RenOS
something is wrong
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User ID: 2051
RenOS
something is wrong
2hr ago
I can relate a lot with this, which is precisely the reason why I consider the trans-movement so scary. I've written about me & my wife's childhoods before: https://www.themotte.org/post/1794/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/311570?context=8#context
In short, this is what puberty is like for many of us, sadly. Before puberty, you might look at teens with hate and disgust. During your own teenage years, you feel like shit and hate yourself. I dunno who said this, but male puberty is like being given a completely out-of-control wild horse, against your will, and you have to tame it or else it will trash your place and piss of everyone. And it takes years. Hell, I still regularly get pissed off at my sexuality. Female puberty is different, but no less difficult.
But at the end, as an adult, you've done the work and it has simply become a part of you. You're different now, sure, but trying to forgo that transformation makes about as much sense as a caterpillar not wanting to become a butterfly because it's too different from the life it has gotten used to.
Not saying that there are exactly zero people who have so massive problems with their biological sex that medication or other changes might become a reasonable option, but in about 99.999% of cases if a teen asks "I feel uncomfortable with my sex, what should I do?" the correct answer is trying to help them find ways to become more comfortable with their body and realize that there isn't just exactly one way to be for each sex, and that a lot of stuff is, while certainly strongly correlated with sex, actually mostly superfluous for it.
RenOS
something is wrong
5hr ago
fraud
And what are you gonna do about it? Not you, personally, of course, but the system. The answer, in my experience, is: Nothing. On paper, they look too much like what they claim to be, and even if the state would start to do personal visits to random benefit-receivers, their legal options are so limited that it's trivial to hide the presence of the guy. Not that I would be in favour of the state doing that to begin with. I don't think the moving around had anything to do with the government, they just used the apartment for storage or the like. In fact they were very lazy about it in a way that made it rather clear they didn't fear them catching on at all; When we had a water leak in the apartment above them and they were repeatedly notified by phone that they have to be present so a handicraftsman can enter, they just ... didn't, up until the moment they were threatened that they have to pay for damages. It was very, very clear to everyone including the landlord that he didn't really live there. But as long as the flat gets paid they just don't give a shit, especially not in these places. We actually had several other people in this building who clearly weren't living in their apartments, at least not all the time, for various reasons. This included me & and my wife; For almost three years, I was officially living in the UK, my wife officially in Germany, but in reality we spent almost half/half in each, mostly together. It's just completely infeasible to investigate anyone renting a cheap small flat, there's way too much of it.
A system isn't measured by what words are on pieces of papers, but by what it does (note: this is distinct from saying that this is outright it's purpose; Of course systems can just simply be badly designed. Though if flaws don't get fixed even after being repeatedly pointed out, it's reasonable to conclude that at least some people in fact like those flaws and don't want them to get fixed). In my experience, everyone thinks this way once it's about a topic they care about; If, say, discrimination against blacks was illegal on paper but there are no mechanisms to suss it out and nothing short of a confession is considered sufficient evidence in court, and anti-black discrimination was as a result still widely practiced with impunity as long as they aren't so stupid as to openly admit it, I'd be pretty sure you'd consider such a system racist, and defending the system with "well but that's illegal so the system is actually perfectly fine" is at best extremely naive, at worst (and, honestly, more realistically) a bad-faith defense. So there imo isn't a hard separation between fraud and gaming the system here at all.
A system is good if the rules as-written are as close as possible to the rules as-practiced, for legibility reason, and if the incentive gradient that is created as a result of the rules as-practiced are reasonably aligned with the intentions of the rulemakers and the population as a whole when the rule was crafted. The second part especially means that the benefits from fraud/gaming the system need to outstrip its cost, otherwise the money is just going to go somewhere else entirely. This is where, in my experience, left-wing systems tend to dramatically fail in a reliable fashion. It's always "nobody is going to game the system", then it's "well that's fraud so it doesn't count" and then finally "why are we deep in the red and everyone still complains that it's not enough".
You can certainly find some conservatives somewhere who really are all about punishing the wicked poor, but this is where limiting benefits to basic necessities is showing its value. Someone in genuine need is still going to be very happy about a can of rice, but it's not worth playing stupid accounting games for. A small apartment is great if otherwise you're literally homeless, but ditto. And so on. To a first approximation with maximal uncharity, that might sound like wanting to punish them, but it's simply a very effective safeguard against being taken advantage of. Which is why conservative tend to have it as an instinctive reaction.
I'm actually broadly against investigations unless it's about a lot of money, since in the west the combination of high legal requirements and high cost of man-hours means that it can happen extremely fast that the cost of the investigation outstrips any plausible amount that could have been defrauded. It's best for fraud to just not be worth it, investigating the most egregious cases, and just eating the (small, in a well-designed system) difference.
