NullHypothesis
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User ID: 2718
NullHypothesis
5d ago
That really doesn't have much bearing on review bombing an entirely separate game. There's evidence on the Reverse Collapse discord of CN players admitting to wanting to review bomb the game, the game actually got reviewed bombed and was at 37% positive at launch before settling at 78% positive in all languages (and 93% positive in English). You can look at the steam reviews over time and the only period with bad proportion of negative to positive reviews is when the game first launched, and if you filter by time played most of the negative reviews have barely any time played, clear signs of review bombing.
I don't care too much for drama happening in GFL1 and GFL2 but I do care people review bombed a game I ended up enjoying which could have an impact on the overall success of the game and subsequent future games beings developed. The EN and CN GFL fans can duke it out or whatever but as a mostly outsider looking in from the perspective of someone wandering why the game got review bombed the information I had access to on explaining why the game got review bombed did not paint CN fans in a positive light, and even if their anger is completely justified and I agreed with whatever issue they had with GFL2 that should not lead to review bombing a completely separate game.
NullHypothesis
5d ago
I've heard Girls Frontline also has good gameplay for a gacha game. Watched a friend play GFL2 on steam which seemed to have XCOM style 3d grid based combat but it also had an autoplay mode.
I haven't played it because I refuse to play gacha games anymore but I did play Reverse Collapse: Code Name Bakery which is a standalone title by the same developers also in the GFL universe. It's a tactical turn based RPG with a pretty lengthy story and time travel mechanics. Despite the graphics looking like a mobile game I ended up completing the game 100% (Steam says I have 140 hours on it). You can consider the story to be told in a similar format to visual novels and the script is 300,000 words long. The prologue cutscene of the final chapter takes 2 hours if you let all the voice lines fully play out. Also the game is considered on the more difficult side even amongst people that play tactical rpgs and some of the later missions can take up to an hour with how many enemies there are so it's a pretty hefty time investment to complete this game. I like tactical rpgs though so it wasn't an issue for me.
Time travel is big part of the game and even death is explained as Jehuty (the female protagonist of the game) sending herself back in time via a "reverse collapse" mechanism. You have to play through 4 timelines (essentially replaying story missions in each timeline but with a twist of having the knowledge of the future which changes what you have to do in the missions) to unlock the 5th timeline which has the true ending.
There was a discussion previously here on TheMotte about downer endings and I'd say the ending of Reverse Collapse would count as one since the main character Jehuty has to sacrifice herself to essentially save the world. There's too many plot points to explain but the ending reveals Jehuty was able to go back in time via mind transfer by swapping her consciousness with Lusica which is essentially a clone. Said clone is instrumental in the bad guys plan to destroy the world, and in the original timeline Lusica was the only entity left alive, which she found was too lonely, so she makes a deal with Jehuty to have them swap consciousness in the past to change the future. Because Jehuty loves Mendo (the other protagonist) and wants everyone else to live she agrees to let Lusica take over her body and to let herself be the one captured by the bad guy instead (there's an in game explanation for why this has to be done this way but I can't remember why). At the end of chapter 5 Jehuty swaps places with Lusica (Mendo and everyone else has no idea this swap has happens). Lusica presumably goes on to live on as Jehuty while Jehuty goes by herself to have one final last stand before she lets herself be captured. T
The final mission plays on this one last stand theme and is reminiscent of Halo Reach's ending where you try to survive for as long as you can but you ultimately cannot win. The enemies spawn endlessly and only get stronger and stronger until eventually you lose and get captured. The mission itself is sort of a mix between rougelike (rougelite? vampire survivor likes?) mechanics where you get bonuses you can pick from every number of turns and the standard turn based gameplay you've been playing for the entity of the game and can be replayed endlessly. I think it's pretty interesting and a gridbased tactical turn based roguelike survival could be a standalone game if that mission had more polishing.
Having played through this game I have to admit it did increase my interest in the GFL lore and universe, although I still refuse to play the two mainline games due to it being a gacha game. Apparently a lot of these gooner gacha games with waifus have pretty depressing storylines and settings. Nikke takes place in a post apocalyptic earth, although the gameplay as mentioned in the parent post seems to be quite something. Arknight (at least the orignal mobile game, dunno about endfield) also takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, but the gameplay here is more like a strategic tower defense, and friend says the game is quite friendly for those that are f2p and that people have beat end game missions with low tier units so it seems strategic play probably has more importance than having the highest tier waifus. It seems to me the writers of these games stories wanted to create some sort of grimdark, post apocalyptic dystopian world but they also need to make money so they put sexy gooner waifus to capture the gacha playing audience.
