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Hyperbole is bad
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User ID: 92
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Hyperbole is bad
6mo ago
I just had a horrible “everyone loses” vision of the future where everyone is permitted to conceal carry and kill criminals but they’re required to wear body cameras while in public.
One thing that I think is often overlooked is that society gives men better incentives, which is actually nothing to sneeze at (though I won't get into "who has it worse").
Women value economic success in men much more than the reverse, while men value a woman's appearance. The upshot for men is that if you spend 10 years developing your economic value you're now richer. You can argue that developing economic value is more difficult than maintaining/developing good looks, but that misses the point I'm driving at.
Consider two identical twins. The parents force one twin to get good grades, play sports, practice piano, etc. The other twin is completely ignored and follows his base instincts (video games, probably). Unsurprisingly the first twin ends up with better life outcomes, and, while one could argue the first twin "deserves" this, in the sense that he worked hard to improve his life, this clearly illustrates that incentives matter immensely -- people just aren't good at abstractly reasoning about what's good for them in the long run and then doing it, otherwise both twins would have been fine.
I contend that society works similarly for men -- yes the constant pressure to be successful is a burden, but it is a legitimately good burden to have -- it's the reason men are more likely to pursue high-income careers. I contend that women lacking such incentives hurts them in the long run, and complaining that "women don't have to worry as much about being economically successful" is like the first twin complaining that his brother is allowed to just play videogames all day. Is it unfair that the first child has to work more? It certainly seems that way to a 12 year old.
I am not saying women have it better or that women have it worse. I've just never seen anyone make the point that, whether it’s your prospective girlfriends, your guy friends (via internal competition), or your parents, having an external factor drive you to improve your life is incredibly valuable, and seems like a pretty significant advantage.
Don’t worry, the mods have decided that’s not a controversial claim, otherwise they’d have issued a warning for not proactively providing evidence.
My best guess is Christianity/traditionalism are popular arguments here, mainly because they act as a foil for progressivism -- the benefits of radically different systems put the costs of progressivism into sharper relief.
I suspect the vast majority of our community would have been against white nationalism/Christianity/traditionalism before the 1960s, and would be against it today if it actually regressed to that point. I think they'd change their tune quite quickly once millions of Mexicans were living in tents across the border, or teachers were telling their kids they have to believe in God or they'll go to hell, or their daughters weren't allowed to go to college.
Whether they don't bring this up because those scenarios are so unlikely they're not worth mentioning, or because it ruins their catharsis while railing against leftists, is probably more a narrative question than a factual one, but I really doubt the readers here were pro-Christian when Christians were more influential and (e.g.) trying to stop Evolution from being taught in schools.
In that sense, it's probably more true to say that this forum hates ideologies that are currently messing with their lives (Progressivism is seen as the primary culprit today), rather than that it hates Progressivism or likes Christianity specifically.
If the Jews were behaving like sovereign citizens and (e.g.) refusing to pay taxes or follow laws, then "persecuting the Jews is no worse than a conflict with a foreign state" might be somewhat defensible.
But it sounds like you're saying "Yeah you pay French taxes and follow French laws and have lived in France all your life, but you don't follow French culture, so you shouldn't get the game-theoretic protections of being part of France". If you agree that (e.g.) Mormons deserve to live without persecution, I feel like that should also extend to Jews.
We also very often see posts get reported for "lying." Leaving aside the question of whether mods can or should judge the truth value of every post, almost always, "lying" is an accusation made about someone's perception of a contentious issue. We don't mod people for expressing an opinion you believe is false and the other person believes is true, regardless of what we personally think is true. We rarely mod people for saying something we suspect they might not actually believe, and certainly not because you think the other person doesn't actually believe what they are saying.
Sorry by "truthful" I don't mean "explicitly lying". I mean "omitting key context that a reasonable person would expect you to include if you actually cared about good discussion (and not just about booing the outgroup)".