Charity for religion
I know this objection, but the same goes for a lot of left-wing charity being extremely politically charged; Imo politics is pretty isomorphic to religion in general. Once you look into the details, one might even conclude the opposite: Lots of nominally religious charities have not only overwhelmingly secular staff nowadays, but in particular very far left staff, and re-direct the money from the conservatives to their own pet causes instead.
RenOS
something is wrong
6hr ago
Watts might be a depressed misanthrope who prays that humanity pays for its sins (any day now), but the man can write.
Yeah, reading his online comments made me genuinely reflect on whether I might have overestimated the depth of his books. I still like Blindsight, but boy does the guy sound like a complete cliche in short-form.
RenOS
something is wrong
3d ago
Isn't Sekiro the closer match? In any case, thanks for the rec, I considered getting Nioh anyway, though it's unlikely I'll find much time playing it soon.
I've also read those principles when they were linked, and also immediately thought: I'm so, so not a conservative. I disagree with almost everything in that list. Not particularly surprising though, since I'm not religious, either.
But that's unfortunately where my agreement ends. Incidentally, your post sums up many things I find extremely irritating about liberals quite well, and why I currently tend to side more with conservatives.
It's this last point that really sums it all up, the idea that the system is there to be gamed, largely is gamed, that there exists an advantage in trying to game it, and the self-congratulation that comes along with not gaming it. To make a seasonal reference, it's as if we are Christ tempted in the desert. Except anyone with half a brain knows that nobody on food stamps is getting any advantage from the system. For a single individual, the income limit is about $2600/month.
Yeah, duh, all systems are being gamed. That's not a moral stance, that's just basic reality. There is about an infinite number of ways to have access to more money than that theoretic limit:
- work black (by far the most common)
- have a boyfriend earn more money
- Have rich parents who give you a certain allowance for your basic needs, except you want to maximize the amount you can spend on frivolities instead
And so on. For a simple example from my own life: We've had neighbours - a family with two kids - upstairs back when I was a student. The guy was a construction worker and very nice, the wife was permanently unemployed from even before they had kids. But somehow, they were regularly not in their place for weeks on end, and they were the kind of white trash that certainly isn't living a jet-set life. So what was the reason? Pretty simple: The flat which we thought was theirs was actually officially only his. She pretended to be a single mom with two kids and got all the government benefits associated with that, among them a nice little house in the suburbs. And then they got all the money from his work on top, while paying very little for the cheap flat.
The reality in most western countries is that if you earn anything like the median wage legally, you'd be better off switching to gaming the system. Yes, for the rich and upper middle class it might not seem worth it, but the working poor and lower middle class not only know this, they usually personally have people around them already doing this. And yes, the only thing holding them back is a combination of self-respect and peer pressure. They tell you this, and instead you mock and denigrate them.
The most common one, both here and in popular discussion, is the desire to prohibit purchases of certain items, which some states have already begun doing. As a said in an earlier post on the topic, these items generally fall into three categories:
There is also this weird insistence to pretend that not wanting government money being spent on something is the same as prohibiting something. No, they can just pay for it with their own money! I've had this discussion with my wife when she was younger about a clearly drunk beggar. No, I don't want to give him money; He clearly already could have bought something for himself instead of getting drunk. With welfare I can't just opt out, so yeah, I want it to be limited to important stuff. That doesn't mean I want alcohol banned altogether, since not only do I expect most people to be capable of enjoying it in appropriate quantities, they may even get drunk if they want to because it's their fucking money. That's basic common sense.
Worse, there really are a lot of people who do actually want to prohibit thing. They're called "liberals":
Now, I don't have a problem with prohibiting pop and candy as some states have begun doing, at least not in and of themselves.
Or meat, or cars, or alcohol, or any number of things. For many a liberal, there are only two states: Banned or mandatory support.
Even the disabled don't get a pass anymore because we all know that they could probably work if they wanted to and they're just faking it to get their free Dr. Pepper and avoid work, which we all know they'd do if they were virtuous.
Again, yes. As a teen, I really got along great with my cousin's husband, who was ca 30 or so at the time, and I was gaming with him in the same clan regularly. Inter-personally, he's nice guy. But it doesn't change the fact that he claimed benefits for some undefined back issues that make it impossible for him to continue to do the warehouse work he did before. Even if that was true - and frankly, I don't think so - he could have certainly done a regular desktop office job instead of gaming 10 hours+ all day. He's sitting in front of a screen either way. At least once they had kids, he started helping out with house / child chores. Of course not because of virtuousness, but because my cousin got sick of his shit bc she was a full-time nurse.
You don't have to work, and unless your hobbies are watching daytime broadcast television or hanging around outside a Co-Go's, I believe you'd find yourself bored with the welfare lifestyle rather quickly.
