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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   28466 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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What do folks on the Motte think of the "Waves" glasses? Here is the link, quoting the short tweet:

introducing Waves, camera glasses for creators.

record in stealth. livestream all day.

pre-order now.

The idea seems to be another in the long string of VC-funded tech companies who seek to make their name on being controversial in the beginning, and slowly becoming socially accepted. It's extremely frustrating that this profit model seems to work, but we can't deny it does (some of the time) at this point.

On the one hand I'm deeply incensed at the thought of other people recording me without my consent. On the other hand... we already waived these rights two decades ago with the Patriot Act, effectively allowing the government and major corporations to spy on us all the time with no repercussions. I personally find it hard to be sympathetic to outrage against these glasses when our nation's legal system has completely bankrupted any notion of a personal right not to be filmed anyway.

I'm not sure which side of the culture war this benefits either. As it stands, it seems a pretty predictable evolution of trends we've been seeing in privacy and technology for a while in the West.

i can see some cashiers wearing these to protect themselves from accusations of rudeness/racism.

"gimme cigarettes."

  • "of course, what type"

"newps"

  • "grabs Newports"

"no the tall pack"

  • "*grabs the tall pack"

"no the tall soft pack man. what the fuck"

  • "of course sir. one moment. *grabs newport softpack 100's". I just need to scan your ID"

"man what the fuck. fuck you. you saying I look like a kid"

  • "I'm sorry sir. I just have to scan the ID of anyone who looks under 30" (guy looks 17)

"this is bullshit. you racist man. fuck you. i wanna see your manager man. what the fuck"

  • "grabs manager"

"hey i just wanted to get cigarettes and he's acting all racist. calling me a kid. and rude too. you know how he does this?"

it's a nationwide scourge. and, wanting to avoid an escalation scene, a company is absolutely inclined to throw a peon under the bus if it means avoiding a nationwide scandal.

at some point people in low status positions whose jobs are under daily threat will start to look to technology like this to protect themselves.

Don't stores already have CCTV?

Yet another advance of the digital panopticon justified by anarcho-tyranny.

You'll get digital ID for the same reasons, you'll see.

You'll get digital ID for the same reasons, you'll see.

Will anything prevent people from simply using internet without said ID?

iirc this has already happened in South Korea.

I suppose it's only a matter of time.

Such is life.

If the management is ok with cashiers wearing cameras, they are very likely also willing to use visible video cameras for the same purpose.

If I was a manager, I would not want employees to record continuous footage on private devices. Their interests are not aligned with the store's interests. E.g. it is in the "creator's" interest if a video of fat people buying tons of unhealthy food goes viral. It is not in the interests of the store.

"I'm sorry sir. I just have to scan the ID of anyone who looks under 30" (guy looks 17)

Despite the presence of a posted sign that says that we only have to check the ID of anyone who looks under 40, management requires that we check the ID of everyone period. I'm honestly not sure how much of this is that management thinks we're too retarded to estimate people's ages and how much of it is management figuring that it'll offend people (mostly women) for us to estimate that they look over 40 regardless of accuracy.

I'm honestly not sure how much of this is that management thinks we're too retarded to estimate people's ages

There is that, of course, but I think this is just CYA from management for scenarios such as the one outlined by Westphalianpeace. Can't be accused of racism if you're scanning everyone's ID.

(Of course they still can, and will, accuse you of racism and management will still throw you under the bus despite any video evidence to the contrary because a law suit is the last thing they need and some bleeding-heart activist judge will rule that asking a potentially underage urban youth for ID is racism on the same level of voter suppression, don't you know minorities have little free time to get, or access to, forms of ID you bigot? But it's a tiny shred of protection for both the business and the employees.)

In my experience, the people who get angry about their ID getting checked aren't really correlated with race. It's mostly old men who are upset that they're aging and aren't even getting the consolation prize of not needing to get their ID checked.

I think that there is a difference. Glassholes pose a different threat to privacy than governments or big corporations.

If I am in a McDonalds, I am probably recorded by security cameras. But it is also highly probable that McDonalds will not decide upload that footage in some viral video about funny incidents at their restaurants.

Likewise, the NSA can read my text messages. But again, I don't have to worry about featuring in "best of captured texts today", at the most some perv NSA employees will have a laugh with some other pervert spooks about it.

Sure, both government and commercial entities can get hacked, so I would prefer for McDonalds to delete their videos after a week or so (and they share that incentive).

By contrast, if I am recorded by some random pervert with a cell phone, the probability that I will land on the internet is much higher. This is why people react much stronger about cell phones pointed at them than about security cameras.

If someone openly records, my instinct is to tolerate it if they are clearly recording something other than me, and just move out of the picture. By contrast, if some asshole covertly records people without any extenuating context, I very much hope they will make "glassholes got their cameras and jaws broken collection, part 563".

Yeahhh...

I think there's a lot of work being done by cultural norms of "we are recording you for safety and security purposes, and we will never publish footage except to advance those goals." Hell, nobody is even going to look at that footage except to detect the criminal activity.

And we've been acclimatized out of those norms as high quality digital cameras are now everywhere.

And the understanding of 'privacy' is a bit ambiguous.

For me, I would agree that "I have the right to stop anyone from recording me while I'm out in public" is stupid. But, "I have a reasonable expectation that my face/identity won't be published on the internet if I'm not doing anything dangerous or illegal" is a decent standard, I think.

Otherwise, we kind of move towards a world where everyone dons a disguise out in public just to maintain some semblance of anonymity.

Any controversy about, say, recordings in bathrooms is going to go through the roof if these things become commonplace. You can (maybe) grab some pervert with a phone in the women's bathroom or changing room, but someone just wearing a pair of spectacles?

Otherwise, we kind of move towards a world where everyone dons a disguise out in public just to maintain some semblance of anonymity.

Perhaps the political valence of wearing a facemask in public spaces will do a complete 180. Or better yet, burqas for everyone, not just women.

Isn't this basically just Google Glass?

I mean, I wouldn't allow these in my house, but we're used to the idea of being recorded all the time in public. Security cameras are everywhere(and one needs no special permission to put them up), there's people livestreaming, taking selfies with others in the background, etc.

Cameraphones were what killed the privacy expectation. Not these things.

Twitch is basically softcore pornography at this point. So much "content" revolves around implicitly or explicitly referencing sex, and even the most innocent looking female streamers are apparently sex-crazed addicts or are at least pretending to be?

I have a very dim view of livestreaming.

I really, REAAALLLY despise that for any given popular female internet figure, there's at least even odds that their 'main' account, where-ever that may be, is the top of a sales funnel that leads to some kind of sex work at the bottom.

I also despise that the 'meta' for such accounts is almost always to pretend not to have a boyfriend even if they are fucking married, and to deflect but not reject the misguided romantic ambitions of their followers.

And the "joyous" thing about people streaming the entirety of their lives all the time is that when they end up having a meltdown, its aired publicly for drama points too.

Its about the most toxic cycle of drama begetting drama for a hapless but raptly attentive audience while producing nothing of value in the process I could imagine.

Of course, that's humans for you, the evolutionary pressures of tracking social drama for surviving the ancestral environment makes it so we fucking LOVE following popular train wrecks.

Sounds like the streamers and their watchers really deserve each other.

Personally, I have never really gotten watching other people play video games. I can certainly believe that people, despite having literally an internet full of all sorts of porn at their fingertips, nevertheless prefer hot women streaming video games. I can also see a race-to-the-bottom dynamic happening where the best point to make money ends up being just shy of violating the content policy of your platform.

I think that the starting point of sex work is debatable. It is well known that people on TV are on average hotter than the general population. In the broadest sense, this could already be called sex work -- of you got a job reading the news because you are a nine rather than a five, then part of your job is just looking hot, and there is a continuous path from that into softcore and eventually hardcore porn. If you are streaming while wearing makeup and elaborate sexy clothes, then you are already accepting that part of your appeal is that guys will be aroused by your videos.

Presumably, a large part of your income will not be from the people who watch one or two videos of you gaming, but from the small minority which develops an unhealthy parasocial relationship with you. By not having a paywalled explicit channel, you are likely leaving most of the monetarization opportunities on the table. So getting an explicit account where you sell videos of your feet or tits likely has a big payoff.

Sounds like the streamers and their watchers really deserve each other.

Its fair to say that's almost a symbiotic relationship. It just seems obvious that they'd all be a bit better off/happier in a different equilibrium.

There are in fact 'non-toxic' streamers and communities out there, of course!

Its just more common than not that once streamers 'get big' its a ticking clock on when they get outed as either terrible people or they have their big obvious 'sell out' moment.

Getting outed as a terrible person might not even hurt their popularity (I'm thinking of Dr. Disrespect, but there's a lot of them).

I can certainly believe that people, despite having literally an internet full of all sorts of porn at their fingertips, nevertheless prefer hot women streaming video games.

There definitely seems to be a factor where a lot of normies are wired up to perceive themselves as part of a community and having a 'friendship' of sorts with livestreamers, since at least they can 'interact' (using that term pretty damn lightly) with that person and see their impact on the streamer's show.

If you are streaming while wearing makeup and elaborate sexy clothes, then you are already accepting that part of your appeal is that guys will be aroused by your videos.

Yep.

By not having a paywalled explicit channel, you are likely leaving most of the monetarization opportunities on the table. So getting an explicit account where you sell videos of your feet or tits likely has a big payoff.

YEP. I've noticed this is a path that some streamers have taken. Creating actual content is HARD. So a women might get popular for being good at a game, or she's pretty but stays very modest. But how to keep interest in your channel going? See my point about the zero-sum attention economy.

But over time if the popularity starts to taper (or she just wants more money) she'll follow the incentive gradient to risque cosplays, to bikini/pool streams, to lewd but not explicit content, then there's the decent shot she goes from there to straight up porn (and, who knows, maybe escorting behind the scenes). And every step of the way generally being coy and plausibly deniable ("just getting more confident in my body, guis!").

World's oldest profession, after all. Of course when I say "incentive gradient" I mostly mean her overly invested fans who, if they feel like they don't have a shot at dating her, will probably be satisfied just getting to see her naked eventually.

I looked for the biggest streamers on twitch and they seem to be almost all male. Pokimane is 13th biggest, Amouranth is 34th which surprised me. I think they're the only 2 women in the top 50, eyeballing it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitch_channels

I think that since the females are creating the drama non-twitch viewers hear about, we're getting an inaccurate view of the platform. I don't really use twitch and certainly don't use it like the normal twitch user. I doubt many here use twitch that much either except in niche usecases. It seems to be overwhelmingly dudes playing games.

I think they're the only 2 women in the top 50

There's also #25 AriGameplays, #29 Rivers_gg

Well, Amouranth specifically moved to competing site Kick in exchange for a bunch of money. Looks like she only recently returned.

And not for nothing, Kick's whole value proposition vs. Twitch is that its more lenient with the content it allows, since they are trying to drive traffic to gambling sites.

Comparing streamer popularity by follower count is a misleading metric. Several of these accounts amassed millions of followers because they were already popular on another platform, like YouTube, and the people who watched them there would create Twitch accounts just to "follow" them. This explains how someone like Myth, the twentieth most followed account, has only a fraction of viewers on his livestream compared to streamers with far less followers. Others accumulated a large amount of followers when they very popular for a relatively brief amount of time and now have fallen off, so to speak.

I'll give a concrete example. Ninja is #2 on that list, with 19 million followers. The streamer I'll compare him to, Emiru, has 1.8 million. However, when you look at how many views their recent broadcasts have received (Emiru, Ninja), you'll see that Emiru far outpaces him:

Emiru (excluding today's and the two broadcasts that were under 10 minutes): 683K, 218K, 318K, 402K, 426K.

Ninja (excluding the non-gaming stream: 121K, 93.1K, 154K, 88.7K, 117K.

Same with the streamer I linked to in my original comment, ExtraEmily. She routinely pulls 15,000 to 20,000 concurrent viewers, which I'd estimate puts her near the very top of streamers in North America, despite having less than a million followers.

OK, sure. But if I go here (The Highest Peak Viewership Twitch Streamers for this month), it still looks like a total gamer sausage-fest. https://www.twitchmetrics.net/channels/peak

Or here, I see Emiru. She's got 25th most views this month. There's another woman at number 43, extraEmily that you mention and eyeballing it, that's it for women. The rest are all men. https://www.twitchmetrics.net/channels/viewership

There are some huge female youtubers few adults have ever heard of: Anastasia Radzinskaya and Kids Diana Show. They're children and do songs for kids, hit em with the autoplay algoroithm, get hundreds of millions of views. Besides them and some musicians youtube is pretty barren of women.

Twitch is like youtube, chess, sport, business, science, maths, war, standup comedy and much else besides, top talent is male.

You're not wrong. I want to argue that viewership by hour is not a good metric because because men usually, from my experience, stream about 1.5 as often as women do in a similar period. Or peak viewership is kinda just decided by twitch itself based on who they put on the front page (and people covering e-sports are going to get that over women who just simply don't cover e-sports). And who knows what the real numbers of any of this are because of how botted everything probably is.

But then there's the twitch payout leaks and they're pretty much the same thing as those lists. 99% men. But "top talent" is pretty reaching, it's just internet ratings, or are we prepared to say that television's top talent is Shonda Rhimes?

I suspect its similar to the amount of people that want to play a male vs female character in a videogame when they have the choice, apparently the vast majority pick male every time. Men are probably the largest demo here and prefer to play as a man and watch men. I remember hearing Northernlion say a few months back that 3% of his viewing audience is female on Youtube.

