rae
A linear combination of eigengenders
User ID: 2231
rae
13hr ago
hell, if most women take it as an active cost to have sex with men [and I'm pretty sure most men understand this to some degree], why would a man want to do it if he's not getting the other stuff women are, traditionally, supposed to get out of sex? At least with women you usually get wine'd and dine'd
Seeing it in those transactional terms is a bit sad. But I’m sure you get that it’s not like wine and dining, or romance in general, is the reward while sex is the cost, it’s more like it sets the scene for sex to actually mean something and be enjoyable.
because of the people that I know that are on HRT, none have changed in this way.
In what sense, they haven’t noticeably changed at all, both physically and mentally? Or just their mannerisms/personality? Because unless they’ve got a terrible endocrinologist (unfortunately quite common though) or are terribly unhealthy, there should be obvious differences like a deeper voice and facial hair for trans men, soft skin and different fat distribution for trans women.
rae
15hr ago
That post is a bit funny when you remember that HRT is a thing that already exists, and although it’s not anywhere close to a fantasy trans humanist gender swap, it really does push you a decent % of the way towards the opposite sex in terms of physiology and psychology.
There’s a few studies out there studying the changes in brain structure pre and post-HRT, and there’s also measurable personality differences and differences in traits like verbal and spatial fluency.
I can easily imagine a sophisticated futuristic treatment that drastically increases neuroplasticity in the brain and fully rewires it over a few months. No weird mind uploading necessary.
You’d still be attracted to girls, and no, that would not make you a lesbian; it would make you a normal, masculine man wearing a female body like a suit of clothing.
At first yes, but you’ll quickly notice a massive drop in libido from the lack of testosterone. Then over the course of many months, maybe years, your sexual desires will likely start changing, you won’t be attracted to women the same way, you might even start to find men attractive. Going from 100% straight man to 100% straight woman is pretty rare but at least a point or two on the Kinsey scale is expected. And of course you’ll find the way you experience emotions is going to be quite different.
What happens when, as a woman, you think back to your memory of looking at Angelina Jolie photos as a man? How do you empathize with your past self of the opposite sex? Do you flee in horror from the person you were? Are all your life’s memories distant and alien things?
I think I can answer that one. No, you will most likely not empathise with your past self. Maybe the closest thing would be remembering things you did while drunk that you’d never do sober?
then we’ve got to keep the dual architecture so you don’t throw up every time you remember what you did on your vacation.
Is it really that disgusting for a straight man to think about having sex with a man?
rae
19hr ago
From what I looked up, secular Israeli women had a fertility rate of 2.0 in 2020, projected to decreased to 1.7 in 2030.
And the most democrat counties in the US have 1.3 children per woman vs 1.76 for the most republican.
rae
23hr ago
I think at this point artificial wombs, genetically engineered babies, AI making human labour obsolete, or even radical life extension and making geriatrics physically 20 year old again, are all vastly more realistic than any social engineering attempt at making the fertility rate go above 2.0 long term.
rae
1d ago
Sure but how is that not in line with what Star Wars is all about? George Lucas wasn’t exactly shy about the leftist political messaging, he admitted being influenced by the Vietnam war with the rebellion being the Viet Cong and the Galactic Empire the US, he compared the Emperor to Nixon. Imagine if he’d made the films while Trump was president.
Like c’mon, the main arc of the prequels is about democracy being willingly handed to an evil strongman dictator over a manufactured threat!
rae
1d ago
"Ok, then transwomen aren't women, Africans with German passports aren't German, and fresh agitprop from Disney released under the Star Wars brand they bought isn't Star Wars."
I was with you until then. Rogue One, the first two seasons of the Mandalorian and Andor were some of the best Star Wars stuff since the 80s. And as much as the sequels were soulless derivative nonsense, you can’t say “only the good shows/films are Star Wars” otherwise you’d have to discard 90% of the franchise including the prequels too.
rae
1d ago
This implies that there’s a linear scale of attractiveness that’s the single only factor that makes having sex with someone enjoyable. Someone that’s physically attractive can be awful in bed, unenthusiastic, or incompatible with you for whatever reason.
rae
1d ago
Fair but if you’re too trad for the 1500s I better see you denounce the printing press and the evils of movable type. Real men write books by hand with a goose feather! And you better own a crossbow for home defence, not a musket.
rae
1d ago
Exactly, you’d probably feel cheated if it turned out the autographs were all done on auto pen by an assistant even if the signature was indistinguishable. The reason art is valuable is generally much closer to the reason memorabilia is valuable.