You can believe whatever you want, 90% of young guys would certainly prefer gaming all day over working, and young women are only a little bit better. In most cases, the primary reason they don't is their parents giving them shit. If their parents are already gaming the system, their kids will usually do so as well.
Conservatives know this deep down, but they don't want to admit it because it conflicts with the First Principle. If there is an absolute, unchanging moral framework, then we can judge people based upon it. And to compound things even further, they are self-arbiters of this framework. They know what it is inherently, and if anyone tells them otherwise, they're just liberals trying to infect the culture. It makes about as much sense as someone confidently saying that frozen burritos are a luxury item that should only be available to the deserving. Because when it comes to any moral obligation on the part of ourselves, there is silence. No conservative criticizes food stamps on the one hand and speaks of an obligation to help the poor on the other. For all the Biblical allusions, I can't find the part where charity has to be earned through moral virtue. The moralism seems to be confused, solipsistic, incoherent. For his part, Russell Kirk was at least a generous man who was known to help strangers in ways that few of us ever will. But I'm not sure that he was really a conservative.
As a matter of fact, most research on the topic concludes that conservatives give more to charity than liberals despite earning less. When I was still forced to go to church, helping the poor and needy was the #1 matter being preached. But helping and indulging their worst vices are not only different, they're opposites. Kirk was pretty average in this way.
At the end of the day, I can't help but notice that most liberals belong into two camps: So sheltered that they basically don't get into contact with dysfunctional people, and the actually dysfunctional. The former can't fathom why people might game the system because they already have it so nice without doing so, and the latter can't fathom not gaming the system. Others are stuck in-between, trying desperately to keep the system working somehow.
RenOS
something is wrong
5d ago
Tbh I feel like saying "no u". Decadence is very important - though not the only dynamic, of course - to my view of the decline of rome. If you agree with that framing, you are conceding my point, not the other way around. I agree that there are people pushing an overly hard version that is clearly wrong, but that doesn't make the concept overall anymore useless/wrong than a white nationalist who thinks that blacks are literal apes makes HBD wrong. HBD also isn't the only thing that matters, but it is one of the things that matter.
How did the roman elites fail to sustain their population? It certainly wasn't material poverty. It also wasn't a lack of sex. What could be an appropriate word for having plenty of orgies, yet not create enough children and to rather adopt some successful general who has nothing to do with you?
Why was having mercenerary barbarians fight enemy barbarians bad? If the romans had stayed strong, they could just weaken the barbarians by letting them fight each other, and if the mercenaries got uppity, the romans could put them in their place. But instead, they couldn't, and became dependent on them. It's true that there were other factors at play here - overextension and civil wars - but even the romans themselves acknowledged that once the practice became normalized, plenty of romans could, but just simply didn't want to fight as soldiers. And I can absolutely understand that! But again, this specific part of the story is typical decadence - refusing a necessary service to keep the society you are part of running because you're used to getting away with it.
How did Rome even keep together, if the elite got so decadent? Precisely because of non-decadent peasants and barbarian troops working for them. The former because they, being subsistence farmers and/or outright slaves, just didn't have any other options, and the latter because they felt that arrangement suited them. Decadence is a sliding scale and needs to be counted over the whole group you are part of. If I sit on the couch all day and get away with it because my wife is working and also does all the household chores, that's decadent and bad. But it's only possible because my wife is sufficiently competent and industrious, i.e. anti-decadent. For as long as she is, we will probably do okay overall. But we have less stuff and if something happens to her, we're fucked. That's just fundamentally more brittle than both partners putting in the work.
You may say now that this sitting-on-the-couch-is-bad theory sucks because it has no predictive value. After all, everything was mostly fine despite my sitting on the couch, and once it wasn't, the REAL reason was losing my wife. Which is ... kind of true? But also mostly silly. It's like saying that state capacity is unimportant, Genghis Khan conquered the world despite steppe nomad having approximately zero state capacity as a society. No, it's just not the only thing that matters.
RenOS
something is wrong
5d ago
First, I agree with @SecureSignals that biological evolution being slow is an outdated & wrong meme at this point from back before archeogenetics existed. We now have plenty of evidence that biological human evolution happened frequently on relatively short timescales.
Second, the principle can be trivially generalized to cultural evolution. We are experiencing ourselves how fast people can spin up new memes, identities, moral/politeness rules and so on, with little concern for their practicality. Under strong selection, you expect that cultural evolution to nevertheless point towards increased function over time; But without selection, it points towards less function, for simple entropy reasons (there are always infinitely more ways to do things wrong than there are ways to do them right).
On the last point though, I actually agree with you. Wars can happen in a way where they disproportionally kill of the brave and pro-social, while the self-centered cowards survive. It needs to be kept in mind that concepts like decadence, "hard time create strong men", etc. are one among many, and they are not always the correct one. But it doesn't mean that they are irrelevant, just as the example of Genghis Khan uniting the steppe nomads and conquering the world is not a proof that the concept of state capacity is useless.