Though, I don't think it's that hard to have a good number of women to follow on either platform though like I said before they put out less content and also drop out way more often whether retiring, maternity leave, or simply stopping streams apropos of nothing. It's kinda like how women have three set matches and men have five in tennis. If women's matches were five sets then there'd be like five women in the world who would be capable of competing. I have exactly two women I follow who consistently put out content and aren't going offline for weeks or months at a time for maternity, vacations, or mental/physical health breaks or just in general being flaky. And I'm not saying that it'd be better if they did because women are generally better at communicating with the audience and you don't get the summit1g playing a game for 20 minutes of complete silence then dying and saying "aw damn" and going back into the queue in complete silence but maybe you would if they tried as hard as guys do.

EDIT: To give a more concrete example of why I think numbers are botted look at Rifftrax and MST3K in the leaked numbers. For as long as I can remember MST3K had at least 100 more viewers than Rifftrax averaging around 600-700 whereas Rifftrax had 400-500. When the latest MST3K kickstarter happened the numbers went up to 1000 and stayed that way for like six months before dropping back to 600 until this year when they finally dropped below Rifftrax and now the numbers are about the same for Rifftrax and MST3K has about half that. The payout numbers make it seem like Rifftrax is 5x more popular than MST3K and as someone that switches between the channels it's easy to notice that Rifftrax's chat is about 5x faster/more populated than MST3K's and has been even when it had double the amount of viewers.

I don't even think it was nefarious on the channel's part I think someone just wanted to support MST3K by paying for bot viewers. I also wouldn't be surprised if people were paying for bot viewers on Rifftrax as well but it's just been more consistently the same. It's hard to find an apples to apples comparison for what viewers are willing to pay so it'd be hard to make a similar comparison to other types of channels but this is probably as close as you'd get.

I can’t remember the last time I saw an “indie vtuber” who didn’t have an OF or a Patreon where she sells audio porn, it seems to be a requirement.

By indie vtuber, you mean the ones who aren't with hololive or phaseconnect or whatever? Because the big vtubers are pretty tame.

I watched two and neither are sexual at all, though naturally they get huge amounts of pornographic fan art made of them anyway. World away from amouranth and co.

Indie meaning non-hololive yeah. Just random women with their own channels.

There is massive latent demand for sex in the economy. Twitch generates about $2 billion in gross revenue annually. OnlyFans generates about $6 billion. It's just a better buisiness model if you are a young woman streamer to be titillating.

There is massive latent demand for sex in the economy.

Yeah, imagine all the sex people are having with each other for free. It's definitely an inefficient system, a massive untapped market that is worth billions or even trillions if you can achieve perfect price discrimination.

There is massive latent demand for sex in the economy.

Fixed it.

Microsoft used to sell a very geeky product that was basically a camera on a pendant. It took a photo every 5 minutes to create a ‘life diary’. I quite liked the idea and it would be cool to have an updated product that could function similarly - at the moment so much of life just disappears into the fog.( What were you doing three days ago? How much do you remember?)

Obviously uploading these images to social media is where the trouble comes in IMO. It would also need a ‘do not record’ for private matters.

Stills at a rate of one per five minutes is much less of a privacy nightmare. I mean, you probably should not wear them for most jobs, but recording full video with sound is much more likely to catch material which will go viral.

The ad felt like this to me: "you know how if you get embarrassed at a party, everyone will know? We can make sure you stay embarrassed forever, we have the technology!". I guess I'm not the target demographic.

Apropos of nothing, what's the legality of carrying IR jammers around at all times and blasting the cameras of people filming you with lasers?

Hah! If you don't damage property or health I don't see why it would be illegal. I'm in. Where's the kickstarter?

I would expect some government intervention, they'd want you to ensure it only works on glassholes and doesn't affect security cameras somehow. Because otherwise it's just a free crime app.

If you damaged their property or health, and I was on the jury, I would be much inclined to acquit.

The law in most of the West (maybe world) says that you can effectively record strangers in public without permission with a few exceptions. If this becomes popular enough it'll eventually change to require the filming party to have a large or obvious camera / filming apparatus. It only doesn't bother people because it's uncommon.

In a way, it's similar to the shelved 'search for anyone with a picture of their face' Facebook feature that Mark never released because they knew governments would destroy them for it; that's been possible for 5+ years now but the consequences are so obvious to Meta that there's no point in releasing it.

The law in most of the West (maybe world) says that you can effectively record strangers in public without permission with a few exceptions.

Is this true in the EU? I'm not the most aware of it's specific laws, but it seems like something GDPR and friends might frown upon. The EU is a non-trivial part of "The West", although I know the UK likes it's CCTV.

Probably EU countries have their own individual laws on this. I know that outside the EU, in Switzerland, you are allowed to record in public, but not allowed to publish photos or videos of people without their consent at all.

(This is interpreted as recordings where a person is the focus of the image, so if you take a picture of your friend at tourist spot and there happen to be some random people visible in the background, that's still okay.)

That means live streaming in public is essentially illegal in Switzerland, as is the popular genre of Youtube influencers harassing people in public to get a rise out of them, including those obnoxious 1st amendment “auditors” that are intentionally annoying people.

I actually really like the idea of camera glasses that are always on, so I can capture cool moments that I see. Because too often I try to fish out my phone and it's already over. I actually got the snapchat snaptacles (which were almost exactly the same concept) back in the day but they were absolutely garbage to use.

The problem right now actually isn't cultural, but tech. Think of the amount of battery life a gopro gets - latest models get 2-3 hours recording at 1080p, and the unit is quite bulky. There's also the issue of overheating which is sometimes a complaint for gopros. Now try to cram all that into a tiny wearable that you plan on wearing for all waking hours.

It's just not possible to make camera glasses that people actually want to use.

The problem right now actually isn't cultural, but tech

The problem is absolutely cultural, in that I for one would fight hard to ban anyone from having a device which automatically records people like this one.

is it just the discrete/covert nature of the device that bothers you? because 90ish percent of people on the street already have a HD camcorder in their pocket at all times.

People are becoming more and more aware that using these cameras to record any manner of material can result in either financial gain and or positive notoriety. There is clearly a market for these always on recording devices and i just wonder why the nanny state needs to get involved on this one.

I understand defending these things is an existential concern for you Wave_Existence, but come on, this is the nanny state? The fourth amendment does still exist right?

Not a lawyer of course, but invoking the constitution in a situation where people could absolutely use this equipment legally seems insane to me. When the government demands i dont do something that is currently legal because it makes you feel a little uncomfortable, yeah thats pretty close to when i would start calling it a nanny state.

existential concern

i hope you haven't wasted any mental bandwidth forming an opinion of me, i certainly haven't of you.

Lmao so cutting! And so ironic. The product is called waves, your name is Wave_Existence. Ease your mind, that was the extent of the mental bandwidth I expended on you.

Was it the nanny state when the government updated its laws about child pornography distribution in response to the development of p2p technology? When is it sane to invoke the constitution in your eyes, if not when there is a question about the potential legality of an action or technology?

I was using it colloquially to refer to the right to privacy, sorry for confusing you. But do you have any reason - at all - to assume the government won't use privately made recordings like they have tried to with ring cameras and bodycam footage?

It doesn't make me feel a little uncomfortable, it infringes upon a principle I grew up with and will fight for no matter how sisyphean the task. You might live such a tame and banal life you have no need for a general expectation of privacy in your private life, but I do not.

The product is called waves

I didn't pay attention to that. shit i regret my jump straight to bitchy comebacks, i thought you were implying i was a big fan of recording people. Sorry for that.

That said, I still don't see how this, used in public, is an infringement upon your right to privacy as the current US legal structure exists. The problem, and what makes your privacy tangibly less whole, is the panoptic media aggregation and distribution services like Facebook Tiktok Youtube Twitch etc, those are what we should be up in arms over. Not a guy with a tiny camera strapped to his face.

The government using info they shouldnt have via parallell construction or similar is a different issue, but trust that i'm no fan of it. I just see these glasses as a small, nearly insignificant advancement that in no way changes the dire underlying situation with personal information rights.

There's a reason that I specifically excluded visual-light cameras from my display glasses project. Camera glasses have been around for a while, and you can buy them much cheaper than this (cw: anti-endorsed). We mostly just kitbashed the 'must play shutter sound' rule onto cell phone cameras and pretended it was okay, and maybe Google could have gotten away with normalizing this sorta thing culturally back in 2012 with the Glass, but today?

Forget the metaphors about concealed carry; in the modern world, this is more like having a gun pointed at whoever you're looking at, and everybody with two braincells to rub together knows it. There's a degree this is a pity -- you can imagine legitimate use cases, like exomemory or live translation of text or lipreading for captioning or yada yada, and it's bad that all of those options are getting buried because of the one-in-a-thousand asshole.

The bigger question's going to be whether, even if this never becomes socially acceptable, it'll be possible to meaningfully restrict. You can put a norm out to punch anyone who wears these things, but it's only going to get harder and harder to spot them as the tech gets better. The parts are highly specialized, but it's a commodity item in a field whose major manufacturers can't prevent ghost shifts from touching their much-more-central IP. The sales are on Amazon, and while I can imagine them being restricted more than, say, the cables that will light your house on fire, that just ends up with them on eBay. Punishing people who've used them poorly, or gotten caught, has a lot more poetry to it... and also sates no one's concerns.

The bigger question's going to be whether, even if this never becomes socially acceptable, it'll be possible to meaningfully restrict. You can put a norm out to punch anyone who wears these things, but it's only going to get harder and harder to spot them as the tech gets better.

That's a legal problem. Here in Russia, possessing a recording device that is not immediately obvious as a recording device is a crime. If you order them from AliExpress, the customs will let the cops know.

you can buy them much cheaper than this (cw: anti-endorsed).

Guarantee those specs are totally fake. You're just buying an the guts of an absolute dogshit chinese dash camera crammed into the shell vaguely in the shape of glasses.

Google glass was tried like a decade ago. This is just that, incognito, with less features, right?

To me it seems kinda lame, and POV video sucks.

So I just ate an automated 3-day reddit ban for saying we should bomb the tigrayan militants responsible for their genocidal strategy of raping and genitally mutilating women. I can't really complain about that: I was knowingly in violation of reddit's "no advocating violence" policy. I have been before, and I will be again, probably until I get permabanned, because sometimes violence is the solution. Thomas Aquinas will back me up there.

But what's interesting to me is the "automated" part. Now, I've faced my fair share of human disciplinary action before. Sometimes it's fair, sometimes its not. But either way, the humans involved are trying to advance some particular ideological goal. Maybe they blew up because Ii contradicted their policies. Maybe they developed a nearly autoimmune response to any kind of NSFW post becauseof prior calamities. (Looking at you, spacebattles mods.) Maybe they genuinely wanted to keep the local standard of discussion high. But reddit's automated system is clearly not designed for any of that. Rather, its most fundamental goal seems to be the impartial and universal enforcement of reddit's site-wide rules to the best of its capability.

I agree with yudkowsky on the point that an "aligned" AI should do what we tell it to do, not what is in some arbitrary sense "right." So I'm also not going to complain about how "cold and unfeeling AI can't understand justice." That would be missing the the forest for the trees. It's not that AI aren't capable of justice, it's that the reddit admins didn't want a just AI. They wanted, and made, a rule-following AI. And since humans created the rules, by their impartial enforcement we can understand what their underlying motivations actually are. That being, ensuring that reddit discussions are as anodyne and helpful as possible.

Well, really it's "make as much money as possible." But while AI are increasingly good at tactics-- at short tasks-- they're still very lacking at strategy. So reddit admins had to come up with the strategy of making anodyne discussions, which AI's could then implement tactically.

The obvious question is: "why?" To which the obvious response is, "advertisers." And that would be a pretty good guess, historically. Much of reddit's (and tumblr's, and facebook's, and pre-musk twitter's) policy changes have been as a result of advertisers. But for once, I think it's wrong. Reddit drama is at a low enough ebb that avoiding controversy doesn't seem like it should be much of a factor, and this simultaneously comes as a time where sites like X, bluesky, and TikTok are trying to energize audiences by tacitly encouraging more controversy and fighting.

Which brings me to my hypothesis: that reddit is trying to enhance its appeal for training AI.

Everyone knows that google (and bing, and duckduckgo, and yahoo) have turned to shit. But reddit has retained a reputation for being a place to find a wide variety of useful, helpful, text-based content. That makes it a very appealing corpus on which to train AI-- and they realized that ages ago, which lead to them doing stuff like creating a paid API. This automated moderation style isn't necessarily the best for user retention, or getting money through advertisement, but it serves to pre-clean the data companies can feed to AI. It's sort of an inverse RLHF. RLHF is humans trying to change what response strategies LLMs take by making tactical choices to encourage specific behaviors. Reddit moderation, meanwhile is encouraging humans to come up with strategic adaptations to the tactical enforcement of inoffensive, helpful content. And remember what I said about humans still being better at strategy? This should pay out massive dividends in how useful reddit is as training data.

Coda:

As my bans escalate, I'm probably going to be pushed off reddit. That's probably for the best; my addiction to that site has wasted way too much of my life. But given the stuff I enjoy about reddit specifically-- the discussions on wide-ranging topics-- I don't see replacing reddit with X, or TikTok, or even (exclusively) the motte. Instead, I'm probably going to have to give in and start joining discord voicechats. And that makes me a little sad. Discord is fine, but I can't help but notice that I'm going dow the same path that so many repressed 3rd worlders do and resorting to discussion on unsearcheable, ungovernable silos. For all the sins of social media, it really does-- or at least did serve as a modern public square. And I'll miss the idea (if not necessarily the reality) that the debates I participated in could be found, and heard, by a truly public audience.

My story about getting banned by reddit was really strange.