The game itself has some interesting facts such as it is a remake of a remake. It also has a remaster of the of the remake you can play after completing the game (completely optional and has 0 achievements) which has the much more bland original story (and blander gameplay mechanics). The original game was strictly a visual novel that the developers made before they made Girls Frontline and the remake was a turn based tactics game, and the remaster of the remake is a mostly faithful recreation of the original remaster.
Another fact, apparently Chinese gacha players got angry that in GFL2 a female character has close relations with a male NPC character that they felt they were being NTRed because only the player should have any sort of relationship with their gacha waifus so they review bombed Reverse Collapse instead. Chinese gacha players seem to be a different breed entirely.
NullHypothesis
8d ago
If you go through the sources for example the Iraq War which has documented deaths between 187,499 – 211,046 and filter for deaths caused by only "US-led coalition, no Iraqi state forces" that number is 17,076. For comparison, ISIS is directly responsible for 26,751 civilian deaths.
So Phailyoor is likely correct. He also linked the same source I found by looking at the source of the number on Wikipedia article you linked.
NullHypothesis
12d ago
We have Tik Tok women who believe Patrick Clancy's is obviously guilty because he looks mean. I think its easy to project a certain image of whatever stereotype you want because we literally have thousands of stories we can pull from that can likely fit any mental image we have. In fact I think being more well read (or more watched?) might make you more susceptible because you have a greater mental library to pull examples from.
If I had a steelman an argument, it's possible that "good" looking people are treated better throughout their lives and are more likely to develop a nicer/charismatic temperament. Conversely, "ugly" people are treated worse by their peers and are more likely to develop a negative temperament. But a big component of beauty is a reflection of the effort put in by the individual (as much as it can be faked by filters, make up, plastic surgery etc, even that requires some effort) and people that put effort into their appearance are more likely to be social (since they understand the social advantage of good looks). Good looks can be considered somewhat synonymous with good health, and healthier people are likely to be more positive compared to unhealthy people.
NullHypothesis
12d ago
The left is more likely to restrict language because they understand the power of language, yet also has many members that continue to use maximalist inflammatory language with terms like "defund the police" and "Islamophobia" and "trans genocide" and labeling their political opponents as "fascists" and "nazis" as well as pushing slogans like "words are violence". And I have not seen much pushback against this type of rhetoric from people on the left, but instead I've seen those on the left play defense for usage of these terms. And why would they stop? They face little to no consequence for it and it only serves to push their agenda and rile up their supporters.
Can you get more intelligent left leaning people to acknowledge that they don't actually believe those terms literally? Yes, but it seems to me that there are enough supporters that actually take those terms literally enough to have real world impact. Defund the police actually did defund the police instead of reforming police like the apologists argued it would and only after it's disastrous impact lost nearly all support. It's likely that type of language played some role in Tyler Robinson's decision to shoot Kirk. We've also had multiple assassination attempts on the President and this has been met with cheers from many of his detractors. Conservative speakers literally need extra security if they want to host an event at a college/university and there are at least several examples of events being cancelled due to security concerns.
It turns out many people are prone to being influenced by the messaging they constantly receive, and that most of their beliefs are not derived from first principles. It's why they cannot adequately defend the positions they hold and why it's often easy to find contradictions in their belief system - they never had to consider it before. Or if they have, they choose to ignore it because it's easier to pretend the contradiction doesn't exist than grapple with the possibility that their beliefs are wrong.
In the case of BLM this is especially true, because advocates usually assume the issues are systemic, and not the result of a shadowy cabal, which is what a conspiracy would require.
Actually a really great observation, since a lot of leftist beliefs on issues hinge on the idea that the problem is systemic in nature, so perhaps it is a major contributing factor to the left being less prone to conspiracy theories. There are likely other factors such as where these ideas can fester and how much push back these ideas usually get that can contribute to the growth and existence of conspiracy theories.
Also I think the term conspiracy theory itself is often used to dismiss ideas without discussing their merits. Alex Jones was right is a meme for a reason. The idea that Covid was leaked in a lab (and many other issues around covid), or that Hunter Biden laptop story was real, or that government was pressuring social media to suppress speech, or that the investigations on trump (e.g. Steele Dossier) were politically motivated and conducted via improper means, were just some of the "conspiracy" theories from the right that turned out to be true or had elements of truth within the claims, but were instead dismissed by opponents by labeling them as conspiracies. How many "conspiracies" from the left turned out to be right? I can't think of any from the last 10 years, I asked AI and the examples were all from the previous century. Maybe you can count the Russia 2016 election interference theory as having an inkling of truth to it? The lack of examples is to be expected since the left has much less conspiracy theories for the reason stated previously, but I think this is a contributing factor to the right's propensity for conspiracy theories, since some of the most impactful of them have turned out to be true.
