self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1hr ago
There is no end of nuance I could add, but this is a good point. I might as well mention that it's very common for the traits and tendencies expressed by genes to vary according to the sex of the organism that receives them (even if this is not an absolute either). The same genes on a different sex chromosome can do different things. So Genghis might well have had a submissive mother, while the same genes might not have manifested in him but might have in his daughters or sisters (or have been outcompeted by the tendencies from his paternal lineage).
The same goes for Ugg and Bride of Ugg. She might hate being raped and enslaved. But her sons might well be perfectly happy to do the raping and enslaving, propagating her genes as well. The question, which requires a lot of empirical grounding to answer, is which tendency wins out overall. But there isn't a unique winner at the very least, we observe a lot of diversity.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1hr ago
Perhaps and (probably yes), but just because an argument is compelling or the person making it rhetorically sophisticated beyond my ability to parse does not make it actually true. I'd say it's cheating, but I doubt an actually omnipotent being would care what I think if it was trying to make me believe false things on purpose.
I will forward an evo-psych explanation that I have found somewhat compelling, while letting you take the opportunity to remember that evo-psych arguments are far less specific or empirically validated than anyone would like:
In the ancestral environment (by which I mean from pre-history to last Tuesday), it was unfortunately common for intergroup violence to culminate in the slaughter of all the men on the losing side, and the lamentation of their women (who were often taken captive and put to reproductive toil, with modern norms of consent not a concern for anyone involved).
Picture yourself as a woman, of reproductive age. You have just been taken captive by Ugg, who has only just finished cleaning his club of the blood and brains that originated from your husband (Grug) and your father and brother (Ooga and Booga respectively). Ugg has, if he's being polite, told you that he's going to take you as his wife. If he is less polite, you have already been raped. Neolithic cavemen or victorious pillagers are not known to be polite, but I do not wish to slander them unnecessarily.
You have very few choices in the matter. Active or passive refusal or disobedience will likely only result you in being beaten +- raped. There is no one in a position to help, and you do not necessarily even think that your fate is morally incorrect or unjust (if you're the introspective type, you might remember the story of how Ooga met Mrs. Ooga, your mother. The circumstances were not that different, even if it feels awful to be on the receiving end.).
If you submit, your odds of going from a glorified concubine or sex slave to a genuine wife (with whatever degree of protection and in-group endorsement that implies) goes up. If you demonstrate enjoyment and do your best to make Ugg happy, he might genuinely grow fond of you, which he is unlikely to do if you fight back. You may end up pregnant with his child (you have little choice in the matter), and a caring husband and father is a better one than one that holds you in contempt. You close your eyes and think of the Dogger Bank (this story predates the formation of the English channel).
Your story is not unique. I have already mentioned the tale of Mrs. Ooga, your mother. This might be the fate of your daughter, and is almost certainly the fate of many of your distant female descendants.
The thing about evolutionary selection pressures is that they do not necessarily act in the direction anyone likes, or endorses on reflection. Another fact about human cognition and social roles is that it easier to feel a certain emotion than it is to consistently fake it. Less cognitively taxing, in the sense that feeling good about your buddies and expressing it naturally is a better signal than smiling at a boss you don't particularly like. The best lies are the ones you internalize, and come to believe sincerely to a degree that no longer feels like lying. It might well no longer even be a lie, it is your honest reaction and desire, even if that is for something others might consider torment.
What are we selecting for? Women, who when in a situation where they perceive that their welfare and wellbeing (and that of their offspring) hinges on staying in the good graces of a male partner: put up, shut up, and genuinely like the abuse, in a seemingly paradoxical yet very true sense. Stockholm syndrome could be adaptive, if your only options are making the best of the city's shitty weather without an opportunity to leave.
This selection pressure and the resulting trait is, of course, clearly not absolute. There are plenty of women who, at least in a modern Western context, will leave an abusive relationship, or seek help from third parties. I dare say that is most women. I think that is not incompatible with my thesis, because evolution often reaches a stable equilibrium with a variety of different traits, some of which are adaptive in certain contexts and not others, but neither of which strictly dominate.