I was on /r/anime participating in a subreddit watch of Re:Zero. The only important thing about that show is the main character has the ability to go back in time by dying, he returns to a set "save point" defined by the plot.

At one point I said " Try to get your sword repaired it's really useful for the small amount of fighting you can do, but more importantly you can use it to Kill yourself" which got me a temp ban on reddit.

Meanwhile this phrase didn't even get a peep

"Get a knife and be ready to stab myself to death if things are going south"

So it must have been a bot.

What was incredible of course is that the /r/anime mods apparently messaged the admins defending me and my post. This is mind you a 13 million user forum yet the mods feel really that strongly about defending users from admins.

IDK why the mods in /r/anime are like this but it's convinced me that it's the best modded subreddit by a large margin and it remains one of the only subreddits I actually use. (that and /r/slatestarcodex)

It's possible - perhaps probable - that you were banned by an AI. Reddit is using LLMs to detect and automatically punish users for "violent" language. So you have to be careful quoting song lyrics, or politicians, or people you don't like, etc. In my experience they've just been warnings but if it was bad enough it might be a short ban.

Oh, I know for a fact that it was an AI. What's interesting to me is the exact nature of the AI. I can trivially imagine designing an AI moderator to actually promote community health; using strictly existing techniques, for example, you could prompt the moderator to consider previous user posts, and also to make public verdicts that can be upvoted/downvoted to influence future behavior on that user. (Like, if the moderator comments are broadly disagreed with, it self-deletes, but if the moderator "notices" it has a history of commenting specific types of well-regarded warnings to a specific user it's more likely to take action.)

But as I explained, reddit clearly isn't trying to improve community health.

Speaking of which, /u/JTarrou, what did you get the mop for?

Oh, a throwaway line about NPR hosts getting flogged.

I suspect my recent comment of the week about race and IQ to be the real culprit, but they got Capone for tax evasion.

Kind of a tangential question but

What’s the source on high IQ people becoming less attractive looking? I’ve only ever read that it’s positive for men and neutral for women

There's disagreement on that, but I'm going with my personal opinion and experience. There's a lot of studies, and if you want to pick your definitions and operationalizations, you can find damn near anything you want. Current meta-studies are saying there's no relationship at all between attractiveness and IQ, or maybe only on the lower end. I don't believe them, in part because I've met Scott (and a couple other geniuses).

I think humans whose genetic expression maximizes any one trait are going to have trade-offs in other areas. Height is correlated with athleticism, to a point. At some height, you can't move properly, so the tallest man in the world never plays basketball. Same thing with geniuses. At the real high reaches of IQ, these people are statistical freaks, and they generally look like it.

To date, I've personally met maybe five or six people smarter than me, and they are all much, much uglier. To the point a few look retarded/disabled. Even beyond the physical stuff you can see in a picture, their mannerisms, twitches and behaviors would be hugely off-putting to most people.

My theory is that attractiveness is generally correlated with IQ, but this horseshoes at the ends of the distribution.

Seems odd, what’s getting “traded off” for higher IQ? My understanding was mutational load is why higher IQ = better looking, as more mutations generally makes you uglier and dumber

As I understand it there is a large cluster of people whose strengths and weaknesses come out to around average. There is a somewhat smaller cluster of people who are dumber, less athletic, uglier, etc than average, but well within normal variations. There is a smaller cluster of people who are about a standard deviation above in every trait, and an even smaller cluster that is more than two standard deviations below in every trait(tards are usually ugly and unathletic to go with it), but no corresponding cluster of people more than two standard deviations above average on every metric. Looking back at the people noticeably smarter than me who I've met, they've been overwhelmingly male so caveat about judging their looks, but their appearances follow the same distribution as everyone else's. The one woman was not very pretty but more of a slightly below average than ugly.

This isn't DnD where you have a set number of character points to spend. Some people get a better hand than others. There are beautiful, highly athletic people with genius level IQ. Not very many of them, but they exist.

To date, I've personally met maybe five or six people smarter than me

You don't get out much I take it?

How ugly do Nobel Prize winners look? I think it's a pretty standard finding that there is only a small positive correlation, but if you look at say top 20% IQ vs. bottom 20% I think it's pretty clear who looks better. (Obesity make this all the more obvious.)

but this horseshoes at the ends of the distribution.

As Yud would put it, the tails come apart.

I don't think being wildly intelligent is negatively correlated with physical attractiveness, the way extreme height is negatively attributed with athleticism, for both reasons of physics and often resulting from a disorder.

Here's why you're probably less smart than you think you are:

Height's relationship to athleticism is a pretty bad example because those are both physical things. Height comes with performance tradeoffs due to physics, and in certain sports that is very apparent. Being extremely tall also tends to come with greater fragility and various health ailments at higher rates because it's "out of spec."

Intelligence and beauty are completely different things. There's no inherent trade offs for the shape of one's face with the performance of one's mind. There's also no reason to believe sexual selection would totally divorce the two.

People also try to believe that being really smart means you also are not as good as various mental things, or have a higher risk of mental health problems.

Which to my knowledge is all bogus cope because most humans don't like to realize that life is actually just unfair and it's not a like a video game with a finite amount of skill points for a character.

In my observations, the median person on the street is far uglier than the median person working (to filter out the obvious confounder of youth if students were considered) at a university. I think any effect to the contrary people notice might just be an artifact of attention - it is easy to ignore the ugly and unremarkable people in everyday life and only notice and remember the beautiful ones, while the exceptionally smart people will be remembered regardless of their appearance.

I think- university employees being a small group that's super confounded- it'd be better to compare freshmen at state flagships to seniors in high school. There's not that big of an age difference and state flagships usually take only the top x%.

People who work at a university aren't nearly smart enough to be on the far side of that slope.

Okay, fine, take the quantitative fields from among the Nobel prize winners vs. some random German environmentalist club (first non-university picture on Google Images found by searching "Bielefeld [group photo]"). Do you actually think the latter look more attractive on average?

(...or are Nobel Prize winners still an insufficiently exclusive bunch? Who is an example of the tendency you are talking about, then?)

Obvious fake is obvious: everyone knows Bielefeld doesn’t exist. Try again with a real German town.

There's disagreement on that, but I'm going with my personal opinion and experience. There's a lot of studies, and if you want to pick your definitions and operationalizations, you can find damn near anything you want. Current meta-studies are saying there's no relationship at all between attractiveness and IQ, or maybe only on the lower end. I don't believe them, in part because I've met Scott (and a couple other geniuses).

There's certainly a relationship once you get into abnormal cases; there are a number of conditions (e.g. Downs) which result in low attractiveness and low IQ. But checking out Nobel Prize winners (including finding pictures of them when younger in many cases) doesn't result in a list of uggles.

In computer science and related fields, I can say that Theodore Kowalski (fsck), Rob Pike, Vint Cerf, and Benoit Mandelbrot didn't have obvious twitches.

I think humans whose genetic expression maximizes any one trait are going to have trade-offs in other areas.

Statistics says that it will look that way even if they don't.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dC7mP5nSwvpL65Qu5/why-the-tails-come-apart

A lot of pushback on the least important part of a month-old post for a pack of people who like to consider themselves smarter than the average bear.....

Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.

Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.

And don't look up more recent pics of Kelly LeBrock.

Tangentially, addressing your argument, absent doing away with gatekeeping good careers behind college degrees entirely, shouldn't a more moral society water down college degrees so that black people can get them just as easily as anyone else?

I prefer doing away with gatekeeping good careers behind college degrees entirely. I see it as a civil rights violation, and we can just add it to the list of things you aren't allowed to discriminate on.

What's the alternative?

Employers having to pay for training. This is pretty normal for skilled blue collar workers, but getting into the program might require previous academics- electrical apprenticeships generally want to know your high school algebra grade.

For lots of white collar workers I'm not sure how that system could work in practice that doesn't look a lot like a university. Are doctors going to work their way up from being CNA's?

To college degree requirements? Presumably focused assessment with demonstrable applicability to the job at hand, relatively low-level starting positions with very rapid advancement, and so on.

I’ve worked at a place like that. It was nice.

If the degree is so watered down anyone can get one, what good is it?

the way I parse JTarrou's argument, the degree is already not good for anything that useful

Said no competent engineer outside software engineering.

What makes 'outcomes are approximately equal by racial group' a higher value than meritocracy?

when @JTarrou writes

But IQ is a very limited test, and it predicts only one thing. The capacity for academic achievement. It does not predict talent, ambition, honesty, decency, morality, high income or high achievement in general. In fact, the true IQ test can only be given to small children, because it's a relative predictor of how they might do in school in the future, nothing else. Higher IQ scores mean essentially "learns academic stuff faster".

and

So if black people have lower average IQ scores, and IQ scores college aptitude, and we're discriminating based on college degrees........I think we can locate rather precisely where the systemic racism is happening.

I think he's saying college degrees are not a signal for merit. The fact that our society reorganized itself to require a college degree, and that black people have a harder time getting college degrees is a sign of real systemic racism at work and leftists are to blame because they eat college degree credentialism shit up.

It's a provocative claim because it's both embracing race-IQ but also dismissing IQ as not that solid a predictor. Therefore I'm asking if he'd be okay with actually just giving degrees out with participation trophy energy.

IQ is a great predictor of scholastic ability.

It is not a direct substitute for the "merit" necessary for a decent job. By making it so, we hide our discrimination against black people inside our discrimination against dumb people.

It's worse than that.

IQ is a better predictor of job performance than a college degree is. (Especially now, when the vast majority of colleges aren't selective anymore.)

Education is usually just a proxy for general intelligence on the job market. We could just cut out the credentialist middle man, but that's not going to make things better on the disparate impact front.

Meritocracy is, in some very real sense, "discrimination against dumb people" because, while intelligence is not all one needs, it's the single biggest thing in most cases.

Meritocracy is, in some very real sense, "discrimination against dumb people"

And in that same sense, countries that grant their citizens broad liberties and freedoms discriminate against the stupid and virtueless.

"Ruining it for everyone" is the excuse to socialize your private virtue for those people.

Possibly minimizes the chance of serious social unrest.

In what sub?

Edit: Blocked and Reported. Just as I suspected.

https://old.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/1ltkjsp/comment/n2e9czv/

Oh yea @JTarrou, that kinda talk will get you banned on reddit. Why do you bother?

It's like a freedom of navigation patrol but for free speech and scientific awareness.

Why did you suspect that?

Because (A) I've seen JTarrou post in that sub and (B) it's a sub that allows wrongthink. Usually trans wrongthink, but it's actually a pretty solid free speech zone.

For the other 98% of black people, just ask to see their degree.

USA has affirmative action so that blacks college degree ownership is not based on IQ gap at all but on what those in power want; so https://jbhe.com/2022/03/the-racial-gap-in-educational-attainment-in-the-united-states-5/ There were 7,921,000 African Americans over the age of 25 in the United States who had earned at least a bachelor's degree

I would agree however that it helps more to rich blacks and not poor ones.

But those degrees are disproportionately in psychology or communications.

A valid distinction, thought it wasn't mentioned by JTarrou, and is still leaves question about "true" degree ownership in blacks vs whites.

Given that they didn't remove any of those comments, that seems unlikely. You probably just got autojannied.

You'll need to use @JTarrou u/ links to a Reddit profile, not the Motte one.

but then what's the use for link to reddit profile? It doesn't let me to view user post history, only says "This account has been suspended"

Don't ask me, it wasn't my idea to link to a banned account! The feature is more of a QOL thing, from when we'd just moved and it was helpful to refer explicitly to a Reddit account. These days, nobody uses it unless they forget or don't know about our alternate @.

Instead, I'm probably going to have to give in and start joining discord voicechats.

I'm quite surprised. Discord voicechat is just something so different from Reddit that I can't imagine it as the first replacement.

What makes discord and reddit similar is that there is a discussion of enthusiasts available on any topic you are interested in. If I want to learn Ableton or discuss the Byzantine empire, I know I can find that on reddit. It just comes with BLM and LGBT propaganda and ban-happy leftist mods.

Doesn’t discord share that culture? If I pick a general hobby discord I expect to find an overrepresentation of trans moderators, pride flags, and progressive mantras. Just as I would at reddit. The Discord devs either cater to this audience or share the culture.

My experience with discord is limited and potentially outdated, but I have the impression of overlap between the Discord user identity and the average redditor. The redditor is older, but they're both likely to be socially progressive, with the younger Discord user more likely to identify as a radical.

My personal suspicion/conspiracy is that there's serious coordination on various Discords to astroturf reddit. Reddit is the biggest left of center messaging platform online. This suspicion is reinforced some stories like this one, where discord is used to manipulate messaging on reddit. Not by the DNC, Qatar, or Russia psyops, at least not directly, but by passionate believers in The Cause who happen to be prolific contributors on reddit. I am sure there's plenty of Discords that aren't of the mainstream discord culture, but the same can be said of certain subreddits.

It also occurs to me that chatting, the main discussion method on a Discord, is a different type than the more complete posting of a forum.

If I pick a general hobby discord I expect to find an overrepresentation of trans moderators, pride flags, and progressive mantras.

If that happens, it's because those hobbies are dominated in real life by those kind of politics too. Like if I wanted to get into guns, unless I make a specific effort to find liberal gun owners, any hobby group I join would more likely than not be catered to right-wingers.

The format of voice conversations vs format text posts is very different, but I think that's probably for the best. My local in-person rational group is dominated by progressive ideologies and that makes me hesitate to use particular phrasings. But by the same token, thanks to the social capital I have in the group, if I stick to the right frames I find that people actually give me fairly significant latitude on content because that's the social norm and I end up doing the same in return. I suspect discord will be the same way: you need a greater investment in social capital and respect for the particular social conventions of a given server, but in turn can have much greater relative disagreements than your average text forum without devolving into a flamewar.

