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
1d ago
I actually found my experience at the selective high school to be more humbling than the alternative -- while I was rarely intentionally elitist towards other students in the younger grades (typically I felt inferior to them), there were definitely a few times where I was like that. Going to the selective school put me in places where I wasn't the smartest guy around. I even met some people who were more intensely elitist than I had ever dreamed of being, who looked down on anybody who struggled with things they found easy, who couldn't even get along with the very smart student body because they thought themselves better even than them. I went from the top 1% of students to the top 20%. Being not the smartest guy in a room helped me understand my limits and be more empathetic toward people not as smart as me. If I hadn't had that experience, I do wonder if I would have turned out like the "I am enlightened by my intelligence" guy.
I was never physically bullied in school, but I was an outcast. This was in the 2000s.
I'm not going to share my IQ or anything like that, so I guess you'll have to take it on my word that I'm pretty smart, in college I was an outstanding student. And maybe it's questionable that I'm "competent," though that depends on what skills exactly you're measuring. But the point of the meme is not that future Presidents of the United States with outstanding charisma are being shoved into lockers, it's that geeky kids who would make good researchers, programmers, or professors are. Those are people who do, indeed, have deficits in some areas, though they are capable of being highly successful in certain socially desirable niches. My teachers throughout my schooling told my parents I was capable of great things; my peers did not think so.
The issue was that it was difficult for me to relate to other kids, and for them to relate to me: I'd make jokes, and they wouldn't get them (my teachers sometimes did, though), I'd make references, and they'd go over their head; I also kind of had a Hermione thing going on, and I assure you that the feeling where students don't like the teacher's pet is still alive and well. The first day I went to the local gifted education program -- and then a selective high school program filled with smart people -- were the very first times in my entire life I felt like I belonged, people laughed at my jokes, people were interested in what I had to say.
The issue with public school is it mixes everybody together. The sorts of assortative social connections that allow people to find others they get along with and relate to are often not present; insofar as they are, it's exactly the sort of cool kids table vs geeky kids table vs goth kids table vs drama kids table stuff the comment you've replied to is talking about. If you go to a school which is a greater reflection of broader society -- so, like, a 100 IQ mean -- it is statistically incredibly likely you'll relate intellectually to very few members of the student body. Perhaps you went to a school located in an unusally well-off section of your community?
I would actually say you have a point in such a situation -- in the selective high school program I attended, I do think there was an observable correlation between a person's intelligence, popularity, and charisma, though there were also many niches where people of various interests could be successful. I recall having several friends who were, to put it bluntly, mathematical geniuses with little charisma.
I'm not sure either side of the story, like @Primaprimaprima indicates (dude, why are we so similar?), tells the whole story of what's going on. I think it's also notable that everything, including IQ, is correlative, and sometimes these correlations break down -- sometimes there are people with high verbal intelligence who suck at fractions (raises hand), or people with incredible endurance who can't bang rocks together, or people who understand computers from the boot ROM to the hyperscalar who can't remember to do their taxes, or people who are incredibly charismatic but lacking in prudence. Everyone, reading that sentence, had at least one real person pop into their head. Maybe someone they know, or at least someone they've heard about. We can talk a lot about correlations, especially when discussing broad social trends, but the core argument for liberalism has always been that correlations break down when talking about the individual. I think school experiences might be one of those situations.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
3d ago
Trump can't win in 2028, he can only serve two terms. I also have doubts he could successfully appoint a successor, his political success is too married to him personally.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
3d ago
Instead, Cortez proved himself a diplomat of no small skill, and put together a coalition of the Aztec's subject peoples which ultimately strangled Tenochtitlan, and then entered into negotiated political relationships with the Spanish crown.
When I took a class on Spanish colonization in the Americas, this was repeatedly emphasized. It was an astoundingly fascinating class, taught by a really passionate professor. And the core message was that it wasn't the Spanish that swooped in and single-handedly took down the Aztecs, it was the resentment of those subject groups that took them down. Which, as @2D3D notes, is incredibly inconvenient both for people who want to say white people are uniquely evil and, I strongly suspect, for indigenous activist groups in Latin America who want to whitewash (pun intended) the cruelty of the indigenous empires of the Americas.