You might just have been an exceptionally unlucky woman. Perhaps the modal woman in your reference group would stand up to an abusive partner. Perhaps they would marshal their blood-kin to step in on their behalf, perhaps they would rely on social shaming. In that situation, having a spine and protecting yourself is compatible with your genes spreading, but in some cases, you must sacrifice the spine to save your life.
Many factors and traits exhibit this phenomenon. Why are there any short men in a world where height is almost always rewarded, even in the distant past? Because height comes at the cost of health, you might starve to death because of the additional baseline metabolic requirements. Sometimes, the Short Kings win and spawn more short kings and queens. Why is every man not an "alpha" male (a term I use as a convenient shorthand, not an endorsement), despite those traits often being attractive? Well, because sometimes being a submissive, obedient man in service to a greater power was beneficial, from the perspective of your genes, perhaps your memes in the context of group selection. Our selection pressures are reduced, but not nonexistent today, so it is easy to forget the time when evolution was more aggressive about quality control (and with a very bottomline take on what constitutes quality, which rarely acknowledges customer satisfaction).
My point is, most of the people reading this take for granted a society with robust social safety nets for battered women. Cultural norms that make them expressly deserving of sympathy and care. This is true in India, but perhaps not in Afghanistan (though even such a patriarchal society might have brothers and fathers stepping in, perhaps because they see it as their patriarchal duty to do so). But there's no dedicated women's shelter around for most of recorded history. Sometimes you must learn to eat shit, say you enjoy the taste, and then, through selection pressures over long eons, end up liking the taste. Unironically. Maybe enthusiastically, albeit with shame. Despite people stopping by and asking "are you okay hun, you know you can just stop, right?" and meaning it.
This explains many things: battered women. Girls who like a domineering and assertive husband. The women who have asked me to choke them, slap them, spit on them, or leave handprints. And those who do not (not that I mind particularly, at least if it doesn't have any serious risk of bodily harm).
Your body and your instincts can be awfully out of date for the environment you find yourself in. You might know that being fired from your job or being ghosted by a date doesn't matter, in the strict sense, but you still feel awful about it. You might spiral into depression or have a breakdown. This is because these were matters of life and death (and sex) for your ancestors. Your genes do try to adapt your phenotype to the environment you find yourself in, but they are very out of their depth.
The usual arguments about superstimuli like porn or calorie dense foods has a corollary: some stimuli today are not as meaningful or compelling as they would be to your ancestors (losing a job, rejection, as I've already said), but were very very bad for you in the past, to the point that your body and mind is primed to panic.
Just to be very clear: this is not a claim about all women, probably not even most women. I do not think that they're all hiding rape fantasies, or that those who do express their fantasies are necessarily cover for a sincere desire to be abused or raped. Or that they would secretly like it, if actual rape happened to them. Explaining something is not the same as condoning it. Evo-psych arguments are notoriously susceptible to overfitting. Judge accordingly.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3hr ago
I would argue with God if he tried this, or at least I'd ask for reasons to believe in objectivity beyond the fact that he's God and thus could be expected to know better. So would I if he claimed that 1 = 2 (without definitional trickery). Of course, I don't think such a perfectly neutral observer exists in the first place, which makes the whole thing moot.
I've already been writing a detailed essay about the topic, and this is something I will address in more depth. Otherwise I agree with the rest of your arguments and their implications.
The thing that gets me about this is, the innate subjectivity of something like taste doesn't prevent us from making objective measurements and coming to objective conclusions.
E.g. with something like beauty standards, it's possible to ask and answer the question objectively: "If a bunch of universities make a bunch of grad students research the patterns of beauty standards throughout different cultures in society, what, if any, is the conclusion that comes out about what beauty standards different human cultures have in common when they all publish their papers and argue with each other through peer review?"
My answer is that you aren't talking about "true objectivity" but something that is about as close as we can get in practice.
When you that kind of study on aesthetic standards, what does emerge is not some kind of agent-independent, viewpoint neutral fact. What you have you established is a fact about the very subjective people and cultures you've studied.