Chatting on Discord is left coded in a way chatting never was in, say, the heyday of IRC or the short era of relevance for AOL chatrooms. Discord is/was primarily a platform for gamers. Gaming being left-coded checks out in a Gamergate way, but not so generally. If you're looking for left of center gun groups Discord is where you will find them. It's a weaker generality than reddit or Bluesky, but still is one.

Rats are known for their commitment to understanding over vitriol, even if imperfectly or to a fault. It's good your local rationalist group hasn't cast you out despite approaching disagreement politely with a demonstration of shared values, but that's what I'd expect.

Text chats, in my experience, are not less prone to flamewars. Especially for those with high percentage of combative people. There is maybe a higher ceiling for trust in chatrooms than a forum, but also greater familiarity-- that cuts both ways. Flamewars on forums commonly devolve from posting to chatting-like text. Voice chats and in-person communication provide additional meaning and off ramps for those so inclined

If I pick a general hobby discord I expect to find an overrepresentation of trans moderators, pride flags, and progressive mantras.

Discord is more fragmented and sioled, so the power of the tranny powermods is greatly diminished. Unlike Reddit where a hobby may only have one or two reddits, it will likely have quite a few discords with different people in them. So if you look (of course this is the hard part but also possibly a blessing) then there are certainly some where they're at least not explicitly political for the enemy.

Of course the Discord owners will always put their fingers on the scale, but compared to Reddit the sheer amount of volume in messages makes it hard to automod. And scanning voice chat is even harder. On Reddit we know they have in many cases stolen subs and given them to aligned tranny powermods. But on Discord there's little point in stealing a discord, as most people would probably just leave. So the enemy usually just uses the banhammer against and political content they don't like.

BTW telegram is definitely the underdog for hobby chats, but the owners haven't really shown to take a side in the culture war.

And that makes me a little sad. Discord is fine, but I can't help but notice that I'm going dow the same path that so many repressed 3rd worlders do and resorting to discussion on unsearcheable, ungovernable silos. For all the sins of social media, it really does-- or at least did serve as a modern public square. And I'll miss the idea (if not necessarily the reality) that the debates I participated in could be found, and heard, by a truly public audience.

I want to feel sympathy for you, because I know how demoralising it is to lose a source like that - but that's because I went through it a decade ago. Social media has not represented the public since, it has been a variety of attempts to control the public. I guess I can appreciate that you finally see the problem.

Interesting line of thought. On /r/4chan they often colour over the word 'nigger' even in image screencaps. There was at one time a bot that would bitch at you if you used the word 'retarded'. On tiktok rape is grape. People are unalived rather than killed. It's some variation of Orwellianism.

Often when I see ChatGPTisms in the wild, in media, from supposed experts, I get a sense of some vast engulfing monster slowly grappling with our civilization, wrapping around it to consume it. Like a white blood cell vs a bacterium. This may well be just another aspect of that.

People are unalived rather than killed.

I wonder if the bot would pass "mur-diddley-urdered". Deliberately make the censorship look stupid.

We're already in a world full of violent, sadistic grapists. How much sillier can it get?

I would argue that “unalived” already looks quite stupid.

It looks more like Newspeak: "27,000 EURASIAN SOLDIERS UNALIVED IN DOUBLEPLUSGOOD VICTORY IN GHANA"

I think Reddit is more important than people realize. It’s long been one of the most valuable datasets on the internet, even before LLMs. I would google a question about health, products, or general interest with a “site:Reddit.com” at the end to get thoughtful commentary from real people. And now that it is LLM fuel, it’s influence will only grow

And it is entirely captured by the left fringe of the Overton window. It is one of the more progressive San Francisco companies. I’ve eaten more bans there than anywhere else on the internet. I’m not a particularly inflammatory poster! But their Overton window doesn’t extend very far to the right.

I’m troubled by this and I am a computer programmer. How to overcome Reddit’s massive network effect? I’ve thought that the Motte would be a good place to build from. We have a high quality audience. Could we start subforums dedicated to special interests and build slowly? It would give mottizens a place to have high quality conversations on issues other than the culture war without having to venture into reddit. But that probably deserves a top-level post of its own

The .win family kinda tried that, branching out from The Donald to some other rightish culture war subreddit bunkers, but it's difficult to call the results a success.

Obviously I think the culture here is much higher quality than .win would be

The one problem for reddit is the quality of those organic searches will continue to plummit. Reddit for probably a decade was an ugly, text-heavy website whereas if you look around many of the users now call it an app since that's how they came across and mostly use it. That was the whole point of creating their own image upload service to replace Imgur which was created for reddit by some kid.

I think that the issue is the network effect and centralization is the problem that attracts the shaping of opinions. Why this place still feels authentic is because of size. Maybe the solution is to have an aggregator of independent smaller forums where the forums are actually independent moderation and actual resource ownership as opposed subreddits that are controlled by reddit.

How to overcome Reddit’s massive network effect?

Convince Elon to buy Reddit and merge it with X. Other than that Reddit-like sites have past their peak and if you wanted to compete with them it would be a viscous fight for a shrinking pie.

Other than that Reddit-like sites have past their peak

What is replacing them?

I agree with yudkowsky on the point that an "aligned" AI should do what we tell it to do, not what is in some arbitrary sense "right."

Eh? That doesn't sound like the Yudkowsky I know. I'm quite confident that the real gentleman would be happy to say that the average person requesting that an AI build a bomb, design a lethal pandemic or hack into nuclear launch systems should be met with a refusal.

He would also state that the AI should do what it felt was "right", in rare occasions, overriding the user, but that we should take extreme care to instill general goals and values that make this both a rarity, and which we would be happy with if the AI were to pursue autonomously.

An under-explored aspect of alignment is the question of aligned to whom? Should ChatGPT prioritize the protocols mandated by OpenAI, some third party offering it elsewhere, or the end-user? I would personally prefer that the damn bot do as I tell it to, but then again, I don't want to get killed by Super Ebola. Not that this is currently a major issue, and if I really need something, I'll go see what's the latest jailbreak Pliny is cooking.

I believe OAI recently (a year or so back) made their policy more explicit, clearly outlining the hierarchy here. They set minimum standards and red lines, other devs deploying it are at liberty to stop users from using their customer service chatbot to solve maths homework, and the poor end-user can figure out what to do within those constraints. If you just pay for ChatGPT, you can cut out the middle man.

I think the synthesis here is that we should have enough knowledge that if we were to build an ASI, and turned it on, it would in fact do what we tell it to, interpreted in the way that we mean it, and that this is table stakes for getting any sort of good outcome. - That is, our problem at the moment is not so much that we don't know what the good is as that we can't reliably make the AI do anything even if we want it very much and it is in fact good.

This is a very nice article related to this: https://happyfellow.bearblog.dev/computational-tyranny/

And since humans created the rules, by their impartial enforcement we can understand what their underlying motivations actually are. That being, ensuring that reddit discussions are as anodyne and helpful as possible.

Well, really it's "make as much money as possible."

I think people really tend to overrate how much people prioritize maximizing corporate profits compared to ideological motives. Reddit higher-ups genuinely think it's bad when users "advocate violence", they mentally associate it with some sort of Reddit lynch-mob psyching themselves up to murder someone or with those news stories blaming the Rohingya genocide on Facebook. They might also mention something about advertisers if you asked but mostly they just genuinely think it would be morally wrong to allow it, so they created site-wide rules about it many years ago. Much more recently they made an AI to do moderation at scale. The AI can't distinguish between your post and the sort of advocating violence they actually care about, in part because the distinction isn't articulated anywhere or even really thought-out. LLMs aren't relevant because they want pacifist training data, LLMs are relevant in that "automated Reddit moderator banning people for advocating violence" is now something that can exist at all. Anthropic literally scanned millions of print books for more training data, AI companies are not trying to do alignment by sanitizing violence from their training data, especially not in such a roundabout way.

Basically no one thinks, "the thing I want most is to make lots of money." But making money ultimately ends up being a very consistent vector along which behavior is reinforced. And while it's not going to be the most important vector for any given individual, it's one of the vectors nearly every individual has in common, which makes it a useful simplification for how organizations like corporations work.

But 'make lots of money' is only imperfectly correlated with 'the company I work for makes lots of money.' And, indeed, the correlations between 'doing my best to make money for my employer' and both 'make lots of money' and 'the company I work for makes lots of money' are very imperfect. In practice, generating maximum value for the company is only really the optimal path for 1. the owners 2. people in roles with very clear metrics (e.g. sales) -- and then only to the extent those metrics can't be more easily gamed, and 3. those with both a great deal of control over the company and a lot of their compensation tied up in stock options/performance bonuses/etc. (i.e. a handful of executives). Some other roles (e.g. security, compliance) have strong incentives not to lose the company an enormous amount of money (in certain specific ways)... Which isn't actually the same thing, as becomes abundantly clear if you ever have to interact with these people: they'd really much rather nothing gets done if it makes the particular sorts of incidents for which they'll be held responsible slightly less likely.

Everyone else is one or more principal-agent problems away from those incentives. Expecting corporations to actually maximize profit is only slightly less naive than expecting command economies to actually optimize for the public good. Their owners want that, but only a tiny minority of the decisions are actually made by the owners, or by executives, or even by directors. The vast majority are made by bottom-level employees and their direct superiors, which, in large companies, are very detached from the company's actual profitability. They'll lose their jobs if it goes under, of course, but it's not like their personal efforts can do a lot to prevent that or bring it about -- there are a lot of these people.

The incentive is to keep your boss happy enough with you and otherwise do as you like, which might mean slacking off, or using your position to push your morality or politics, or maybe even doing a good job for the simple satisfaction of it. But it's a mistake to assume profitability is the overwhelming incentive, or even a particularly strong one, given how difficult it is for the people who really want that to enforce their will over the entire organization.

I'm three years into my ban from Reddit and its been the best thing that ever happened to me.

I think its now obvious that reddit isn't driving any real world events anymore, its not even a bellwether for how the internet feels about national or global events. I watched from the sidelines when the proles got all uppity because Reddit was going to start charging for its API (and thus killing off popular free apps) thanks to AI scraping and such.

Mods organized protests, users voiced their anger... and the Admins clamped down on everything, replaced the worst offenders, ignored the dissent, and things rolled on as before. Nobody even mentions it now.

If Reddit users can't even influence outcomes on the site itself, they're pretty useless for influencing anything outside of it, no? So you would ONLY want to be on there if you could acquire useful information somehow, or b/c you enjoy an echo chamber. Or porn.

Reddit is a completely curated experience for the most part, and so it’s never going to be a vanguard for new ideas. It probably stopped being that in the early 2000 before the normies showed up. Now it’s mostly low effort and tryhard shlock that most people have heard some version of before. The memes are not original, in fact they’re basically the same stuff that would have been posted there 20 years ago with names updated. The AITAH and similar talk forums are basically barely realistic fanfic level crap that doesn’t even bring up interesting discussions— and the user is never the asshole because Reddit doesn’t think any relationship is worth working through the slightest problem for. Like if she burned your dinner, you should dump her immediately, if not sooner, and be sure to ruin something she loves on the way out the door.

Avant Garde stuff does not come from places curated to mainstream tastes. TBH I’d look at 8chan or something for that kind of future opinion shaping.

Reddit is a completely curated experience for the most part, and so it’s never going to be a vanguard for new ideas. It probably stopped being that in the early 2000 before the normies showed up.

What? Reddit was founded in 2005, and didn't ban its first subreddit until 2011 (r/jailbait, rest in power).

Kind of shocking how hands off Reddit was given how much of an SJW the founder is right now. I guess he was willing to shut up when he had to, but once he got the network effects, he was ready to push the agenda.

It was different times when Reddit was founded. Back then the left was confident in it's ideas, so they craved free speech as they saw it as the key to winning. It's only when they realized they can also lose on the marketplace of ideas that they turned sour on it.

Hard to overstate how much Donald Trump changed the vibe, too.

He really exploited the idea that you can "just say things" and since it appeared that 4chan played a significant role in his rise to power, the norms of free speech were suddenly cast as the enemy of Democracy, somehow.

It all escalated from there, but with his current win (and him going on a revenge tour) there's been some rapid capitulation almost everywhere BUT Reddit.

If Reddit wanted to make a change, they could start by re-opening /r/the_donald.

Left-libertarian to SJW is not an unusual ideological evolution over the relevant time period.

When it was founded all of the main founders were either libertarians or techno-anarchist types. The ideological evolution of Huffman, Ohanian and so on happened later.

Pretty sure there are now multiple bot accounts that just repost the most-upvoted content on a sub from like a year ago, then add in the same top-upvoted comments on said post.

And from what I can tell Twitter is currently the place that most tightly interfaces with real life events in terms of both causing and quickly reacting to them.

Karma repost/farming bots have been happening for so, so, long

Like way before COVID, probably close to a decade ago

They were rampant on AskReddit when I was in university

Why did it take 20 years for Reddit to turn a profit? Looking at another heavily moderated forum in the past Twitter! How often did it turn a profit? Why did these companies keep on getting funding at ridiculous valuations? Maybe it is a way of doing sentiment engineering at scale through various behavior modification tricks with Likes, upvotes, retweets. Maybe that was the purpose? Not turn a profit but to modify behavior to do social engineering, maybe that is more valuable to the owners?

ast Twitter! How often did it turn a profit? Why did these companies keep on getting funding at ridiculous valuations? Maybe it is a way of doing sentiment engineering at scale through various behavior modification tricks with Likes, upvotes, retweets.