RenOS
something is wrong
6d ago
In the meantime, their soldiers, who lived rough out of both necessity and for training, beat the snot out of the tough barbarian folk for centuries; and only then were beaten by Romanized barbarians who adopted their tactics and equipment to a large degree.
This is imo a pretty major misrepresentation of history, and an instructive one for the distinction here. A more correct framing in my view would be that Rome was reliably growing back when its armies were staffed by capital-R Romans. After having grown substantially, they improved their military success even further by using auxilia allied barbarian troops alongside their regular legions. This was a great invention and worked for a long time, growing Rome even further. Having overextended so far that it was simply not feasible to fight all conflicts with enough roman legions, barbarian mercenaries increasingly got hired to stuff more and more holes, until at some point the entire distinction between "proper" legions and the auxilia got eradicated.
Paying people to fight for you actually can also work, especially if you're rich and have a technology level far beyond them. But even back then the Romans already commented on the hardiness of their allies compared to the softness of the Romans. Both sides gained: The barbarians gained access to gear and technology that would otherwise be beyond them and allowed them to beat and conquer tribes further outward, while Rome stays safe and has troops. Btw, even the Roman elite changed their ethnic composition around this time, since they didn't have enough kids and had a tendency to adopt successful military commanders.
Everything looks mostly fine if you look at it from a super eagle-eyes view, but under the hood the barbarians already substantially got into control of all the important structures. This also changed the loyalty that many people in important positions felt to Rome itself, with predictable consequences. Romanizing barbarians is a two-way street, which by mainstream historians always gets ignored. Legions would just blackmail politicians when they felt they didn't get enough, or even just because they could get away with it. Later roman leaders frequently blatantly side with their own heritage over romans. Soldiers would abandon the army on a whim and, since they would just go back to their barbarian tribes, Rome could do absolutely nothing against it. Unlike asin the past, where desertion was punished with death. In fact, they would frequently outright change sides. All of this would have been unthinkable with capital-R Roman legions fighting barbarians.
The actual sack of rome is less a glorious victory from the now-improved german barbarians against still-tough roman soldiers, and more a wimper from a dying empire whose troops by that point simply were also germans, and who had little problem with abandoning the losers once the writing on the wall was clear.
If you're getting so decadent that you can't fight for yourself anymore, you don't necessarily lose instantly. Especially if you're adaptable and find a way to get the others to fight for you. But pretending that decadence/softness or vice versa hardiness doesn't matter makes about as little sense as pretending that money, landownership or technology doesn't matter.
RenOS
something is wrong
6d ago
This seems quite far from the colloquial definition. Usually it's considered sufficient if most people around them consider it humiliating. If you make a terrible joke and everyone around you laughs about you instead of about the joke, that is humiliation. If anything, not even noticing the difference makes it extra-humiliating.
Also, enough people on the left are clearly in the kind of damage control mode about the scandal that implies at least some level of awareness, even if it doesn't rise to the level of changing their entire view. Like the tapeworm guy admitting that, well, this particular tapeworm was bad, but we shouldn't hurt them unnecessarily and dewormer is still evil in general. Also, did you know there is lots of other parasites? Singling out tapeworms like that seems pretty problematic, you know.
Having to admit that you did get taken advantage of in precisely the way others predicted beforehand but you brushed them off is humiliating, even if you try to spin it to make it sound less bad.
RenOS
something is wrong
6d ago
If someone somehow convinced himself that tapeworms are actually totally fine and symbiotic with humans and that deworming is evil for hurting these beautiful creatures, and then later ends up in hospital over it, that does seem pretty humiliating. Though YMMV over how much this allegory applies to the somali fraud situation.
RenOS
something is wrong
6d ago
You're partially correct, but imo also far too naive about the way this is extremely prone to first devolve into disinformation "for the good of the people", and then as the students, being people, come newly into your field believing that bullshit and the disinfo becomes the obvious truth, how could you disagree? Even noticing that there are so many older scientist secretly believing things they've been told all their life are evil and wrong will, if anything, strengthen their conviction.
In the hard sciences, if people do this right , they're very open "this is a simplification, I don't believe this & it's not true, but for the lay-person it's close enough that it's better than knowing nothing". But once politics is involved, I've personally talked with scientists in my field who defended a position in public with such conviction that I was genuinely convinced that they believe it. Until only much later in a pub after a pint in a private round they admitted that no, they actually think as well the counter-position has the better evidence, but it is getting abused by his political enemies, so to weaken them he has to bring it down, and as a scientist in the field he is well-positioned to do so. This works for a while and might seem reasonable as a single person, but it (rightfully) erodes trust in science as whole.