(Assuming the statistics was done correctly, which does not happen as often as anyone would like in sociology or anthropology.)
It is an "objective" fact that X beauty standard is the most popular for Y (most humans, assuming your sampling was representative). That does not make it truly universal. Language is imprecise, so I will say that have found out an empirical truth about the specific subset of entities you have surveyed. In the same manner as we normally talk about truth, of course.
In other words:
Let's say we did a survey and found out that the majority of humans think blue is the best color. Then we can be confident in the claim "the majority of humans prefer the color blue over all other colors tested". That is not the same as blue being the "objectively" best color. You have a frame of reference, just a reasonably well specified one. An alien would possibly disagree, or the people who are colorblind and simply can't see blue. What you have won is a popularity contest (done scientifically), and not one about ontology.
You can't dodge this metaphysical headache, but most of the time, it can be ignored from a pragmatic point of view. If the NIST clock has the endorsement of the best physicists, if it predicts temporal events with better accuracy, if it matches the consensus of other clocks better? Then I will say it's the best clock, without worrying too hard about the fact that I can't help smuggling in my own preferences about what it means to be a better clock or even the importance of telling time.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
4hr ago
I'm sorry to tell you that the other mods disagreed with me, and I ended up changing my mind. You might have missed my second reply saying so. Not because of anything you've done, but because we expect the replies to immediately go into CW territory.
The one thing I have to give post-modernists a point for is their observation that there is no such thing as objective truth, value or morality, in the strict sense. That, and that it is impossible to remove the filters that exist between us and "reality", the mind is a lens: in the absence of the lens, there is no mind.
The map is not the territory. This is true, it cannot be otherwise. I then immediately part ways with them: yet, you cannot remove the map and still have navigation.
There is no observation without an observer, and there is no such thing as truly objective, privileged observer.
This is, once again, true. But I disagree with every fiber of my being on the implications.
I think that is a poor excuse to entirely dispense with the idea of consensus reality, of shared standards, or even making moral arguments. It would be akin to claiming that since the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle rules out a perfect ruler or clock, your broken timepiece is just as good as the atomic clock in NIST's basement. Or that your eye balled estimate of your dick as actually 12 inches long is of any value, though accuracy would probably be preferable given the tendency/desire that some postmodernists display: they enjoy sucking themselves off. At least it would get in the way of the unproductive navel gazing.
We might agree that taste is not an objective phenomenon, but when you use that as an excuse to write utter dross, and pretentiously to boot? I'm glad to be with the other side in calling them out for their sophistry and nonsense. If all aesthetic judgments are equally valid expressions of equally valid perspectives, then the person saying your novel is self-indulgent dreck is expressing a perspective that is just as valid as your own conviction that it is a masterwork of transgressive poststructuralist prose. The relativist move was supposed to protect you from criticism, but it has accidentally also dissolved the grounds for your own aesthetic pride. You can't have the shield without also losing the sword.
The fact that perfect objectivity is unavailable does not mean that the concept of better and worse approximations of it has dissolved, which is why science and empiricism works. The fact that we cannot deduce a universal system of ethics from scratch does not mean we cannot seek to find a theory of morality that most of us will happily subscribe to, or at least consider a directional improvement. You are telling me that we all wear glasses, but I will object to the sleight of hand you then employ, which is snatching them away and declaring that the myopia is honesty.
(I once had a lengthy relationship with a scholar who subscribed to post-modernism, if not as awfully as what I have described. It was... painful, even if think she's not a bad person, even if we parted amicably.)
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6hr ago
Amadan continues to hemorrhage the site into an echo-chamber, self-made-human's addiction to the attention they get from here got so bad they started using A.I in an effort to make this place their Substack, faceh continues to scream, magicalkittycat puts up the good fight but since the moderation is fundamentally broken it's useless
I'm relieved to find that I think that all of the specific examples you've given are, as far as I'm concerned, bad ones or at least of questionable judgement. That genuinely makes the one that singles me out easier to ignore, so thanks?