Speaking of the worst argument in the world, I think it also applies to labeling Jan 6th as a coup, which is something Hanania does in his article.
NullHypothesis
18d ago
Most people don't practice for most things in life, and public speaking is no exception. By practice I mean deliberate concentrated sessions with the explicit goal of improving something, not just going through the motion. That's how you get teachers that such at teaching 10 years into their career, public speakers who suck after giving 10s of talks, gamers that are stuck in silver after 1000s of hours played, even if their intelligence is at least average.
There's this interesting article by Dan Luu where he argues that 95th percentile is not that good. He talks about public speaking as an example too so quite relevant to your point.
Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do
Your own experience supports his thesis. You had a class on communication, you acknowledge applying it wasn't difficult, and you can identify yourself as being in the top 10-20% of presenters.
To give a couple of concrete examples, I helped Leah prepare for talks from 2013 to 2017. The first couple practice talks she gave were about the same as you'd expect if you walked into a random talk at a large tech conference. For the first couple years she was speaking, she did something like 30 or so practice runs for each public talk, of which I watched and gave feedback on half. Her first public talk was (IMO) well above average for a talk at a large, well regarded, tech conference and her talks got better from there until she stopped speaking in 2017.
As we discussed above, this is more subjective than game ratings and there's no way to really determine a percentile, but if you look at how most people prepare for talks, it's not too surprising that Leah was above average. At one of the first conferences she spoke at, the night before the conference, we talked to another speaker who mentioned that they hadn't finished their talk yet and only had fifteen minutes of material (for a forty minute talk). They were trying to figure out how to fill the rest of the time. That kind of preparation isn't unusual and the vast majority of talks prepared like that aren't great.
Most people consider doing 30 practice runs for a talk to be absurd, a totally obsessive amount of practice, but I think Gary Bernhardt has it right when he says that, if you're giving a 30-minute talk to a 300 person audience, that's 150 person-hours watching your talk, so it's not obviously unreasonable to spend 15 hours practicing (and 30 practice runs will probably be less than 15 hours since you can cut a number of the runs short and/or repeatedly practice problem sections). One thing to note that this level of practice, considered obessive when giving a talk, still pales in comparison to the amount of time a middling table tennis club player will spend practicing.
If you've studied pedagogy, you might say that the help I gave to Leah was incredibly lame. It's known that having laypeople try to figure out how to improve among themselves is among the worst possible ways to learn something, good instruction is more effective and having a skilled coach or teacher give one-on-one instruction is more effective still5. That's 100% true, my help was incredibly lame. However, most people aren't going to practice a talk more than a couple times and many won't even practice a single time (I don't have great data proving this, this is from informally polling speakers at conferences I've attended). This makes Leah's 30 practice runs an extraordinary amount of practice compared to most speakers, which resulted in a relatively good outcome even though we were using one of the worst possible techniques for improvement.
If you practice and do any sort preparation for your talk, you're already better than the average person. Most people go through most of life just winging it, and out society is built to be resilient that way. The upside to this is that you can probably become an "expert" relative to the population on most disciplines with just some effort.
Seems like there is some opportunity to teach effective communication as a side hustle. Business professionals already pay $1000s for bullshit courses anyways.
NullHypothesis
18d ago
This case seems to have brought to the public discourse (at least online) the idea of repealing the 19th amendment more so than any other gender culture war story of this century. I know some here have floated around ideas of alternate voting systems e.g. only net taxpayers should have voting power. In the early days of the United States, only those who owned a certain amount of property were allowed to vote. This usually meant adult white men who had a tangible stake in society (some states had some exceptions). Perhaps our founding fathers had some wisdom in restricting who can vote. It's not clear to me that despite all our advancements in public education and technology that the modern average person is more educated and intelligent than the average person eligible of voting in the late 18th early 19th century.
Don't know if this discussion has already been hammered out already but I haven't given it enough thought/research to make this a top level post.
NullHypothesis
18d ago
Massachusetts specifically having the burden of proof on the prosecution to prove that the defendant is sane, rather than the defense having to prove the defendant is insane, seems backwards to me. The downstream implications of this seems disastrous to me? Nevermind the fact that proving a negative is often much more difficult, sometimes even impossible.