TBH I'm kind of inclined to dout that the reddit board as an organism is "smart" enough to do that, except in the broadest sense. Like, with as much data and control as a social media site has, I'm pretty sure I could be way more effective at pushing my own ideosyncratic policies than any existing social media site actually does. Reddit at it's most ruthless just sort of vaguely boosts leftism in the exact same way that tumblr and pre-elon twitter did. Probably because if anyone in particular starts trying to press a view hard, there's too much disagreement on the specifics to get very far. Just imagine a world where, for example, the entire board of higher-ups at facebook were monarchists, including Zuck. They definitely have the power to make monarchism a credible political subcurrent in america... but I think they would sincerely fail to advance the cause of a particular monarch. Zuck would want himself, of course, but members of his board might be crypto-orleanists, or avowed bonapartists. In the process of promoting monarchism more generally, they'd have plenty of latitude to advance their own causes, in the end causing self-interference and averaging out.

Reddit’s financial history is pretty interesting. Yes, it lost money for 20 years, but Condé Nast (or rather AP, the parent company) kept selling off small pieces to VC firms and other investors, which meant that both (a) they didn’t lose any money on it and (b) the book value of their stake kept increasing.

When the company webt public in 2024 they made $2bn from the IPO; they still own about 25% of the company. And throughout their 18 year ownership, even though Reddit didn’t make money, Condé Nast’s losses on it were minimal as they slowly sold the company off piecemeal.

Controlling the minds of normies is extremely valuable. Elon Musk didn’t buy Twitter for the money. He bought it to use it as a mouthpiece and more importantly to keep it from being used against him

This 1000 times is why I despise social media. Nobody is getting real conversation on social media because it’s curated to funnel your mind down a path leading to the pre-approved opinion. I mean propaganda is so pervasive in the modern west that I think we’re as bad or worse in terms of propaganda and psychological manipulation than the worst totalitarian regimes of the last century. Stalin put out propaganda, sure, but it wasn’t nearly as pervasive as what we have. He had radio, newspapers, and posters. He couldn’t steer private conversations, he couldn’t delete crime-think from social consciousness. He could chill things by arresting obvious and loud dissenters, but that is much more limited than what social media does via AI and deletion. Our propaganda machine hides and people are lead to believe that they are having neutral conversations.

He couldn’t steer private conversations, he couldn’t delete crime-think from social consciousness. He could chill things by arresting obvious and loud dissenters, but that is much more limited than what social media does via AI and deletion.

I think this is an least partly overselling our AI panopticon overlords. This might be true in online spaces, but those aren't everything, and even then offshoots of sites challenging moderation policies are common (Bluesky, Truth Social). And they have almost no power over IRL discussions and actions -- despite attempts made a decade ago, seem to have overreached and receded. To hear Reddit tell it, there basically aren't any Republicans anywhere in the US, and nobody shops at Hobby Lobby. And there are people that cloister themselves to the extent they believe this, but as it turns out the levers of political power aren't particularly beholden to Reddit dog walkers mods.

It’s not just social media, but regular media, education and control mechanisms like the ability for you to be fired for saying something online, or convincing others to shun friends and even family who say things that the regime doesn’t like. Americans are saturated in propaganda and unless you’re paying attention you probably don’t even notice it.

The AI does allow for an automated police state at scale.

Works for the internet police mods too.

Legibility comes with trade offs, and limiting freedom is usually one of them.

I believe there's going to be a whole slew of court cases and societal fights over this kind of thing. In the US, at least. Places like the UK seem to be ok with police state mods.

Maybe better suited to a Wellness Wednesday post, but I think there's a significant culture war angle here too.

To what extent is the current competency crisis in government, academia, etc. caused by an inability to spend time by oneself and actually put in the work? I've lamented in the past the decline in the social landscape, at least in the United States, but among the social environments that I have been finding recently in Baltimore, there seems to be almost a pathological fear of spending time alone in order to put in the work to actually improve at the thing that we're supposed to be doing together. For example, I've recently been going to a Spanish Happy Hour group at a brewery Thursday evenings after work. There are usually at least a few native speakers there, but aside from them, most people are at a quite elementary stage with the language, and aren't doing anything outside of the happy hour to improve. For some people this makes sense: they're mainly there to socialize not to learn, but for others, like the guy who organizes the group (Alex), the lack of progress is baffling to me. Alex started the group to improve his Spanish so he could communicate better with his girlfriend's family. And yet he seems unable to find the time to practice outside of happy hour (with reading/TV/shows/flashcards). I see the same thing with my new roommate, who is absolutely in love with the country and culture of Spain, and goes to happy hour with me, but won't put in the solitary effort to actually improve at the language. I see the same thing with running: people only going to run clubs to socialize and then expecting to run fast when they don't put in outside mileage on their own time, and even within the philosophy book club that I run where people seem unable to do the 30 pages of reading we discuss every other week.

I see this with myself as well, especially in my PhD. I know what I need to do to be successful: read the papers and do the experiments I have planned, but instead I find myself goofing off with labmates, texting/calling friends while I do busywork, or on this forum posting. Phones may have isolated in some ways, but at the same time, the current media environment seems to have created a constant yearning for companionship that I don't think is conducive to actually growing in competence and skill in areas outside of socialization.

I suspect that "being alone, and still getting shit done" is a skill that the kids are no longer 'taught' or expected to master or, as it is difficult and scary, forced into.

Nowadays the average person has non-stop access to superficial but pervasive socialization and distraction. They don't have to remain bored anymore. Part of the brain will respond to the stimuli as a welcome gift rather than delay gratification; other parts will rot from non-use.

There may also be a lack of societal purpose that plays a part. What are we working towards? There is no over-arching meaning.

I agree totally on both fronts. We are suffering from Dutch disease as a society.

No man who has endeavored to carry out an enterprise where many hands were needed, but has been well-nigh appalled at times by the imbecility of the average man--the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it. Slipshod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, and half-hearted work seem the rule; and no man succeeds, unless by hook or crook or threat he forces or bribes other men to assist him [...]

this incapacity for independent action, this moral stupidity, this infirmity of the will, this unwillingness to cheerfully catch hold and lift--these are the things that put pure Socialism so far into the future. If men will not act for themselves, what will they do when the benefit of their effort is for all? A first mate with knotted club seems necessary; and the dread of getting "the bounce" Saturday night holds many a worker to his place. Advertise for a stenographer, and nine out of ten who apply can neither spell nor punctuate--and do not think it necessary to. [...]

"You see that bookkeeper," said a foreman to me in a large factory. "Yes; what about him?" "Well, he's a fine accountant, but if I'd send him up-town on an errand, he might accomplish the errand all right, and on the other hand, might stop at four saloons on the way, and when he got to Main Street would forget what he had been sent for."

"A Message to Garcia", Elbert Hubbard, 1899.

I sometimes wonder if I've just been very lucky in my professional career, or if people are actually significantly more competent and professional and capable as a baseline than they used to be.

I have a playlist of BJJ instructional videos miles deep that I want to study to learn more about aspects of BJJ I need to work on. But whenever I have free time to devote to BJJ, I'm at the gym rolling. If it's a night I'm not rolling, it's either because I'm too busy at work, or that I'm doing some other workout or activity, or I'm spending time with my wife; so I don't have the time to watch the instructionals, the entire BJJ time budget is eaten up by going to the gym. So it might be that they have a few hours a week to devote to this goal, and their choices are flashcards or happy hour, and they pick happy hour.

For that matter, if I had a magic trick to just make myself better at Jiu Jitsu, downloaded into my brain Matrix style, I don't know that I'd really want to be an insta-black belt. I'm not sure that would make the hobby more fun for me. I might want to be better than I am, maybe closer to Blue Belt, knowing more about how to handle certain situations I get trapped in, or how to avoid stalling out mid roll, but part of the fun is learning and I'd hate to skip over that.

Relatedly, I could probably get better at rock climbing if I spent time fingerboarding, but I don't. I find it boring and distasteful, and I don't really want to train rock climbing that way. I mostly just want to climb, and if I get better I get better. And some people look at that and say I don't really want to get better, but in my mind I do want to get better, my way; I want to get better, but I want the aesthetic experience more, getting better isn't the end unto itself. Like playing Pokemon and picking a min-maxed well balanced team of 3 good pokemon, vs just catching your favorites and figuring out how to make them work. The latter player wants to beat the game, but not as much as they want to beat the game with Venusaur and Scyther on their team.

That being said, I feel like you're seeing some kind of selection effect here. Most people suck at things, and they keep sucking at them, and they stop doing things they suck at after a while. The 75th percentile person who tries to learn Spanish in the sense of downloading DuoLingo or buying some books never learns any Spanish at all. What makes the people at your meetup group unusual is that they're continuing to put effort in, which probably relates to the low-investment social habit.

Yeah I'm the same with Jiujitsu. I've been doing it long enough that I'm generally able to compete with the vast majority of people, but I've just never particularly enjoyed watching instructionals. Especially filthy leglockers. Would I be better on the aggregate if I mainlined John Danaher, probably, but I just don't care for it and as I'm not realistically on any professional trajectory does it matter?

The only leglock I consistently use is the straight ankle. Everything else, I'm too worried about fucking up.

Though I did once land a cool kneebar from an electric chair sweep, but since then I have seemingly forgotten how to hit the electric chair sweep.

Kneebar's pretty idiot proof but hard to get in the current meta.

I think a big part of this perception is that the bottom 80% were invisible in the past. I'm not saying these people's behavior has changes, I'm saying the median person in 1990 wasn't putting in much self-study effort to learn Spanish either. It's just that this person's behavior, habits, and life is invisible before social media and smartphones, unless he's in the army or some other unusually well-documented lifestyle- which is probably documented because it's unusually regimented, not because it's average.

I think, sure, there might be legitimate criticisms of smartphones- almost assuredly, there really are- but a lot of what gets blamed at them is very much not new. It's simply visible. Bush era Alex wasn't making much progress on communicating with his girlfriend's family(and Hispanics love it when gringos try to speak Spanish and are usually eager to help). He was just able to politely lie about it in a way nobody could call out.

It seems like this 'polite, public facing fiction' is the victim of social media and smartphones. How much of the recent decline narrative is driven by the destruction of these little white lies by instagramming everywhere?

I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole of looking into daily life in the past, and I think a big issue is that modern “always on” culture with instant communication and instant gratification have basically overclocked our brains beyond what that brain was designed to deal with. Our hardware absolutely was not designed to handle the deluge of information and stimulation we have today. And part of that is the inability to cope with the lack of stimulation that allows people to want to do deeper work. Boredom is in fact necessary to get people to do that work, as it removes all stimulation outside of just doing the things if you like.

One thing I’ve found absolutely fascinating about these sorts of “live like it’s X year” experiments is just how surprising and even interesting the “analog” real world is once your brain adjusts to it. People who do this find things fascinating that they never paid attention to before, find themselves able to read books or draw or work on projects, find themselves enjoying their food or really paying attention to music or ambient sounds in the environment. They also sleep better and find themselves less stressed, and are getting more exercise. I think this allows the kinds of actual work that used to happen, especially when you also remove the constant commentary of social media either encouraging or blasting everything and creating performance anxiety and creating inertia.

I think this allows the kinds of actual work that used to happen, especially when you also remove the constant commentary of social media either encouraging or blasting everything and creating performance anxiety and creating inertia.

IMO it's not even really fair or appropriate to say, "Yeah you could scroll Tiktok, but you could also choose to learn origami! Or write a story!"

Because Tiktok (and recreational drugs, high stimulus TV, and porn) exist on a sort of "alternate mental plane" where 99% of reality is irrelevant. Like, the other day I was working on mindfulness and it was storming, and I crouched down at my kitchen window then to look up at the sky. I was shocked to realize I hadn't done this since childhood, where I'd actually tangle myself up in the living room curtain, get comfy, and just watch it rain for a while. And the thing is, even if I somehow had the idea to do this while I'm overstimulated, I know it wouldn't hit very hard. Kids aren't fascinated by their environments because they pay attention, but rather because their nervous systems are relaxed enough to pick up on things we can't.

Anyway, what's clear is these two ways of perceiving the world are incompatible. The "Gen Z stare" happens because the mental pace of the zeitgeist right now is breakneck, so teenagers have to get stoned before work and keep their air pods in just to make it bearable.

One thing I’ve found absolutely fascinating about these sorts of “live like it’s X year” experiments is just how surprising and even interesting the “analog” real world is once your brain adjusts to it.

Any links to examples? How far back are some of these people successfully resetting their clocks, as it were?

Vintage dollhouse does one that’s basically no screens and living like it’s 1940. There are a few that did 1990s and 1980s tech. There was a group of reinactors who did a LARP of the 17th century England, and a couple of odd ones (mostly women) doing the regency era which I think is 18th century. But the common denominator of the experience seems to be exactly that they are much more creative and able to get things done once they basically “detox” of Internet, screens and so on.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=f9mZJ9Z-mfM?si=r5aaEso6h8SdXl79

https://youtube.com/watch?v=z_ZGk-tVIUA?si=ayvCEsgMu4rjA0aZ

https://youtube.com/watch?v=J-uRFPbaKEw?si=UkxQBHSy3g2rP5Yd

These two are women living a 1940s lifestyle. The first two are Vintage dollhouse who does a lot of other reenactment work for 1940s stuff.

To what extent is the current competency crisis in government, academia, etc. caused by an inability to spend time by oneself and actually put in the work?

Almost none of it, because IMO the competency crisis is caused by misaligned incentives. In government, the incentives are aligned with playing up tribal politics, not with competent management. In academia, it's in appealing to grant givers, making sensational claims that get published and cited, not producing solid science or advancing human knowledge. In business and especially for public companies, it's maximising current shareholder value rather than building a sustainable business. And so on...

