ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
2hr ago
Mass shootings (non-gang related), serial killers, and stranger rape all of have one other thing in common: they're extraordinarily rare. Most incels just descend into listless stagnation; they're not going to be agents that fundamentally change society.
ThenElection
3hr ago
It was tongue in cheek (not obviously enough so, apparently).
Those latter groups can easily be ignored and shuffled off to other physical areas for other people to deal with, on a day to day basis. Sexless men seem to sprout up everywhere and are encountered everywhere on the Internet, so they're harder to avoid and need a more forceful hand.
ETA: tongue in cheek
Access to sex is a major incentive for being economically productive for men. If the distribution of sex becomes more unequal, the marginal utility from additional work or career growth will decrease for men for those under the xth percentile (imagine the derivative of the Lorenz curve; depending on the starting and ending Gini indices, that break even point is around the 65th percentile). Those men will put less effort into moving up the curve through dedicated everyday effort and self-improvement and instead focus on consumption of other goods (video games, porn) and wild unproductive bets that would move them far up the curve in a single fortuitous event (gambling, speculative crypto, GME).
Which means a poorer, less dynamic society. Which is definitely a society that can survive, but I'd prefer a different one.
ThenElection
3d ago
I would question whether it's really the young and attractive in particular; if you think about the Longhouse discourse, it supposed that it's the older matriarchs who wield power.
A model I've been playing with: imagine society as a graph, with individuals as nodes that create information. Information flows through edges in the graph, with more information flowing through those edges with greater weights. The nodes are labeled with either M or F, about half and half. The F nodes are more highly connected and have edges with greater weights (in this hypothetical, at least), while the M nodes are more sparsely connected and dominated by a single strong edge to an F node.
With this structure, although M and F nodes create approximately the same amount of information, the information that actually reaches any particular node will have passed through far more F nodes than M nodes. And, if you made that graph more highly connected, it makes the ratio even more disproportionate.
ThenElection
4d ago
To be clearer, I'm suggesting that it's not useful to defend actually-existing capitalism with an appeal to ideal capitalism, just like it's not useful to defend actually-existing communism with an appeal to ideal communism.
ThenElection
4d ago
The USSR wasn't Real Communism. It suffered from a lack of communism. It was only because wreckers not devoted to true socialist ideals corrupted the system that it failed.
ThenElection
5d ago
I know a couple actual women in AI (not in the "I can call an LLM through an API" sense but in the "I was a listed author on the GPT-4 paper" sense), and the funny thing is that they despise things like @WomenInAI, who constantly spam them begging for a crumb of interest or validation. Their general attitude seems to be "why bother to spend time with a bunch of wannabe clout chasers whose only exceptional quality is being a mid-tier woman adjacent to tech, when I could instead spend the time helping create a God?" Which is, at the least, an attempt to produce something real.
ThenElection
6d ago
I wonder how much age plays into it: if older people disproportionately serve on juries, then women would also disproportionately serve, even if serving rate conditioned on age was equal.
This struck me, from the Irish Times article:
In 2009, Irish academics who studied 108 rape trials found that male-dominated juries had the highest conviction rate. There was not a single [rape] conviction in the 17 cases which had female-dominated juries.
What's going on here (assuming that rape convictions aren't so rare that 17 non-convictions are possibly noise)? Maybe when there are men in a group, people fall in line behind a leader, but if there are not, you end up with egalitarian jockeying for social position that manifests as hung juries?
Probably need more actual studies to be able to productively speculate, though.
ThenElection
7d ago
Many of these loans were taken out with the expectation of securing a valuable job.
Were they?
I sincerely doubt that CS or EE majors are anything but underrepresented in the recipients of these bailouts. Which does point to a third possible party who has at significant share of the blame: universities themselves. They encourage students to take massive loans of dubious benefit with false advertising. More economically advantageous majors are often even limited in enrollment.
I don't hold the student loan debtors too responsible for the issue. They're young idiots who are told by pretty much everyone that it's a good idea to go on what's effectively a four year party vacation because they'll automatically get a good job afterwards. It's akin to someone who doesn't understand how interest rates work taking out a payday loan. But we really should be punishing the institutions that put them in that position.
ThenElection
12d ago
The issue with experiments is that you need to objectively evaluate and act on their outcomes. In principle, I think it's possible for an individual to (imperfectly, but still much better than random guessing). But any social-wide experiment will create institutions that are embedded in the conditions of the experiment, and they will do their utmost to maintain and expand the conditions they're adapted for. Maybe some won't, but those will be selected against. This would apply both in your capitalist and socialist examples (as well as any other I can think of, from anarchist collectives to feudal fiefdoms).
ThenElection
13d ago
The transformer came out of Google Brain, not GDM.
ThenElection
15d ago
Mostly Bay Area weather. I'd increase the number of days with heavy low-laying fog and add thunderstorms to make it a bit more interesting, and I'd make Friday and Saturday nights much warmer to make patio and rooftop dining/drinks actually pleasant.
ThenElection
15d ago
I'm skeptical that MDMA gets dumped in a drink of an unsuspecting victim at any significant scale.
It has played a role in the rapes I know of in the rave scene. But, similar to the alcohol ratchet, the victim knowingly consumed it, overshot and reached an incapacitated state, and then a predator took advantage. Still very much a rape, but "date rape drug" has much different connotations than that scenario.
