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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4414 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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Bulverism is a waste of everyone's time

A response to Freddie deBoer on AI

Freddie deBoer has a new edition of the article he writes about AI. Not, you’ll note, a new article about AI: my use of the definite article was quite intentional. For years, Freddie has been writing exactly one article about AI, repeating the same points he always makes more or less verbatim, repeatedly assuring his readers that nothing ever happens and there’s nothing to see here. Freddie’s AI article always consists of two discordant components inelegantly and incongruously kludged together:

  • sober-minded appeals to AI maximalists to temper their most breathless claims about the capabilities of this technology by carefully pointing out shortcomings therein

  • childish, juvenile insults directed at anyone who is even marginally more excited about the potential of this technology than he is, coupled with armchair psychoanalysis of the neuroses undergirding said excitement

What I find most frustrating about each repetition of Freddie’s AI article is that I agree with him on many of the particulars. While Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence is, without exception, the most frightening book I’ve ever read in my life, and I do believe that our species will eventually invent artificial general intelligence — I nevertheless think the timeline for that event is quite a bit further out than the AI utopians and doomers would have us believe, and I think a lot of the hype around large language models (LLMs) in particular is unwarranted. And to lay my credentials on the table: I’m saying this as someone doesn’t work in the tech industry, who doesn’t have a backgrond in computer science, who hasn’t been following the developments in the AI space as closely as many have (presumably including Freddie), and who (contrary to the occasional accusation my commenters have fielded at me) has never used generative AI to compose text for this newsletter and never intends to.

I’m not here to take Freddie to task on his needlessly confrontational demeanour (something he rather hypocritically decries in his interlocutors), or attempt to put manners on him. If he can’t resist the temptation to pepper his well-articulated criticisms of reckless AI hypemongering with spiteful schoolyard zingers, that’s his business. But his article (just like every instance in the series preceding it) contains many examples of a particular species of fallacious reasoning I find incredibly irksome, regardless of the context in which it is used. I believe his arguments would have a vastly better reception among the AI maximalists he claims to want to persuade if he could only exercise a modicum of discipline and refrain from engaging in this specific category of argument.

Quick question: what’s the balance in your checking account?

If you’re a remotely sensible individual, it should be immediately obvious that there are a very limited number of ways in which you can find the information to answer this question accurately:

  1. Dropping into the nearest branch of your bank and asking them to confirm your balance (or phoning them).

  2. Logging into your bank account on your browser and checking the balance (or doing so via your banking app).

  3. Perhaps you did either #1 or #2 a few minutes before I asked the question, and can recite the balance from memory.

Now, supposing that you answered the question to the best of your knowledge, claiming that the balance of your checking account is, say, €2,000. Imagine that, in response, I rolled my eyes and scoffed that there’s no way your bank balance could possibly be €2,000, and the only reason that you’re claiming that that’s the real figure is because you’re embarrassed about your reckless spending habits. You would presumably retort that it’s very rude for me to accuse you of lying, that you were accurately reciting your bank balance to the best of your knowledge, and furthermore how dare I suggest that you’re bad with money when in fact you’re one of the most fiscally responsible people in your entire social circle—

Wait. Stop. Can you see what a tremendous waste of time this line of discussion is for both of us?

Either your bank balance is €2,000, or it isn’t. The only ways to find out what it is are the three methods outlined above. If I have good reason to believe that the claimed figure is inaccurate (say, because I was looking over your shoulder when you were checking your banking app; or because you recently claimed to be short of money and asked me for financial assistance), then I should come out and argue that. But as amusing as it might be for me to practise armchair psychoanalysis about how the only reason you’re claiming that the balance is €2,000 is because of this or that complex or neurosis, it won’t bring me one iota closer to finding out what the real figure is. It accomplishes nothing.

This particular species of fallacious argument is called Bulverism, and refers to any instance in which, rather than debating the truth or falsity of a specific claim, an interlocutor assumes that the claim is false and expounds on the underlying motivations of the person who advanced it. The checking accout balance example above is not original to me, but from C.S. Lewis, who coined the term:

You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly.

As Lewis notes, if I have definitively demonstrated that the claim is wrong — that there’s no possible way your bank balance really is €2,000 — it may be of interest to consider the psychological factors that resulted in you claiming otherwise. Maybe you really were lying to me because you’re embarrassed about your fiscal irresponsibility; maybe you were mistakenly looking at the balance of your savings account rather than your checking account; maybe you have undiagnosed myopia and you misread a 3 as a 2. But until I’ve established that you are wrong, it’s a colossal waste of my time and yours to expound at length on the state of mind that led you to erroneously conclude that the balance is €2,000 when it’s really something else.

In the eight decades since Lewis coined the term, the popularity of this fallacious argumentative strategy shows no signs of abating, and is routinely employed by people at every point on the political spectrum against everyone else. You’ll have evolutionists claiming that the only reason people endorse young-Earth creationism is because the idea of humans evolving from animals makes them uncomfortable; creationists claiming that the only reason evolutionists endorse evolution is because they’ve fallen for the epistemic trap of Scientism™ and can’t accept that not everything can be deduced from observation alone; climate-change deniers claiming that the only reason environmentalists claim that climate change is happening is because they want to instate global communism; environmentalists claiming that the only reason people deny that climate change is happening is because they’re shills for petrochemical companies. And of course, identity politics of all stripes (in particular standpoint epistemology and other ways of knowing) is Bulverism with a V8 engine: is there any debate strategy less productive than “you’re only saying that because you’re a privileged cishet white male”? It’s all wonderfully amusing — what could be more fun than confecting psychological just-so stories about your ideological opponents in order to insult them with a thin veneer of cod-academic therapyspeak?

