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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
Then we get to the Reno shootout. Woman decides to intervene in some quarrel between a man and a woman. Man starts yelling at woman. Husband of woman intervenes. Man goes back to truck, gets gun, shoots husband. No, this wasn't what was deemed justified -- things continue. Woman pulls out her gun, shoots man. Man shoots woman (and some bystander) too. Then another bystander fatally shoots the man, thinking he's going to kill the woman. The dead man turned out to boozed up, coked up, and high on pot too. If the WSJ writer had his way, presumably the bystander who killed him would be imprisoned for it. Or not shot him and maybe the woman dies instead. How would that improve things?
I assume that if the WSJ writer had his way, nobody here, including the first guy, would have had a gun. Unfortunately, there is no policy that would have realistically disarmed the first shooter without people screeching that it aims to disarm the second one. Any efforts towards a general crackdown on lethal self-defence should also be understood through the lens of this environment - encumbering any reasonable use of guns is just a means to the end that only unreasonable uses remain, which would make a total ban politically more attainable.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
· Edited 3d ago
But on the other hand, some forms of protecting people from the damage they can do to themselves and others in a fit of passion seem to be very popular. We have laws against drugs and gambling, contra any "it is good that druggies slowly poison themselves/compulsive gamblers surrender their money to someone who is more responsible with it" arguments; the state mandates that you were a seatbelt while driving; most people ban assisted suicide, do not recognise consent to major amputations and maimings to the chagrin of cannibals and trans-disabled everywhere; and, indeed, all have largely banned legal duels.
Your line of argument particularly reminds me of ones about gambling. As it happens, I play a lot of gacha video games (F2P games with a significant "lootbox" component, where you can spend in-game currency that can be either very slowly gained from playing or straight up bought with real money on a probability to obtain a character or item). I have never had issues with self-control, and probably spent a grand total of $50 on all such games in my lifetime, only buying small top-ups to signal to the developers that I especially liked what they did in a particular patch now and then; so for me, these are just ridiculously high-production-value live-service games I get to play for free (but where sometimes I can not get access to some content). However, in these games, if you must get an item and RNGesus is not on your side, it is not uncommon to have to blow $2k or more on gacha rolls. A friend, who likewise plays a lot (of the same games, and then some more), has spent more to the tune of $20k, and continues spending heavily.
A while ago, we both entered an argument about whether gacha should be banned, instigated by a third friend (who does not play it, but is very European). I took what is essentially the pro-gun position: the lack of impulse control of some should not be a reason to stop consenting adults from engaging in business transactions, even if there is a probabilistic component, and rejecting even the polite fiction that adult members of society can be trusted with making decisions for themselves and shouldering any consequences leads you down a path whose endpoint can not really be described as liberal democracy anymore, etc. The addict friend, who continues indulging in his addiction and happily spamming me every day about what haul his most recent $500 of paid pulls got him, took the "ban it all" position. At the end of the argument, the two of them expressed what seemed like genuine, if slightly brainrotten, concern that I am out of sheer contrarianness drifting towards becoming a "libertarian trumptard" (their words!).
(On the other side of the divide, drugs? I would wager that "adults who can use drugs responsibly should not have to take restrictions due to irresponsible addicts" is a much more Blue position.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8d ago
I'm surprised that "abnormality" is a prerequisite for getting worker's compensation. Accepting for the sake of argument that PTSD is real, this is a real instance of PTSD, and it really prevents him from continuing in the same line of work, should "all firefighters experience this, and usually it does not result in them quitting with PTSD" be a sufficient argument to deny compensation? Does that mean that in cases like those radioactive watch face painters, where everyone in a line of work was exposed to a perhaps underappreciated probabilistic risk by convention, those who did get struck by it (the people who got cancer) have no claim to compensation?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9d ago
I doubt that, if the safety of Israel's population were seriously threatened, some countries in Europe would not open their gates to them no questions asked. (Not without irony, the main way I'd expect this to fail is that in some countries the Muslim population that washed up in no small part thanks to Israel's misadventures, and other things (such as, uh, Algeria) that rhyme with them, has become a significant enough voting block to provide a contrary incentive to politicians!)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10d ago
I'd be curious what the argument was for logical arguments beating "pissing them off", as opposed to the latter just being a dominant strategy...
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
13d ago
Considering the figures on the Wikipedia page, with the sub-replacement values for "Christians" and "others", I'm inclined to believe that whatever they are doing at least does not work as a society-wide intervention. "Jewish non-Haredi" is already given as only 2.4, and I assume that there is a large number of sufficiently aberrant lifestyle people (like settlers) in that group pulling up the average without resembling "affluent liberal modernity".
