Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Layoffs slowed down in tech I think.
It was really bad in 2023, not so bad now. But all of that is relative to the insane market of 2021.
It’s slowly picking up but is overall fairly healthy relative to other engineering industries. Even the 2023 market was probably way better than the market for industrial or chemical engineers has maybe ever been?
Younger people in tech definitely have it worse, no doubt about that. Even if demand had stayed static there are just way more people studying computer science now so the competition is insane. At the Big-ish Tech company I work at, internships only go to both the best and brightest students from the best colleges but also those with referrals. If you don’t have a referral you’re toast.
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Seems very field-dependant. Finance is seeing slow recruitment and some layoffs, but 2018 was worse and 2007-2010 was in a different dimension entirely, and there are still places hiring aggressively. I would put it this way, in 2008 a lot of people spent a year or two looking for a job and then left the industry entirely, like retrained as lawyers or chefs or went into (non-finance) sales or opened a small business or became accountants or did coding bootcamps or became high school teachers or whatever. There were no jobs at all. Maybe it’s like that in tech, but you don’t see many experienced engineers leaving tech entirely for now I think.
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Are introductions a thing here? Should I just start poasting? I've lurked for some time, but decided to start commenting. There have been some posts recently (and in this thread) about a slow decline in the users here, and I feel compelled to state "it's not all bad" for the record.
I have a younger sister who is, I suspect, considering a conversion to the religion of trans, and I'm wondering if anyone else here has some experience with a family member doing so, and if you have any thoughts on such. I'm usually pretty reserved, and to be honest, I'm pretty chill with people who disagree with me about a great variety of things. My current plan is to try to avoid any major disagreements of faith and the associated language, but I'm pretty uncomfortable with lying directly if asked.
I have a cousin who is pretty far down a FtM transition and I regularly feel uneasy over not having made at least a token effort to... I dunno, present alternative solutions to their unhappiness? This is of course predicated on my bias towards assuming a high probability that transitioning will be regretted at some later point in life. And I really don't know if I could have had that discussion without causing massive family drama.
Best of luck to you and your sister!
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Intros? Haven't seen many of 'em, but you're welcome to. Post away by all means!
FWIW, I've tended to think we're probably doing fine just as we are actually and not to sweat too much over periodic variability of CWR comment count. I think it's probably a good thing that even our more real-world famous posters don't advertise the site much, as it would probably draw in a lot of low-quality posters who break the rules, make more work for the mods, make the experience worse for current posters, etc. I think people who make good-quality posters are more likely to find us on their own. How did you end up here?
I think Motte-style debating is usually a good template, or good practice, for discussing such topics as trans-ness as a new religion with potential adherents who are otherwise close to you. Avoid sneering and weak-manning, but point out real risks and challenges. Like to what extent is the excessive enthusiasm about the topic encouraging young people to take more radical measures that they're not really ready for, some of which will have life-long consequences.
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I do not have any direct experience with this sort of thing. But based on what you said here, I think it's likely that there will be a time you can't both be agreeable, and avoid saying something that you think is a lie. You don't need to decide now what the answer will be (and in fact I would say you shouldn't), but it does deserve some thought. If it comes down to it, which do you think is more important - getting along with your sister, or the truth? Just something to ponder in the back of your mind.
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I don't know that I ever introduced myself, but you are certainly free to, if you wish. It's always good to see new users.
How old is your sister, roughly, if she's transitioning?
Mid 20's, lives on the other side of the country. I'm not sure when she plans to 'come out' to the family (or if, honestly - though it might become obvious depending on how far she goes physically).
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Might the emphasis that certain cultures place on family and clan commitment inadvertently cause selfish / sociopathic genes to flourish? If you have children with varying levels of sociopathy, then the most sociopathic of kin would benefit from the activity of the least sociopathic of kin, as they are both morally incentivized to benefit the family or clan as a whole, but the sociopathic one is a free-rider. If instead you have a culture without family or clan commitment, and instead relative free association, then the most-empathic / least-sociopathic progeny can form mutually beneficial “societies-in-miniature” with those from other families and clans, provided they have some method of weeding out free-riders and the hidden sociopathic. I think we could imagine such a shift happening when religious communities colonized North America. If this phenomenon is legitimate then it would weed out the sociopathic across generations.
People really, really like the idea of group selection but from an evolutionary perspective, it just doesn't seem to work out. People have tried it to model it, but it always ends up collapsing. The problem is precisely the "weeding out free-riders and the hidden sociopathic". Kin-selection does so automatically, since if you're cooperative, your relatives tend to be as well and if not vice versa. Furthermore, clan structures can and do weed out free-riders directly as well.
Btw, this does not mean that free association and broad cooperation is impossible long-term; It just means that you need to structure it in a reciprocal way so that everyone benefits.
I assume group selection works on bees and such? Are there any other society structures where it works? I was wondering if genocides could be such a selection mechanism, but it would have to be one's that do not involve taking all the women.
No, worker bees are sterile and afaik share half the genome of the queen, so serving the queen is in their direct "genetic interest". This is classic kin selection.
Is sterile the right word for something that can't reproduce sexually, but can still give birth? They start laying unfertilized drone eggs all over the place if there's no queen scent.
As you say, supporting the queen maximizes a worker's individual reproductive fitness, until there is no queen. Then it's every bee for herself.
Huh, you're clearly more knowledgeable about bees than I am. The queen suppressing the workers' reproduction with scent reminds of an argument I've heard; That, while the gay uncle hypothesis doesn't make evolutionary sense for the gay uncle himself, it does make sense for his siblings. Meaning, effectively castrating your brother so that he has to invest into your offspring is a viable strategy. It wasn't a very popular argument, however.
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Nah, it's the opposite. Psychopaths can only thrive if they can meet new people to victimize. A close-knit community that stays together for a long time is the best defense against psychopaths.
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The problem with genes that increase sociopathy is that if you've got one, your relatives more likely has it too. If you have a gene that causes you to steal resources from your sibling in a significantly negative-sum way, then that gene will on average reduce your own fitness too.
In any case this would only apply if children with more resources go on to have more children than those with less resources. That was probably true back when America was colonized, but not so much today.
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Is anyone betting on the election? I'd like to put a pile of money on Biden, but the odds are so even that I'm worried exchange fees would make leaving it in a money market fund a better investment.
Can anyone who's done this before give me a rough idea of costs, especially hidden or opportunity ones a beginner might miss?
I hope you waited.
Oh yeah, much better odds now. Still convinced it's a good call
Why?
Look how smoothly they reinstated the narrative after that disaster. It's been a day and it may as well never have happened, complete memory-holing. Just go to /r/politics and it's wall to wall "undecideds now support Biden after debate!"
Dems control everything in this country. All we can do is point out the spreading cracks as fast as they paper over them.
Are we going to win against a political machine that collects as many mail-in ballots as they need to win any election?
May as well make a bit of money off the spectacle at least.
