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Hyperbole is bad
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User ID: 92
it makes pro-gun people sound like lunatics when they deny that getting rid of the guns would reduce murder.
Why is our hypothetical anti-gun person trying to get a pro-gun person to admit something that has no practical relevance to the debate? I don’t think the pro-gun person assuming that his interloper is just sound-bite hunting is very crazy.
Saying something like “assume a magical fairy takes all guns out of private ownership in the US, would murders go down?” seems a lot fairer, because you’re making it clear “I’m saying something kind of silly to establish if you’re debating in good faith”.
But if you say “do you admit if there were no guns in the US then there would be fewer murders?”, I don’t think it’s surprising if the pro-gun guy assumes ill-intent.
Rufo literally admitted to the fact. He's just not willing to capitulate on the word, for the exact same reason Democrats don't want to call the estate tax the "death tax" despite it being factually triggered by a death -- because everyone agrees on what the estate tax is and calling it a different name changes nothing about the actual substance of the disagreement. Refusing to use your opponent's loaded terminology has nothing to do with being dishonest.
For what it's worth Easter happens on a different day every year (somewhere within a ~30 day interval), while "Transgender Day of Visibility" happens on March 31st every year, was created in 2009 by activists, and was endorsed by Biden in 2021. Easter won't occur on March 31st for at least the next 25 years (sorry, my chart only goes to 2049).
The point being: the only "choice" Biden made in the last 3 years was to continue to proclaim his support for transpeople on a holiday he had already endorsed in the past, rather than staying conspicuously silent. "Democrat politician refuses to endorse leftwing holiday he's already endorsed three times" would certainly be something to talk about.
If "Biden endorses holiday for the 4th time (but this time it's on Easter!)" merits relitigating The Motte's favorite hobbyhorse, that says more about The Motte's desire to relitigate it's hobbyhorse than it does about any novel development in the real world.
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Hyperbole is bad
1mo ago
princess Kate announced that she has cancer. for some reason it was such an important secret that she first released a doctored photo of her with her kids
God I hate celebrity gossip. Imagine not knowing how tell your kids you have cancer while your 10-year-old reads rumors that his dad is having an affair, that his parents are getting divorced, and that his mom has an eating disorder.
mass shooting in a Russian concert hall. the US embassy was warning about an attack a couple of weeks ago. ukrainians, islamists, false flag, some other mystery group?
The Islamic State claimed responsibility and US intelligence confirmed it.
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.
While I appreciate a top-level post talking about VisionOS, you seem to be claiming that keyboard/mouse is the moat around high-income tech jobs that keeps out "the strong and physically capable", which seems crazy to me.
Typing speed doesn't meaningfully affect an engineer's productivity (except maybe in the low-complexity world of undergraduate projects). A new operating system isn't going to increase the percent of people who can use threads.
What stops more people from becoming software engineers is that it's hard.
Keyboard and mouse still hold the crown.
It’s shocking to you and me, but most people spend more time using a touch screen than using a mouse and keyboard. Modern UX prioritizes mobile experiences over mouse/keyboard.
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Hyperbole is bad
9mo ago
This is a good example of why bagging the whole film industry together is so lossy -- yes, there are directors who like to insert overt political messaging in their films, but Nolan (or James Cameron, Wes Anderson, etc.) do not.
As a kid I assumed that since it wasn't obvious the director of Jurassic Park and Raiders of the Lost Ark were directed by the same person, then directors must not matter very much. As I get older I've begun to appreciate that this attitude was naive.
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Hyperbole is bad
4mo ago
Either you care about white people, their bio-diversity, history and continued existence or you don't.
There are many, many people who care about white people who aren't "white nationalist".
It dates to Nicholas Shackel in 2005. Scott's article mentions this (not sure if it did when it was published but I think it did).
I feel like I’ve lived a sufficiently goody two shoes life to be allowed to say that no, not everyone has been an edge lord.
That said, I don’t think people should be punished based on opinions they held years ago.
Great, now compare those European countries with the United States.
Or do it with South Africa's 2021 GDP instead of its 2004 GDP (34% higher) or its 2002 GDP (50% lower).
I'm not going to argue for or against your thesis but your argument is not compelling.
The infamous ‘Google interview question’ is an IQ test
Obviously it correlates with IQ and G, but it’s not an IQ test.