I mean, sure, with a sufficiently compelling religion you will find some people willing to live on a farm and multiply for your ethnoreligious group's manifest destiny; the fraction of people willing to do that might however not be that large, and Israel already has an easier time there because their baseline Jewish population is preselected for propensity to go for such a thing from a much larger global Jewish population. I'm however not convinced that that group could sustain itself even at its current level of lifestyle without a much larger and lower-TFR group subsidising them. I'm in fact not even convinced that Israel as a state could sustain itself at its current level of lifestyle without the much larger and lower-TFR group that is the USA subsidising them. Israel's TFR is also secured by weapons and money built by/earned by Americans burning their fertile years in the rat race at Raytheon.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
13d ago
I don't know enough about Utah, but I would assume Israeli fertility is nontrivially carried by subgroups that are not living in affluent liberal modernity. Maybe, assuming that the subgroups are not actually genetically distinct from the general population and have a steady rate of evaporation (as in children who leave the group and join modernity), such a strategy could be viable - maintain a self-sequestering pronatalist cult, and keep the rest of society running on a steady trickle of apostates from their circles - but it hardly seems stable, especially since I assume evaporative cooling will cause the cult to drift genetically towards who knows what over time.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
13d ago
Was pre-1960s America/Europe "Muslim/Amish with a different paint job"?
No, but we can't go back to anything like it, because not having invented smartphones and Uber Eats looks very different from upholding a ban on smartphones and Uber Eats and we have neither the coordination nor the technology to just forget a capability.
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13d ago
I dispute that it's such a good metric, because GitHub submissions always have an element of flexing and self-actualisation (the "become the best stamp collector in Sheffield" type of male hierarchy climbing pursuit). The best female programmers I know disproportionately do not put their hobby projects on Github, and are often unenthused by the idea even if urged to (it draws attention, might attract the bad kind of attention, looks like cringy showing off which they just axiomatically don't like, etc.).
Hell, even in my personal space, my SO has probably written 5x the volume of shell scripts to automate random chores that I have (my tolerance for annoyances being much higher), but mine are on github with a nice readme and Show HN post to introduce them and hers are not.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
13d ago
Well, that sucks, but all the counterproposals look an awful lot like "we should turn into patriarchal muslims/amish with a different paint job first".
Besides, in a couple centuries, I wager both Europe and the US will either be ruled by Clippy or members of whatever type of cockroach (literal or metaphorical) emerges from the rubble of WWIII, and in the latter case the TFR probem might be solved for Westerners too since erasing industrial society seems like a reliable enough way to get the opportunity costs of childrearing under control.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
13d ago
Now, are there societies which combine female domesticity with a functioning sewage system?
Well, what is the cause and what is the effect there, though? It's suspicious that even for well-sewered Western society, by the time proper sewer systems proliferated, female workforce participation was already most of the way to the modern value. (Quick Google says 56% for the US now, and 40% for Victorian England.)
I don't think TFR>2.1 is compatible with affluent liberal modernity without speculative innovations in the class of artificial wombs and AI childrearing with no humans in the loop, so I'd rather just enjoy its boons while they last. We'll have to destroy freedom and fun to get TFR up eventually anyway; why be in a hurry about it?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
13d ago
See this paper (randomly lifted from Google) and everything that it cites. I haven't personally experienced the Japanese workplace, but I have worked with and socialised with many Japanese people (and do not have a language barrier), and the core thesis essentially rings true. The role of the senior is fundamentally ceremonial, and any significant decisions affecting the group are always based on meticulous vibe-checking. A senior or authority who fails to vibe-check and just steamrolls their personal preference will find themselves sidelined in the most Mean Girls way imaginable, unless it's literally a doddering old (wo)man with a long social track record in which case they will be superficially humoured while the actual decisions are carefully made behind their back.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
13d ago
That's a lot of speculative theories and subjective experience that may really just be yours (maybe about 1/3 of research papers I have built on had women first authors, and I'm in a hard theory corner of CS). Either way, the picture you paint of the impact of women in the workplace seems nothing short of apocalyptic, so wouldn't you expect at least some examples of societies that don't allow it outperforming those that do? Instead, on top of the steamrolling dominance of egalitarian Western society, we are now seeing the ascendancy/imminent superiority of China which at least anecdotally places even more women in competitive tail jobs.
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13d ago
Everyone can use that suffix, and it is not exclusively agreement-seeking (a simple そうだね。 has all the vibes of an English "Right."~"I see.", and the Facebook "like" button is translated as いいね).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14d ago
· Edited 14d ago
In that particular case, I never found out. It was an undergrad that I only intersected with as we both TAed the same course, and my curiosity about undergrad drama was no longer high enough to seek out information that was not volunteered.