But it’s also, ultimately, a waste of time. The only way to find out the balance of your checking account is to check the balance on your checking account — idle speculation on the psychological factors that caused you to claim that the balance was X when it was really Y are futile until it has been established that it really is Y rather than X. And so it goes with all claims of truth or falsity. Hypothetically, it could be literally true that 100% of the people who endorse evolution have fallen for the epistemic trap of Scientism™ and so on and so forth. Even if that was the case, that wouldn’t tell us a thing about whether evolution is literally true.

To give Freddie credit where it’s due, the various iterations of his AI article do not consist solely of him assuming that AI maximalists are wrong and speculating on the psychological factors that caused them to be so. He does attempt, with no small amount of rigour, to demonstrate that they are wrong on the facts: pointing out major shortcomings in the current state of the LLM art; citing specific examples of AI predictions which conspicuously failed to come to pass; comparing the recent impact of LLMs on human society with other hugely influential technologies (electricity, indoor plumbing, antibiotics etc.) in order to make the case that LLMs have been nowhere near as influential on our society as the maximalists would like to believe. This is what a sensible debate about the merits of LLMs and projections about their future capabilities should look like.

But poor Freddie just can’t help himself, so in addition to all of this sensible sober-minded analysis, he insists on wasting his readers’ time with endless interminable paragraphs of armchair psychoanalysis about how the AI maximalists came to arrive at their deluded worldviews:

What [Scott] Alexander and [Yascha] Mounk are saying, what the endlessly enraged throngs on LessWrong and Reddit are saying, ultimately what Thompson and Klein and Roose and Newton and so many others are saying in more sober tones, is not really about AI at all. Their line on all of this isn’t about technology, if you can follow it to the root. They’re saying, instead, take this weight from off of me. Let me live in a different world than this one. Set me free, free from this mundane life of pointless meetings, student loan payments, commuting home through the traffic, remembering to cancel that one streaming service after you finish watching a show, email unsubscribe buttons that don’t work, your cousin sending you hustle culture memes, gritty coffee, forced updates to your phone’s software that make it slower for no discernible benefit, trying and failing to get concert tickets, trying to come up with zingers to impress your coworkers on Slack…. And, you know, disease, aging, infirmity, death.

Am I disagreeing with any of the above? Not at all: whenever anyone is making breathless claims about the potential near-future impacts of some new technology, I have to assume there’s some amount of wishful thinking or motivated reasoning at play.

No: what I’m saying to Freddie is that his analysis, even if true, doesn’t fucking matter. It’s irrelevant. It could well be the case that 100% of the AI maximalists are only breathlessly touting the immediate future of AI on human society because they’re too scared to confront the reality of a world characterised by boredom, drudgery, infirmity and mortality. But even if that was the case, that wouldn’t tell us one single solitary thing about whether this or that AI prediction is likely to come to pass or not. The only way to answer that question to our satisfaction is to soberly and dispassionately look at the state of the evidence, the facts on the ground, resisting the temptation to get caught up in hype or reflexive dismissal. If it ultimately turns out that LLMs are a blind alley, there will be plenty of time to gloat about the psychological factors that caused the AI maximalists to believe otherwise. Doing so before it has been conclusively shown that LLMs are a blind alley is a waste of words.

Freddie, I plead with you: stay on topic. I’m sure it feels good to call everyone who’s more excited than you about AI an emotionally stunted manchild afraid to confront the real world, but it’s not a productive contribution to the debate. Resist the temptation to psychoanalyse people you disagree with, something you’ve complained about people doing to you (in the form of suggesting that your latest article is so off the wall that it could only be the product of a manic episode) on many occasions. The only way to check the balance of someone’s checking account is to check the balance on their checking account. Anything else is a waste of everyone’s time.

You can only confirm someone's checking account balance for sure by looking at the balance. But you can find evidence for the size of someone's checking account by doing things other than looking at it. If someone claims to have a hundred million dollars in his checking account and I notice he doesn't live like a rich person, and doesn't have a job that could earn a lot of money, etc., I haven't proven for sure that his balance isn't that. But I have found Bayseian evidence for it.

Correct. Right now, there's no way for us to confirm whether breathless AI predictions will come true in the near future, because they're just that - predictions. But we have Bayesian evidence pointing one way or the other.

Bulverism is about 50 percent of Marxism, so it's no surprise Freddie indulges. When you have an implicitly deterministic epistemology, you don't have to explain why an idea is wrong when you can explain how it came about by the wrong causes.

With the increased usage of ChatGPT and other aislop in everyday communication such as casual emails and slack messages, AI apologists have increasingly tried to excuse this usage by non-native English speakers(citation needed, but besides the point). The excuse being that for non-native speakers, AI usage can save time, or even increase the quality of the resulting writing. I want to argue this is actually the opposite, and that using AI output particularly and exceptionally corrosive when used by non-English speakers.

I came across this section(plaintext transcription in below comment) of a YT video, where an intermediate level English learner is trying to use ChatGPT improve a piece of writing, and also learn from it. (source video, not important). