraps. The Kinsey reports from the 1940s found 37% of males had at least one homosexual experience, 11.6% were about equally bisexual and 10% were more-or-less exclusively homosexual.
I’ve known plenty of gay and bisexual men and none fit the profile of “watched too much porn, couldn’t get a girlfriend”. Gay men just have completely different innate sexual appetites, and lots of bi men are closeted and cheating on their girlfriends and wives. The closest thing to what you’re describing would be bisexual men choosing to hook up with men because it takes less effort to organise than ordering from DoorDash, or men dating trans women because they’re more “chill”, but I can’t believe being an incel for long enough will make you want to shove a penis into your mouth with as much enthusiasm as these guys had.
rae
1mo ago
The right totally offers solutions -- see that clip that was circulating of Charlie Kirk talking to somebody considering hormones; you just don't like the solution. (ie. talk therapy, find a way to be comfortable in your own body that doesn't involve intense, largely unstudied, lifelong pharmaceutical intake + extremely invasive surgeries, carry on with life)
And what if those other solutions just don't work? I did try talk therapy for years, I did everything I could to convince myself I didn't need to transition. I went to the gym and became very physically fit, I dated men and women both, I talked to TERFs and tried to read what they said with an open mind. And yet, the pharmaceutical route - just a estradiol gel you apply daily to your skin - is so far what has made me the most comfortable in my body and reduced my body dysmorphia by a huuge amount.
The history of trans medicine goes back over a hundred years and is not just a fringe modern leftist medical movement. If you read say, Harry Benjamin's famous book from the 1960s, he describes how psychotherapy has been completely unable to cure transsexuals and transvestites from their mental affliction and provides numerous psychiatrist reports to that effect. This is from a time when gender non-confirming behavior risked severe social disapproval, and was often outright illegal, and all pressure would have been on patients to not be a transsexual as opposed to today where there is acceptance and even encouragement. Psychotherapy has advanced since the 1960s sure, but why do you think talk therapy would be more effective at reducing gender dysphoria now than it did back when transitioning meant losing your job, your family, your friends?
There's plenty wrong with the modern trans movement, I won't deny that. But the right wing proposal - "find a way to be comfortable with your own body", "carry on with life", I'm sorry, that's not an actionable solution I can put in practice, that just sounds like "cope harder". Why would I subject myself to lifelong psychological pain, have it be this constant weight on my shoulder, have difficulty being intimate with a partner when I can just... accept that I'm trans, follow an established treatment plan, and have all that inner suffering massively reduced? I didn't pick that option out of some ideological belief, it's just the best option I tried so far, and I'm lucky enough that it hasn't had any negative social or professional consequences.
rae
1mo ago
Beyond general freedom as an argument - if you start restricting the rights of individuals based on their genetic predispositions, why stop at black vs white?
The crime rate difference between whites and asians is even greater than between whites and blacks. Left handed people are more likely to be criminals as well. And of course, the crime rate difference between men and women is gigantic.
Despite that, I highly doubt @ArjinFerman and the other race realists here are sexist against men and racist against all ethnicities other than East Asian.
If there are is a genetic component in some African ancestry (although which part of Africa, as there is a huge amount of genetic diversity even within single countries?) that is correlated with lower IQ, it would still be one of many factors involved, and does not mean culture and discrimination is not a factor.
What are you or @ArjinFerman suggesting we do with that information?
rae
1mo ago
Firstly, social class is not really about money. Social class is about culture. A mechanic or a plumber can make more money than a university lecturer with two PhDs. How many rich black American are from stable, two parent households in high income areas and have the same cultural values as their white counterparts? Are they engineers, doctors, businesspeople, or are they in the stereotypical high earning occupations available to black people? And can they avoid social pressures and expectations - including that from the black community itself - for their own kids as well, who might look to role models that look like them?
But in any case, if you look at the statistics, the incarceration rate for black men still sharply decreases with income. That means if you want to decrease the black crime rate, facilitating their upward mobility is still the most effective way.
rae
1mo ago
I’m actually in agreement that there is political distortion from the left in the social sciences (less so in medicine), but the American right has not presented any credible alternative and instead doubled down on even worse distortions of their own, and burning down the whole thing. The American medical establishment supporting protests (perhaps due to internal political pressures?) does not mean you should distrust the whole institution when it comes to non politically influenced matters.
I’m transgender myself, and I would love for the left to stay out of my medical condition, and for there to be actual studying of the phenomenon and treatment options without political bias influencing it. Unfortunately the right does not offer any solutions and seems interested in stopping research and putting laws that restrict treatment.
I was a fan of the anti-woke movement early on - the intellectual dark web so to speak - but it really feels like Americans just traded one flavour of woke for another.
rae
1mo ago
I’m not American so I’m not too familiar with what you’re describing. Where I live the vaccination enforcement and lockdown measures were significantly harsher than anywhere in the US, and there was broad social support from all political parties. Shouldn’t conservatives, i.e. the party of law and order, be a fan of measures which promote public safety?
And the right in the US, especially in its current MAGA incarnation, is just as gleeful in its authoritarian tendencies. It doesn’t even feel economically right wing anymore; tariffs, protectionism, anti-immigration, the government having ownership of major companies… that was all leftist policy 50-60 years ago.
rae
1mo ago
Why is the American right so obsessed with autism and discovering some unknown or suppressed cause for it?
Politicising medicine in general is baffling to me, like how Ivermectin is right-wing while vaccines are left-wing (and I remember 20 years ago most antivax people were leftwing). At some point it feels like American politics is about picking any conceivable topic and flipping a coin to declare one side Republican and the other Democrat.
No, race realism is also wrong, the actual reason is class/subculture for which you are using skin colour as a proxy, due to the US having a underclass primarily composed of black people. I live in a European country and there is a social class that behaves in identically disruptive ways on public transport, despite being as white as the rest of the population.