On another occasion, there was a mixed undergrad/grad bouldering group I was in for a while, and one of the undergrad girls (who seemed to be socially fairly central to the group before) suddenly stopped coming. I asked why I hadn't seen her around and the only response I got was "X? Oh, X is cancelled." Some of the other undergrads present just turned around and did some sort of "oh yeah, there was that" raised-eyebrows nod. - me: "Huh? What happened?" - interlocutor, repeating: "She's cancelled." I didn't pry further. Figures what they have going on.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14d ago
But she understood that intuitively, which is why she didn't ask her female friends. If she did ask, the reply, however superficially encouraging, probably would have carried an undertone of "really? you are asking about that?" that she would also have caught on to. The point is that female (and oldschool Japanese) norms are not actually reducible to "Male Westerner culture, with a layer of obscuring passive-aggressive misdirection applied on top"; communication really is supposed to bottom out in getting a hint, and making sure that others get the hints that you want to drop, with no truthful explanation in words being accessible as a last resort, and yet it works if everyone cooperates on it. (Whether it is a global or merely a local optimum is another question.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14d ago
I already disowned my choice of the word "bourgeois" in a comment elsewhere in this subtree, as in hindsight it was not the right term to describe the group of people I was aiming for. I assumed you would have seen that post as well, sorry.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14d ago
It’s hard to describe exactly, but there’s a difference between presenting criticism in a way that allows people to save face, and the kind of knives-covered-in-sugar behaviour where the critic tries to pretend that no criticism is actually occurring.
Which setting, do you figure, does which?
A missing piece of the puzzle may be that (as far as I can tell) well-adjusted women in "feminised" social groups in the West also in fact do get the substance of socially-diffused deniable criticism clearly, even when it is never explicitly stated to them. Failures occur when men and incorrectly socialised (or neurodivergent) women enter those circles.
I've even seen a pattern along the lines of the following: Chinese girl to American CS student guy friend: "I feel like those people hate me and don't actually want me to join their homework group" - guy friend: "Did they actually say something to the effect? No? I'm sure they are just busy, don't worry about it too much" - [girl gets bullied out of the girls' group and winds up with only male friends, who also all want to get with her]. In this case, the girl should have followed her initial instincts; in fact probing about it more positively would have revealed that she had a pretty accurately understanding of why the others were cross with her. The system worked fine, up until the point that it had to contend with people that expected it to be something that it actually isn't.
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14d ago
After looking through your posting on the topic (search author:Amadan HBD), I concede that in my impression of it you seemed to be more hostile than appears to have been the reality (which could be because I only encountered the handful of posts of yours that I thought were out of line - ones where you were a bit too quick to lump it in with a rather less commonsensical/more universally reviled position ("our still sizeable retinue of HBD enthusiasts and Holocaust deniers") - or because those left more of an impression). However, I don't understand how you reason that my diagnosis of Hlynka is "comically off-base": you talk about his open disdain for HBD yourself, and surely the gloss of "order, discipline and capitalism" applies to a proud salt-of-the-earth ex-military man like him.
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14d ago
I've seen versions of this argument before, and there is one point that I always get caught up on, voiced here as
Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.
...which sounds plausible, but then I remember that this has a great deal of overlap with complaints I have read in many forms from Westerners finding themselves in a Japanese workplace. Japan is not exactly known as a den of feminism, so could the author be wrongfully universalising a Western perspective? (The hypothetical tail of the argument is also: if Japan is in fact feminised, which I guess would mesh well with old "effeminate Asians" stereotypes, then why does it work so well in ways that the Aesthetic Right tends to appreciate in particular? Why does it not import refugees or create HR departments, and why is it happy to glass-ceiling women at lower management level and outright push them to get married and retire in their 30s once you look at more traditional corporations?)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
15d ago
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
16d ago
"Bourgeois" was probably the wrong term, I should have said something like "normie right" - I intended to contrast with a group that would include Moldbug fans, frog posters, antisemites who hate Jews for their treatment of Euro gentiles rather than for their treatment of Muslims, Great Replacement theorists and the "dark enlightenment". This includes a lot of people you would consider "Blue Tribe Right".
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
16d ago
I remember the moratorium you are talking about, but thought you were talking about a more recent incident (I think we also got a sort of moratorium after moving here for a while? Maybe I'm mixing it up with a moratorium on SS's single-topic SSposting, which felt like another instance of right-wing mods wanting to bury the wrong and cringe kind of right-wing posting?). Not sure who were the mods back then and what was their motivation, though my instinct would be that it must have been similar, since the outgroup/fargroup relations to HBD in the SSC/Motte community have been like this for the longest time.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
16d ago
Something something building consensus, but, uh, +1.
My best guess is that OP is referencing some old CW battle (about a media personality who got cancelled?) and thinks that the personality's imminent comeback will "separate the goats from the sheep"/reveal people's true sentiments on something (hence "survey"), but yeah, I would like to see less of that sort of iykyk posting. The style seems be more in line with rDrama or Kiwifarms, that is, places where encyclopedically keeping track of obscure beefs conveys status.
Uh, you might or might not win that round of banter, but you would for sure win an immediate meeting with HR, "RoyGBivensAction was joking about shooting me/my whole family/half of our office" and what-not.
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