The commenter I linked to decided that
Recently the US city of New York, decided that BLM protestors that felt victimized by the police preventing from running amok
accurately portrayed
The protesters arrested in the Bronx were surrounded by police officers before an 8 p.m. curfew and prevented from leaving
To me this is a really obvious example of somebody going on a tirade about how bad their outgroup is. My main gripe (as somebody who disagrees with BLM) is that you have a less accurate understanding of what happened after reading his comment.
Could you argue that that comment makes this board a better place?
I think it's pretty clear mods are much more rigorous about enforcing things if there is some obvious flow chart they can appeal to if somebody questions their decision. "Less than 50 words --> low effort" -- who could argue with that?
Another good example is "consensus building" which should mean "don't imply we all agree with you" but instead means "don't use the phrase 'we all know'".
And so we have things like "Given Kamala's own exposure as a weak air-head" just stated matter-of-factly and in-passing, when any sane standards would require at least a context link.
The mods have (correctly) decided that allowing things like "We all know that Kamala is an air-head" is damaging to discussion, but when MelodicBerries simply assumes his reader agrees with him and that the claim needs no justification this is also building consensus. But it's not part of the mod flow chart "we all know" -> "building consensus", so it's completely kosher.
Basically no discussion board on the Internet actually asks its members to "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be" -- the onus is always on whomever disagrees with your claim to hold you to account. TheMotte and /r/slatestarcodex, according to their own rules, should be the exceptions. But I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually seen that rule enforced.
I think thats because that’s because the mods are human and enforcing it requires making difficult-to-defend decisions and that’s scary.
I thought maybe BMI was confounded by age, but it turns out age isn't a good predictor of monthly income. Here's a linear fit with age and log(monthly income)
coef std err t P>|t| [0.025 0.975]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
age -0.0025 0.010 -0.260 0.795 -0.022 0.017
bias 8.2223 0.292 28.195 0.000 7.648 8.797
(n=223)
And here it is with bmi and age
coef std err t P>|t| [0.025 0.975]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
age 0.0034 0.009 0.370 0.712 -0.015 0.022
bmi -0.0636 0.013 -4.978 0.000 -0.089 -0.038
bias 9.5392 0.383 24.899 0.000 8.784 10.294
Then I thought maybe older women are working more hours, but the regression on log-hourly income (rather than monthly income) is similar:
coef std err t P>|t| [0.025 0.975]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
age 0.0024 0.006 0.416 0.678 -0.009 0.014
bmi -0.0275 0.008 -3.414 0.001 -0.043 -0.012
bias 6.3876 0.241 26.454 0.000 5.912 6.863
Edit: here is the data in a form more friendly to a python programmer https://pastebin.com/aZqGTbG5
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Hyperbole is bad
1mo ago
I’m guessing OP cares about their community’s well-being, not just their own intelligence.
The correlation between grip strength and reasoning is 0.23.
If you pick two random people their grip strength will correctly order them by IQ 58% of the time. If you only look at people with z>1 grip strength then this drops to 53%
So for any moderately selective college you’re basically operating 3% above random.
If you order by SAT you get 70% and 60% respectively.
You’ve got a long way to argue that affirmative action is so unmeritocratic that it makes such a crappy signal like mile time comparable to a decent signal like test scores.
Then we can talk about why you think “mile time with no AA” is either better or more politically feasible than “test scores with no AA”
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Hyperbole is bad
10mo ago
why would you want to depress native fertility by importing a bunch of low-skilled workers
This is the first time I've heard this claim. Is there empirical evidence to support this?
Hey mods. My discussion with @Amadan seems to have ended without a resolution. Could I get some clarification on how our rules permit insulting public officials when it isn't explicitly necessary to make your point? It seems to contradict several of them:
Be Kind… To a lesser but non-zero extent, this also applies to third parties. You shouldn't just go and attack people that you think are bad, you should be kind to them, even if you think they're mean, even if you think they're bad.
Or
Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
Or
To have a discussion on some point of disagreement it is necessary that both parties be willing to say what they believe and why, not merely that they disagree with the other party. Sarcasm and mockery make it very easy to express that you disagree with someone without explaining why, or what contrary claim you actually endorse, and you can't grow a discussion from those grounds.