Once you see the public as epistemic enemy, you honestly should excuse yourself and stop being a science communicator; Arguably you aren't one anymore already anyway.
RenOS
something is wrong
6d ago
"my father taught me, so that's what I do" is so extremely conservative-coded you might as well say you voted Trump. That's at least my impression among PMCs.
RenOS
something is wrong
10d ago
Claude Pro, or does it need to be Max?
I've been using AI for asking questions, researching basic infos and summarizing them, for boilerplate texts, that kind of stuff. The free version so far has been good enough for the most part. We also want to save money, so I'm a bit reluctant to have a new expense on my list.
RenOS
something is wrong
11d ago
Afaik this is a major reason why people were not very worried about the cratering birth rates for decades - the ultra high birth rates of the recent past were a result of this massively reduced infant mortality and clearly unsustainable, there already was a scare about overpopulation shortly beforehand and so it seemed like a needed corrective. A short-lived undershoot stemming from an overcorrection is also quite normal, and due to the nature of the issue "short-lived" is measured in generation time.
RenOS
something is wrong
11d ago
Our views might not be in as much tension as you think.
First, satisfaction is a positive feeling in my framework, so having many things you didn't build doesn't feel bad. I also don't suffer due buying almost everything per se. What matters is that you have enough things to feel satisfied about, ideally regularly in your direct environment. And also, there are many ways how you can feel satisfaction. For me, it's definitely my kids. And it's also my wife, or more specifically, the relationship with her; We've had our up and downs (still do) and it was hard work to keep it together at times. But we've adapted to each other so much that the entire idea of ever breaking up seems utterly silly, and we've found a way of being that makes us both happy. I also have academic degrees, especially my doctoral thesis, but honestly it all didn't quite turn out the way I wanted, and I'm not sure how satisfied I am with it. Some of the papers I was involved in or even main author are nice, though, and I certainly feel satisfaction when reading them again - but I have to make a conscious decision to do it, it's not automatically present daily the way my kids are.
On the second, I explicitly mentioned that satisfaction can even be felt for people close to you, not just only yourself (which is part of the reason why I call it satisfaction as opposed to pride). I used to be the kind of disagreeable materialist atheist who made fun of the idea of feeling pride for the accomplishments of one's ancestor or vice-versa one's kids. After having children myself however I get it at least partially: Not quite pride, but I do feel a deep satisfaction every time my kids accomplish something. And I can then at least imagine how someone in the past might feel the same about his, say, close-knit warband. It's not implausible to me that with all the hard challenges one might have gone through with them, such feelings might include a large part of the fellow tribesmen, maybe even the tribe as a whole. Of course, even if you're very self-focused and the, say, bow-maker of your tribe, you can still feel a lot of satisfaction every time you see someone else with your own handiwork, which you do constantly, every day.
RenOS
something is wrong
11d ago
Pregnancy and early baby time is also really high-variance. My wife didn't mind the first one that much, until at around month 7 she suddenly couldn't lie down anymore without a massive heartburn. It got a bit better once she found an elevated positioning that was just the right mix of less heartburn while still being somewhat comfortable. The last three months were still kind of awful, and the birth was the crowning achievement, 24 hours of pain and screaming without any sleep, and at the end she was so tired that the nurses almost started a cesarian. Then the first few days the nurses tortured us by waking us up every 2 hours sharp (independent of the babies actual sleeping pattern, of course) to make absolutely sure the baby drinks enough, despite even the doctor visiting us saying that it's fine if the baby drinks irregularly early on, as long as they start drinking more, get enough overall and she looked healthy anyway. Chadette nurses don't give a fuck about virgin doctor advice, though, and carried on. After the third day we were let go, and finally got some okayish sleep for the first time.
Some others friends even apparently mostly enjoy pregnancy, while others were suffering from day one, with pain and throwing up. Birth is universally awful, though. But after the first it's at least usually relatively quickly over.
Sleep is also really variable; Our first was mostly sleeping through the night except for a single milk (which we didn't mind at all) from around 1 until 3, and then completely slept through. Among other friends, we know babies that sleep through the night with like 4 months (really jealous), and toddlers that still wake up every two hours with 3. Our second also certainly sleeps worse than the first. The pregnancy and even the birth were much better, though.
Then there are kids like me. Early birth, low weight. Barely drank anything. According to my parents, I loudly screamed through large parts of the night, and regularly during the day, up until one. My parents don't say it, but I suspect that might be one reason I'm an only child. And we still don't know why, I have no lasting condition and there was no family history. Just random.
Of course, this makes it no less scary for first time parents; You really don't know which way the dice will roll.