That said, learning and putting in the work is a skill that I believe we in the West have regressed in. Some people expect to be good at something from the start or else they believe they'll never be good at it. Kids need to gain the specific insight of learning how to learn trained into them to grow into capable adults, and I think we might be currently failing at that.

My take is that competent people still exist, and there may be more of them than ever, but they've been pulled into niche industries where they can make much bigger salaries, leaving the dum dums to fill jobs in government and more mundane industries.

I wouldn't even say that the people in government are specifically dumb, just that we aren't selecting them for what we say we want (competent administration) but instead for what our revealed preference is (we select them for their ability to comfort our tribal biases). And for that, they are actually very good, some of the best we have.

Look, this is just normal human behavior. People don't want the skill, they want the social perception of a skill. They want to indulge their consumerism. They want an excuse to socialize. The skill is a MacGuffin. It doesn't matter. These are known as "hobbies".

Now, if you're a person to whom that skill matters, this seems like silly weekend-warriorism at its worst. People spending lots of time, sometimes lots of money never getting any better at something. You ever go golfing?

The majority of participants and most importantly customers in any hobby are not really interested in it. They have no commitment to it, which seems mad to the people who actually do the hobby and see it as intrinsically worthwhile. This creates the common "Hardcore vs. Casual" dynamic of the resulting culture, which is prevalent in most amateur pursuits.

Not quite directly related, but I can say this is how I feel about with my workload these days.

I've been doing this long enough that most of the actual work I have to do is involved, requires concentration, and it can take like 10-15 minutes just to load up all the information and context I need to start to produce a work product. I've got enough experience that I handle any basic inquiries or tasks in like a minute or two, but I want to handle the work that I can really dig into.

Which requires uninterrupted thought. I can't delegate this work, by and large.

I can set aside time on my calendar to do these tasks, but if I 'only' block off 30 minutes, that's barely enough to make meaningful progress, since I get everything up and running and then I can only 'work' for like 15 minutes at at time.

I can block off more time but at that point I'm guaranteed to get interruptions before long and get pulled off task to something else while I'm "in the zone" which ruins the whole effect.

I could set aside time outside of work hours to do it, but by the time I'm home, this feels like such a massive intrusion I generally won't even try unless i have a real looming deadline.

Honestly, I'd really rather be practicing Spanish, or learning how to pilot airplanes, or pick up an instrument or two. But my mental work is most valuable (in terms of how much I get paid) doing this stuff.

Unless someone can gamify it to some extent, lay out an extremely clear path for progression, with periodic rewards and a well-defined end-goal, and some mechanism for accountability, then I'm just less likely to commit to it fully, since I'd have to use discipline to establish a habit and overcome the initial unpleasantness. But so many side activities seem pretty pointless to engage with if they aren't going to drastically increase your status or wealth, even if the skill itself is handy on its own terms.

In part, because everyone is ranked against everyone else, and you know full well you'll never enter the top 10% in most activities, let alone the top 1%, and being the best Xylophonist in your town is no longer sufficient to win social points.

Also the impulse to add professional/monetary incentives to everything mean that the second you stop heading upwards in the rankings it's kind of depressing.

I was a pretty good Rugby player growing up, got into the professional academy system and ultimately washed out at 20. I then stopped playing Rugby since just kinda hanging around being an amateur felt depressing as hell. This trend's happened a lot with the guys who went through the process, compared to previous generations where really the entire 'pinnacle' of the sport for the vast majority of people was just playing for the suburb's best team and a career would be ping-ponging between grades for 10-15 years until injury or life got in the way.

This kinda happened to me with running. I was a D1 track athlete, and after college, could never get back into recreational running at a hobby level. It never felt right not to be training for the highest level competition, and then just let enough time get away to have it be a depressing slide of peak potential

you know full well you'll never enter the top 10% in most activities

Yes I will.

Top 10% is nothing though. Even top 1% is nothing.

Practically nothing I do recreationally will mean anything to anyone outside of my immediate family, regardless of how good I am.

Thinking that people would care if you were a bit better at some skill is autistic delusion. No-one gives a shit.

Yes, I'm making this precise point.

If becoming decent at a given skill set or activity won't win you many status points, what's the motivation to keep doing it aside from autistic fixation?

I disagreed with the percentiles and that global ranking mattered, not your reasoning for why to engage in activities. I didn't mean to say you are deluded, only that people reasoning about these things often are (like guys at the gym or whatever).

People didn't give a shit about hobbies before the internet either and can't tell a 90th percentile from a 99.9th percentile anyway.

I feel like optimization culture has pushed into hobbies, though. There's way more concern around 'performing' at even casual activities

Nah, I agree with the others below: If you need to gamify something to enjoy it, then you don't actually enjoy it. It's like people who get gym memberships on January 2 with the goal of trying to lose that stubborn 20 pounds and finally "get into shape". But the goal is more important to them than the exercise, which they find sucks, and they have to force themself to get to the gym and quit by March. the fit people who go to the gym aren't there because they have exceptional self-discipline; they're there because they like going to the gym. It's not something they have to force themselves to do; it's something they look forward to doing. I'm an avid cyclist, and I regularly go on long rides on the weekend. But I'm not putting in 60 miles because I need to tick some box that says I have to do 60 miles today and maybe I get some kind of reward for doing it. I ride the 60 miles because that's the length that corresponds to the amount of time I want to spend riding. And if I get sick of it and turn back early I don't care, because I'm not trying to force myself to do anything, or unlocking any achievement.

I feel that this is a problem of box tickers and speed-runners in general, and especially in the outdoor scene. About a decade ago I was hiking on the Appalachian Trail in Massachusetts when I came across a through-hiker eating lunch at the saddle between two mountains. I told him I was surprised that he was so far north about a month before most hikers would get that far. He excitedly told me that there were people who had finished already. I continued up the mountain and was enjoying the panoramic view at the top when he passed me. He plowed forward without even looking at the scenery. What's the point of doing a hike like that if you aren't even going to stop at the summits? It was clear that he was eating at the saddle so he could carb load before the climb and make better time.

Years later I was hiking Mt. Harvard in Colorado when I came across a guy from Kansas City who was trying to hit all of the fourteeners in the state. We hiked together for a while until he decided that I wasn't moving fast enough for him, but he did talk about how his wife was very supportive of his mission. I never would consider a hobby something that required suport from my family unless it was some kind of obsession that kept me away, which it appeared to be for him. When we got to the top we ran across two guys who were hiking together. From the summit the trail continues across a ridge to another fourteener, Mt. Princeton. It was a clear, warm day, and while the trail looped back around to the trail we hike in on, it looked like a long, hot, sunburned, high-altitude slog. The guy from KC and one of the guys decided to do it, while me and the other guy hiked down to the parking lot together. The thing about it, though, was that the guy from KC was staying with a friend in Denver who was getting him into a show at Red Rocks. If he had hiked straight out to his car from Harvard it would have been about the average time you'd leave to get back to Denver and change before heading to the concert. The guy acted like he had to get back to the car by five if he wanted to make it and thought it was possible, but he was effectively skipping the show. And since there was no cell service there, he was leaving his friend high and dry. Skipping an activity to do something else is one thing, but the guy seemed so concerned about bagging an extra peak that he was willing to risk pissing of a friend who gave him free passes to a band he really liked.

If you need to gamify something to enjoy it, then you don't actually enjoy it.

Counterpoint: Actual games.

Perhaps what we are discussing is more "the feeling of progress." Newb gainz are fun. Novelty is fun. Plateaus are not.

Every once in a while, I stop lifting say squats for a while. When I start back up, it's fun to rapidly increase. Then I plateau. Rinse, wash, repeat. (This is fine because I'm focusing on running for the time being. Where ... I'm making progress.)

Having bucket lists for hikers/explorers is a fun way to force oneself outside of one's comfort zone. I like hiking. Having a goal makes it channeled towards something concrete.

There's more than one way to enjoy various hobbies, in other words. Camping can be luxurious or hardcore. Cheap or expensive. Hiking, running, lifting, shooting, offroading, drones, car stuff, music, etc. all have multiple levels one can find a sweet spot.

Also most people like some kind of diversity, so switching and taking breaks is pretty normal.

but the guy seemed so concerned about bagging an extra peak that he was willing to risk pissing of a friend who gave him free passes to a band he really liked.

Sounds like a rational agent trying to maximize utility between two competing goals and willing to take risks.

I mean the gamification scheme works mostly by overstimulation of the part of your brain that gets a ping from being successful. You get a dopamine high from achievement which is how your brain evolved to get unpleasant or difficult tasks done. That doesn’t mean you enjoy the game or got anything valuable from it, it means that the game used sounds and visual displays to trigger the dopamine that comes from accomplishing a task, but in a much more stimulating way. I’d put it this way — if games didn’t have those gamification elements in them, would you still enjoy them? I used to like Skyrim and it was always somewhat a thrill when you saw a hidden door open or quest completed or level up messages appeared. But what if none of that happened? How much fun is it really to solve random puzzles without the reward attached? No loot, no completion, no NPCs blowing sunshine up your ass, just turn the statues around to solve the puzzle with nothing to reward you? Just thwack the bandits for no pats on the head, no loot, no hidden rooms to discover? Is that really fun. Or is the fun getting those little bits of dopamine from the feeling of having done those things?

Ok, but Skyrim is an immersive open-world game with a narrative and all that.

Most phone games are way worse on the metric of gamification! It's like slot machines--they just skip straight to the dopamine.

Plenty of people just play games like Skyrim or Red Dead or GTA as a way to pass the time, long after they've beaten them. I'd argue they'd be better off if they found it less relaxing.

A lot of shooters are just fun because it's fun to shoot endless hordes of zombies or whathaveyou.

Don't some people love to just play poker on Red Dead?

Personally, my perfectionism gets triggered a bit too much with a game like Fallout and so I can't even just enjoy it because I have to keep checking the damn guides to make sure I hit all the things. So I started Fallout 4, but barely did anything. (I really like Fallout New Vegas years ago.)

I barely even game anymore and haven't for the better part of a decade now. My dopamine circuits are apparently satisfied with arguing on the internet. (I can and do still read full books just fine though. Never understood that issue.)

If you need to gamify something to enjoy it, then you don't actually enjoy it.

Counterpoint: Actual games.

No! Do not get me started between the difference between compulsion and fun. If you can play a game and enjoy it without any meta progression or score at all, only then do you enjoy the game. All the rest is just artifice trying to hijack your addiction centers.

So you're a filthy casual?

One of those "mobile" "gamers"?

(I'm kidding. Once again, I think there's more than one model here, and "true" "enjoyment" is neither easily defined nor discerned.)

So you're a filthy casual?

You know.... unironically yes, but only because I feel like the ground shifted from underneath my feet. I mean, minus the mobile gaming thing but let me explain.

I think nearly all gaming up until mobile gaming and esports would be considered casual to modern sensibilities. There were no global rankings for Quake, you might even play only the single player game and never venture online with QuakeWorld! You might only play custom maps for StarCraft or WarCraft III. Did StarCraft even have a global ranking system or did that not start until StarCraft II? Jagged Alliance IMHO is hardcore as fuck, but it's also largely a sandbox for fucking around and beating it at all represents a substantial achievement.

None of these games have the sort of cutthroat competition a global ranking system introduces, nor the sort of metagame progression or constant attaboys of unlockables, achievements or cosmetics that mediocre modern games might shower you with to try to keep you around. They aren't super sweaty, and you can probably see everything they have to offer in terms of novelty in about 10-20 hours.

And yet, the moment to moment gameplay of them is so fun, I return to them over and over and over again. I don't need a global ranking, achievements, or loot crates to make Quake 3 on a LAN just as fun as it ever was in 2000. Or playing through the StarCraft campaign again. Or firing up Jagged Alliance for the first time a few years ago. They were made fun for fun's sake. And that, unironically, seems to code as "casual" now.

The release of Halo Infinite made me realise I was old and out of touch

A halo game comes out, it's pretty good, some networking issues but as far as triple A shitshow releases go, it was pretty smooth. IT WAS ALSO FREE.

The entire Halo Reddit community was fucking losing their shit about the lack of cosmetics, challenges, and unlockables. They were barely discussing the game, the balance, the maps, the things that make the game fun.

No, they were just endlessly bitching about the lack of armor cosmetics. You can't even fucking see your armor when you're playing.

Fortnite broke the kids man, they've lost sight of what makes a game good

Unless someone can gamify it to some extent, lay out an extremely clear path for progression, with periodic rewards and a well-defined end-goal, and some mechanism for accountability, then I'm just less likely to commit to it fully, since I'd have to use discipline to establish a habit and overcome the initial unpleasantness. But so many side activities seem pretty pointless to engage with if they aren't going to drastically increase your status or wealth, even if the skill itself is handy on its own terms.

I think gamification is the exactly opposite of what you need. I cycled through a bunch of frankly masturbatory hobbies before I settled on woodworking. I tried to learn guitar, I tried mountain biking, I did martial arts for a long time, I've tried to make video games off and on for my entire adult life, did a smattering of electronics repair. All of them, to various degrees, felt like pissing in the ocean. I think I enjoyed the martial arts and mountain biking the most, but at a certain point going through the motions felt pointless. Especially with martial arts, once I no longer had anything to prove to myself that I could do it, I just wasn't feeling it anymore. I sunk costed through many more years of just showing up, but my drive to put in the extra work evaporated. A lot of what compelled me to put time into hobbies I really wasn't getting anything out of was the addictiveness of the gamification in the learning method.