I don't think there's mail ballot fraud at the scale needed. Do you have any reason to think so?
Ballot harvesting isn't even "fraud", any more than busing people to the polling center with a list of people to vote for and then taking them to a free concert. It's just a lot more efficient.
It's how the whole system works in WA now.
Ah, that makes sense, I'd misunderstood.
Well, be sure you don't take Washington as the national baseline. Trump's up in all the swing states, though by an admittelly small margin in several.
Biden certainly has a chance, though.
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I honestly hope betting on these kinds of things never becomes normalized. Seriously, the amount of radio commentary that revolves around betting and fantasy teams makes me wonder if anyone watches sports purely for pleasure anymore. The last thing we need is for our political ecosystem to devolve to the same level of discourse.
To actually answer your question, only bet if you think the odds the bookie gives you are wrong. If the odds are even and you think the election is a toss up then don't bet. If you think Biden will win in a landslide then put a few dollars down. If you're rooting for Trump and you're hoping that a financial stake in a Biden victory will make you feel better if he wins, keep in mind that never works.
Why doesn't that work?
Because you're still going to be pissed about whatever you lost either way. The amount of money you might win due to a Biden victory probably isn't going to be life changing, and if it is, then you're going to be rooting for Biden anyway and not caring too much about the politics. It's like betting against your favorite sports team.
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Will certainly be a fun ride to watch the action.
There's been a lot of speculation that Biden will be "hot-swapped" after he malfunctions during the debate. So even if, based on your posting history, you think the Democrats will rig the election, a Biden bet might not be a sure thing.
Personally, I'd bet on Trump.
Yeah, I should have said "bet on dem victory" rather than Biden specifically, but that pushes the odds they're giving even further towards no-profit coinflip
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Can anyone explain to me what this image is supposed to be about?
The flag in question represents the bear culture among gay men, which prizes fatness as a sexual feature. Presumably, the widespread adoption of Ozempic would mean less bears, which is not the preference of the maker of this meme.
Is it about fatness? I was under the impression that bears were about being masculine (in contrast to the stereotype of gay effeminacy), in particular by valuing beards and such.
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Suddenly my twitter is full with left wing/ pro biden accounts in force? Has anyone noticed something similar? Their campaign suddenly got active or the algorithm confused me with undecided?
The SCOTUS just ruled on the Missouri v Biden case about the government interfering with social media. The SCOTUS wussed out and declared no standing. Twitter / X probably realized it was going to go the government's way when no opinion was released last week.
So we're back to the government juicing "appropriate" narratives.
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Just the general twitter algorithm being crappy I'd guess. I recently made the mistake of liking/interacting with a math puzzle tweet, and now I get tons of these retarded "99% can't solve this: 100/5(4-2)" engagement bait questions.
The exact same thing happened to me, but a few "Not interested in this post" clicks fixed it soon afterward. It still don't know how clicking "like" on some topology theorems could convince the algorithm that I really wanted to witness order-of-operations-confusion train wrecks too, but at least it was temporary.
And, whoa - did I manage to do the same on Facebook??? Last time I was on there I finally snapped, and instead of clicking "Block" on only the first "Suggested For You" slop before exiting, I went down my timeline and blocked AI image purveyors one after another after another. And now that I reconnect, to get a count of how much of their feed is algorithmic garbage as a negative contrast to Twitter, the count is 0%? Today there's literally nothing there but posts from friends and (not too many or too stupid, even!) sponsored ads. I'm not even seeing anything from the less repulsive sorts of "Suggested For You" that I hadn't blocked. Did Facebook happen to change their algorithm right as I got most fed up with it? Is their algorithm too dumb to guess that I won't want to play "find all the physically impossible or architecturally stupid details" in 20 AI log cabin pictures in a row, but not too dumb to realize when they pushed me over the edge? Could I have fixed this long ago if I'd just been more exhaustive about it earlier?
Probably close to a year ago, I noticed that Facebook has become better at serving me content I enjoy than it has been at any time since around 2010. The algorithm still isn’t perfect, but it’s gotten remarkably good.
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My wife and I are looking to start having children shortly. As you might imagine being dual-income professionals, we left it to somewhat later in life (32 for me, 30 for her). I was diagnosed as a child with Asperger's Syndrome (now high-functioning or Level 3 autism, I believe), and her brother is severely disabled with low-functioning autism (she also has a lot of the classical traits, but was never diagnosed).
I've been scouring the internet for the last few hours but haven't found anything useful in terms of research - is there anything out there talking about the chance of having low-functioning autistic kids if you're high-functioning yourself?
We're tossing up going down the IVF route, maybe taking a trip to Greece and getting female embryos implanted to avoid the worse outcome, but it's difficult to make that call without knowing the odds.
If you're going the IVF route seriously consider getting your embryos screened for autism via Orchid genomics. It costs about $1200 per embryo but can easily save you hundreds of thousands in money and emotional worry from having to deal with an autistic child for life.
No links to Orchid, they're just the only ones I know who do polygenic screening for tism at the moment.
They do now? Nice, didn't know that.
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Unfortunately "low functioning" has become a bit of a no-no term, everyone is either "high functioning" or just has autism (which still includes plenty of "medium functioning"). There's a few newish papers using the term, but most are older, and none are about what we are interested in.
But as usual in science, you can read between the lines. Generally speaking, autism is nowadays considered a continuous range of impairment, literally called ASD (autism spectrum disorder). One of the more popular ways to measure it is the social responsiveness score (SRS), which is then transformed into the SRS T-score (corrected for age, gender etc. similar to how IQ isn't just a raw test score but normed to 100). The T-score is normed to 50 with an SD of 10, so 60- is normal, 60+ mild, 65+ medium, 75+ severe. There's also quite a few other measures, but understanding at least one makes reading the papers a lot easier.
I'd say the closest to what you want to know is the heritability of these quantitative traits (1,2). TL;DR: the SRS T-score is moderately to highly heritable, in fact most measures of ASD severity are. In particular, I'm a big fan of monozygotic vs dizygotic twin comparisons since they sidestep many of the usual complaints, which in this case leads to a high heritability estimate of ~56-95%. There's a few other concepts you can take a look at, such as familial risk (which often don't include a measure of severity, only an ASD yes/no which is imo outdated at this point) or autism prs scores, but the results are mostly consistent between them.
So, in short, your children will most likely have an autism level similar to your own, with maybe a slight correction towards the mean and with a significant variance. Which necessarily implies a substantially increased chance of severe outcomes given the continuous nature of the disease. Exact numbers are difficult to give without knowing more, sorry. But chances of 10% and upwards, depending on where you make the cutoff of what you consider sufficiently problematic, aren't implausible.
On a sidenote, my favorite approach is measuring the degree of relatedness between siblings (for those that don't know, siblings, unlike parent-offspring pair which always get almost exactly 50% of each parent, can in theory range from 0-100% in genetic relatedness depending on which part of the parent's genome they get, though in practice it's a normal distribution around 50%) and then measuring the heritability based on that. Since this is doable for the majority of society, it further sidesteps some complaints about twin and/or adoption studies such as non-generalisability or different treatment between obviously different siblings.