RenOS
something is wrong
12d ago
All the pronatal propaganda is making it clear that being a father is extra hard if you're not in your early twenties, so I'm already at only the second best age to become one
Na, especially as the dad, you just shouldn't be very old, i.e. in retirement when they are in high school. Especially since, despite all the talk, many women really want to be the primary carers for the kids anyway. For that reason and simply due to fertility issues the situation for women is different, but even for them plenty of pronatalists actually consider late twenties the best time.
RenOS
something is wrong
12d ago
Amtrak will not let you buy train tickets for kids unless you have one adult per kid.
Wow, that's crazy to me.
RenOS
something is wrong
12d ago
No. This isn't coding or even math proofs where you could plausibly be a prodigy working on it by yourself since you're ten. You're fresh out of an okay college. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to think that you have any idea what you're talking about in respect to hiring compared to companies who have been doing and optimizing this for literal decades. You are the equivalent of a kid watching his first starcraft video and, never having played it, announcing that you're probably better than the best players in the entire world because you have identified something that you think was a mistake. Hell, no, you haven't even watched the video, you've only been told about it second-hand.
I've had these points on my mind for a while now, but I guess now is a good time to write about it.
Imo there are two broad issues in modern culture closely related to this. Actually more, but these two are quite fundamental and thus especially hard to fix.
First the issue of what happiness even is. Modern culture is very fuzzy on it, and as such, has a tendency to default to the easiest-to-achieve, lowest common denominator: Fun and the avoidance of pain. Fun is being on a roller coaster. Fun is sitting on the couch watching Netflix. Fun is anything that doesn't challenge and doesn't create anything but keeps your mind occupied, even excited. I don't think I need to explain what the avoidance of pain is; But intrinsically it's a negative, and you can't built up a functioning society from a negative. Neither of these are wrong per se, they're just not sufficient for "the good life", they feel empty on their own. There are probably even more that I'm not aware of, but two major kinds of happiness are imo necessary to really feel good about yourself: Flow and Satisfaction.
Flow is about being challenged, and rising to the challenge. It's the state of mind when you have sufficiently trained something, say, Tennis, and play against a roughly equally skilled opponent. You may eventually lose, or you may win, the game itself might be mostly pointless (or might not), but the important part is this fundamental knowledge: You really feel deep in your bones you are good at this. The thing itself absolutely needs to a have some appropriate level of difficulty, or else you can't feel the flow.
Satisfaction is when you (either alone or in a group; sometimes even not you yourself but someone very closely related to you) have created something lasting, look back on it and, to quote a well known book: And He saw that it was good. It's having build a house, or planted a tree.
Sexuality gives a nice example of all three: Masturbation is fun; Seduction and sex is flow; Being in a relationship and having kids is satisfaction.
The good life, in my opinion, consists of waking up and immediately being satisfied about everything you see around; Then you do your job and naturally, automatically feel the flow, until you're finished and feel satisfaction again about a job well done. Tired, you indulge yourself with a little bit of fun in the afternoon and do some chores, and then fall asleep, satisfied about a good day and, again, everything you see around you. You can see what the relative priorities in my view are based on how much time is spent on each.
It's easy to see how hunter-gatherer societies effortlessly do this without even being aware: You wake up in a hut/tent which you necessarily must have crafted yourself or someone close to you, and the same goes for literally every piece of furniture and equipment present in it. You go hunting and feel the flow. Ideally, you successfully bring back game satisfied, cook it, enjoy it, and finally fall asleep. Very simplified, I know, but you get the gist. I'm also not claiming that life was necessarily great back then, since fear, despair and death were constant companions. But these positives were downright unavoidable if you did survive.
In modern life, we have successfully conquered those negatives. But on the positive side, everything tends to be the wrong way around: Nothing I have around me I have built myself; It's all just bought. Some work at least involves flow, but since flow requires difficulty it also implies things can go wrong with some regularity. More efficient is when nothing can really go wrong. Having successfully optimized everything, a lot of modern work is largely flow-less, rubber-stamping documents, endless meetings with decisions by committee, or supervising a machine that makes every product exactly the same in a way no human ever could.
But fun, oh fun! Fun is overflowing. Many people who nominally work full-time actually mostly indulge their fun for most of it. Plenty of people just flat-out do not work and you can guess what they do for most of the day. You absolutely can go through an entire modern life without ever really creating anything at all nor being meaningfully challenged.
The second is on the nature of close, especially romantic, relationships. The primary modern narrative is one of matching: You find people who share your views, preferences and inclinations, so any time spent together is automatically fun. People who don't match with you should be avoided. Reddit liberalism is the purest form; Any conflict results in a recommendation of "just break up and find a better match". Worst, in a certain sense, are not only the endless options, but the appeal to identify with those options. You don't enjoy gaming among other things, you're a gamer. You don't just like meat-less cuisine, you're a vegan. Remember the toaster-fucker problem.