ThenElection
16d ago
Even ignoring the pre-Clovis peoples, native American tribes regularly warred with each other: the successful ones expanded, and the losers fled to more marginal lands, had their women integrated into the replacing tribe, or were killed.
1492 wasn't at some equilibrium state where everyone was where their ancestors had been for thousands of years. Even post-exchange, this process continued: who does Mount Rushmore belong to? The Lakota, who were dominated by the US? Or the Cheyenne, who were dominated by the Lakota? Or whatever group preceded the Cheyenne before somehow being erased from the historical record?
ThenElection
16d ago
I'd add that getting and holding a professional job for a couple years is itself a strong assimilatory force; I can't think of any H1B who aided or carried out a terrorist attack. Which isn't to say H1Bs don't bring their own issues (preferential hiring of their in-group being a major one), but the biggest offenders there aren't people from Muslim-majority countries.
For what it's worth, I've been unable to reproduce the cockroaches in penis answer. Though I'm sure at least some of the viral screenshots are legitimate, and there's definitely a team spending their entire memorial day weekend quashing these as they come up.
Technically, one issue is that there would be a different LLM being used in search than elsewhere. The one used in search would prioritize cost and speed above all else. A couple minutes worth of Google search inferences is a greater volume than probably a day's worth of inferences across all of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Naturally, quality is going to suffer. And even if Google were inclined to, it simply doesn't have the hardware to run its top-of-the-line model for every search query. (No one does.)
For comparison, Brave handles maybe 10 QPS? Google is closer to 100k QPS.
Google needs to improve quality, but that's probably not even its main priority right now: it needs to decrease costs.
ThenElection
18d ago
"I came for my Vicodin for my joint pain, not to be fat-shamed, you sexist pig!"
ThenElection
19d ago
Yeah, workshopped it for a minute or two and that's the best I could come up with. And agreed, Trotsky ice axe jokes will never get old.
Bisexual atheistic male here. And I also don't want the list of buzzwords--meritocracy, equality, the rest--you list.
But your supposed vision (to the extent you describe it here) has no appeal to me. I want very simple things: clean, safe streets, limited crime, pretty buildings, parks, reliable infrastructure, consistent paycheck, good food, a nice glass of wine, friends, family. I really don't care who happens to rule over me, so long as I have those things and the rulers don't bother me too much aside from taking up to half my income and using it wisely. In a perfect world I'd never be asked to think about politics again; in the next-best world, I'd pay attention only so far as it meant participating in city politics to make sure the government does spend my income wisely. And I don't care about what hairstyle anyone chooses; I can like it or not, but beyond that it's meh. And I don't think democracy is itself better than any other system of government, but transitioning away from democracy to another one would almost certainly cause more chaos and suffering than it's worth.
In a word, I'm a hobbit.
ThenElection
20d ago
What's interesting about Lenin's writings is that he's usually pretty forthright about what he wanted and planned. For much of the 20th century, there was an internecine dispute between orthodox Communists and a motley group of Western intellectuals (heavily influenced by the trots) about whether Stalin had "betrayed the Revolution." But Stalin was an organic evolution, and Lenin and especially Trotsky didn't just theoretically support measures of brutal repression but actively executed them. Stalin won in the 1930s because he was the moderate; Trotsky's point of view was something like there wasn't enough worldwide violence, not that there was too much. Naturally, once he decisively lost the fight, he changed his tune, but it's unlikely anything really changed inside his head until his death.
ThenElection
20d ago
"Date rape" drugs are largely an urban legend, except for one: alcohol. And it's still absolutely true that men will encourage women to drink to excess, particularly through a ratchet where each successive drink lowers judgment, leading to susceptibility to another drink, etc, to the point of being black out drunk and having no judgment at all.
This is pretty messy: each step is consented to, and there's no deception about what's being consumed. Sometimes it's even innocent, particularly when both people are getting trashed. But enough women regret it that I'd be a fan of stigmatizing and punishing this behavior, particularly when the alternative is encouraging women to never have a single drink on a date for fear of falling prey to this ratchet.
ThenElection
21d ago
The gender norms being biologically driven would be almost reassuring: if it were just our genes driving the behaviors, we will at some point in the future be able to move around a couple base pairs and solve the issue entirely.
If they arise purely from social dynamics and have nothing to do with biology, on the other hand, they are self-sustaining and have resisted millenia of attempts to change them, across massive geographic and temporal spaces. That seems much harder to fix.
ThenElection
21d ago
I got a wife by changing my strategy, and we make each other extremely happy, so the outcome was definitely net good for us. And I'm 90% confident that continuing on my previous path would have ended in actual suicide.
In the end, I'm not going to martyr myself, or advise anyone else to martyr himself, to satisfy an imagined set of rules the vast majority of women don't even themselves follow. Make it even 25%, and I'd reconsider.
In the US today: depending on what you consider infanticide, when IVF is used sex-selectively, it's usually to select for a girl. And when children are being adopted, adoptive parents have a strong preference for girls.
For infanticide itself, according to the CDC, boys are more likely to be victims of it than girls, both in absolute terms and proportionately (8 boys per 100k person years vs 6.2 girls per 100k person years): https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6939a1.htm#T1_down
I couldn't find concrete statistics on sex-selective abortion in the USA, but I'd expect it to follow the same trend.
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