I appreciate this greatly - I'm going off to do some more reading and we're going through the SRS together to try and figure out where we might sit and what that heritability might look like. Given the chances at play, $20-30k for a few rounds of IVF for gender selection doesn't seem very unreasonable at all, but I'll start drilling down into the numbers a little more.
As an aside - ultimately my concerns are more about nonverbal children requiring constant care. We make the sort of money that a child being mostly homebound or unable to work but mostly functional is within the risk we're willing to take, but we won't make that kind of money if we're suddenly in full-time caring roles.
What does gender selection have to do with it?
Autism is ~4x more prevalent in boys than in girls. This is true for a lot of genetic diseases due to the relative size of the X chromosome meaning girls can have one copy of a allele that causes issues and have it 'error-checked' so to speak by the other.
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Activity does seem to be declining, with 750 comments on the last CWR. Any idea why? This is, at least to me, the only place online that has good generalist discussion other than the posts (not comments though) of some substacks.
Hard to find this place.
Some low level recruiting would be interesting.
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I don't know what it is, but I'm finding the subjects people choose to talk about here increasingly boring, to the point where often a whole week goes by with nothing interesting being discussed.
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The discussion has largely been had. It will likely pick up around the election, but the long term trend is decline.
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I think it's just natural churn. Life gets in the way, and long time users will eventually fall away. I know I've been purposely trying to reduce my 'arguing on the internet' time.
On Reddit, this wasn't a problem because there was a constant source of new users. On here that's not the case.
I guess the future of the forum is to decline to nothing or go back to Reddit (and maybe get banned for wrongthink there in a few years).
Reddit feels very hollow these days too
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I may be overgeneralizing my own experience, but IMHO it's at least in part because while many people came together to discuss their apparently irreconcilable differences over the last 10-15 years, ultimately they found that their differences were indeed irreconcilable, and left disappointed and/or righteously angry. Most Mottizens, and I'd argue truth-seeking netizens in general, are now very familiar with the basic shapes of both sides' arguments, and so when CW issue de jour #2567 pops up they can usually predict with some accuracy what each side will say. The conversation is therefore mostly no longer interesting. Battle lines have been drawn in the wider culture, and now we're all just waiting for (or actively working towards) one of the factions to emerge victorious.
I mean if someone asserts (insert your demographic) here should be marginalized and stripped of rights for the good of society(read to advance my political agenda) There isn't really to much of a practical point in responding to that in anyway other that "May thy knife chip & shatter"
Well, occasionally, arguments have been known to work, if you think they're wrong. If you agree that they are in that person's interests, though, there isn't all that much to be said.
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Yes?
I was voicing my support for your opinion and offering what I thought was a practical example of something like that playing out. Sorry If I was being obtuse.
No worries, maybe I misread. All good.
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Yes, we’ve been in the unceasing trench warfare phase of the culture war for at least a couple years now. I think COVID / George Floyd was the last straw for a critical mass of people and the whole thing just became absolutely calcified.
2012-2016 was a war of maneuver, 2017-2020 was a war of position, now it’s just an endless knife fight. I’m not complaining, as I consider myself a part time culture warrior. That’s just how it shook out, and those still interested in the culture war like myself find it more useful to just knife our opponents in between the ribs, rhetorically speaking of course.
I’ve never felt the culture war is more important than now, but it’s also more boring than ever.
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Honestly the whole period felt like nerds who didn't quite get it saying "what exactly do you mean by declaring all of us Moral Mutants to be Exterminated by Progress?"
I still hope something more productive things can be discussed now that everyone's finally realized. There's lots to talk about beyond litigating Current Thing attack #6836865 as if there's any questions about intent.
Good example: that Guardian journalist we talked about last week who was posting "hanging Mussolini" threats at people. Nobody said "oh wow you'd better not do that, people might think you're advocating violence", they just posted dead Che Guevara and Rosa Luxembourg's rotting corpse back at him, suggesting he'd enjoy the bottom of a canal so much he'd never want to leave.
There's a bracing level of mask-off bloodthirsty hatred that wasn't there even in 2020. Feels like living in the first chapter of a William Luther Pierce novel.
From my perspective, the bloodthirsty hatred is well earned. I’ve been meaning to write about this for a long time, I feel the siren song of a genuine FedPoasttm calling me.
I know a lot of digital ink has been spilled in this place accusing large amounts of people using civil war coded language as “LARPing”, or puffing their chest as keyboard warriors, but it seems to me something really has turned.
For me personally, I find myself relishing in the suffering of those who hold me and people like me in genuine disdain and act maliciously toward us. This is new, and it’s not just the product of some tweaked algorithm or exotic status game; I’ve never truly felt like this before, it feels true and I really gain nothing from it, in fact I’d be deeply penalized if I broadcast it widely.
Something interesting has happened in the few times I’ve expressed my genuine, undiluted desire for serious misfortune to befall members of the PMC that I blame for our current decadent state; at first, people are slightly alarmed. Then, utter relief that they aren’t crazy and someone else feels the same way as them.
rly makes u think
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts, if you can express them without breaking the rules. I think you've identified a real thing shared by an increasingly large number of people. I think about the issue frequently, but am not sure I have a full post worth of thoughts.
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I think you can use <sup></sup> to make the text suprescript. Like this: tm
Thanks, big dog.
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I don't think it's really accurate to analyze the Culture War as just "nerds and aspies who didn't get the memo". (At the very least, we can always ask, why this particular memo, with this particular content?)
I was around 20 when all this got started. That's really young! I was naive and I didn't know shit back then. (I still don't, but I hope that I've learned at least a few things since then). So I believed a lot of false/stupid things and I had to figure things out through trial and error.
People aren't born with an innate knowledge of history, politics, and philosophy. It has to be acquired - both on an individual level and a social collective level. Memes propagate through society and help people avoid the mistakes of the past. Social phenomena always happen for a reason - it's a mistake to think "well if people just did X Y Z then we could have avoided all that mess".
There's something to it, but I agree ultimately it's a mischaracterization.
It's wrong because we didn't "not get the memo". Nerds and and aspies were the first to notice the changes in political discourse and culture. Normies were the ones insisting that nothing is happening, and if it is it's overblown, etc., etc. If anyone didn't get the memo, it was them, and all the old liberals getting canceled for not jumping on the train fast enough are proof of that.
It's correct in the sense that we obviously overanalyzed the whole phenomenon. Normies just assessed who is on which side, and stayed loyal to their tribe. We spent entire years debating if all this really means what we think it means, did we miss something, are we not being uncharitable, etc., etc., etc. With the end result being us just following in the steps of the normies, even though we realized first that something is changing.
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You know, I'm no genius, but more and more I find that when I see a general culture war question I want to reply to, I end up linking back to or quoting a comment I made or someone else made years ago. My new posts tend to all be about books I've read or great movies I've watched recently.