The reality, in my view, certainly includes matching, but also involves skill and work, and most of all, adaption and the change of self, letting go of yourself. A lot, in fact. Again, harkening back to hunter-gatherers makes this painfully obvious: The choices in your tribe, maybe also a few other friendly tribes around you, are very limited. Childhood friendships will likely last for life, and should be invested in and adapted to appropriately. You may actually get the girl that suits you the most, but there will still be some points of conflict. Fortunately, options for views and preferences are rather limited to begin with as well, reducing some tensions. But you will have to change the person you are for her, and she for you. And when it comes to kids, you probably already get forced to look after those of other people anyway (and yes, also do the bad parts), so having your own adds not too much extra work.
As an only-child, I've grown up with literally nobody helping me how to manage a close relationship, let alone get a girl in the first place. Or at least putting me in my place, telling me to get better and put in the work. I've spent a large part of my teenage years resenting the fact that I'm supposed to be the active suitor, as opposed to be pursued. Aren't we in a feminist society? If a girl wants me, she can hit on me the same way I can hit on her! Certainly, at least, she should put in the same amount of work during dating! And anyway, no girls have the same interests as me, so why should I even attempt dating them? A few same-age boys and girls correctly told me I'm stupid, but the culture overall indulged me instead. Mostly through indifference, but I even got some approving nods from some older woman who said my attitude was mature and society will move that way eventually, you just have to find the perfect person for yourself!
And for friendships and relationships it even kind of works for enough people. We do meet so many people that it's true we can get much better matches than in the past. And already as kids we regularly get told friendships don't matter, we can always find new ones. So a lot of the social skills for close relationships (which are different from the social skills for early/superficial friendships - I was always good at those!) either never get developed, or atrophy. Few feel the need to ever put in work, and rather just get a whole new friend instead. If you train a skill, it's the one to cycle through people and find good matches.
Kids now are the perfect storm of everything that you did learn being useless, needing all the skills that you didn't learn and were told are useless, being challenged and requiring work in a way you probably never have been before, and the only reward is something that you might not even be aware you want or like. You don't get to choose your kids, you roll the dice with your partner and that's that (though at least they have some predisposition towards being similar to you; adoption is accordingly actually worse in that sense). All the skills you developed to find new friends and explore how well you match are pointless. Instead you have to do a lot of stuff you would never like and you don't even get paid for it. Months of sleep deprivation, changing diapers and reading toddler books.
I'm also increasingly convinced - courtesy of my wife hammering it all the time - that one of the most important parts of parenthood is teaching your children relationship management techniques from a young age on so that as older siblings they naturally have a good relationship in the first place and effortlessly keep it that way. Stuff like, when one gets a cookie, you always break up some part and give it to the other. Or you just sit there when they fight over a toy, and force them to repeatedly give it to the other back and forth until they have internalised that you don't need to fear that the other will keep it for themselves, so you can give away a toy freely, you'll get it again. And, the only part modern life somewhat teaches you, identifying when the other really needs some space and giving it, and to just play on your own without needing constant feedback. Maybe I'm naive and probably we will run into problems again as they get older, but generally they just do this stuff automatically now, simply get along for the most part and when not they also can just play by themselves for an hour or more, despite still being quite small.
And it's obvious to me that plenty of parents lack a certain introspection that allows them to see how deficient their skills in this respect are, and just try to press their square peg modern adult life intuitions into the round hole of relationship management for kids. They may do some things admirably competently, getting their kids into bed at seven sharp, managing screen time perfectly, juggling a million play-dates, working full-time and regularly getting date-nights with the wife through a babysitter. But it's obvious that they mostly resent the intrusion into the individuality they are used to, they don't really teach their kids (if they even have more than one) how to manage the sibling relationship or any other close one, they maximize their childless time on every occasion and worst of all, the kids feel that and correctly identify it as rejection. At the other end parents go crazy indulging every whim because, again, they have never learned how to manage a close relationship in a reasonable way and are so deathly afraid that their kid might not end up liking them that they rather give up absolutely everything. Sometimes parents manage to combine those two, somehow.
So, what is one to do? The first, and most important is the constant satisfaction you can feel every time you have your kids around you. Especially if you're not used to that you may need to concentrate a bit on it. But it's always present, indescribable, and at least for me far beyond what I feel for anything I have ever created otherwise. The next, often near-unimaginable part is that you can actually enjoy things you don't through empathy. I certainly don't enjoy reading toddler books on my own. But I do enjoy watching my toddler, feeling what he feels, (trying to) think what he thinks, and through that even toddler books become great. For this, you need to let go of your individuality a bit however, which not everyone is willing to do. From there, advanced techniques are possible: Changing diapers can be enjoyable, by concentrating on how the baby feels better afterwards, and on the fact that it is a necessary for your children. Even the sleep can be, as you cuddle with your child and concentrate on how happy it is to be with you, on how happy you are that it exists, and waking up a few times in the night is a small price to pay for that. But again, if you do that you are literally re-modelling your entire mental structure and let go of the person you used to be to the degree that "dead" becomes an apt description for that person. As you see, even happiness itself can be a skill issue.