There are many, many bad things you can say about European activity in Latin America. The other thing emphasized in my class was how terrible the encomienda system was. But what was also emphasized about that was how many members of the clergy were intensely opposed to what was happening in New Spain, including this fire and brimstone sermon against slavery from a Dominican friar:
It is to make these sins known to you that I have ascended this pulpit, I who am Christ’s voice in the wilderness of this island; and it behooves you, therefore, to hear this voice, not with commonplace attention, but with all your heart and with all your senses—this voice which will be unlike any you ever heard, a voice more harsh and severe, more frightful and devastating, than you ever thought to hear.
This voice declares that all of you are in mortal sin, living and dying in it, because of the cruelty and tyranny you practice toward these innocent people. Tell me, by what right or justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible slavery? By what right do you wage such detestable wars on these people who lived mildly and peacefully in their own lands, where you have consumed infinite numbers of them with unheard of murders and desolations? Why do you so greatly oppress and fatigue them, not giving them enough to eat or caring for them when they fall ill from excessive labors, so that they die or rather are slain by you, so that you may extract and acquire gold every day? And what care do you take that they receive religious instruction and come to know their God and creator, or that they be baptized, hear mass, or observe holidays and Sundays? Are they not men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as you love yourselves? How can you lie in such profound and lethargic slumber? Be sure that in your present state you can no more be saved than the Moors or Turks who do not have and do not want the faith of Jesus Christ.
People like to point to Christianity as some evil thing that made European colonization worse, but amen amen I say to you, it was the only thing that kept it from being even worse than it was. Fire and brimstone, baby.
It also allows them to continue harboring their intense classism and hatred of people like white appalachians and poor southerners. I agree there are some criticisms you can make of those groups -- some of those very hard-hitting -- but the criticisms made by elites are often far more gutteral and contemptuous than grounded and sympathetic. I would not be surprised to hear some references to "scum of the universe".
The real thing that distinguishes this to me, though, is how it contrasts powerfully with the attitude towards other poor groups; I can't tell you how many middle class+ white people I know will talk endlessly and with great care about being respectful towards AAVE speakers, and then in the next breath make fun of backcountry white dialects that are similar in many respects. It's not the kindness or politeness that grates me, but how selective it is. I dislike the sort of smorgasbord contempt you get from some of our more... elitist posters, but I can at least respect the consistency.
Poor white people are the only people you get to be prejudiced against nowadays, and people are eager to use them to fulfill their innate desire to look down on and insult people they see as lower than them. Compare the valence of the phrases "white trash" and "black trash."
I also get the sense, like ThisIsSin, that overall standards have gone up a lot too, while people's actual value has gone down, with greater obesity, sedentary lifestyles, and mental health challenges among both men and women.
But I also can't help feeling that people have just lost interest in romantic relationships in general. They don't believe in eros any more. They don't have faith in love being valuable. This especially seems pronounced among women, who, after all, are the biggest traditional market for such high valuation of love.
There just seems to be a cohort of women that's not interested in dating any man who comes their way. And I'm not saying they won't date any man who comes their way (that seems eminently reasonable), but that they won't date any of the many men who come their way (some of those men, I know, were generally very popular among women). I know, and have had, lots of female friends and acquantances who have never been in major relationships and show no interest in starting one. We talk about "men going their own way" -- but "women going their own way" seems to be an even bigger group, at least from my zoomer perspective. Love seems transactional, not interpersonal, to them; if I recall correctly, some back in school would joke about marrying a rich man for the money, but actually loving a man never seemed to occur to them.
I haven't noticed as much of a similar cohort of men, though there are some. And there are definitely men who 'desire' a relationship but aren't very active in looking for one.