The point of an IQ test is to measure something “intrinsic”, and so they try not to rely more than necessary on education (e.g. they tend not to include calculus questions), as this confounds your attempt to measure something intrinsic.
In contrast, a genius who has never programmed a computer or taken a CS class is going to fail a technical interview, which is literally by design.
This doesn't seem like a nit when the debate is around what tests are legal, illegal, or legally grey.
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Hyperbole is bad
1mo ago
Regardless of whether EA is "themotte's outgroup" (for whatever sensible definition you want to use), it is really plain that animal EAs are Quantumfreakonomics's outgroup.
"Sneering at a member of the outgroup" seems like an apt description.
Most posters here think quality insights are generally self-explanatory, especially to readers who are ideologically sympathetic or at least are rational and charitable, and so there is little need to invest the time to preemptively solve for [citation needed]. A post without any citation is thus more likely to reflect the original poster's belief that the post will be ideologically well received by the community.
When we were on reddit (and I was scraping every comment anyway) I thought about writing a script to rank posts based on value, and top on my list of useful signals was links, especially links to papers (any link that ends in pdf is probably good, links to arxiv or jstor are great, links to wikipedia are better than nothing (sometimes good, but often just thrown in for no reason).
What I hate is posts that claims controversial things, while the evidence they provide is just whatever feelings the author picked up via osmosis.
I've never really cared about the length of a post, so much as whether the author did anything to rise above the lowest possible level of scholarship, because scholarship is what determines value of a post. A one-sentence comment that drops a link to a paper that answers an interesting question contributes a lot more than 1000 words claiming that it really feels like your in-group is right.
This is one reason why I like when somebody posts about some topic they're passionate about. It's a way that the author can post a comment that, from my perspective, is well-researched, even if the author did absolutely no research for that explicit comment -- they've been woodworking or Mormon-ing or chess-playing for 10 years, and even if their post is valueless drivel to another woodworker/mormon/chess player, it might as well be a well-researched thesis for the right audience.
And where I'm going with this is that variety is good specifically for of this reason (and probably others). I don't really expect random Internet people to spend their free time reading peer-reviewed meta analyses for me, but "I live in Spain and here's is a mile-high overview of current politics that I received via osmosis" is grade-A content from my perspective. Even better is "I'm a researcher who studies X, and this is what I believe" because, again, even if no research went into that specific comment, you're getting decades of research behind it.
On the other hand, the marginal comment where somebody says "I like traditional values and cancel culture is bad" provides much less intellectual value here than it would most other places on the Internet.
(Tangentially... is there an API for this site? I've tried (e.g.) "https://www.themotte.org/comment" which seems like it ought to work based on the code but I get "Method Not Allowed")
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Hyperbole is bad
1mo ago
No, calling Biden “his excellency” definitely involves intentional spite.
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
5mo ago
I expect a crucial component is exact what is meant by "homosexuals". The decision to identify (either to yourself or publicly) certainly correlates with many other variables, many of which correlate with IQ (simply becaise few variables in social science are independent).
For example, if going to college makes you more liberal and more likely to identify as homosexual, then that would increase the average IQ of self-identifying homosexuals.
I'm skeptical you're actually interested in these, uh, incidental (?) correlations though? Which makes your question seem kind of poorly defined.
Reading Sotomayors and Jackson’s dissents all I can think is: “this is an excellent example of why affirmative action needs to be banned”
A post that is 100% culture warring, and booing outgroup scores (+44/-5) and has no mod action. If the majority of readers here want to read posts that dunk on leftists, then they should expect to run out of leftists to dunk on.
Either we all need to spontaneously coordinate and suppress our base instincts, the mods need to start cracking down on culture warring (as distinct from analysis, which is what the Culture War thread is purportedly for), or we all need to make peace with the fact that our community has exactly the amount of ideological diversity that we deserve.
Edit: previous discussion
I have to admit, when I look at domestic box office numbers I mostly just see noise (a big factor imo is competing films entering the market), but to give some reference:
Disney's previous two big movies were Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3.
Ant-Man started at $106M its first week, then dropped to $32M (70% drop) and $13M in the next two weeks.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 went from $118M to $62M (47% drop) to $32M.