(It is far more painful to be critiqued by people you like, and who like you, generally speaking. Especially the ones who do usually demonstrate good judgement about these things.)
For what it's worth, I do have a Substack that I use as a Substack, I also think most if not all of my posts are the type of thing that has a place here. There is plenty of stuff, including effort-posts, that I do not wish to post on the blog but do share here, and far fewer the other way around.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6hr ago
After a discussion with the other mods, I've changed my mind. Please repost this is in the CWR thread.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6hr ago
I don't see a very strong reason why this couldn't just go in the CWR thread, but I will approve it anyway. I think that more of our regulars should consider making front page posts than is currently the case (the majority of submissions are spam or cranks, but you don't see that).
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9hr ago
I obviously disagree very strongly on factual premises. Especially:
it’s still probably at least several centuries of spending about 500 million a cosmonaut to build these colonies.
If we're using/relying upon human astronauts (or if the Soviet Union/Russia is pioneering in space flight, why cosmonauts?) for centuries, the future has dun goofed.
I am also not claiming that we should be spending all of our money on spaceflight. I am saying they we should be spending more money on it, but closer to the "3% of the national budget" that the average American believes NASA gets instead of the far, far smaller fraction it actually is.
In the near-term, we do have other very important things to spend our money on. I would be the last person to think that money spent on AI data centers is inherently wasteful or stupid, barring the usual x-risk concerns. If we got get AGI and then ASI, spaceflight and the exploration/industrialization of space becomes way easier.
But I do not think we are guaranteed to get AGI. I think it makes sense to hedge against a future where things don't pan out, and we need to do it with old-fashioned human grit. That means that spending large amounts of money on things like medical or anti-aging research, fusion power, spaceflight and so on. Just in case AI doesn't show up on schedule. And also because they would have immediate near and medium term benefits, assuming the research and investments pan out.
A society or a civilization can have multiple priorities. Even Uganda can spend money on both food, education and electricity, let alone the US. I am arguing that we should spend much more, but not ridiculously more, and that this spending should be considered a civilizational project that will pay off in our lifetimes, even if not next week. If the US has the money to waste in Iran, it has the money to put men on Mars (and women, and small children too).
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
11hr ago
Following up a few days after my pharmacologically-induced fist fight with the divine:
I think the changes to my mood seem robust so far. I am notably calmer and more euthymic. I didn't want to say it explicitly until I collected more of my own observations, but I feel less emotionally reactive, more stable.
That isn't a drastic change, mind you, I've always been a pretty even-tempered person. But I did get some moderately hurtful news (even if, in objective terms, it means nothing) and I took it with far more equanimity than I'd expect. If I was more anxious and insecure (and I have been) it would have had a very real chance of making me turn to drink, at least for a night. I just felt a mental note of disappointment, a little irritated, but then back to myself.
Being calmer is, still, a directional improvement. It's not like it's affected my ability to feel emotions, that's very much there. But let's say a rock has an emotional lability score of 0, and a woman with BPD a 10, the average person 5. I'd say I was a 4 before, but a 6-7 when already depressed and anxious. It's down to a 3, I think. That is as much fake precision as I'm willing to deploy.
I think the default tinnitus I gave myself my playing loud milsim games at 21 has gone away. But I have specific tinnitus that comes in for reasons I do not wish to discuss. That's still there, but it has a known cause that it would be overly optimistic to expect a psychedelic to fix entirely.
Oof. For what it's worth, I wouldn't jump from "twinges of pain in my chest" to "oh god I've got a cardiac problem" given your background and age, and it's a very good thing you know it's most likely due to anxiety and stress.
That out of the way, I do not think there is anything wrong with being a 30 yo on permanent medication. You need to eat food and drink water anyway, a small pill or two has... negligible effects on your QOL, and the main reason you end up wanting/needing to take one is to improve or at least maintain your health. If you live long enough, you'll acquire a list of mandatory medication, though at that point it's more likely to be your doctors headache than yours.
Statins are not bad drugs. I am not a cardiologist, but I strongly suspect you'd benefit from taking them, and apparently your doctor agrees too. You shouldn't expect side effects more significant than muscle aches for a few days, and they're cheap. Go for them. They have my endorsement, and you can stop if you can't tolerate them.