So anyone can go to Massachusetts, act insane and get diagnosed with some kind of mental illness, then go out and commit a crime, and has the excuse that they were not mentally sane and get away with the highest charges in their court? 25% of women and 13% of men already take some kind of psychiatric drug, and that number only seems to be going up decade by decade. All the defense has to do is show some possibility someone is not sane, then the prosecution has to do the much harder task of proving someone is not insane?
In my non lawyer/medical opinion, someone who commits a crime is already someone that is abnormal, someone that murders other people with no cause (e.g. self defense) I would consider mentally ill already, because regular sane people do not typically murder people.
If "insane" people cannot be criminally responsible for crime they commit, then it stands to reason that they lack the mental capacity for entire other categories of living, like voting, holding a job, access to social media, just being part of society in general. For most of the world this is not an issue because the default assumption is that you are sane and that your insanity must be proven. But in Massachusetts it seems there is an inconsistency is not choosing to apply same standards outside the court of law.
Honestly seems to me the real issue is Massachusetts' backward stance on the burden of proof having to prove sanity.
NullHypothesis
30d ago
Some of it just the usual misinformation. Some of it is biased interpretation of facts. A lot of it just women in group bias. There is no steelman because for many of her supporters there is no logical argument for why they actually support Lindsay other than she is a fellow woman.
There's a go fund me for Lindsay's parents. It's surpassed a million in donations. There are some comments that could give insight into why some people are donating.
There is an entire headcannon from some of her loudest supporters about how the husband actually did it or egged her on to do it so that he could get out of his marriage and get married to his now wife. I think some people have too much spare time.
NullHypothesis
2mo ago
Aristocrats also have a large degree of separation in their actual living space for hosting guests and parties/events in their mansions compared to your typical home. When your entire hallway is marble flooring and your mansion is capable of hosting 100s of guests and you actually live in an upper floor and you have servants to clean your home and your events likely have dress codes that's completely different from having guests in your home where your carpeted bedroom is right next to your likely carpeted living room. Do you really need to "signal status" if you're just hanging out with your friends?
What's with the entitlement of "being the guest" anyways? Both the host and the guest should try to be respectful of each other. Frankly speaking, if someone is going to get offended when they're asked to remove their shoes, I don't want them in my home. If you think your shoes are cleaner than my floor then you're delusional. In my home we offer slippers for guests.
Easy thing to do is just copy what the home owner does. They keep shoes on, you keep shoes on. They take shoes off, you take shoes off.
Honestly seems to me that Keturah has an ick against taking shoes off for whatever reason and so wrote an entire article trying to justify that.
NullHypothesis
2mo ago
You weren't Kirk's target audience.
A poll of 1030 college students found 94% of college students were aware of Charlie Kirk and that 30% of them engaged with his content at least a few times per month. The guy was popular enough to get a parody of him made in South Park. Why would there be so many people that was absolutely gleeful at his assassination, if he was some nobody?
With the singer comparison, I think it would be relatively easy to point to another artist who is currently more popular with young people. Which politician/activist other than Donald Trump is more popular amongst right leaning young people? Maybe Asmongold, but he's not really a politician or even an activist, more of a streamer/commentator who occasionally says things left leaning people don't like.
I think this is indicative of the gap between young people on the right and the older generation. Kirk may not have been a thought leader creating new ideas for republicans to rally around, but he was certainly very effective at getting their message out to the younger people. Who are the young people listening to now? Kirk's death is clearly a big loss for the Republicans.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
That correlation only applies to pre-1994 SAT scores. Nowadays a 1200 SAT score puts you at the 75th percentile, the IQ equivalent percentile would be 110. The SAT now tests scholastic achievement more than aptitude/cognitive ability.
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
Art is subjective but I will note a decent number of people created really amazing content in a niche community I'm a part of during the COVID days, and now that those days are over a lot of these people no longer produce content. Nothing too crazy big but the bigger works probably had 100s of hours of work put into it over the course of months. The creatives had more time and also had a bigger audience to get their work out to. With things returning to normal the audience size diminished and people had to return to their day to day jobs so activity simply isn't what it was back then.
I don't disagree with your point about people that say they want to do X but never do X. People like the idea of being a writer or artist or creative type more than actually doing the work. Making anything takes work. There are the artists that don't have a career but do spend like 10 hours a day drawing, and then there are "artists" that draw once a month and spend 95% of their free time scrolling reddit and watching TV shows. I don't think there is much you can say that is going to flip the second type of person to the first type.
I don't think this is a great example, because Charles E Little John harmed members of both parties, and the stated reasoning for his conviction is not because he leaked Trump's tax records, but because he leaked the tax records of thousands.
