urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
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User ID: 226
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
2mo ago
One of the eeriest things for me was reading about how the gender ratio at colleges alters people's dating experiences in profound ways, and realizing that huge amounts of people's dating behaviors really were influenced by market dynamics.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
3mo ago
Since this is the place for encouragement, I want to encourage everyone involved in last week's discussion of relationship insecurities started by @Sheepclothes.
As someone who has my own insecurities about dating and relationships that I've been struggling with lately (not about my partner's past but about her future -- could she do better than me?), this whole comment thread was helpful in crystalizing my thoughts and was heartening to read. I especially want to highlight @2rafa's comment as insightful about insecurity as a challenging, but real, sign of concern for another person and @justmotteingaround's comment giving solid advice that insecurities are something inside you, not them; it's your own perceptions and not the reality, the map and not the territory.
If it were possible to nominate an entire thread as an AAQC, I would do it for this thread. Sometimes the dating/relationships threads on themotte (and the internet in general) can get incredibly heated, but this whole discussion was full of sensitivity, honesty, compassion, and forthrightness. Everyone optimized for light, and I think it's because they chose to share their own experiences and commit to being vulnerable, rather than thinking about the discussion as a place to argue for a position or score points. Instead of a motte and bailey, there was a garden party.
I'm in a weirdly calm mood today (I think I'm just sleep deprived), so I wanted to share that I found this helpful and encourage everyone to bring that energy to more discussions.
Really, really great job guys. I mean it.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
3mo ago
It's hard for me to see it as anything but, oh all that stuff is great only when we do it, but if they do it, then it's terrible and unacceptable.
The default state of everything is "I will love my friends and hate my enemies." It's a wonder of values that anyone ever decided to do anything else.
If you understand the current-day progressives as simply falling into the same human foibles that every other ideology has faced -- rather than taking their claims of enlightenment at face value -- then you truly begin to understand them. They aren't special, they aren't chosen, they aren't annointed, they aren't on "the right side of history," they aren't all-powerful, they aren't all good: they're humans, just like you and me. If they can tear down statues, I can tear down the idol of themselves they've built in their own heart, an idol of self-righteousness and pride. I even see in myself -- especially in the past, when I was younger, when I was drawn to progressive politics -- those features, that self-doubt that made me want to take the great figures of the past and spit on them, the deep and overwhelming desire to be right and just and dutiful, the desire to be better than others. But these are human follies, not progressive ones, they are sins of the flesh, not sins of the woke.
And so it goes, on and on, the spinning wheel of time, rhyming as it goes.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
and there is nothing new under the sun.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
Anyway, if you go along with any of that, it's not hard to see how the Christian concepts of "faith" and a general "Let go, let God" orientation have a very specific role in easing the demons that beset anxious women who are prone to relitigating all the things that inflame their worst inner voices. One general read of the tradition might say, "There is an authority outside yourself, it can and must be infinitely trusted, it is the root of all reality, it is all benevolent and all knowing, you are a child of God and of infinite worth, you are not wise enough to stand in judgement of anyone or even yourself and humility and hope and forgiveness are thus commandments, despair and gossip are sins, trust God and do your best and turn to faith to come to internalize that all this suffering and anxiety and confusion and difficulty has meaning and has a point and will be bearable."
My god, you sound exactly like my evangelical mom when you say this.
Some of the most effective advice against mental demons actually comes from my mother -- she talks frequently using the exact language you've used here, about how we've got all these voices in our head that sound like one's voice but aren't. And in her mind, it's a choice to listen to them or to do something else that's important; focusing on them gives them more power.
What's funny is prayer also came up as a potential coping strategy (in a long list of coping strategies) that my definitely-not-religious therapist shared are helpful to some people when dealing with strong emotions. And I can share I do find it helpful at times.
If you allow me to be psychological instead of theological, I think it has the same effect as those mental excercises where people imagine their worry as physical object and then imagine getting rid of it. It unburdens the mind in a way it will accept. (And if you'll allow me to be theological instead of psychological, there was a thread not too long ago about why people believe in petitionary prayer, and this is it -- it's not about somehow bending the will of God towards something, but about releasing the concerns about which you can do nothing outside of yourself and putting it into the hands of God.)