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Religious nonsense taking over. No one wants to post to a place that denies reality.
This is a large component of why I've withdrawn from posting on a regular basis. Very boring and tiresome dynamic with Christians more and more spamming their respective sect's catechisms, constantly squeezing in extremely disrespectful shade towards atheists and secularists while advocating theocratic intrusion into government, then even mild atheist pushback or criticism of religion getting dogpiled and jannied. Cue an evaporative cooling effect. I encounter enough of that in daily life to be turned off by additional online exposure at the levels found here of late.
I tried checking your history to see what sorts of things you like to post about, and in what tone, but couldn't.
So, anyway, what sorts of things do you like to talk about?
No thanks, I keep private mode on to hinder profiling and dox attempts.
Well, if you won't explain or let me see examples, I have no way of knowing whether your own assessment is accurate in my view, or if the reaction is warranted or not. (Assuming things like that are what you like to talk about, which I did, because you describe it as a major factor.)
Of course, it doesn't really matter.
I'm fine with that. I spoke up to register that AhhTheFrench is not alone in his observations of increasing Christian preaching and having objections to that trend.
Fair enough.
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Hey we agree on something! I think one should have their posting history open for assessment, we don't have much to go on during anonymous internet discussions, it is hard enough to know if someone is acting in good faith or worth responding to even with a post history. Without one, they can be as mercurial and changeable as they wish for good or (more often) ill.
Fwiw, posting history is always open to the mods. While I personally dislike it when people make their profiles private, I understand some people do have legitimate doxxing concerns. Also, it's really annoying when people do the reddit-style "I just searched your posting history and found you posted something months ago that I will now use as a stick to beat you with."
True, but you shouldn't have grown that stick off your branch if you were concerned about being beaten with it. (Has a more tortured metaphor ever been created?:)
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My God™. Please, give the topic a rest.
The more you bang on this pulpit, the more you fall afoul of the rules on charity, consensus, and discussion. I know you think religion is wrong. Rumor has it some people disagree with you. We are not going to privilege your position just because you feel really, extra strong about it. I guarantee you: there are people who feel that strongly about things you think are even dumber.
So I beg you, kindly stop nailing your theses on every thread.
I’m a committed atheist, it’s incredibly obvious that this space is many times more secular than a typical space, especially on a global scale.
Although there does seem to be a bit of a teapot in a tempest purity spiral going on in the dissident right now about Vitalists vs Christians, although it has a whiff of fakery / enemy action to me.
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It me.
I have ended the Culture War. The Roundup just hasn’t caught up yet. :)
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/r/TheMotte or even the CWR thread in /r/ssc was a very lightning in a bottle thing. People can claim it was THAT attribute or THAT SET of attributes, but I don't think anyone really knows what they were. So by extension, I think it's also going to be pretty hard to dissect why themotte isn't being like it used to be.
I personally don't use the motte as much as I used to because:
I still find myself going back to hacker news and less wrong because there is new, useful and original content in both those places. I think the motte would benefit (ME) if there were more abstracted discussion on things as opposed to just what's happening.
Sorry.
Evidently not boring to me, but fair enough, it makes sense that it is to those outside the United States, as well as to most in the country as well.
For what it’s worth, I find those discussions very interesting.
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Maybe it's that we've (not just TheMotte - the ratsphere, the 'dissident right', the internet at large) have picked all of the intellectual low-hanging fruit, and only more specific, complicated things are left? I find SCOTUS discussion interesting and read all of it, though I don't have much to contribute.
That might also contribute to the feeling of wasted time - all the discourse happened, and what changed?
Unsure about the direction of causality, but Elon Musk was two handshakes away, and he bought Twitter.
The people who participated or observed the proceeings have been thinking of different thoughts than they would've if the trousers of time had bifurcated differently and we'd gone down the right leg. Or perhaps this is the
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It’s not that it’s complicated, it’s just mostly irrelevant to people outside the USA. For better or worse, my country essentially banned guns fifty years ago, so the back and forth on the Second Amendment doesn’t really hold much interest.
Incidentally the reduction to legal battles is both the strong and weak point of constitutional government IMO: it sublimates important questions into legal ones. The important work of convincing people ‘guns are important weapons against tyranny’ vs ‘guns aren’t worth the extra murders’ has nothing to do with textual debates about what exactly an ‘arm’ can refer to.
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Is there anything interesting happening out there in the world this week?
I probably wouldn't know, since I use this site for news.
The war in Ukraine drags on. The conflict in Gaza drags on. Pride month drags on. A few people were shot at Juneteenth celebrations, but not enough to invite a lot of attention. There are some marginal improvements in LLMs. The Supreme Court has ruled on some things, and some posters have done write ups for them. There were some blog posts put up as top level comments. They probably got more engagement than they would have on people's personal blogs, anyway. I vaguely remember some disgruntled writing about relationships.
Anyway, I'm not sure it's just the message board, so much as the actual world that's in a bit of a slump.
Well that's certainly a news filter.
One of the things I use this site for is trying to find some balance to news that sounds really bad for the right when reported by mainstream/left-leaning sources. Very few such news items have gotten any discussion at all here in the past several months. Of course, I could write my own effortposts to try to get the discussion going and I don't, so this is partially my own fault.
What are some of the things you are thinking of? (No need to write at length, I'd give my thoughts on a short list.)
Hmm... I definitely remember thinking that multiple times, but I don't remember specifically about what. Some general categories:
Honestly, I've hardly paid attention to all of those. My general perception of the trials was that the document one was real, but the others were mostly politically motivated, conviction notwithstanding.
I haven't looked at project 2025, really. I should. Any concerns you find particularly worrying? I know people are concerned about the one day dictator thing, but my read on that is that he's honest on that: he wants to do a lot on day one, not seize power.
I haven't seen the gaffes (except the shark vs. electrocution one, but that mostly just seemed like him rambling on with an idea that didn't make sense, not age issues). I'd guess that Trump is more competent than Biden, but that's purely vibes. I'm not a huge fan of 80-year-olds in the white house either way.
I'd be happy to be elucidated on any of these. I expect to vote Trump, but that's more just because I think Republicans will handle things better in office (student loans, affirmative action, general wokery, maybe foreign policy). I'd love if someone shrunk the government and put substantial effort into fixing the debt problem and reducing welfare, but it sounds like none of those will be happening any time soon (Republicans are slightly more likely, but really not very. It'd be unpopular and anger the old people, who vote red.). I know people are worried about Trump doing political prosecutions and lawfare, but I honestly think that's less likely when Republicans are in control, given the occurrences against Trump, Musk, Alex Jones, Bannon, etc. I do think the events surrounding January 6th (the Pence stuff, not the riot stuff) were pretty bad, though, and wouldn't have minded too much if the supreme court had ruled that he could be taken off the ballot for that under the 14th amendment, though I'm not quite convinced that it was an insurrection.