And actually people try to make the same kind of arguments about the “1st edition” having some special property or unique trait, like saying a Stradivarius has a magical sound modern violins don’t have, even though no one can actually distinguish between them in a blind test. Isn’t it enough to say that a Stradivarius is valuable because it’s a high quality 300 year old instrument made by the most famous luthier in the world, without having to resort to nonsense about no one else being able to reproduce the sound?
rae
1d ago
The Old Testament has the Israelites turning away from God time and time again, despite all the miraculous things they saw.
Isn’t this because originally Judaism was a polytheistic religion that then became based around monolatry, then monotheism? Turning away from Yahweh would have originally been like some Greeks turning away from Zeus to worship Poseidon.
If there is no God, then there is no basis or criteria for categorizing anything as good or bad.
I never understood this argument. Wouldn’t good or evil just be God’s subjective morality, which anyone could theoretically disagree with? It’s not like human ethics haven’t varied throughout history, or that moral philosophers have formed much of a consensus. Like, could God convince a vegan that eating meat is okay? “I put these animals on Earth for you to eat!” “What the fuck, why did you create living sentient beings that suffer and need to be killed for nutrients instead of I don’t know making bacon grow on trees like apples?”
I’m not even vegan, but it’s a pretty good example of how humans disagree on some fairly fundamental issues.
And God having created us doesn’t give him any special right, like your parents don’t get to decide your morality, and him being able to enforce his opinions doesn’t make it objective anymore than living in North Korea makes Kim Jong Un objectively right about everything. Or if I designed a simulation of intelligent beings, and said to them “if you don’t follow these rules I’ll put you in a special sub-simulation where you’ll be in pain forever” that doesn’t make me objectively right in that world; I could change my mind later, they could convince me that I’m actually evil, that some of the rules are nonsense, or they could outsmart me and escape from the simulation etc.
rae
1d ago
Even if you’re a man who likes casual sex with a variety of partners, surely you’d prefer to have like a new fwb every few months as opposed to having one night stand after one stand night? It takes time for two people to get into a good rhythm and learn what feels go for each other, and you’re unlikely to have great sex if you’re doing it with a different person each time.
rae
1d ago
I think people should be open about the social and contextual reasons they like a piece of artwork without having to pretend there’s something intrinsically special about the piece itself.
Humans just don’t like seeing replicas and care about authenticity, and it has nothing to do with the aesthetic value of the piece - that’s a red herring. If you’re in a museum looking at, let’s say, Palaeolithic stone axes, you might feel certain emotions or a sense of connection to humanity’s distant past. Then if you learned the collection was made by a boomer in the 90s in the Palaeolithic style, you’d be disappointed, regardless of whether the axes looked “good” or not, since they’re literally just crude chipped stones with hardly any aesthetic values on their own.
AI art is a replica of human creativity, it feels hollow because there’s no one to connect to, but it has nothing to do with the quality of the output itself.
rae
1d ago
In the UK the only time the average age at which women married was below 24 was very briefly when the baby boomers came of age, 26 was actually quite close to the average from the 16th century onwards. Or is 1500s England not traditional enough?
I would rather the universe not be a boring place. The total intellectual dominance of materialism for going on two centuries now has gotten rather repetitive (which is part of what drives my interest in any and all exotic ontologies, like Kastrup's analytic idealism). I would rather not believe that we have everything figured out, that we have the final true picture of reality in our grasp; at the very least, it would be nice to introduce some epistemological uncertainty into the mix, the presentiment that there might be something new and unforeseen on the horizon.
The issue I think is that everything that can be studied and figured out ends up falling into the purview of materialism, no? The kinds of stuff you consider boring, repetitive materialism today would have seemed spooky and magical to people 200 years ago. Special and general relativity, quantum physics, bizarre cosmological phenomena like black holes, neutron stars, quasars, supernova, the scale of some stars. Or here on Earth, human’s engineering prowess is anything but boring, just look at your phone or your computer, or at the progress in machine learning right now.
If you find the current word lacking in magic, mystery and wonder, that’s on you. If suddenly we found proof of angels or spirits or some other supernatural phenomenon, who’s to say you wouldn’t end up finding it boring as well? We’d study it, it would stop being supernatural, and people would start complaining when the ritual takes too long to start or the connection to the spirit world starts lagging for 2 seconds.
rae
2d ago
Maybe I’m a romantic but I find it a little sad if you don’t get the magical experience of a spark spontaneously forming between you and a classmate you’re sitting next to, doing what you can do group projects with them, and stumbling on a romance that way. Your first romantic experience should be one without practice, with butterflies in your stomach, awkwardly holding hands for the first time, leaning your head on their shoulder, both of you discovering everything for the first time together. You can’t get that with someone that’s just flirting practice, like you can’t pick the first person you fall in love with.
rae
2d ago
It didn’t feel like school was very helpful for the short autistic guys I knew either though. Or for the tall autistic guys. High school is probably the worst environment to learn how to flirt (after your workplace), you’re stuck with the same people year after year, and any cringey attempt at practicing your ability to flirt risks becoming gossip that the whole school learns about.