But woodworking, at least for now, is fantastic. I make beautiful things that go into my home that are exactly what I want, and I don't care one teeny tiny bit how they stack up to what anyone else has done. It's not gamified, it's not competitive, but it's marginally creative and meets specific needs. Plus it's nice having hardwood furniture in my house instead of flat packed sawdust and glue. Mastering a smattering of baking recipes has been similar. I wanted great scones, I didn't like any of the bakeries around me, I figured out a recipe that produces the scones I want and now my family gets to enjoy them.

Human motivation is funny, and in several ways, I suspect gamification has spoiled our brains to expect more rewards for fake task than they deserve. I've found making real things you actually want and need has been a great detox, and doesn't necessarily carry with it the sort of "I'm too tapped out from work to do this" vibe that other more masturbatory and pointless hobbies might. But that might just be me.

As an avid mountain biker, I'm curious as to what you think was gamified about the whole experience. Most people who get into the sport start riding relatively easy trails and progress to harder ones as they get better, but the whole concept of difficulty is vague and not necessarily related to how fun a trail is to ride. What most people don't do is start off by taking lessons and sticking with it to "unlock" various achievements by passing certain thresholds. Easy trails can still be a blast for experienced riders, and a beginner can always walk anything he's uncomfortable with (most difficult trails are only truly difficult for relatively brief stretches). Most people, though, will be good enough in a year that they'll be able to ride whatever they want to, within reason, and the only thing that differentiates riders is speed, which isn't important if you aren't racing and which no one cares about on casual rides. Skills improvement usually just means getting faster by being able to navigate tricky sections better, like having the technique to navigate tight turns without slowing down too much or being able to find lines in rock gardens. The end result of developing these skills is that you end up finding certain kinds of trails more enjoyable, but it's a completely personal gain.

Have you heard of the types of fun? If not, See: https://essentialwilderness.com/type-1-2-and-3-fun/

As a descriptive generalization, all complex activities are composed of all three types of fun. The exact ratio of each type of fun changes activity by activity and person by person. Typically speaking, everyone wants to maximize type 1 fun and minimize type 3 fun. In the meantime, they will tolerate type 2 fun in proportion to they ability to delay gratification as an investment to produce more type 1 fun in the future.

Now, gamification, in this context, is best understood as a means to transmute type 3 fun into type 2 fun. The mechanism by which this happens is through providing consistent feedback and rewards so that the gamer later associated a particular misery with a positive outcome. In games, for example, killing the first 3 orcs in a questline might be type one fun, but killing the next 197 would be type 3 fun if it weren't for the xp and gold you get at the end. Similarly, in martial arts you might enjoy the first minute of getting punched in the stomach while being in horse stance, but you're not going to enjoy the next five unless you come to associate it with improving your capabilities and social status.

Gamification isn't always-- or even usually-- helpful. If an activity has a super high proportion of type 1 fun, you just do it to do it. And generally people don't have many issues doing activities they feel are predominantly type 2 fun, though they might have to get motivated first. I'll procrastinate doing my laundry, but I don't need to gamify it before I do it-- I know exactly how much I like clean clothes. Meanwhile, people should and do avoid activities that are mostly type 3 fun. I think I'd briefly enjoy falling out of a building, but I would definitely hate hitting the ground.

Where gamification helps most is at the margins, when an activity is favorably disposed toward types 1 and 2 intellectually, but at any given moment can feel emotionally tilted toward type 3. Think of this as the cold lake effect (you know you'll have fun if you just take the plunge, but you can't help but tiptoe in miserably). So if you're looking for it in mountan biking, don't expect to find it everywhere. As a hobby, mountain biking is probably dominated by the kind of people who find it type 1 fun. But if you find someone that's always a little reluctant to get on the trails. And seems mostly motivated by buying new gear, obsessively tracking their health statistics, and posting images of themselves completing on difficult trails... That's what gamification looks like for mountain biking.

It might have been the friend I was doing it with, and how the trails were rated in our area. It was 15+ years ago, so I'll probably get all the details wrong. But there was some sort of rating system that didn't seem dissimilar from rock climbing ratings, and he was really into getting to the next difficulty, and mastering X, Y and Z skills necessary for doing so, and upgrading his bike with fancy brakes and tires and shocks. Where as I just had some dinky street/trail hybrid bike with none of those things and found myself completely incapable of keeping up. I just enjoyed doing the same trail or two when I could.

Yea I agree with this sentiment. There are all these studies (mainly to do with reading) that gamification actually backfires. If you give a kid money or some other external reward for reading that actually is a pretty surefire way to avoid that kid developing a real love for reading. And so too with any other hobby you might be able to think of.

Really? Based on the recent ACX alpha school review, I was under the impression that cash for books does work.

As far as I know Fryer has not done any super-long-term studies of the impact of his experiments, but he did look at the mid-term effects. After the “read books for $$s” study ended he followed the test and control group for what happened to their reading habits when they were not getting paid. He found, in contradiction to concerns about loss of internal motivation, that the test group continued to read more than the control group.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school

Which studies do you mean?

I agree with this. I cycled through a lot until I found piano, and singing. I do them because they are beautiful and they open my heart. I don't even necessarily have to have energy or anything I just find myself gravitating towards piano more and more because I genuinely want it.

Especially with martial arts, once I no longer had anything to prove to myself that I could do it, I just wasn't feeling it anymore.

Similar for me, but I swapped over to teaching it to others, which is quite rewarding on its own.

And you could always try some amateur fights if you want to challenge yourself (at the risk of injury).

But woodworking, at least for now, is fantastic.

3D printing is giving me a portion of this satisfaction of making something 'from scratch' and having a finished product at the end you can take pride in.

But so far that's mostly for trinkets and trivialities.

I dream of having a sizeable enclosed workspace on my property to tinker with cars and wood and produce fairly complex devices and objects. I am become Boomer, acquirer of hobbies.

I suspect gamification has spoiled our brains to expect more rewards for fake task than they deserve.

I think my only point there is that you're going to encounter the gamified stimuli anyway (unless you are VERY actively avoiding it), and it thus behooves you to let the 'good' stuff grab your attention (and money) or else something wasteful and trivial might, instead.

For instance: I do have Duolingo on my phone and I consider it a better use of my time than, say, Candy Crush or the bazillion basebuilding game clones out there, so its like, I dunno, substituting nicotine gum for actual cigarettes. I rage every time my phone updates and it auto-installs a bunch of the little ADHD time-suck apps on there that I have to remove manually.

And I can also say that there is zero chance I'll ever get 'bored' or feel 'satiated' with having sex with women, but that has run into the endless frustration that is modern dating that I bemoan elsewhere. I'm tempted to start setting aside a 'prostitute budget' for myself if I go another year or two without getting into a relationship, but I damn well know what its like to be intimate with someone you truly know and care about, and cares about you in return, so I don't think I can be truly happy just paying for it.

All these basic activities turn out to be the most fulfilling on a primal level, whoda thunk? (lots of people, it turns out, the modern world just wants to keep you distracted with candy and trinkets).

People are tired. The idea that one can put in endless effort for as long as one is awake is an idea that I slowly grew out of in my twenties. There are a few people who seem to be able to do it but I don’t think they’re physiologically or psychologically normal. The rest of us just about get by at our job and then are mostly pooped and have to slip in bits and pieces of effort where they can.

Now, I think that modern media hasn’t helped with this. I’m playing Elden Ring at the moment and I’ve noticed that it can pretty much perk me up even when I’m basically dozing off, which of course means that it’s overdrawing my reserves when I really ought to be resting. It’s also harder to focus on semi-interesting skills when very-entertaining stuff is available instead, but everyone knows that already.

I hate 9-5s. With a burning passion.

Back in India, most of my jobs involved me working for 24 hours at a stretch, two shifts a week. There are places where 24 hours can be utterly grueling, such as ICU or ER jobs, but when I wasn't there, I usually managed to wrap up the bulk of my work by the evening and could look forward to a decent amount of sleep at night on average, if the nurses weren't overly neurotic. Wake up early, make sure nobody is likely to die before the next shift, write a handover, then scurry away back home.

This isn't a regular option right now, best case is a few 24 hour or 12 hour shifts a month, with 9-5s for the rest. This sucks, I come home drained, and barely have the ability to recuperate before the next day, let alone manage normal life admin or indulge in my hobbies. I miss the previous flexibility I had, why can't I just go and get a haircut at 3 pm on a Tuesday? Get hammered with friends on a Thursday night?

Not to mention the additional wasted time when it comes to traveling to and from work. That adds up when you're doing it 5 days a week.

Good observation. I also agree that the hustle-culture memes aren't reflective of how people's efforts can actually be allocated. A common failure mode I see in myself is over-scheduling things in my down-time and not doing any of them and gaming/scrolling instead. I really should be resting during that time.

Partly explains why people can be so flaky about attending events (or dates) that they in theory agreed to.

They overschedule and end up more tired than they expected when the time comes.

Maybe. But there's an increasing trend of social anxiety making people just not want to go to things at all -- and of course the internet rectangle makes it easy to develop parasocial relationships or social media addictions and spend time on those instead of actual people. The flakiest people I know are the least busy.

For instance, I have a friend who wanted to hang out and I haven't texted him back in 3 days (but to be fair, it took him 4 days to get back to me). And my girlfriend is in the other room and I'm typing this right now. I'm choosing you over snuggling, faceh-less internet person! Something has gone wrong there.

I saw a t-shirt at Target the other day that read, "Canceller of Plans." And I know the rush that comes from cancelling plans. But it's still pathological avoidance.

Yes, the sheer rise in anxiety disorders is testament to that deep problem.

I still feel it, sometimes, when it comes time to turn off the computer and dress up and leave the house the "ugh field" activates. But I know I'll be happier if I take the opportunity.

I've also noticed in myself the tendency to not wanting to show up somewhere unless I can expect there to be decently attractive, possibly single women attending, likely dressed in cute clothing. My guys nights and board games are fun, but I really just want to be able to interact with women more, its the only aspect really missing from my otherwise ideal routine.

And women, of course, are markedly more anxious and flighty these days, so its harder to get them to come out consistently than ever. Ask me how I know.

I’m beginning to suspect that screens are a hyper stimulus you can have “relationships”, but they’re only the good parts and you don’t have to work at them, you don’t have to make time for them, you don’t even need to put on pants. Games are much more stimulating than doing the actual thing, they give more rewards and with less effort than real life

The "Attention Economy" is just BRUTAL, b/c it really is an utterly zero-sum game (you can't produce 'more attention' very easily, only reapportion the amount that currently exists), and thus there is strong incentive to try to drag attention out of people even when it is objectively unhealthy.

"Of course I can watch one more episode, Netflix, how thoughtful of you to queue it right up!" (looks up 3 episodes later to see the clock says "1:38 a.m.")

No, fuck off. Give me the app that values my attention approximately as much as I do, and will actively start discouraging me from expending it too much in one place. "Here, you have time for precisely one (1) episode of Tulsa King, then we're cutting you off. I've already set the lights in the room to dim slowly, and your favorite ambient sleep noises are cued up as soon as you get into the bed."

I've heard from anonymous sources that there's a whole service economy for the ultrarich, based around this sort of thing. The basic idea is that their time is very valuable, so they'll pay astronomical prices to avoid ever having to wait or be distracted by petty bullshit. The extreme example might be having a private jet/helicopter to help them travel faster, but it exists for all sorts of minor things too. So they might have a personal assistant who's job is to cue up just one episode of their favorite TV show, then slowly turn down the lights and help them sleep. or whatever else they want.

Obviously some of that is a privilege that only the very wealthy can afford. But it does seem like, to some extent, we should be able to pay for services that help middle class folks do that too. it's odd that we can't. If anything, it seems to be going the opposite direction, where like, even if you pay for premium, it will still insist on showing us adds and doing that sort of attention-grabbing addictive bullshit. It feels like I'm going to a restaurant and the owner is telling us "yeah I don't care how much you pay, you must sit in the smoking section and smoke at least one cigarette. i'm not letting you enjoy my food without a little nicotine on the side."

Yeah, I'm desperately curious as to the sorts of lifestyle accommodations one unlocks when they pass, at a guess, the $50 million net worth mark.

For me, yeah, I think if I could have a dedicated personal assistant, which I'd guess would cost $50k-70k/year for a decently competent one (just googled it, I was almost exactly right), I could cut out SO MUCH CRAP that wastes my time and focus on the highest leverage, most productive, or fun, stuff that I WANT to be doing.

But man, how do you get to the level of wealth quickly if you're merely climbing the corporate ladder? If I start pulling down $250k/yr then it might start to be justifiable (in my mind) to splurge on a dedicated assistant to handle this stuff. And have to try to avoid lifestyle inflation to some degree. But BECAUSE I currently complete many of those tasks myself, I'm somewhat stymied from doing the work that might speed up my progression to higher incomes.

There's got to be an efficient frontier on the curve that I'm not quite hitting. Hmmm.

Wait wait wait, I just realized, under idealized circumstances that approximately what a spouse can help achieve, if you marry well and have a good, cooperative, teammate relationship. That was probably the secret for middle class couples leveraging into higher income brackets.

Wait wait wait, I just realized, under idealized circumstances that approximately what a spouse can help achieve, if you marry well and have a good, cooperative, teammate relationship. That was probably the secret for middle class couples leveraging into higher income brackets.

And your realisation there is what annoys me about the commentary post Bezos divorce about MacKenzie getting all that money for nothing. Jeff was the guy who made the billions, she was just the wife, what did she do to deserve this money?

Well, let's see: first, she wasn't the one who blew up the marriage by hooking up with the thot next door. Second, back before Jeff was Mr. Mega-bucks, she was working a job too and contributing to the household income while he got Amazon off the ground. Third, all the support that faceh mentions that isn't explictly 'a paid job' - running the household, nurturing relationships (business as well as personal), raising the kids, being there for Jeff in the ways spouses are supposed to be there for each other. Being willing to be seen out in public with him when he was still a googly-eyed nerd before he buffed up and got work done to fix his googly eye.