What are the reasons that you would point to voting for Biden/not voting for Trump?
The documents trial definitely seems like the most clear-cut case. And there's been drips of really bad-for-Trump-sounding headlines like yesterday "Special counsel probed Trump Mar-a-Lago trip that aides 'kept quiet' weeks before FBI search: Sources". The /r/politics commentariat is pretty convinced Trump and Kushner literally sold classified information to foreign adversaries, but I'd like to think if the government had anything resembling proof of a crime of that magnitude they'd actually indict them on it.
I'm not sure how much to read into it as really different from his first term, but it sounds like a more organized attempt to destroy the functioning of the federal government, so possibly even more effective at stopping a lot of important government functions. Not sure exactly how this interacts with the Chevron Deference case that presumably will get a Supreme Court opinion in the next day or two.
The above bleeds into the general policy issues that are more Republican Party related than Trump-specific: a Republican Party controlled federal government effectively means a 4-year pause on any chance to make improvements in anti-trust, climate/energy, environmental regulations, transportation, voting, public health, healthcare, USPS, IRS (e.g. Direct File), and I'm sure more areas that didn't come to mind writing this list. I don't expect to fully agree with Democratic Party policies, but I can generally expect them to not be actively trying to make things worse and there's a possibility of convincing them to do things better.
Trump's foreign policy in practice didn't seem to be majorly different, but he seems a lot more likely to do something stupid. And with the active wars in Ukraine and Palestine there's more opportunities for him to do real damage.
There's also some culture war-y issues that I'm likely shielded from living a Blue state, although could cause problems if I ever travel to/through a Red state. But a Republican Department of Education following Florida's lead could make it difficult for many of my friends to keep their jobs as people who are both teachers and queer. And many Red states making it difficult for people trying to have children to access healthcare and some national level politicians talking about want to make federal laws along the same lines make me worry about friends who want to get pregnant in the next few years. Also, more Republican appointments to the Supreme Court, among other problems, possibly results in Obergefell being overturned, although I'm not sure how that interacts with the Respect for Marriage Act.
It's good that someone is voting on national issues. I'd love to do so, but I think that would be naive of me.
The Democrats have made pleasant noises about high speed trains and carbon reduction, but in spite of the billions spent on CAHSR and Biden's electric charging stations, zero passengers have ridden CAHSR and only one charging station per billion dollars spent has been built. Millions of DEI hires have probably been made though.
Similarly, I'm sure pleasant noises will be made about anti-trust, but they will only go after political enemies, and big donors like Google will remain unscathed (if they don't actually get given a subsidy or tax break). "Health" funding will of course go to more DEI hiring. "Education" funding won't go to my kids, it will go to forgiving the student loans of AWFLs.
At this point the mask is off.
At this point, it's pretty obvious the Democrats will use the power of purse and prosecution to take from me and mine to benefit the PMC, so in spite of my agreement with their stated positions on so many things, I cannot vote for them.
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Yeah, /r/politics is about the most biased pool you could think of.
I think it would be different from his first term, as he'll have way more buy-in. He's generally, through his generating a cult-following and way he handled that 2022 primaries, purged the party of people not willing to be pro-Trump. But I haven't looked at specific policies, to know whether they would be bad. What sorts of important government functions?
Now, my thoughts on your list:
Improvements on anti-trust: Probably a little more pro-corporation than under the democrats, but more hostile to them than Republicans ten years ago. I'm inclined to think people hate on corporations too much, so I don't know that I would be in favor of antagonism towards the largest and most successful companies.
Improvements on climate/energy: I'm really not sure how I feel about this. Our climate policy choices have not been ideal (like why are we not at least considering releasing aerosols into the stratosphere to reduce the greenhouse effect—it's way, way cheaper than reducing emissions). But it makes sense to be worry about contaminants.
Improvements on environmental regulations: I don't have a sense of how much the EPA is doing currently. I definitely appreciate keeping things clean, and the national parks and such. At the same time, I've heard that environmental regulations can be overly burdensome and make it considerably harder and more expensive to build things. Not sure how much of that is state vs. federal.
I don't have a good feel on either of the last two how much a president gets to set policy on those vs. it being mandated by Congress. I'm guessing the president can, with cooperative agencies, do a lot.
Improvements on transportation: Like, interstate highways? I have no sense as to whose administration spends more on them.
Improvements on voting: How exactly? I wouldn't mind requiring IDs. It'd be cool if we let children vote, and parents vote on their behalf, but no one serious would do that. Anyway, overall, how does the administration affect this?
Public health/healthcare: Yeah, our system isn't great. Not sure what's better. The most important thing, on this, though, is that we need to spend WAY less on this. Health care makes up almost a third of the entire federal budget. I'd prefer privatizing a lot more of that, in general, but we certainly shouldn't be spending that much when we're in as much debt as we are, and with as large of a deficit. But no one's going to touch this, because the old people will get mad. I trust Republicans better in a pandemic, given that there seems to be no course correction from the overreaction to 2020, and that Republicans would probably buy-in slightly more to Republican-given medical advice.
USPS: I don't see why you care about this much?
IRS: Is direct file a democrat thing? I hadn't realized it was polarized.
Foreign policy: I'm not sure. I agree that Trump is a little more likely to be unpredictable, but not terribly so. I think he's viewed as more competent, or at least as having more agency (which helps on some fronts), but is more hated by Europe (which hurts on those fronts). Biden doesn't always make good decisions, as seen in Afghanistan. It wouldn't surprise me if some of the ongoing foreign conflicts would have been less likely to take place if Trump were in the white house. At the same time, it wouldn't shock me if he just ceased support of Ukraine, which—I don't know that I'm a fan of, but I haven't thought about it sufficiently. He'd be more pro-Israel, I think. I don't know what even is a good resolution in Israel.
Oh, I'd love a Republican department of education. A significant reform in how universities are funded would be great. I have no interest in spending large amounts of federal money on a bunch of radicals. School choice probably is more a state thing, but that would be great too.
I don't expect any restrictions on IVF besides a few states. It's electoral suicide. Abortion restrictions are not nationally popular, and IVF restrictions less than that.
Supreme court is fair enough, though I wouldn't mind another conservative justice, except that that might make the democrats excessively mad and fuel polarization (but I'm not sure how much I should take that seriously, since they're already willing to slander the court as it stands currently). My sense was that Sotomayor's the only liberal who would have any real chance of dying? But she's not that old. Thomas and Alito are older, but they're the most conservative justices. I don't anticipate the court moving further right in the next few years, even if the law does, as a result of their actions. You're right that that could make a difference in overturning Obergefell, if they could convince Barrett they have standing and that stare decisis doesn't apply. Kavanaugh and Roberts don't like rocking the boat, and are enough of institutionalists that they wouldn't touch it, I imagine, but another conservative could make the difference. Not sure if that would happen, though, given Gorsuch's opinion in Bostock. But the marriage act you point to would suffice.