If a member of government controlled by party A does something that harms both members of Party A and Party B (which includes many of the wealthiest members of both parties), then party A convicting that person to me doesn't seem the same as party A convicting someone that did an action that mostly harms members of party B with little harm to members of party A.
If Charles had only leaked Trump's record, would he have received the maximum penalty? Would he have even been prosecuted during the Biden era? Would he have been pardoned by Biden if he did face any penalty?
NullHypothesis
3mo ago
NullHypothesis
4mo ago
One day you'll be old too, so I'd be cautious of discounting old people as mostly just a burden.
Funnily enough this isn't a new idea. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of the Futurist movement of the early 20th century asserted in his Manifesto of Futurism the idea that the old were useless and that it was the young with creativity, strength, and innovation.
The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we want it to happen!
He was 32 when the manifest was published. The guy lived to 68 and went on to fight in both world wars, enter politics, write books and poems, have a family, and continue to advocate for futurism. So doesn't seem like he upheld this portion of his manifesto... otherwise he would've stepped out of the way after he hit 40. Its easy to demand others do something until you also have to do the same.
Anyways if we want to actually tackle what utility old people can provide, I'm going to say the nuclear family structure has been detrimental to a role old people have played for most of human history. Older people in an extended family structure can provide support for the family through housework, taking care of the children, companionship, and yes, knowledge counts too. Also, it is older folk that is going to have the most knowledge of family history and pedigree. For a lot of people knowing their family and history gives meaning and a sense of legacy and purpose in context of the wider world. ChatGPT is not going to have information about your family history. It should also be the role of older people to act as a glue that keeps the wider family connected. They have the time and pre-existing relationships to maintain the network of family and having access to such a network provides value. ChatGPT is not going to provide that network. Older people can also fill less desirable jobs and roles that need volunteers.
Consider all the inventions, works of art and literature, businesses, etc that have been created and developed by people in their older ages. Is the rate lower than the rate at which younger people create these? Obviously yes, but your claim was that the elderly will never do anything for the human race. It's also likely the success of work produced by old people come from having many years worth of experience in life. Do you think JRR Tolkien was capable of writing Lord of the Rings in his 20s? If yes, why didn't he do it in his 20s? He began his most famous work at around 62. Also, the average age of a successful startup founder is 45. This is after filtering out small businesses with no intention of growing large. Should the group most likely to have a successful startup not reap the benefits of their risk and effort in their old age? Why would anyone bother taking that risk if they aren't allowed to do so?
Also, does legacy mean nothing to you? Would you not like to have grandchildren, maybe greatgrandchildren and see to their growth and success? You don't think you'll be able to provide them any value other than your previously accumulated material wealth? Do you believe that you would serve them better by dying and giving them an inheritance than guiding their growth?
I'm not fully discounting your complaints either, because things like advances in medicine has caused older people to live longer than they used to which has increased the strain on social security. Couple that with less people having children and this is one of the great pressing problems of the 21st century. Personally I'd restrict voting power to adults that pay taxes and that'll probably address a good chunk of the issues you point out. Maybe even have it proportional to the amount you are taxed up to a cap. But I don't think "clearing" out old people is the solution. What exactly do you mean by "clearing" out old people anyway? Make it illegal for everyone over 40 to have a job? Let them starve to death? Mandatory assisted death over 60? It's not like basic resources are an issue - we currently grow enough food to feed 10 billion people, and if people aren't having kids then eventually the population is going to start shrinking. You might think old people are getting the in the way of young people, and to an extent that may be true, but is that the main factor?
For example, lets consider the high price of housing and rent. A common sentiment I see online is that the boomers are hoarding all the property so young people cannot afford homes. But is that really the main issue? The cities with the worst housing markets are the ones that tend to have the most restrictions and regulations on housing and rent. In a city like New York, rent control leads to a lot of empty apartments because it's cheaper for the owners to leave it empty than to spend the money necessary to renovate it to a livable standard from updated codes in NYC. LA has restrictions on the size of apartments and in San Francisco you can spend years waiting for a permit because a study has to be done on the environmental impact your new building will have on the local bird population before you can begin construction. That's not really an issue with the existence of old people holding homes as much as it is an issue with government mandated regulations making it harder to increase supply of housing. The homes older folks tend to live in are also cheaper homes in LCOL areas where their money can go further, while young people are more likely to be competing for homes in more expensive cities where there is more opportunities in their career. I haven't crunched the numbers to see what has the bigger impact but my gut feeling is that the restriction on housing supply due to not being able to construct enough new homes is a bigger factor than the housing supply being constrained due to old people buying up all the homes.