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
2mo ago
The hell? I’m in that bracket and there’s no way Trump has 50% support among young people. How could that even come about?
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
To mirror Scott's ACX survey: In the past 24 hours, have you thought about the Roman Empire? If so, what was the context of that thought?
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
The traditional strain of American Evangelicalism is definitely not a fan of Catholicism, but it competes with a more ecumenical strain that sees Catholics either as perfectly valid Christians who happen to be wrong about some things (as all sects of Christians consider the others to be), or at least good allies against things opposed to their shared fundamental beliefs -- precisely the sort of situation being talked about here.
The big issue is, with the rapid rise of non-denominational Protestantism in the US, there really isn't a term that you can use to describe all Protestants that they would actually identify with except "Christians." And even that gets pushback from the "I'm not a Christian, I'm a Christ-follower" people. By far, the largest Christian group in the US that seems to still identify with a particular Church first is Catholics, thus the clunky term "Catholics and Christians," which really just means "Catholics and undifferentiated Christians." The trend elsewhere, outside of the LDS church and confessional Protestantism, is towards rebranding churches as just "X Church," instead of "X Baptist Church" or "X Bible Church" or even "X Methodist Church." And it's important to note that, if anything, evangelical Protestantism is more friendly towards Catholics than confessional Protestantism, who have explicit and very long catechisms and creeds that speak firmly against Catholicism and come from a time of literal warfare between the two groups.
If Trump's team wanted to pander to Catholics (as it seems he wanted to do) while communicating more effectively, they might have said "Catholics and Christians of all kinds," or something like that. But as it is I don't think it was designed to exclude Catholics, but explicitly to include them. It just sounds very clunky.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
2mo ago
I suspect, yeah, that's it. He was popular and charismatic and beloved and totally destroyed the left in his elections and thus he's loathed by his enemies.
He also pushed a lot of deregulatory policies that upset the left. But I think the hatred for Reagan on the left outpaces the actual impacts of his policies.
I think it's similar to Obama, who was and remains pretty loathed by the right, but whose policies haven't really made much of an impact -- the big one was the ACA, which has been mostly defanged. It's the fact Obama was popular and charismatic and defeated the right's challengers, some of the most qualified Presidential candidates in recent memory, easily (and, admittedly, with often dirty rhetoric).
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
2mo ago
national Origen mythology
Alright, if the public schools are teaching the pre-existence of souls, I want a voucher right here and now.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
2mo ago
The KotakuInAction people are all over Japan. I'm very much just not a weeb, so I don't really relate to that -- and it doesn't help that the big issue for a lot of KIA people is that they want scantily-clad women, and this is the one horseshoe-theory area of agreement between me and the woke. I don't like the weird uncanny valley female face thing, but maybe a little less cleavage and a little more practical armor for female characters is a good thing. I still don't know WTF BioWare was smoking when they created the outfits for female characters in Dragon Age Origins.
I don't buy too many AAA games, but I also didn't buy too many AAA games before wokeness. Actually, I probably buy more now, because my gaming tastes are broader. though the ones I buy are more selective, and usually older anyway. I recently bought BioShock -- never played it before. And I'm going to admit, despite my hatred of the cyberpunk genre's aesthetic, philosophy, and morality, I have enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077. (It helps that I had essentially no context before buying it, and so wasn't offended by the shift from RPG to action adventure.) For the most part, it's genuinely difficult to find a game in my library that released after 2017, indie or otherwise. I play games basically on a 15-year delay, and I only play games that come highly recommended.
It's probably the same with my film watching nowadays, I just recently watched Goodfellas for the first time. My recommendation to everyone for everything is: don't engage in stuff just to engage with it, find good stuff and enjoy that. Life's too short for bad games, bad books, and bad movies. And there's too much good stuff not to just enjoy that.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
5mo ago
the emergence of tumblr, which saw ideas that had largely been confined to the philosophy departments of European universities reach a mainstream audience of young women
The thing that made me a conservative as a young man wasn’t gamergate, it was this. I distinctly remember the day a friend said, “hey come look at this,” and he was showing me tumblrinaction. The intense “KILL ALL MEN ALL MEN ARE RAPISTS EVERY ADVANCEMENT TOWARDS ARTIFICIAL CONCEPTION GETS US CLOSER TO ELIMINATING MEN” stuff that was du jour on tumblr back during this time shocked the shit out of me. And the racial and trans (and it’s almost forgotten now, but otherkin) stuff too.