I'll note that the conservative justices, having looked a whole lot at them the past few weeks, seem considerably more principled than the liberal ones. At least, they're less likely to vote as a bloc, and they are more likely to care about what is correct law than whether it has things they view as good or bad.
So I guess that explains why you would prefer to vote blue, but doesn't really work to motivate me.
Here's my best pitch for you:
In general, we need to be spending way less. Social security will run out within ten years, on current trends. [The federal government] is struggling to find lenders to pay off the current spending. This will eventually turn into a sovereign debt crisis, crashing the U.S. economy with presumably negative effects on the world, both economically, and as a result of reduced American influence leading to a resurgence in nations trying to be expansionary. I fully expect this to happen within the next few decades. Let's try to have less of that, and Republicans have a better chance of doing that, even if way less than ten years ago, and even if it's not that high of a chance that they do that, instead of sleepwalking off an abyss. Yes, that would involve reducing welfare, but that'll happen anyway soon, as it runs out of funding.
I really wish we had Milei.
Anyway, regarding foreign policy, our shipbuilding capacity is far, far, far, worse than china's. I expect Republicans better to handle that, but not much. (There's so much inefficiency throughout the entire department of defense.) I expect Republicans to be more willing to deter bad action by nations. Republicans are evidently the only ones who might go after the Houthis, which is definitely needed, because shipping lanes are extremely important (Economics matters. People struggling in life is bad.).
I get that that's only two things, but I think those two matter by far the most, as the economy and foreign policy are the things with the largest effects.
Four years ago, I thought Biden would make the country more united. That didn't work, so you shouldn't expect that. Rather, what you see is institutions spending social capital on leftist causes, leading to further-declining trust.
Are there major wins from Biden over the last four years that you could point to that are better than the pre-COVID state of things? (E.g. reducing inflation, crime, a better economy: those don't count unless they're better than 2019.)
As I said, I'm here to understand, not to win arguments. Not that I won't respond, just that my goal here is not to convince you that I am right and you are wrong.
The short version is: of course there aren't any major wins. As long as the Democrats don't control Congress (and there's no realistic way of that happening in 2024; not sure what the 2026 Senate map looks like, but generally mid-terms aren't great for the president's party), they can't really pass any significant legislation outside of whatever they can squeeze into a budget reconciliation bill. The downside of a Republican presidency is much higher magnitude than the upside of a Democratic presidency because the Republicans have the goal of breaking things, which is a lot easier to do without legislation (the Republicans are also unlikely to get 60 votes in the Senate).
... do you think anti-trust is just lawfare against entities the government doesn't like? Monopolies result in high prices and bad service for all of us. The government doing something about them makes life better for everyone except the monopolists. Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy by Matt Stoller is a good book on the history of the politics around monopolies. The Biden administration is the first in a while to take monopolies at all seriously.
Somewhat related, Trump actively weakened the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has been actually doing things under Biden. I'd rather the financial system actually be restructured around smaller banks, but I don't see any political appetite for that.
Geo-engineering isn't a real solution to this problem. Even if we somehow knew how to do it and were confident we had all of the unintended consequences covered and well understood, the geo-political implications of fossil fuel dependence are still bad, as is the fact that fossil fuels getting increasing expensive to extract has been a drag on our economy for 50+ years and response for most of that time was to put our fingers over our ears and say "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU". The US government likes that they understand the geopolitical situation resulting from the importance of fossil fuels and the fact that the US has a lot, so they don't want to change, but that's playing with fire and it's stupid.
The only real headline here is the EPA press release "Biden-Harris Administration Announces $3 Billion for Lead Pipe Replacement". I don't have any other details here; mostly worried about a Republican president discouraging the EPA from enforcing existing regulations, but I assume there's always new things for the EPA to worry about.
The received wisdom on transit blogs is that a Republican administration probably kills, or at least significantly reduces, federal grants on bus/rail improvements. And probably kills any meaningful discussion on improving passenger rail in general. Inter-state rail seems more obviously the federal government's purview, but in practice a lot of projects that stay within a state are partially funded by federal grants.
If the Democrats could pass legislation, they could at least try to reinstate the Voting Rights Act. There's the For the People Act, although, of course, what politicians are willing to put in a bill they know will never pass may be different than what do would do once in power. I'd like to go further and uncap the House (perhaps with multi-member districts to have easier minority party representation), but I don't really see that happening, especially as it would likely be seen as a power grab by the Democrats since it would make winning the presidency without the popular vote basically impossible in practice.
Uh, single payer? Privatized medical billing is incredibly expensive and a complete waste of everyone's time. Everyone I know in health care complains that so much of their time is spent on billing instead of actually helping patients, and it's completely unnecessary except to employ a bunch of clerical workers doing nothing useful and funneling cash away from actually providing health care.
Don't get me wrong, Biden's handling of COVID (and H5N1 for that matter) has been awful. But his policy has been to do nothing while Trump's COVID policy was to actively sabotage everything except funding the vaccine development. Trump's pandemic plan is to disband the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (Biden's plan seems to be to shrug his shoulders and say testing cows for H5N1 is too hard, so not a lot better). A sensible COVID policy would have involved prioritizing research on transmission (after vaccines and treatments, of course, but it's not like the same scientists would be studying all of those) and what it's effected by and both communicating that information clearly (e.g. "gathering inside/inside with HEPA filters/outside is fine without masks is fine a X density, with N95s that are actually available at Y density") and providing the relevant equipment (HEPA filters, N95s, etc.). Instead we are watching another possible respiratory pandemic develop and no one's bothered to so much as put some HEPA filters in our
germ factoriesschools.I'm not sure where you got the idea that I care about this much. It's one of several items that get mentioned in news articles regularly. There's the obvious problem of it looking a lot like a plot to make mail-in voting work worse to reduce turnout and possibly swing elections. But also, it's an example of Republicans trying to destroy a cheap public sector solution so they can replace it with an expensive private sector one, costing everyone more money.
This is the point in reading your reply that I'm pretty convinced I'm just being trolled, but I'll respond with charity.
Yes, Republicans have proposed defunding Direct File. They didn't want it funded in the first place: the IRS creatively interpreted the funding bill letting them "study" the possibility to run a functional, albeit very limited, pilot program. Republicans are consistently against anything that makes filing taxes easier. They have openly stated their goal is to make the process of paying taxes painful to garner political support for reducing taxes. This makes them a political ally in Intuit and H&R Block who want paying taxes to be painful so they can sell you their products that should be unnecessary.
Also, the Republicans are consistently against funding for the IRS to actually be able to enforce tax law, which in practice results in rich people paying significantly less in tax than even what they are legally obligated to pay. Which is good evidence that they don't actually want to reduce the deficit because actually collecting taxes owed would help there.
Wait, what?! What possible evidence do you have that anyone thinks Trump is competent in foreign policy? The fact that his acting like an idiot didn't accidentally start any wars, so it must have been more calculated than it looked?