Or
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
"Trump is a venal, fascist clown" seem like really clear cases of prioritizing heat over light, vilifying your outgroup, arguing to win, and treating the thread as territory to be won. Just completely counterproductive and the anthesis to the goals of this place.
If you decide you're going to allow them, could you explain how my interpretation of these rules is wrong and/or rewrite the rules to be more clear?
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
Maybe if a women feel rejected by or reject their own tribe themselves, they attempt to undermine it in the hopes of getting conquered by a different tribe? That seems overly complicated though, the answer to this should feel simple because it's emotional. Help me out here.
If you actually believe that then Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be. Otherwise consider being kind and charitable rather than tarring an entire group.
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Hyperbole is bad
6mo ago
They're ready to start pogroms now.
Are you using a definition that isn't
an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group
?
Can you tie together the first part of your post (linking to a blog post about free speech) to the second part (baseless speculation that your outgroup is behaving like dicks)?
The two people that were laid off on my team were lower-than-senior engineers who hadn’t been promoted in a long time. From what I can tell this is the general advice given by consultants to upper management for figuring out who is a weak performer.
Either an insult is materially relevant to the argument, in which case it requires justification (and deserves a mod warning if one isn't given), or it is not relevant (in which case it deserves a mod warning for creating needless heat).
Given Kamala's own exposure as a weak air-head, it seems almost inevitable to me that we will see Biden vs Trump once again in 2024
It's plain here that the point about Kamala that's actually relevant to the argument is that she has no hope of being the Democrat nominee. A context link that is appropriate is a link to a poll or a prediction market.
Instead MelodicBerries goes needlessly out of his way to call her an airhead. If this was relevant to the argument and supported by evidence it would be fine. Instead it's neither.
(This is a good time to mention that it has always bothered that TheMotte has never explicitly endorsed "Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite comment policy", but even if @ZorbaTHut doesn't like that, surely "don't insult people for no reason" is a good norm, since the round up text links to things like IN FAVOR OF NICENESS, COMMUNITY, AND CIVILIZATION and mentions "you should argue to understand, not to win", "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion", etc.)
If you say "Trump is a venal, fascist clown," that's your opinion, and someone who likes Trump would very likely report you for it, but you don't have to post a link to support your opinion. If you say "We all know Trump is a venal, fascist clown" you'd get modded
Props for consistency (though, to be clear, I'm not arguing the mods are politically biased), but I strongly disagree on your trade off between light and heat. "Trump is a venal, fascist clown" should not be allowed unless (1) required by the point you're trying to make and (2) proactively supported. Having higher standards when people are being insulting seems like required, base-level moderation to me.
There is a difference between saying "The world is incidentally a better place because Alice stabbed Bob in a tumor" (what Utilitarianism is happy to say) and "we shouldn't punish Alice for stabbing Bob" (what Utilitarianism does not say).
This is because Utilitarianism doesn't justify punishment on the basis of right/wrong or, indeed, even intent. It justifies it on whether the punishment would increase utility (yes, shocking).
It happens to be true, in this universe, that punishing based on intent often yields to better societies than punishing based on results. But if you lived in an upside-down universe (or were governing a weird species, say one that didn't arise from evolution) where punishing Alice increased her propensity for violence, then Utilitarianism gives you the tools to realize your moral intuitions are leading you astray – that the deontological rules that work sensibly in our universe would be actively detrimental if applied to the other one.
So no, punishing based on intent doesn't necessarily lead away from consequentialism, because it's plain that we live in a world where punishing people who merely try to inflict harm (and mitigating punishment when the perpetrator's intent is good) is a more effective social policy (or parenting policy, etc.) than ignoring people's intentions.
It seems like a non sequitur to try to tie a BBC documentary to this. The burden of knowing what you’re doing is an order of magnitude higher for state actually using it to execute people than it is for some guy making a documentary.
So when an execution that was expected to result in loss of consciousness in seconds actually takes minutes (that’s probably worth mentioning in your comment), it seems completely kosher to criticize the institution that just put somebody to death in a terrible way — a BBC documentary from 10 years ago is not a valid shield.