Then I started to see women I knew in real life saying those things explicitly. And then I saw people in institutions saying it. And then it seemed to take over. At each stage, of course, the rough edges were sanded off. The radfems who truly hated men were very quickly marginalized. But the animating spirit remained the same.
So I remember when it wasn’t “crazy kids on college campuses.” I remember when it was crazy girls on tumblr. And I saw the crazy tumblr girls’ ideas take over the world.
That certainly does for making one a conservative.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
Please write it. I've had an effortpost about gender polarization and unrealistic expectations for relationships bouncing around in my head also. I think it may be in the top three biggest world issues right now, it seems to be happening everywhere.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
I think your point is fair, but I would not describe either Kansas City or Tulsa as great havens for white identitarians. Both have longstanding racial strife. I’m actually not sure where such a person would want to go, if being around white people were the main concern.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
2mo ago
It's neither. It's the romantic entanglement and love for women (and the children they bear) that has the civilizing influence. The traditional courtly ideal of love is a man winning the affection of a particular virtuous woman by cultivating and demonstrating virtue.
And the reality's not far off: give a man a woman who loves him and through her give him children, and suddenly he is concerned with the good not only of himself, but of his wife and children, and thus he takes fewer risks, he thinks more about the future, and is connected directly to the interests of women and children (from which he might otherwise be alienated by his age and sex). It is one thing to think of women and children indirectly. It is another to love them. "The married man is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife."
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
Most of the conservative Christians who like Jews that much are dual-covenanters, they believe Jews also go to heaven because of the covenant with Abraham.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
2mo ago
If you sold state secrets to them, they'd presumably be positively inclined towards you and unlikely to turn the police state against you.
I actually suspect the opposite. "If he'll spy for you, he'll spy on you."
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
2mo ago
This isn't because of any particular failing on the part of the writers or critics involved, but is instead a simple corollary of the fact that the majority of works in any domain will tend towards mediocrity.
It's the Matthew principle all over again! The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
I think it's probably best to see "literary fiction" as a genre, not a quality marker (TM). It's a style and set of focuses that people, even today, choose deliberately to write in -- and some don't. And, within the modern literary fiction works, few are very good, and even fewer than that will ever be remembered.
Our view of the past is colored, always, by what has survived. Sometimes things survive because they just truly are brilliant and inescapably good, and people can't help talking about them. Sometimes, however, they survive because of being in the right place at the right time. The Great Gatsby is pretty good, I enjoyed reading it. But no one today would ever have heard of it had it not had it's post-war resurgence due to soldiers reading it during the war. It was, like you said, a historical accident.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
I was able to see shadow bands on the ground after the eclipse, but I didn't know they were called that until now. To me, they resembled low-quality video game lighting, like how Minecraft lightning used to work long ago. It was pretty cool.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
3mo ago
This sounds correct to me, as I'm a younger right-winger and those are points of agreement for me with the left wing. I think with health care, with social order, with institutional trust, with dating and relationships, I think young lefties and righties both see the same problems. They just often disagree profoundly on how to fix them.
Though I do wonder how much the NSA weighs on your average zoomer normie, who seems to treat spying by the government and corporations as a fact of nature because they've grown up surrounded by it.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1mo ago
How does this match up with decreasing fertility even in countries where women are generally not part of the workforce, as brought up by other commenters?
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
4mo ago
For us right-wing urbanists, a massive crackdown on vagrancy and crime - this making transit more appealing to rich people by removing all the visibly
poor/dysfunctional people - is a necessary precondition to the fulfillment of our vision.
See, I'd love this, and I'd love making urban life safer and more beautiful. It's not really my cup of tea, but I would love to have it as an option.