On the other side, the same way you need to teach your kids how to get and give space from and to each other, you need to set boundaries to not go crazy and lose your individuality entirely. Changing diapers is necessary; Making the third dinner because they suddenly say they don't want the first two dinner options you made is not. If they're hungry, they'll eat. You probably screwed up earlier by letting them snack too much and indulging them too often before, otherwise they wouldn't even get the idea that making a third dinner is a possibility. That behaviour is not even good for them, let alone for you.
Again, since you haven't been taught how to properly give up a part of your individuality in the first place, that means you also haven't been taught how stop at some point. I'd echo some other posters here that now with kids, I look back on my pre-parenthood self with cringe; I only really have become an adult after becoming a parent.
Also, not to mention, kids are also lots of fun as well. They just do so much random shit you don't expect, you can't help but feel good. But the fun really isn't the reason why you should have them.
This got quite long, and probably a bit meandering. The TL;DR is, I guess: Children are everything modern life isn't, and hence, it anti-prepares you for it. This is what I mean with "it's cultural"; Even if we gave everyone huge stacks of money for having kids, I'm unsure how much it will change for the better. Ultimately, those that really want them will get them anyway, and for those that don't, I'm not sure it's an improvement if they do. And in our world, the future belongs to those who show up, so evolution will sort it out longterm anyway. We'll just have to muddle through, and maybe try to teach our kids those skills so that they have an easier time.
RenOS
something is wrong
12d ago
Of course, since the answer to "is x perfect" is almost always "no", for any important irl task. The actually relevant question is "are their hiring practices EV+, especially compared to whatever deepneuralnetwork wants them to do?" to which the answer is also "of course".
You don't seem to grasp how much money is on the line and/or how important even a small statistical edge can be in ultra-competitive fields.
Sorry if my post was overly abrasive, in any case. There's lots of discussion to be had about how many sub-messages are in each piece of media and their respective share of importance. There are always multiple messages being sent simultaneously, some of them even unintentionally. I just find the hard denial of political messaging quite frustrating at this point.
But even with that in mind, I can't help but think that turning the halftime show of the super bowl - to my knowledge one of the biggest public events in the US - into something where the majority of the US population is literally not the target audience is itself a message, and not a very nice one.
RenOS
something is wrong
13d ago
One of my closest friends is a CEO of a medium sized tech company, and after years on the job he is convinced that correct hiring is by far the most important part of a well-functioning company. Good people make everything easier, and even just a few troublemakers can drag everything down. According to him, most experienced managers he's talked with agree.
You may claim they are wrong, but I'd be surprised if managers in prestigious, ultra competitive fields think differently.
A lot of DINK-couple (Double Income, No Kids) are no longer as eager to become DICKs (Double Income, Couple o' Kids) as they used to be. This fact is concerning because I have a suspicion it has a strong potential to rapidly initiate a self-replicating demographic spiral. DINKs have more resources compared to DICKs, and if more people choose to stay DINKs then life for DICKs will probably become even harder, which in turn will lead to even fewer DICKs. I think the carrot for DICKs probably won't be enough here: society probably also needs to put a dent in the wallet of the DINKs, maybe throught some tax scheme, to encourage more childrearing.
Yep, this is a major problem imo. As a DICK myself, you frequently directly compete with the DINKs. DINKs can easily work 10-12 hours and still have a decent amount of free time, especially since sleeping through for 6 hours is OK. With (small) kids, you struggle to get your 6-8 hours of work, and your sleep is fucked up for a looong time, so you might feel tired even with technically 8-9 hours. DINKs can and do buy the same houses in the same locations, just with a different layout, and they have waaaay more excess money to spare to drive up the prices. Etc.
There's a lot of other issues, too, but this makes everything a lot harder.
I'll second this. Theoretically I learned english for my entire school time. In practice, I was pretty terrible at anything but the most basic texts, and completely hopeless at even understanding normal english speech. And let's not talk about having to speak myself.
A small breakthrough was going to the UK as a teen for two weeks, but there were too many other german students with me. The big breakthrough for understanding happened at university. Well, actually, in the evenings, because I watched so much english TV with subtitles that I noticed I could increasingly just forego the subtitles. Then the breakthrough for speaking it myself came when I went to work at a Max Planck Institute with >70% foreigners, so there was just no option but speaking the english.
School wasn't entirely useless, since I also watched a lot of subtitled Anime, yet didn't learn japanese nearly as well (though I do know quite a few words and stock phrases). You need some basic framework to make sense of everything to begin with. But its benefits top out pretty early.
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