NullHypothesis
4mo ago
Do you engage in active trading, and if so have you consistently beat market average returns over a long period of time? How long have you been profitable?
If you do, how much time did you invest in learning before the effort was financially worth it? How much time do you spend now? At what size of your portfolio did it become an activity that became worth spending your time on (if we exclude it being an activity you do as a hobby).
Nobody would accept the possibility of performing surgery or any other skilled work without serious training, but people seem to expect to be able to do well in the markets without educating themselves and obtaining the tools.
Yes, but we can see clear evidence that people do put in the effort and become actual doctors and surgeons. I haven't encountered in my personal life anyone that day trades for a living. The previous VP of tech at my company did day trade, but considering he was still working as the VP of tech I get the feeling it was more of a hobby for him than anything else. Amongst the people who that maintain an online presence related to some form of active trade I found their success dubious or shady (often their online presence is a funnel to some sort of course which is their actual wealth generator). Cameron Ross is a name that gets thrown around as someone who successfully day traded but he engages in very risky trades and I haven't found evidence of anyone being able to replicate his success after taking his courses. On the contrary he had to settle with the FTC after they got sued for misleading his students about the success of following his courses.
Of course since trading is something so easy to get into the failure rates are highly inflated. I'm willing to accept that at certain markets and with enough retail investors playing the field you could get some sort of advantage by being more intelligent and disciplined, and that there could be retail investors with strategies that only work at a small scale that allow them to making a living off of trading. I'm looking for some actual stats on success rates though since there are plenty of other ventures, careers, side hustles etc that have more concrete evidence of success for a given level of effort. Some people have told me it takes on average 2 years before day trading becomes profitable but they didn't provide me with any evidence and the fact that they weren't day trading full time doesn't instill much confidence in that number.
Since we have this weekly thread now and the Motte has a lot intelligent autists I figured I might be able to get some actual perspectives from successful active traders (if there are any here).
Just saying put in more effort if you want to get good at something doesn't mean much, that's just obvious. Becoming a surgeon takes 13 to 15 years. A lawyer takes 7 years. You can land an entry level software engineer role if you dedicate 6-24 months of intense study. What's the average effort threshold for active trading, to say, beat the minimum wage if you had a portfolio of 1 million dollars compared to just passive investing? Last thing I want to do is spend 1-2 years on something that won't yield good results.
NullHypothesis
4mo ago
Has anyone here had any success actively trading over a long period of time (at least 10-15 years) and beat the average market return of 10% to 11.5% over that time period? Do you have confidence you will continue to beat market, and how much time and effort do you spend actively trading? If you are making a living actively investing (off your own portfolio, not managing other peoples money, what was the approximate size of your portfolio where it was feasible?
If you do active trading, do you also active trade in your IRA?
My thought is that for most people, active trading is an exercise in futility, and the data seems to back it up. Nearly all retail investors that actively trade don't beat the market average (or even lose money), and even like 70-90% of professionally managed funds don't beat the S&P 500 each year. Over a longer period of time, the percentage drops even more suggesting those funds were just lucky.
Every other week I hear coworkers/friends/people in discord servers I'm in talking about stocks, but I can't help but feel like they're mostly gambling rather than having a system that actually works. Some of them have had successes beating the market but they've also been only trading for like 2 years. I'm always wondering if it's like a gambler bragging about his wins but never sharing his losses (but at least in the stock market the expected returns are positive). Comparison is the thief of joy as the sayings goes so I guess it really doesn't matter how other's are doing on their finances as long as you personally are doing okay, but every once in a while I can't help but feel like maybe I ought to take some time to look more into individual stocks and see if I could do better. But at the same time, for someone in my age bracket I'm doing fine, so maybe I don't need to try to do better in this area, and I can put my mental effort towards other things.
Personally I have about 6% of my portfolio in individual stocks, 1% in crypto and the rest in various index funds. I'm thinking of just selling all the individual stocks and then not having to worry about my stocks ever again, the only reason I haven't sold them is because a good chunk of them are in SAAS and security tech companies who's valuation is lower because of the AI boom, and I'm hoping they recover since my belief is that AI has not yet provided meaningful advantages in those areas.
NullHypothesis
4mo ago
My first thought was inflation might explain a good chunk of it but the chart on wikipedia indicates the increase in USAID outpaces inflation (11.8 billion in 2001 should be equal to $21.13 billion in 2024), and also seems like USAID funds really started increasing in 2021. Also that 23 billion is the average after accounting for inflation in 2023 dollars. Wikipedia also says 2023 was an exception year with $16 billion in funds for Ukraine but even accounting for that 2023 had 43.79 - 16 = 27.79 billion which is above the average of 23 billion.