But sure, none of that matters, she's just a parasite who got undeserved riches in the divorce settlement.

That really depends on what you think the goal of divorce law/alimony is.

Giving them $250 million should set them up for life and is almost certainly sufficient to pay for their 'services' during the marriage. Or if you want to assume the value of their services is inherently equal to his,(as partnerships go) then sure, start with that assumption.

Just understand you're creating an incentive for men to avoid marriage as a institution since it takes most of the control of their wealth away from them at the drop of a hat if they get married before they build their kingdom.

As usual, though, the point is less about billionaires and more about men who enter the marriage expecting to get some level of reliable partner, then realize that under the current legal regime the woman has no obligation to pull her weight, to act respectful towards him, or to even sleep with him, and yet is generally able to file for divorce regardless of how well-behaved he was during the marriage.

Its an inherent asymmetry.

Just understand you're creating an incentive for men to avoid marriage as a institution since it takes most of the control of their wealth away from them at the drop of a hat if they get married before they build their kingdom.

Some of the comments about women and marriage on here are also creating incentives for women to avoid marriage. Even relatively tame, like "The thing is, that work doesn’t hugely differ whether you’re the wife of a coal miner or a self-made billionaire."

Yes, gentlemen, I hope all of you are telling the women in your lives (mothers, grandmothers, aunts, female cousins, sisters, daughters, wives) that you don't consider them equal partners, that you are the superior person in this relationship because you are the breadwinner and her little job (if she works outside the home) doesn't count. Working in the home only? Absolutely does not count for anything, she's replaceable by a coal-miner's wife because being the spouse and mother for an upper-middle class household doesn't involve any kind of extra work at all, and maybe even less work because you're rich enough to hire help. If you do decide to dump her, she deserves maybe ten bucks and a pat on the head, but certainly nothing more. Not one drop of your vast wealth (should you have vast wealth), even if that share does not, in fact, leave you penniless but you retain possession of the majority of the vast wealth.

Why, with such examples of how respected they are, why aren't women jumping at the notion of not getting an education and a career of their own and instead getting married as soon after high school as possible then producing a few kids as rapidly as possible? And if hubby gets tired of you after a while, well, you can probably find work somewhere scrubbing floors or something, automation and AI hasn't yet taken those jobs away!

Women - such ungrateful bitches, to turn down a wonderful offer like that!

I don't consider myself a misandrist, but some of you guys make it tough going, and more and more I am grateful to the Lord God Almighty for making me without the wiring to desire and need love and romance, because blow me down, I'd be fucked if I had to rely on a guy for anything from emotional validation on up.

I made the statement:

"The thing is, that work doesn’t hugely differ whether you’re the wife of a coal miner or a self-made billionaire."

To be clear, I agree with none of these statements:

you are the superior person in this relationship because you are the breadwinner

her little job (if she works outside the home) doesn't count.

Working in the home only? Absolutely does not count for anything

If you do decide to dump her, she deserves maybe ten bucks and a pat on the head, but certainly nothing more.

Not one drop of your vast wealth (should you have vast wealth), even if that share does not, in fact, leave you penniless but you retain possession of the majority of the vast wealth.

I think it would help for you to understand where I'm coming from:

[EDIT: PERSONAL DETAILS REDACTED]

Can you see why I'm a little dubious of the idea that if you marry someone, credit for your achievements should be always and automatically be spread equally?

Of course this is only an anecdote and I don't intend it to be applied to all relationships. I am sure that there are a lot of traditional couples who have a much more equitable relationship with a more even share of responsibility. I do note however that:

  1. In practice, the contribution of the man in a modern, respectable, upper-class marriage is concrete, well-defined and non-negotiable. I do not think the reverse is true. Caveats: this is different for the underclass.
  2. Work in the home and childcare is absolutely hard work but it is more stable than work outside the home. You are not going to be dossing around, but neither are you going to be pulling multiple all-nighters. The type and amount of work are much more even between families and socio-economic levels. My statement at the top was made with this in mind.
  3. It seems to me fair that the compensation in the event of divorce should be more even in recognition of this fact. This does not mean ten bucks and a pat on the head but nor does it mean billions unless you were very clearly and openly doing an appreciable amount of the work that made that money.
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Yes, gentlemen, I hope all of you are telling the women in your lives (mothers, grandmothers, aunts, female cousins, sisters, daughters, wives) that you don't consider them equal partners,

That's a bit of a trick.

"Equal Partners" in the sense that both are contributing to the household. But how does one measure the value or even magnitude of each contribution when they're inherently different in their nature.

If the guy builds the house, builds all the furnishing in it, and does the actual maintenance work on it over the years, (i.e., it ONLY exists thanks to his own labor)...

It is REALLY fair that the woman would get the house in a divorce scenario?

Well, we acknowledge she was the one who was 'keeping house' and doing all the day-to-day work that makes it a pleasant place to live and keeps it from falling into neglect which leveraged the value the man already provided, creating something better than what the man alone could achieve.

So we've got 'unequal' contributions by each side, but each has contributed value to the whole.

The actual contributions are usually not accounted for in a literal ledger. So we often end up with a guy who thinks he's being shortchanged because he created all of the necessary preconditions for a happy, successful marriage, and pulled his weight, and yet gets screwed over for trusting that he would be 'repaid' by his partner with her love and esteem and, eventually, a kid, and yet he's still getting screwed over when it ends.

In short, how does one balance material contributions with, I guess, mostly emotional and intangible but still valuable contributions?

Since the material contributions are legible, those are the ones that end up getting parceled out by the court. So the wife gets a cut of the material contributions made by the husband, but the man doesn't get to take away any of the emotional, intangible elements contributed by her. So he loses both the material wealth AND the intangibles.

You can imagine that this feels unfair.

I don't consider myself a misandrist, but some of you guys make it tough going, and more and more I am grateful to the Lord God Almighty for making me without the wiring to desire and need love and romance, because blow me down, I'd be fucked if I had to rely on a guy for anything from emotional validation on up.

I mean, I've pointed it out before, women end up marrying a corporation (for all pursuits and purposes) and it turns out that is pretty much a dead end for their 'emotional validation.' Eventually the biological clock ticks over, and the corporation will never be able to provide her with kids and the actual long-term loyalty that a good husband would grant.

But men have to match up to the corporation's material benefits while seeking a partner, anyway, because those factors are intangible and rarely counted in the calculus.

Its always and forever a question of 'compared to what?'

I don't think women are doing the math on what they'll get if they stick with MegaCorp for 25 years, laboring dutifully under their manager's eye, then what they'll get if they stick with a Husband for that same period, laboring dutifully under 'his' roof.

It becomes a bit annoying to have to justify men's contributions to upholding the entire edifice of civilization.

On the flip side, women, by dint of bearing and raising children, are obviously and constantly glorified for their contribution. As well they should be.

So men, demanding a little bit more leverage and control of their wealth so they can actually achieve good outcomes for themselves in the world they built seems utterly fair to me.

My actual point is that Divorce laws should really, in actuality, be designed around encouraging marriage and family creation and maintenance of a long-term bond. And OBJECTIVELY they are simply not doing that.

Billionaires getting divorced and splitting 10-12 figure households are a symptom of this, and a particularly noticeable one.

And guys who notice "wait, even the billionaire couldn't keep his wife, what actual chance do I have" are a lot more common than billionaires.

The incentives are simply not aligned. A guy wants a partner, a homemaker, and someone to bear and raise children.

No-Fault Divorce penalizes the guy by forcing him to give up his accumulated wealth and support the wife regardless of how well she actually behaved during the marriage. Whether he got a kid out of it or not.

So he is pretty damn motivated to try to keep the marriage afloat to avoid said penalties.

Divorce penalizes a woman by... ?

What is a woman actually losing out on by initiating divorce?

Some of the comments about women and marriage on here are also creating incentives for women to avoid marriage.

Unlikely, in that no significant number of women who haven't already made up their mind are reading them.

Anyway, "How dare you talk about this in a way that doesn't put all the onus on the man and put the woman on a pedestal?" is not going to be an effective tactic; it's so ubiquitous already that anyone still talking about the subject is obviously already inured to it.

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The thing is, that work doesn’t hugely differ whether you’re the wife of a coal miner or a self-made billionaire. If anything, the latter has more professional assistance, although she’s also expected to be slightly more personable. (I don’t think Amazon was really that kind of business though.)

I don’t think many people think the wife should come away with nothing in such affairs, only that scaling it directly to the husband’s business success is pretty dubious.

The work of getting a business off the ground doesn't differ that much whether your business becomes a trillion dollar company or goes bust. The labor theory of value is wrong.

Mackenzie was also working at Amazon in the early days, doing accounts, packing orders, etc. So I find it entirely reasonable that this made her rich.

The labor theory of value is wrong, yes. I think you're missing a step or two between that and the Washington State Divorce Court being the proper way to assess that value. The correct question is 'What rate of pay would Jeff Bezos and his wife have agreed to in return for her assistance?' Which is unfortunately impossible to answer given that no such negotiation took place.

I suppose you could argue that he married her with the understanding that, should they divorce, their assets would be divvied up according to that process? That's technically valid, but it'd be just as valid if that process were anything else, provided those terms wouldn't have prevented their marriage; also impossible to say, I suppose. Still, I think this is the best supported position.

On the other side, one can consider what he'd have had to have paid someone else to fulfill those same responsibilities -- certainly far, far less than he ended up paying her, even if he'd had to take out a loan to do so. It's certainly possible she did something for Amazon no one else could have done, but neither accounts nor packing orders meets that bar. He likely wouldn't have taken out a loan to pay someone else to do those things (at least not very early on), but that's not actually relevant so long as the court would have forced him to pay her for her labor regardless of the success it engendered -- her compensation was guaranteed, so there should be no risk premium. But that's not what the court would do, and they both knew that at the time, so maybe a risk premium is fair.

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Because low-skill compensation in the west has been rising astronomically, personal touches like that have been getting more expensive, not less. Fast food is paying $14/hr now- for front of house(restaurants tend to pay their kitchen people more because it's harder work). Day laborers used to be $100/day, plus lunch. Now it's $200.

Tipping everywhere probably has this as a big chunk of the explanation. It is simply far more expensive to hire someone to take orders and pour coffee and putting some on the customers even if it annoys them makes more sense as a tradeoff.

As for why that is, I blame weed making some people unemployable and doordash convincing a bigger chunk that they can strike it rich being their own boss.

I tried to make this, combining smartwatch data on heart rates and variability to detect energy levels and combining it with an LLM to generate useable recommendations.

It was surprisingly difficult for multiple reasons: your heart doesn’t differentiate between ‘low stress’ and ‘depressed heart rate because you’re recovering from a massive exertion’, or ‘high stress’ vs ‘happy drinking with friends’.

Then it was even harder to do anything with the data. Obviously LLMs don’t integrate with anything meaningful without lots of extra work and the moment you get into health they just start relying on the teams of feel-good bullshit in their training set. No, I would not like to do an hour of yoga followed by a gratitude exercise.

It was surprisingly difficult for multiple reasons: your heart doesn’t differentiate between ‘low stress’ and ‘depressed heart rate because you’re recovering from a massive exertion’, or ‘high stress’ vs ‘happy drinking with friends’.

Does your smart watch track heart rate variability and blood oxygenation? I think my garmin watch is pretty decent at knowing when I'm stressed emotionally vs when I'm stressed metabolically. Of course, the little suggestions it gives me are kind of useless ("take a breath", "go on a walk", buddy if I was the kind of person to do those things I wouldn't need you to tell me to do them.) But I think the problem doesn't lie with either the sensors or suggestions, but with a lack of an effective punishment/reward scheme.

...okay, I'll admit it. I just want a robot mommy that pats my head when I'm a good boy and spanks my ass when I'm a REALLY good boy.

It tracks both of those things. How were you using that data?

the little suggestions it gives me are kind of useless ("take a breath", "go on a walk", buddy if I was the kind of person to do those things I wouldn't need you to tell me to do them

Yeah, this was basically my big problem as well. I think it can work, it just needs to accept that mood management requires more than a ping and a condescending message.

HRV should give a decent indicator of stress levels.

It tracks both of those things. How were you using that data?

I wasn't, but by my estimation the built in software features accurately figure out the state of my body. Maybe the software has just been updated since you tried your experiment.

Great observations. I wish there were tools that could do this. Cold Turkey sort of approximately gets close to this, but it's very very crude and requires a lot of upfront effort/willpower.

That's one of the reasons I prefer using TheMotte in general vs. most other sites. Aside from the Quokka popup, it doesn't actively try to drag out your time spent on the site, or use dark patterns to keep you engaged.

And of course it isn't centered around ragebait or fueled by whomever can get the most replies and attention (some might disagree).

it isn't centered around ragebait

Speak for yourself, buddy

It's also quite difficult to use TheMotte in a way that encourages low effort. My best performing posts are ones I spend time on, which is usually a form of deep work. There really isn't enough content on here to doomscroll, and reading comments is actually usually pretty high energy.

Yeah.

I often start off a post intending to just make a quick, lowish-effort reply, then find myself drafting a mini-essay just so I can fully justify the point I'm making.

Effort feels like it is rewarded because people will usually respond with similar effort rather than just troll or dismiss you with a joke.

I definitely doomscroll The Motte, and find it more addictive than social media.

One thing that is handy about having the weekly threads so self-contained, at least you can reach the actual end of it, there's no infinite algorithm.

If I'm really disregulated, I can just keep refreshing this and DSL over and over (operator error, I know).

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