Contrary to popular belief, this cohort actually seems just as pronounced among women of a conservative background, to my eyes because of the intense values against casual dating in that cohort. They are, just as much as any highly-selective women, waiting for Mr. Right to fall out of the sky. And it has to be Mr. Divinely-Ordained-Right, because the marriage is in three months and they will immediately have children.
My crackpot theory is also that this has something to do with women's relationships with their fathers (and men's relationships to their mothers); most of the women I've gotten on well with romantically have had at least decent relationships with their fathers. I have a weird suspicion that the rise in divorce and single parenthood has led to a lot of women who don't have major male influences in their lives, so they don't form the understanding and appreciation of men's personality traits that women who grow up around them do -- leading them either to idolize or reject something they don't really understand. Growing up with a caring father gives you a good example of the positive influence of men in your life, and a key example of the value men can provide to you and your children. Plus, it means you love at least one man, and that predisposes you to feel positively about them in general. My girlfriend groans at my dad jokes, but her own father's are even more groan-worthy, so she's had a lot of practice tolerating them (and I think secretly enjoys them, don't we all?).
I guess it just makes me sad, I'm a big believer in the value that an intimate relationship, above and beyond the sexual or transactional benefits, brings to people's lives, more than most men -- and I know this, because when I bring up my beliefs on the issue other men mostly don't seem to understand me and talk about it in confused ways, the same way my asexual friends IRL have talked about sexuality in ways that are incredulous and confused. I have this strong value, I've seen its profound impact on my life, and I see it profaned and cast off everywhere -- "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, Moloch the loveless."
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
4d ago
After reading this a couple times last night, sleeping, and then reading it again today, I finally realized what the quotation means and why people are reacting the way they are: the message is addressed to people who were trying to use the bridge and were impeded by the protesters, not the protesters themselves.
I thought the message was addressed to the protesters, who the DA was claiming were falsely imprisoned by the police. There are probably lots of reasons for my misinterpretation -- "imprisonment" being more closely connected to jail (and booking) than to being impeded by a protest, "detained" being a word associated with the police, and of course my schema of the world in which San Francisco prosecutors are more concerned about police misconduct than public disorder. I am fascinated by my misinterpretation.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
6d ago
Ukraine is an especially poorly partitioned country where you have entire regions that are mostly Russian speaking, then others that are Ukrainian speaking, and still more that are heavily Hungarian.
This sounds like a "Comrade Stalin threw a dart on a map and put the border where it landed" problem. And I agree it causes tremendous issues of national identity and integrity post-breakup. For the Bolskeviks, obviously that was the point: divide the minority ethnicities, put them in SSRs with people they hate, destroy nationalist ambitions, profit collectively owned return on collective investment.
And then there's Moldova, which just is North Romania, but was divided from the motherland because of dumb Soviet border disputes.
Who wore it better: UK or USSR?
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
7d ago
I guess my problem with these examples would be, I never looked at any of these as paragons of game writing, even in their heyday. In my youth, Halo was a multiplayer game, people didn't care about the campaign. I've never heard Destiny praised particularly for its writing, I associate it with multiplayer as well. Call of Duty is the Marvel movie of videogames, they've had stories but I've also mostly associated them with multiplayer rather than their campaigns. I don't do horror in any medium, so I can't speak to Dead Space.
But overall, your list leaves me wondering whether you're just looking for good stories in all the wrong places.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
7d ago
ME1 is my favorite game of all time, but I agree with the criticisms of the trilogy as a whole. I feel it went immediately and, ahem, massively downhill from there.
The reason I like ME1 isn't even because of the power fantasy, which I don't care about very much, I desperately want games where the main character isn't all that powerful. I'm actually annoyed we don't see more of those. Let me be a damn shopkeeper with a girlfriend, damn it.
What I liked about ME1 was the character work and the worldbuilding, which I think was pretty good. People praise ME2's character work, but my problem is I think they stretched themselves out too much, and had too many characters to focus on the important ones. I also agree the characters of Miranda and Jack were bad. The only acceptable female romance options in Mass Effect are Liara, Tali -- and I'll go to bat for this one -- Ashley "religious tomboy" Williams. I hear the chicks really dig Garrus. And I mean really dig Garrus.