Really not sure how to respond to that. College has clearly gotten too expensive. The Democrats don't seem to really be trying to address the root causes and the Republicans just want to reduce the public funding to make it even more expensive.
School choice is a scam. Private schools that are better than public schools may exist, but they're the really expensive ones that school vouchers won't meaningfully cover, so they'd effectively be bleeding public school budgets to subsidize sending upper-middle-/upper-class children to private school. For the most part, private/charter schools are worse than public schools and the rare statistics showing otherwise are misleading because they're choosing their students. An important part of the scam is that school funding per student is not actually the marginal cost to educate a student in such a way that the funding for gen-ed students effectively subsidizes the much more expensive per-student special-ed programs. Charter schools don't accept special-ed students, so school voucher programs effectively defund special-ed through subtle accounting.
Not popular, and yet they happen anyway. Maybe the Republicans would keep their religious extremists from passing such policies if they ended up with a trifecta, but it's definitely something I worry about.
And Biden wants to raise cap on the payroll tax that is causing this problem.
The debt crisis is entirely artificial and it has been Republican policy to intensify it for decades because they want an excuse to kill welfare and other government spending. We could just not cut taxes and fund the IRS enough to collect the taxes that are officially owed.
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There's a presidential debate on Thursday; there's two effort posts in the back on my head, neither of them particularly time-sensitive. There's a brewing potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. South Africa's coalition government continues to take shape following their general election. Milei in Argentina claims to have officially solved the persistent inflation problem.
I mean, yes, there is, and I post about it often enough (to the point that I sometimes worry I'm being a broken record/single-issue poster, though that's probably just unfounded anxiety), but to a fair extent we're all just reading tea leaves on the biggest question i.e. "will they do it?". Nobody knows for sure except maybe the CPC and the Five Eyes, and not even necessarily them if the CPC's plan is the highly-sensible "have it ready to go, but call GO or NO-GO based on exactly how much of a shitstorm the US election is" (which in turn means the Five Eyes can't know - "you can't know what I'm going to do if I don't know it myself", or as Sun Tzu put it, "the pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless: if it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it nor the wise make plans against it.").
I mean, I suppose I could bang on more about my advice regarding this i.e. "the chance is high enough that mild prep vs. nuclear war is extremely, obviously justified; extreme prep may be worth it if you have the means, but moderate prep outside of special cases like 'if you live in an obvious nuke target, you might want to either stop doing that or pre-arrange somewhere else to go' is usually merely an error that doesn't engage a plausible worldline". But, again, I don't like to be a broken record.
Doesn’t the invasion window end before the election?
Yes, but it's not like there can't be shit flying before the actual vote.
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I might agree; we’re in a lull right now.
Shortly before Trump is elected, the culture war is heating up. Ferguson, I Can’t Breathe, They’re Not Bringing Their Best, Lock Her Up, “this is why Trump won,” Russian collusion, Mueller report, MetToo, BAM Covid, everyone goes retarded and forgets that the original deal was just two weeks at home, masks, no masks, masks again, lab leak conspiracy, BAM The Floydenning, cities burning everywhere, He Crossed State Lines, Get The Jab, where’s your vaxpass? Trump dethroned, Jan6 unarmed rioters incriminate themselves as to their whereabouts at the time, Russia does an actual invasion and the resulting war is actually incredibly boring, Hamas gives things a go and it confuses US Jewish interests only slightly.
It’s been a veritable marathon. But now Trump is perhaps once again going to reclaim the throne, and the vibe seems to be shrugs. I’ve seen this movie before, and it was way more shrill the last time. Unless China does something, or some justice dies, I can’t see where the next topic is supposed to come from.
♪♫ We didn't start the fire! ♫♪
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evaporative cooling?
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Last week was a weird week. I can’t be too harsh because I’ve never topposted, but even though more people than ever are complaining about comment length, every toppost was a writing/research project. Also there was much, much more SCOTUSposting than normal. I saw some discussion of US tax law in there.
Looking at it now, it looks like we had 2 more effortposts made in the literal final hour of the thread’s life?
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Any twin studies on effect of poverty on criminality?
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I want to start logging my mood, then create a graphic similar to the ones on /r/dataisbeautiful but with a bunch of other stats like sleep quality, ability to focus, energy, etc. What is the best software to do this? Preferably free, open source and easy to use.
I used Reporter for iOS.
https://apps.apple.com/jp/app/reporter-app/id779697486
It allows you to survey yourself with custom questions at scheduled, semi-scheduled or random intervals. You can set the answer format for each question to be multiple choice, open, numerical etc. The app does a simple plot for each question but you can also export to CSV and do the analysis yourself.
Incidentally, the stats showed my best moods by a country mile were when I was at the pub with friends. Something of a surprise since I consider myself pretty introverted.
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Just log all of that in an excel sheet. You can use any plotting package of a programming language of your choice.
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Why block users? I have never blocked a single user on any platform. I cannot imagine getting so asschapped that I need to signal just how upset some guy on the internet made me (and I used to get into some heated arguments in spaces with no rules on decorum). The user in question may even say something interesting later, or I may want to participate in a thread that he parented.
If it's actual spam usually admins or moderators step in.
Some posters are so consistently low-value that it is a waste of time to read anything they write (and usually the discussions the provoke). Gotta protect my time!
That being said, blocks on the motte (as far as I can recall) result in very disjointed threads and so I no longer attempt to block anyone here.
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From a different perspective, I get why people would block me here and have blocked me on various forums over the last couple of decades: I’m kind of a huge asshole, and I used to drink and hang out on forums for hours just going back and forth with people constantly.
I used to post on mma.tv (close to 100k posts) and several posters there blocked me on and off over the years. Although now I’m on a discord with several of them and have met up with a few of them over the years. A couple are even close friends.
I found themotte way way back because I found a post by Scott and I started following him because he was so new and interesting, a double rarity for a forum junkie. I had zero idea what a rationalist was. Also I’m not as eloquent or intelligent as a lot of posters here. I just have my thoughts, feelings, and perspectives and they come from a much different place than a lot of people here.
Also, like someone else added, sometimes you need a break from a poster and opinion that you know will start a several hour long ‘ debate ‘ .
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I block scammers on steam. I've been tempted to block users on reddit, but usually I keep them unblocked so I can downvote their posts out of spite.
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There are some users whose comments asschap me a whole lot. But I can't live with acting on it and blocking them. Not there yet in terms of achieving true nirvanna where I don't get asschapped in the first place, maybe one day.
FWIW, it's not exactly their opinions, as someone mentioned downstream, some posters just have really annoying writing styles. I recall reading a post where some guy almost literally hedged every single statement he made. Motherfucker, just commit to it! Its's not like we can't fill in the "it seems like"'s or "I think"'s using our imagination.
I've also been blocked by 4 different users, 3 of them, never even responded to. I'm quite the asschapper myself (mostly unintentionally?).
I blame my hedging on having read Pact/Pale and getting into the habit of not speaking direct lies or opening myself up to be called on a mistake.