Ffs, I'm getting a migraine while typing this. There's a hole in my vision. It's not fair to blame you, so I'm joking when I say that you've made this more of my headache than your own. I'm not sure which one of us has it worse, what I'd give to be 25 and free of anything but ADHD and depression (sad haha).
Then there's the GLP-1 stuff. Wrangle yourself some semaglutide or the new stuff, they'll keep your weight down, help with the cholesterol too indirectly, and just keep you in better health overall.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Hey, I have the same thing as well...
.... maybe. This is a very bad time to be fishing for compliments, at least from me. I do not doubt you can write well, or that you are capable of making high effort, good-faith arguments. With no comment on the former, I would prefer to see more of the latter.
Also, you have been warned for LLM-baiting in the past. I would advise, for the health and longevity of your current account, that you do not try this experiment without talking to us mods first.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I think your link might be broken. Leads to a dead reddit link.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
My understanding of current consensus is that entirely or majority LLM written posts are banned.
The problem is that there is no consensus beyond that. If we had a rule, informal or not, that a suspected X% of AI is the cutoff for action, I would enforce that, even if I think that the acceptable value of X is larger than most.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Ah, well done.
Now, what did I tell you about agreeing with or complimenting me? It keeps me up at night, or so I'd say, if my sleep cycle wasn't shot and if I wasn't already the consumer of a cup of strong coffee.
I mostly believe you. Mostly. And mostly because you are the honest kind of criminal, once we have you in the lockup - you're usually kind enough to submit a written confession before we need to pull out the nightsticks or stage a shoot-out.
It would be... nice, of course, if you did that proactively without needing the trip in the police van. Have you seen gas prices these days? But I can't hold that against you, because I only disclose the usage of AI when required or when someone asks.
Go on. Shoo. Live to see another sunset, or continue giving Anthropic engineers a headache. I think that if the other mods were likely to act, they would have acted. I leave that door open for them, if they so choose.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I did not even need the "main paragraph" to know what he did, it's obvious to me, and probably other people who do use LLMs a lot. I don't doubt that you noticed too. I do not think that his "explanation" is unbelievable, but do forgive me if my reaction to him offering me a sealed bottle of water is to send it off for chemical analysis. If he hadn't admitted to it, I would have banned him. He did admit to it, so I am not sure what to do. I am slightly annoyed none of the other moderators have stepped in and taken the problem out of my hands, but can't blame them for that. My inner conflict is my own, and I am genuinely unsure if more moderation effort is required beyond telling him "We know what you're up to."
I noticed it immediately because, I’m sorry to say, it read a lot like some of the things you’ve written recently in style and tone. The rest was a mix, but clearly quite a lot was written or rewritten by him.
I know. I noticed and found it deeply uncomfortable. If it makes you feel better, I've already dialed downed the usage of AI for stylistic advice or editing significantly, because I've increasingly come around to the people who think that that it dilutes my own voice and personality. That, by itself, would not have been enough, but I've noticed other people doing the same thing in the wild: I do not want the primary difference between Count and myself to be the arguments we make, with our style and tone being similar.
Dialing down is, of course, not zero. But you can see how my most recent long-form post is more "me" in style than what came before. This is a recent development, mere weeks. I don't think I did anything morally wrong, but I do not want to become part of a homogeneous blob of writers with pleasant but startlingly similar prose.
For the rest of your points? I don't disagree. We will soon be unable to tell. I'm lucky that I have a digital record predating LLMs that I can point at to show that I don't need them as a crutch or as a total replacement, more as a regular tool or aide. But that is not a binary matter either.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I did got to the gym twice last week, so I breathe a sigh of relief.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
This was an excellent essay, a worthy indulgence for the sin of a few dozen shitposts.
I wonder what your take on AI-assisted writing is. No particular reason, of course, though you might want to look at my mod-hatted reply.
Count. My good sir.