But my opposition to the anti-car people comes from a political realism. I don't think the PMC culture that runs cities will ever crack down on dysfunction. Given that, I want to protect the rural/suburban car-based life that affords me separation from the crime and dysfunction of the city with everything I've got. Realistically, the options for Americans aren't "safe suburbs with car culture" vs. "safe cities with walking and public transit," they're "safe suburbs with car culture" vs. "unsafe cities with muggings where you walk and schizophrenic tweakers shouting on the train." When urbanists say my way of life needs to be destroyed and everyone should become a city-dweller -- without fixing the dysfunction of the cities -- I treat them like people carelessly, maybe even maliciously, trying to lead me into physical insecurity, and act accordingly.
I wish right-wing urbanists every bit of luck, and should it come to me to aid them in concrete ways I will do so. But I'm not going to hold my breath that America's cities become anything more than crime-infested, hollowed-out lands of despair, with the potential exception of Manhattan, which is probably America's only actual good urban neighborhood by international standards.
And yet, as I say, the women I know who seem most drawn to therapy culture and counseling seem... not great.
This has the same vibe as “all the people I know who seem most drawn to oncologists all seem like they’re sick.” Um… yeah?
I don’t think therapy works for everyone. It works for some, and not very well for others. I’m rooting for myself being in the first group. But I hear testimonials from people who it has definitely helped, and I don’t see any reason to doubt them.
There might well be people of your acquaintance who went through therapy, found it helpful, and then moved on. They don’t talk about it, because it’s not an identity for such people, and mental health is very personal. The people for whom it is and identity and doesn’t work well are definitely the ones who are going to talk about it more. I’m not sure you can make a good argument about its effectiveness from the people who talk the most loudly about it. I think you need studies for that.
But I agree, therapy culture is toxic. It’s the equivalent of WebMD making everyone think they have cancer. It takes something private and useful and turns it into a very public weapon. Most people don’t need the tools of therapy, and I think the idea that they do is silly. It’s a condescension to the needs of a select group of suffering people. It’s like chemotherapy — it saves lives, but you shouldn’t give it to someone without the need for it.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
2mo ago
I suspect there are two concepts that are being conflated here -- sensitivity in terms of what you feel, and sensitivity in terms of what you detect.
One is being a highly sensitive person. While I think this is a useful construct, when you break it down I suspect it's a combination of neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness to experience in the Big Five model of personality. I don't think this is the sort of "sensitivity" that is conducive to "sensing" other people's hidden intentions, though maybe it allows you to be creative in particular ways that people with other personality dimensions would find difficult. I don't think it's a superpower. (Maybe if you want to write angsty poetry, of which I wrote much when I was a teenager.)
The other is what is often called "emotional intelligence." I don't like the term. I would prefer "cognitive empathy." This type of "sensitivity" makes it easier for someone to "read" other people's emotions and intentions because it allows you to mentally understand their perspective, modeling their behavior in your head. It has nothing to do with poor functioning, and in fact has everything to do with good functioning! It's the closest thing to a "superpower" in terms of what you're talking about.
My evidence for these being separate is that psychopaths, who are definitionally not highly sensitive in the first definition, are capable of being highly sensitive in the second definition -- that's where the ideas about psychopaths manipulating people by reading and mirroring their emotions comes from. In fact, to function at all as a psychopath, you probably have to develop a great degree of cognitive (system 2) empathy, because the more automatic emotional empathy that gives most people a head start in understanding other people's emotions is absent for you.
I suspect that the random youtube videos and quora posts are a bit of copium, combined with it being high-status and rewarded nowadays to praise sensitivity and emotionality to the high heavens.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
2mo ago
See also the ancient Greeks, who typically divided the sexes into separate spheres so strongly that would make a medieval trad blush -- while also worshipping and holding in high esteem goddesses like Artemis, Athena, and Hera, who are often depicted as more competent than the male gods. Certainly less likely to be diverted from their goals by a sexy woman.
I have a family member with diabetes who recently switched insurance, and the new insurance had her doctor jump through a lot of hoops to demonstrate the drug was actually being used as medically indicated. It took a while for the back and forth to finish so she could get the drug. So it's not just across the pond that it's causing issues.
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