I get the historical and current issues with racism in the US, but I do think it blinds both the left and right to the possibility that culture is the biggest issue.
rae
1mo ago
Felled-Martin’s novel is poorly written, sanctimonious, masturbatory drivel and it absolutely did not deserve the praise that it got. I stopped reading after one of the main characters (a trans woman) got a hard-on from shooting at a TERF militia called “the Knights of JK Rowling”. I wasn’t aware before but it doesn’t surprise me that the author called for the death of public figures she disagreed with, I’m glad she’s being cancelled after celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death, and I genuinely hope it represents a vibe shift from the politics that dominate the kinds of media she’s involved with.
And I say all of this as a liberal trans woman who heavily disliked Charlie Kirk and found his politics morally reprehensible. You don’t have to mourn the man, you can even comment on the irony of his final words, but actively cheering on his death, a gory assassination in front of thousands of college students, should be completely unacceptable.
You can get 10-20 tokens/s with CPU only inference as long as you have at least 32GB of RAM. You can offload some layers to your GPU and get probably 30-40 tokens/s? Of course, a 3090 gives you >100t/s but it’s still only $800, I’d consider that mid-range compared to a $2k+ 5090.
Swapping from the SSD is only necessary if you’re running huge 100B+ models without enough RAM.
rae
2mo ago
If you think you’re being subsidised on a $20/month plan, switch to using the API and see the price difference. Keep in mind that providers make a profit on the API too - if you go on OpenRouter, random companies running Deepseek R1 offer tokens at a 7x cheaper rate than Claude Sonnet 4 despite Deepseek most likely being a large model.
As @RandomRanger said, it would make little sense for ALL companies to be directly subsidising users in terms of the actual cost of running the requests - inference is honestly cheaper than you think at scale. Now, many companies aren’t profitable in terms of revenue vs. R&D expenditure, but that’s a different problem with different causes, in part down to them not actually caring about efficiency and optimisation of training runs; who cares when you have billions in funding and can just buy more GPUs?
But the cat’s out of the bag and with all the open weight models out there, there’s no risk of the bigcos bumping up your $20/mo subscription to $2000/mo, unless the USD experiences hyperinflation at which point we’ll have other worries.
rae
2mo ago
TLDR for this one: for LLM providers to actually break even, it might cost $2k/month per user.
If the Big AI companies try to actually implement that kind of pricing, they will face significant competition from local models. Right now you can run Qwen3-30B-A3B at ridiculous speeds on medium-end gaming rig or a decent Macbook, or if you're a decently sized company, you could rent a 8xH200 rig 8h/day, every workday, for ~$3.5k/mo, and give 64 engineers simultaneous, unlimited access to Deepseek R1 with comparable speed and performance to the big known models, so like... $55/month per engineer. And I highly doubt they're going to fully saturate it every minute of every workday, so you could probably add even more users, or use a quantized/smaller model.
rae
2mo ago
Were you attracted to women before on any level?
I don’t see how conversion therapy can work unless you start off at least a little bit bi. There’s something just neurological different about gay vs straight brains and you can’t change that through therapy anymore than you can fix epilepsy. I also find the flip side - e.g. straight men watching gay porn and “turning gay” because straight porn became too boring - to be similarly questionable.
rae
2mo ago
consistent in claiming that (contra your interlocutors) they can reason, they can perform a variety of tasks well, that hallucinations are not really a problem, etc. Perhaps this is not what you meant, and I'm not trying to misrepresent you so I apologize if so. But it's how your posts on AI come off, at least to me.
When someone writes something like that, I can only assume they haven’t touched a LLM apart from chatgpt3.5 back in 2022. Have you not used Gemini 2.5 pro? O3? Claude 4 Opus?
LLMs aren’t artificial super intelligence, sure. They can’t reason very well, they make strange logic errors and assumptions, they have problems with context length even today.
And yet, this single piece of software can write poems, draw pictures, write computer programs, translate documents, provide advice on countless subjects, understand images, videos and audio, roleplay as any character in any scenario. All of this to a good enough degree that millions of people use them every single day, myself included.
I’ve basically stopped directly using Google search and switched to Gemini as the middle man - the search grounding feature is very good, and you can always check its source. For programming, hallucination isn’t an issue when you can couple it with a linter or make it see the output of a program and correct itself. I wouldn’t trust it on its own and you have to know its limitations, but properly supervised, it’s an amazingly capable assistant.
Sure, you can craft a convincing technical argument on how they’re just stochastic parrots, or find well credentialed people saying how they just regurgitate their training data and are theoretically incapable of creating any new output. You can pull a Gary Marcus and come up with new gotchas and make the LLMs say blatant nonsense in response to specific prompts. Eppur si muove.
rae
2mo ago
I guess there’s a big difference between a bi guy who’s secure in his bisexuality and has had relationships with both men and women, and one that’s still figuring things out. The former seems to use “pansexual” or “queer” as a label more often I’ve found? I can totally see why bicurious guys would be a problem though, and I don’t think I’d want to date one.
I’d date a trans man for sure if we’re compatible. It’s not that I’d be more attracted to one, but it makes things easier when you have a shared experience over things like dysphoria and the other person just gets it. Plus you don’t have to worry about them transitioning to a woman (which is weirdly common among men willing to openly date trans women).
The effective retirement age gap between men and women is very small (~1 year) in the developed world, and in France it seems that it's actually women who retire 1 year later than men. Legally speaking it's equal between the sexes in nearly every single developed country, but when it was lower in the past for women, the most sensible explanation I read was that since the norm was single-income households and women tended to marry younger, they timed it so when the husband retired, they would both get their pension at the same time.
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