There is insufficient storytelling about male characters having compelling romantic relationships with women in all mediums. I dare everyone to try to find actually-sensitive storytelling about male-female relationships, from a male perspective, that isn't 1. pornography 2. completely hamfisted or 3. downplayed. Apparently there's "not a market for it" and "why do you love women that much, that's gay" but, uh, this is my thing, my question with each and every story I engage with is "how high quality is the love interest subplot."
The stuff I get is generally not great, but I have to take the crumbs I can get from the master's table. The best stuff might literally be fanfiction. Somehow teenagers on the internet are doing a better job with a whole genre than the entire media apparatus.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
11d ago
What I was taught in school (in the 2000s) was that the original plan did include resettlement, which became extermination when the Nazis couldn't find anywhere to put them. This ship was discussed. The article (from the US Holocaust Museum, the source for the "official story" if ever there was one) says:
[T]he German government had sought to accelerate the pace of forced Jewish emigration. The German Foreign Office and the Propaganda Ministry also hoped to exploit the unwillingness of other nations to admit large numbers of Jewish refugees to justify the Nazi regime's anti-Jewish goals and policies both domestically in Germany and in the world at large.
Obviously this has undertones of "they were just doing this to justify their eventual murder" but it doesn't seem excluded from their view that the "anti-Jewish goals and policies" at the time were something other than raw genocide.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
11d ago
I would also want proportion to the amount of non-violent usefulness for the item, and the amount of necessity for the item in society. No one needs a firearm to get along in society. Yes, it may have usefulness in a law-abiding way, but even the closest thing to a necessity for firearms in society in self-defense -- which involves, inherently, violence. It may be justified violence, but it is violence. Someone who shoots a carjacker is doing the same thing an armed carjacker-gone-wrong does -- using a firearm against a person. And there is no necessity in the 21st century to hunt for food, and certainly no necessity to hunt or shoot for sport.
A car, however -- using a car to run someone over is incorrectly using a car. No one for a lawful or legitimate purpose runs over a person with a car. There is no sense in which a car is supposed to be used to run someone over. There are no sports in which people get run over by cars. There is no such thing as driving through a crash test barrier made of clay for sport. A car, used properly, is not a weapon, it's a means of transport. Firearms are weapons.
And you also kind of need a car to get along in society -- especially in places where public transportation does not exist or is woefully inadequate. It makes a lot more sense to give your depressed teen (with a drivers' license, of course!) access to the family car than to give them a gun. After all, if they can't use the car to go visit their friends, or go to their after-school job, what they'll be doing is moping around the house. And that just sounds like more depression.
Perhaps he could have used the gun at a firing range to let off some stress. But if I were the parents, and actually paid attention to the kid, I wouldn't let him do that without supervision. And I wouldn't even do that, personally. The parents made an active choice to put a weapon in the hands of their depressed, angry son, unsupervised. That's not bad parenting, that's ludicriously harmful parenting. I would even say negligent.
All that being said, it's interesting to me that owning a firearm is a right, but driving a car is a privilege -- yet the former is optional and the latter, for many people, a necessity.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
11d ago
This is the most hilarious legal clause ever. If you're guilty of treason you shall suffer death... or be subject to prison for five years and fined $10,000. What a spread of possible sentences!
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
14d 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
17d 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
20d ago
To me what’s frustrating is he always has to get in a parenthetical jib at people he doesn’t like, even as he’s defending them. And that always lines up with stuff the woke people are saying. It’s not unique. Like him calling James Damore an obnoxious sexist in the linked article.
I just find it annoying that he attacks people for using social opprobrium to attack people they don’t like, and having to mention their disagreement with a cancelled person even when voicing they liked something about them (like the podcasters with Woody Allen). And then he just does the same thing just at a lower level. The difference between “James Damore is an obnoxious sexist” and “James Damore should be cancelled” is one of degree, not kind. Especially in how he does it, with no reflectivity, just mirroring what he’s heard about the guy instead of actually evaluating what he did for himself.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
21d ago
Hey, is it me who gets to be the C.S. Lewis quote poster today? I can't believe it.