If someone holding their breath transforms your humane execution method into something that results in minutes of suffering, that’s a black mark on the method and people are allowed to criticize you for not knowing or not caring.
But yes, I agree if this happened in California the response would probably be different.
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Hyperbole is bad
4mo ago
It’s interesting because this happened once to me and it was a girl with a Snapchat in her bio. I pretty religiously avoided girls with some sort of social media (eg a instagram) in their bios since I expected they were just hunting for followers, so maybe that’s the difference?
When avoiding a derogatory term makes discussion more difficult you will have a leg to stand on. “Tranny” doesn’t, yet you insist on sheltering under free speech.
So I ask: how is this specific usage of Free Speech (allowing people to say “tranny”) helping us achieve our terminal value?
All of the community's rules must be justified by this foundation.
Yes, it takes judgement to decide what speech to allow. But here’s a simple heuristic:
If a word drives some people away and is unnecessary for communicating ideas, then modding its usage helps one aspect of the foundation and doesn’t hurt the other.
“Tranny” drives away certain perspectives and makes no ideas easier to communicate. So how is allowing it helping achieve the foundation?
Mechanics and process aside, the end result is a San Fran full of growing compassion and ever more unhoused
The alternative hypothesis is that the homelessness in San Francisco is driven by a very brutal housing market.
For example, this paper finds that "a 10% reduction in housing costs is estimated to lower homelessness rates by around 4.5%". The median rent in SF is $3275 and $1434 in Kalispell, MT (i.e. 130% higher in SF).
It always kind of confuses me that people think treating the homeless a little bit meaner or nicer will have a meaningful effect. Being homeless really, really sucks. I don't think it is the lack-of-sucking that enables the homeless to keep being homeless.
Seriously think about it: you've homeless for 4 years, have no education, references, or work experience. 2/3 long-term homeless have mental health issues and 2/3 have drug issues, so tack on one of those.
Would somebody shooting paintballs at you actually motivate you to get a job? Would you be successful at finding one if it did? Would you still be looking for a job a week later?
(This isn't to say that typical "compassionate" solutions are effective either)
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Hyperbole is bad
4mo ago
It's worth noting that "fair fight" spaces have their own failure modes, notably that people interpret their opponents uncharitably and take opportunistic potshots. One of my favorite things about quokka spaces is that they avoid those failure modes.
Also "status" is absolutely a thing in masculine spaces, which is one reason why "I'm sorry, I was wrong" is never seen here.
Yes, if you found your space on Free Speech you'll attract seven zillion witches. And if you ban witches on sight you won't.
But that post doesn't say that those are the only possible options, probably because slatestarcodex.com was a clear alternative where discourse across the political spectrum occurred all the time.
So yes, the fact that TheMotte became "alt-right" was entirely predictable, but no, it was not inevitable.
What do you wish Trump et al could accomplish between 2024 and 2028? Is it mainly restricting low-skill immigration?
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Hyperbole is bad
5d ago
Since you now know this comment exists and haven't modded it... it seems like my comment was accurate?
I'm mentally unhealthy enough that I've tracked my reports and gone back to see if mods actually did anything, and I've concluded my reports just waste moderator time.
I don’t think it’s possible to create an Internet community where everyone engages charitably but people are also free to call each other or their outgroup stupid, evil, or faggots.
To the extent such a community does exist, it’s living on borrowed time as one group leaves due to asymmetry in hostility (if your community is 80% Packers fans and 20% Bears fans, then Bears fans are going to see a lot more hostility than Packer’s fans).
TheMotte itself began its existence due to a one-time infusion of quokkas. who had the miraculous ability to tolerate their outgroup. I support an increase in moderator effort to preserve this, since it is ultimately why TheMotte works at all.
If you find a place with weaker civility norms and better quality discussion I’m happy to be proven wrong. As it is, the only places I’ve seen higher quality discussions (about politics) are places with stricter civility norms, and at this point I think that’s just an unfortunate reality that stems from human nature.
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