According to my Indian friends, it’s self teaching all the way down. The professors read off PowerPoint slides because they’d rather be doing research, and the students skip class to watch YouTube videos from random Indians explaining the course material (among other things).
Although the Indians I know are software engineers who left India, so it might not be like that at all the colleges.
rae
3d ago
How are the additional subjects assessed? Is it “you must have done 200h of humanities”, or additional end-of-year exams?
My question is mainly, why don’t the coaching centres become accredited schools where you fly through the government mandated curriculum in like the first hour of the day, then spend the rest of the day on the important tutoring? If there’s lax schools where they don’t even measure attendance that well, wouldn’t a combined coaching centre + high school be possible and an immense success?
I think that’s kind of the US model of the prep school, and similar to the one I attended. On many occasions a teacher would sigh, say “this is for the official curriculum”, we’d fly through it in 15min, then they’d teach the actual insanely difficult material we cared about. As long as we passed the (very easy) annual official tests and bought the official textbooks, the teachers had more than enough leeway.
Homeschooling is legal only after the age of 14, and how many parents do you think have the time for that here?
It doesn’t have to be administered by the parent, my thought was that you could have the same tutor you’d be paying for coaching at the start of the day, then you just need basic supervision to ensure they’re studying and not playing on their phones.
rae
3d ago
Wait a minute… if the standards for actual schools are so lax as to make them effectively pointless, and parents are spending enormous sums on tutors and exam coaching, why not have a private school where the curriculum is just exam coaching in the first place? Or just “home school”, i.e. tutor the child during schooling hours instead of wasting their whole day?
Seems like home schooling and alternative schools are legal in India already, so why bother with the whole charade?
rae
3d ago
Education, at least in STEM fields, was one of the few areas where the Soviet system arguably outcompeted the American one though. They went from a society of illiterate farmers to dominating in Math olympiads, chess, getting most of the early milestones in the space race, and had more women in STEM than probably a lot of the West has today. Quite impressive given the degree to which their economy was crippled by central planning and ideological suppression.
rae
4d ago
It’s bizarre then because actual communist countries (at least in Eastern Europe) had a very discriminatory high school system. If your child didn’t have the right grades, and you didn’t come from the correct background, they’d be sent off to be a vocational school to become a bricklayer or a janitor at the age of 14.
The acceptance rates of gymnasiums were very low, even if they significantly favoured students from a proletariat background, and the curriculum at engineering high schools was on par with a modern undergrad university course.
If you’re against selective public high schools and try to mix students of different academic abilities in a classroom, it seems to me like the American system is exactly what you’d get, where private and charter schools act as a substitute of public high schools with selective admissions. In what world would you want to put a 13 year old who knows calculus with one that’s functionally illiterate in the same class? They need to be taught different materials at different speeds otherwise you’re wasting precious public money paying for one to do nothing in class, either because they have already learned the material or because they can’t follow it. Each according to his ability, each according to his need, no?
rae
5d ago
I’m surprised Moldbug is your example of someone posting good, well-informed opinions online. I didn’t get the impression that his takes were any better informed than Musk’s, just because he uses pompous flowery prose instead of juvenile sex jokes and doge memes does not make the underlying ideas more rigorous.
rae
5d ago
Rae came in here purely to vent his spleen in a way that was unproductive and frankly a real dick move. I didn't bother to get into it with him because there's no point arguing with someone that angry about the topic that they will go out of their way to shit on someone else's beliefs, but it was a really crappy thing to post.
I’m not angry about it, just confused! I can’t wrap my head around believing in Christianity in that way, although I do find it fascinating as a topic of discussion.
I actually love the trope of God as some sort of cosmic horror like in this excellent short film and to me it makes a lot more sense than any other interpretation.
I don’t understand how the idea that God is benevolent and all powerful became more popular than there being a malevolent or indifferent God out there. Watching someone struggle with the problem of evil is strange to me because you can easily resolve it by saying God is evil/doesn’t care, and nothing really changes about Christianity’s metaphysics. The Bible says God is good but of course it would, that’s from God’s/his prophets’ POV, they’re going to justify their own actions the same way anyone committing evil acts would.
Orban was a corrupt, out of touch wannabe autocrat who lost the election in a landslide despite having control over all the mainstream media. Don’t let the culture war stuff fool you, it was just a distraction so that he and his cronies could rob the country blind. He didn’t care about Hungary at all and was happy for the country to stagnate, suffer economically and to cause a brain drain due to his policies, so long as he was in power.
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