I know someone using an LLM when I see it. I know you've used one. The issue is that I do not know it you were lazy and simply typed a short prompt and got Claude (in all likelihood) to do all the work, or if you shared a draft and had it edit it for you. Or something in between.
Why? Because I use them everyday. I can smell it. I also know that some effort was made to not make it glaringly obvious, but it takes a thief to catch one, at least depending on how busy/lazy the police are.
I suspect you might deserve a warning or a ban for this. The only reason I'm not doing it is because I genuinely do not know if you have used it in the manner I use it, which is minimally and doing the bulk of the labor. There are no facts here to fact check, per se, at least not in an objective sense, or I'd look for hallucinations.
Untouched by the light as you are since birth, I still wish to extend you a little charity and benefit of doubt, though I worry even that's too much. I am too tired to even get into the weeds of this, or at least how I pick up on the tells. But not too tired to not throw your post in Pangram, which says this is 17% AI. Nor too tired to remind everyone that I have used Pangram on my own edited writing and in semi-formal experimentation, and noticed that it has few false positives but many false negatives, including underestimating the degree of AI contribution. I'd eat my non-existent hat if a mere 17% of the post came from an AI. The issue is that I do not know if was 20% or 90%.
Unlike you, I feel little need to feel morally unclean because I have a pretty clean track record of good-faith, high effort engagement well before LLMs, and also because I disclose my usage to whoever asks, if I've used one to any degree. You really ought to understand that we're not the same, at least in my eyes. You still benefit from my fear of hypocrisy or error.
When all of God's Creations sing in heaven, won't a shitposter be part of the choir?
So I won't do anything. At least not right now. If the other moderators step in and whack you, I will defer to them. Alternatively, if they're busy, I will assess general sentiment and act accordingly when I'm back. I am genuinely okay with anything from tolerance, to a warning, to any kind of ban. You belong in a museum or a zoo, maybe a zoological museum. I'd pay for entry.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Call the cops. Definitely seek the hold, but cops first. Share as much evidence as you, she's at serious risk to herself.
@Throwaway05 or @reo might be able to provide more specific advice. I hope they show up quickly enough to help. I still think my approach is for the best, based off what I know.
Mod hat on:
As general advice, it's a bad idea to post on the front page if you need people to see it immediately. It'll be stuck in the filter by default until a mod allows it through, which we don't see (the post shows up for us, we have to specifically check the filtered list). You're lucky I checked right now.
Also, I would personally excuse this post on the grounds of emergency, but I do not know if the other mods would, at least on general principle. This is not a new standard I'm setting on behalf of everyone else.
Mod hat off:
I'm going to write a reply as a normal user. It seems serious.
Edit:
In hindsight, I should have written the second comment first. I'm tired and barely thinking straight after being up all night studying. Thankfully it cost all of 30 seconds, so I won't lose much sleep over it. Consider this an apology nonetheless. My priorities were out of wack.
Also, for anyone else in a genuine emergency, probably post in the CWR thread too. More likely to be seen by someone, hopefully someone who can help. I don't care, personally, if it's not actual CWR material, at least if it's a real emergency.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
The subreddit is nice, albeit too quiet for my taste. The actual comment section on the ACX Substack? Pure sensory hell for me, in the sense that the terrible UI and UX makes me never quite feel like writing there. I could and should, in the sense that's a good way for me to get a boost in popularity in exchange for effort, but it's just that bad. And I'm the kind of person who begrudgingly uses the reddit mobile app, even if it's a hacked and modified version.
I am not claiming that this is a universal experience. I am only claiming that situations like this can and do happen, including in well documented histories as well at present, in the parts of the world that can be impolitely but accurately be described as shitholes. And we know the past was much more violent than the present, or the fact that far fewer men passed on their lineage than women did, or the recent evidence that Neanderthal-Cro Magnon crossbreeding usually involved Neanderthal men and CM women. I wonder why.
You don't even need the maximal "consent to rape or die" version. Even the ability to tolerate and ameliorate flawed men who are otherwise good providers is adaptive. As you've noted, societal norms didn't even switch to condemning such behavior till well within living memory.
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