Considering under which admin USAID funding really ramped up I think it's fair to conclude it would've likely kept going up if Kama was president.
NullHypothesis
4mo ago
In addition to other comments about how phrasing the question biases the selection, I'm curious how much impact the red/blue color of the button are subconsciously influencing people's decision on what button to press.
Also, I believe that vote count was influenced by the reply to himself indicating "Blue voters hanging on by a thread currently." That might have given enough push for people to be willing to press the blue button to end up with the 42/58 split instead of something closer to 49/51 as it was before the comment was made.
I'm also curious if there is any data on the demographics of the people that would press each button. I think it's very likely women are much more likely to press the blue button, and men are more likely to press the red button. If the men who would press the red button was conscious of this, would they be more likely to change their mind? For example if 70% of women pressed the blue button but 80% of men pressed the red button, that would mean the surviving men now have to live in a world where there are only 3 women for every 8 men. For the red button pressors, does the possibility of having to live in such a world impact your decision in any way? If you knew this possibility was made aware to all red button pressors, do you think it would impact enough red button pressors to become blue button pressors that could change how you perceive blue button pressors?
What if the question was modified so that the death/survival put you into random groups of X number of people? Or more simply, rather than this being a game of everyone, this is a game of a set number of people e.g. 10,000 or even just 100. At a low enough number, your chances of dying if you pressed blue actually increases significantly, if we assume the 42.1% red to 57.9% blue ratio holds true (it likely won't and I already expressed some skepticism at that number being a "true" answer). I presume red button pressors will always press red regardless of the size of the group. Are there any blue button pressors that would press the red button in smaller group sizes? For red button pressors, what if it was a small group e.g. 100, and within that group is a friend or family member that you know would likely press the blue button. What if this button was presented strictly to people in your family (or people in your friend group). Would you be more willing to press the blue button?
What if the percentage of people that needed to press the blue button to survive was increased to 60%? 75%? 90%? Most of the provided reasons for pressing blue still holds true because none of them take consideration any calculation on what percentage of people one might believe to press blue to warrant pressing blue. For the blue button pressers, is there a number at which you would change your mind? There has to be a number, because if the requirement was 100% of blue button pressors must press blue for blue button pressors to survive, knowing there are people that would press the red button even if the number was only 50% required would make any rational actor press the red button instead.
NullHypothesis
6mo ago
https://youtube.com/watch?v=S-sqsvcZJ2w
Forgot who shared this bop before.
NullHypothesis
6mo ago
Someone's age in relation to their net worth is also important to take into consideration. Based on birb's description of his interactions with these people, it's likely they are 35 or younger. Having $10 million in net worth at 35 or younger is the top 0.1% of people in that bracket. He also said they aren't working, if true, would be a different class of people than the people who build up their wealth by grinding away at a top 1% income job.
Like you said I do think a $10million net worth is within the realm of possibility for the average Mottizen. It would also entail never really spending the money that's compounding on anything until you reach near retirement age unless the income is much greater than is needed to achieve the investment value you indicated and I think most people would rather have that money go towards something like a home and creating memories than towards accumulating wealth just so you can say you are worth 8 figures.
To be able to reach $10million in net worth and also have a standard of living similar to people within that asset range would require even more income When you factor in how taxes have the function of lowering the amount of money you actually keep the more you earn, and that states where you can find these top 1% income jobs also tend to have state level income taxes, the amount of money you need to actually be earning starts to reach like half a million dollars. That's anything but normal. That's saying to be rich you just need to make a lot of money, or to be in the top 1% net worth of people you just need to make a top 1% income.
NullHypothesis
7mo ago
Speaking of the Atheism+ movement, Scott had an interesting article on that
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/
You would think the atheist skeptics who were anti-feminists would align with the alt-right (or at least anti-woke given their previous anti-feminist stances) but a large number of them ended up on the side of woke social justice.
I wouldn't say impossible, see inattentional blindness. There are a lot of people driving cars that shouldn't be driving cars but do because you kind of need a car to get anywhere in most of the US.
It certainly doesn't help the side that wants to say she had absolutely no awareness, and does help the side that wants to argue she wanted to run him over intentionally. But also, this happens in a matter of seconds, and I'd think someone with the intention of trying to run over ICE with a car would've done it a different way, and invoking Occum's razor I think the answer that she was being wreckless, and a bad driver is more likely than she saw an opportunity to run over an ICE officer and made a split second decision to run him over.