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Like urquan and some others here, I also tend to hedge my comments most of the time. In my case, it’s something I started to do in middle school, following the advice of Benjamin Franklin:
This method also saves embarrassment, as I think Franklin pointed out elsewhere in his autobiography, on those occasions when what you thought to be so, isn’t.
In this place, people tend to speak more dogmatically and forthrightly, but at least for me, having gotten so used to hedging my words in such a way, it would take a conscience effort for me not to.
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This was probably me.
I see my use of the motte less as an attempt to argue and more as an attempt to find common ground with other posters.
I hate argument -- always have -- but love discussion. The difference between those is that the first requires a sort of overconfidence and seeks to win, while the second requires humility and seeks to understand. My goal on the motte is to state my personal experience and views and to find common ground with other people, not to assert that my perspective is universal or try to win an argument. I find arguments infuriating and soul-destroying, not energizing or engaging.
By using phrases like "I think" or "it seems to me" or "my feeling is" or "in my experience", my goal is to demonstrate that what I'm saying isn't something I believe is universal or without exception, but something that is directionally true, an opener for discussion rather than a closed epistemic case.
But I also know, just philosophically, I have a high bar for confidence in claims. The sort of evidence that would convice someone else to make a strong claim often only convinces me to make a weak one. This isn't due to a lack of intellectual confidence -- people who know me IRL would agree to that -- but due to my high degree of skepticism of grand claims. When someone makes a claim with a great deal of rhetorical confidence, the first thing that comes to mind isn't how insightful I think the claim is, but all of the myriad possible exceptions to the claim.
I myself find more argumentative or assertive conversation styles to be grating -- it sometimes demonstrates a brash overconfidence out of bounds of what the speaker actually has reason to believe. My impression of such styles is that they alienate rather than invite exceptions and alternative perspectives; they shut down friendly discussion and perpetuate unfriendly debate.
You notice I wrote "sometimes" there; I had a draft where I simply stated "it demonstrates a brash overconfidence..." and I found that to be itself overconfident. This is precisely because there are some times where such rhetorical strength in what one says is warranted; the "sometimes" doesn't hedge the claim (reflecting a lack of confidence in the claim) so much as demonstrate my belief that this is not a universal truth but one that is true only in a subset of situations.
When I wrote essays in college there would be a section of argument but then a much longer section where I walked through all the objections and exceptions. This got me a lot of points for being thorough. Obviously I put more rhetorical emphasis, as my claims were based on evidence or deductive argument. But it also reflected my view that the world is incredibly complex, and when we make claims about social processes or the human experience or the state of other people's minds, we're almost certainly mostly wrong, even if our point lands for a subset of experiences.
It's not that I'm not commited to what I'm saying, it's that I believe the claim is true insofar as my personal experience reveals, and even then for only a subset of things. I tend to use these phrases where I'm making claims about other people's mental states, the situations in far-off places, and broad social trends: precisely the areas where the evidence-to-supposition ratio leans the most towards supposition and speculation. And since I don't have omnipotence, I express a limited or perspectival claim because that's all I'm actually able to speak to.
The point is to express epistemic uncertainty and openness to alternative perspectives.
But I understand it can be grating as a writing style if it's done too often, so I'll work on moderating that.
I think I do the same, not infrequently—I don't want to give the impression that I'm more confident than I am when I'm not entirely sure, so I'll try to qualify things to convey the right level of confidence.
I like both discussions and arguments, if they're productive.
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It wasn't you. I don't exactly recall finding your posts grating to read. They are often long and could use some getting to the point, but are smooth to read. The grating ones have a sprinkling of off statements or stylisms that are plain jarring.
On the flip side. I'm a big believe in brevity. Which often reads as overconfidence and argumentative. But I truly do believe that just like code that is too long has a smell, so does text. Preciseness and efficiency with resources is a skill (if not virtue).
I auto append hedging qualifiers to any non factual statement anyways. The sky is blue, but is the state of modern political discourse grim? Of course not, I have already prepended nothing to the first statement and "I think that" to the second statement. No one ever could make an absolute assertion about the state of modern political discourse, by DEFAULT it's a "i think" statement. If you feel the need to spell that out, I think you ought to trust the reader (and yourself) more.
I wonder if this is a product of the type of writing you've trained yourself to do. Coding trains you to be clean and efficient, jettisoning words and phrases that are insufficiently information-dense. I imagine journalists who had the fortune of coming up back when newspapers still had editors have been similarly trained to cut out the fat in service of the almighty column-inch. As a lawyer, it was beaten into me by harsh editors that those kinds of qualifiers are "weasel words" undermining my credibility to the court, so I tend to assume any grammatically qualified statement to be a bad-faith attempt to imply something they don't have the facts to back up if called out on (if you had the goods, you wouldn't bother qualifying the statement and would have simply stated it as unalloyed fact). It's often hard for me to turn this instinct off and remember that most people do not have formal training in argumentative writing.
But for someone with more of a creative writing background, who is trying to write neither efficiently nor persuasively, the connotative difference between a "thought," a "feeling," and a "fact" may often be really important. While a scientist writing for academic journals needs to be careful not to overstate their conclusions, and so will see qualifiers like "I think" as nothing less than honesty and good form.
EDIT: re-reading this comment, I may have disproved my own theory. Unnecessary qualifiers were clearly not beaten out of me: I literally started this comment with a qualified "I wonder if" in order to insulate myself from pushback stemming from the fact I hadn't put all that much thought into the idea...
You would think, but you’d be wrong. Scientific writing has an immensely irritating (to me) convention of pretending that the writer doesn’t exist as a human being.
You can see lots of ‘it may be observed that’ and ‘it is apparent that’ and sometimes a ‘we conclude’ but never ever ‘I think’ or ‘I can’t be sure but’. It’s a combination of lingering Enlightenmeny pretensions of objectivity plus a desire to deflect professional criticism.
I hated writing like that, it felt deceptive and weaselly.
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That's fair. I appreciate the advice. I struggle terribly with limiting my length, which has a lot to do with the thing about pointing out exceptions that I noted above. I also think almost exclusively in text so when I express a view it's usually the culmination of a lot of actual words floating around in my head. When I write a short text it feels... unfinished, like I've left something important out. But, with effort, I'm able to do it, so informal activity like the motte gets the long bois and actual essays or professional writing gets edited-down stuff.
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How is blocking someone a signal that someone on the internet upset you? Is there even a way to tell who's been blocked by someone?
ETA: Apparently there is. Huh.
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There are regular posters on some fora with writing styles (or the equivalent of verbal tics) that just grate on me and I got tired of seeing them.
For example, on the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang comment section, there's one guy (who, thankfully, doesn't post every day) who begins every single damn post with a hideous guffaw, "BARHARHARHARHAR!!!"
Unfortunately the Post doesn't have a block feature that I can find, so I have to just wince whenever I see that excrescence at the top of his posts.