This popped into my head from Mere Christianity:
Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God’s eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the V.C. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.
Lewis is talking about God's judgment, but you can really substitute your moral framework here; he's talking about external actions vs internal choices, which is a cross-cultural theme. And I do think there's a tremendous difference between the two.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
22d 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?
I checked and there's a Mormon category as well. I would certainly be interested if Scott would drill down even more, I'd like to see stats on EO vs OO -- and does he have any Church of the East peeps in his readership? (probably not)
(also I want to cross-reference this with Scott's "Have you thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours" question)
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
22d 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
23d ago
Oh, I don't know either. My girlfriend and I had a chat the other day where we were lamenting that people weren't involved in their communities, voluntary associations are dying out, people are lonely, everyone seems to hate each other. And then we just sat there in shocked silence as we pondered how we had no idea how to fix this. I think we both consider ourselves lucky to at least have each other.
Sometimes I feel like a sane man in an insane world (and other times an insane man in a differently-insane world, I guess that's how it goes). But there's something massively wrong with everything, and the internet seems to be making it meaningfully worse, filled with negativity (even deserved negativity!) and brutal comparisions. I'm certainly part of the problem. I've been on a death-spiral as of late that's consisted of hate-reading people's discussions on modern dating, and the only thing I've gained is unnecessary insecurity about what is really a very happy relationship with someone I love. Maybe that's what's going on -- there are real problems, things could be better, but everything people are engaging with is so harshly negative that it colors their perception of the world in ways that make the real problems seem worse, and even actually positive things that exist seem unstable. And since the problems are deeply connected to social trust and confidence, this acts as a self-fulfilling prophesy that makes the problems actually worse and the positive things that exist actually unstable. Nobody seems to be living in the real world, I'm no exception. I wish I could live in the real world. But how do I go about doing that? Am I so far gone, so deep into the rabbit hole that there isn't any way out? What is the real world? What is real? How do you define real? What is "online"? Do our minds make it real? A Roman official once said to a man he was about to execute, two thousand years ago yesterday: "What is truth?"
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
23d ago
Yeah, I think a huge part is insufficient pair bonding. I wonder if perhaps the problem is social media and porn -- unrealistic expectations abound there.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
23d ago
Most would be better if the rule was just have sex with the person whose about your intelligence and attractiveness within a 10 min.walk and marry them for 70 years.
I disagree with your view on elites but I agree 100% with this. This is what people did for a very long period of time, and it's what led to all the old couples I know being happily married for decades. There are multiple stories in my family history of either a guy or girl at age 15 seeing the cute-one-next-door riding their bike and saying, out loud, "I'm going to marry that one." And then it happening. They found an eligible person who met their minimum standards for attractiveness and similarity, and chose to commit to them. By contrast, my girlfriend's mom had an insightful commentary on people in relationships today: "They keey divorcing because they just keep shopping." Stop shopping, stop comparing, stop optimizing, make an acceptable choice and allow the natural human instincts for pair-bonding do their job, and then continue to choose your partner even when it gets tough. That's what love means!
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
23d ago
Most would be better if the rule was just have sex with the person whose about your intelligence and attractiveness within a 10 min.walk and marry them for 70 years.
I disagree with your view on elites but I agree 100% with this. This is what people did for a very long period of time, and it's what led to all the old couples I know being happily married for decades. There are multiple stories in my family history of either a guy or girl at age 15 seeing the cute-one-next-door riding their bike and saying, out loud, "I'm going to marry that one." And then it happening. They found an eligible person who met their minimum standards for attractiveness and similarity, and chose to commit to them. By contrast, my girlfriend's mom had an insightful commentary on people in relationships today: "They keey divorcing because they just keep shopping." Stop shopping, stop comparing, stop optimizing, make an acceptable choice and allow the natural human instincts for pair-bonding do their job, and then continue to choose your partner even when it gets tough. That's what love means!
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