I have the same response I gave to @Grant_us_eyes - they can go wild complaining about the issues they have on GFL2 reviews and forums, I don't appreciate them taking the drama to another game, the issues they had with GFL2 did not apply to Reverse Collapse. They may share the same universe but as far as I know it has completely different characters from the main GFL and GFL2 games with the exception of a few cameos.
When you see a game being review bombed, it's normal to want to know why. Sometimes it's legitimate, like Silksong butchering the Chinese translation. But when the review bomb is because people did not like what developers did with an entire other game, that's a level of pettiness that I actually don't respect, especially because it's a game I ended up enjoying and almost didn't' buy because of the lower rating. Lower review rating = less sales = lower likelihood another game being released.
I'm someone that mostly only plays games developed by Asian developers and Indie developers and almost never Western AAA games, so I understand their concerns quite well. I even previously wrote about Korean gacha gamers before mostly in their defense. But there is a line between players passionately advocating for the games they want and just being unnecessarily vindictive. I will note that I do not know Chinese so the information that I had access to comes from English sources which naturally will be more biased towards the EN community and against the CN community, but here's a post that seemed to summarize all the drama and has some understanding for Chinese gamers and providing sources and comments from both sides of the controversy:
https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1ifexp8/video_games_the_cuck_chronicles_a_saga_on_the_cn/
According to that post, Chinese gamer harassed the voice actor but there doesn't seem to be any supporting evidence for why they did so other than her being the voice in the drama. This also goes into the entire cancel culture concept, I'm sure it's different in the Chinese community but to me it seems there is a remarkable difference between anger towards someone who has contempt for gamers and lets that contempt seep into the work, and someone who just happens to be in the crossfire for doing the work they were hired to do. I don't see evidence of the voice actor showing contempt for gamers and if there was any I'm sure that context would've been included. Even then, I've never been a fan of cancel culture (in the west typically tactics employed by the blue tribe), so I also don't condone a group of Chinese gamers employing cancel culture tactics to harass people that had little to do with the source of the controversy. It'd be one thing if the voice actor is tweeting anti gamer stuff and egging on the playerbase, but that didn't seem to be the case here.
There's also a difference between wanting a company to change directions to go back to course in the direction you want, versus active wanting to sabotage everything related to the thing you dislike as punishment. Obviously #notallchinesegachagamers, but there was a significantly loud enough group of Chinese gamers that actively wanted to kill GFL2. Here's a funny thing that happened:
Side observation, it also seems like the Chinese gacha gamer communites have their own share of trolls and fans of different games go to war with each other. As an outsider this is the information about the drama happening in Chinese gacha games I get to read about. I don't know how common this type of behavior is but it's quite funny to read about.
But this also lead to an active campaign to kill the sales of Reverse Collapse by review bombing it, which again is a completely separate game, and how I learned about this controversy to begin with. There's evidence on the Reverse Collapse discord of CN players admitting to wanting to review bomb the game, the game actually got reviewed bombed and was at 37% positive at launch before settling at 78% positive in all languages (and 93% positive in English). You can look at the steam reviews over time and the only period with bad proportion of negative to positive reviews is when the game first launched, and if you filter by time played most of the negative reviews have barely any time played, clear signs of review bombing.
A big issue seems to be how different customer bases view the purpose of a review on a global platform like steam. It's pretty common sentiment amongst Chinese gamers that reviews are a way for their issues to be heard considering steam forums are banned in China. We saw something similar happen in Slay the Spire 2, which was review bombed about half a year ago by Chinese players that didn't like the direction the game was going in. In this particular case, since it was issues specific to the game itself, their complaints are legitimate as they saw the game moving towards a direction they didn't like. But for pretty much everyone outside of China, the game continued to have high ratings even with the changes. Steam tries to mitigate this issue by having overall ratings and language specific ratings, but the overall rating is featured first. Cursory reading seems to indicate that a lot of this is downstream of popular Chinese influencers/streamers who play Slay the Spire 2 in a very different way, so the Chinese audience has a different idea of how Slay the Spire 2 should play compared to everyone else.
This seem like one of those situations where differences in culture on how people use a platform leads to friction between player bases. Actually, Chinese players review bombing games is a topic in and of itself, as I previously mentioned sometimes they seem relevant and even necessary, but other times it just seems to be extremely petty and vindictive. Looking around various gaming forums, steam, reddit, it does seem like most non-Chinese gamers have a pretty negative perception of Chinese gamers though due to how many popular games have been review bombed by Chinese gamers, which can also be downstream of the general anti-Chinese sentiment that seems to be part of Western (or mostly American) culture.
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