The Little Mermaid went from $96M to $41M (57% drop) (also this week isn't finished yet)
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Hyperbole is bad
10mo ago
Was hard for me to find explicit before/after online, so I'll paste the diff I stitched together here:
"Kiss the Girl" changes:
Yes, you want her.
Look at her, you know you do.
Possible she wants you, too.
There is one way to ask her.
Use your words, boy, and ask her
It don’t take a word. Not a single word.
If the time is right and the time is tonight
Go on and kiss the girl
In "Poor Unfortunate Souls" they simply remove the dialog about men liking women who don't talk:
Ursula: That's right! But, you'll have, your man. Life's full of tough choices, isn't it? Oh! And there is, one...more...thing! We haven't discussed the subject of payment...
You'll have your looks! Your pretty face!
And don't underestimate the importance of body language!
...
The men up there don't like a lot of blabber
They think a girl who gossips is a bore
...
It's she who holds her tongue who gets a man.
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Hyperbole is bad
11mo ago
The defense in the article is
“There’s just more and more layers of stuff that hospitals and physicians’ offices—anyone in healthcare—is being asked to do. Documenting and meeting regulatory requirements—all of these have added to the demand,” Selberg told Healthline. “Has that demand actually gone into creating better outcomes…in less time and with lower costs? I think, as the blog described, the answer is no.”
It's hard to know whether this is accurate or not without finding a trustworthy expert. But if "administrative bloat" is where all the money is going, and if there is no good reason for it, this seems more like a symptom of the lack of competition, which is driven by a ton of factors (failures of governments to prevent monopolization, lack of transparent pricing, etc.).
I know you were explicitly asked "where is the money going", but I think it's worth being clear that "where the money is going" is not necessarily the area where Solutions need to be directed. Blaming "administrative bloat" is like blaming "corporate greed" when the paper mill dumps too much pollution in your river. One of the government's core jobs is keeping people's incentives aligned with being pro-social. Forcing hospitals to downsize or pay administrators less (or whatever) is treating a symptom of the overall screwed-upped-ness of legislation of the medical system.
The steelman is that the “alt-right” were basically conservatives who were very loudly anti-immigration and anti-pc in ways that the establishment Republican Party was not (e.g. I remember people on /r/TheMotte itself lamenting that no party would ever reduce immigration).
It is clear that being loud and proud that “we don’t care if the left calls us bigots, stopping immigration and keeping trans advocates away from our kids is super important” is now very prevalent at the national stage in a way that it wasn’t in 2015, and that Trump demonstrated a clear departure from historical norms. Whether you want to call that “the rise of the alt right” or not is a narrative question more than a factual one.
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.
my churning viscera limits my rhetorical strategy from being much more sophisticated than…
If all you have to go on is an internal sense of revulsion, I’m not sure you should be trying to convince him the first place.
The argument that you want to disincentive teens from becoming prostitutes seems weak to me, since it seems really inefficient — how many girls are you saving from a year of prostitution in return for condemning this woman to never have a family for the next 60 years?
I’m guessing very small — probably less than 0.1. Prostitutes are pretty rare in the US so it’s hard for interventions targeted at random people to actually hit their target, and even then, how many teens are going to know she’s single because she was a prostitute (the answer is zero), and finally, your targets are unlikely to have great impulse control anyway.
Or, to make it simpler: how often did you, as a teen, think about the life of an adult you knew when making a decision? The answer is: never, because you didn’t know anything about the personal lives of more than 6 adults, and you didn’t see their lives as relevant predictors of your own life anyway.
I agree this makes it obvious that Rufo is refusing to abandon something indefensible because retreating is how battles are lost. I agree it's good to point this out when it happens. At the same Rufo is being quite honest that their actual disagreement is whether Thomas Jefferson should be viewed as a shitty person, so this really doesn't seem like a case of "thinking on your feet exposes the problem with your beliefs/honesty/etc." -- Rufo seems more than willing to be honest.
Robinson's insistence on only having that argument after establishing linguistically favorable footing makes Robinson seem unreasonable here. What's wrong with arguing whether a man who owned slaves and helped found America was a good person without having to use one of the most mind-killing words in all of discourse?
Might as well go around insisting that Republicans admit Hitler was "right leaning" before beginning any debate. "It's just a fact" right?
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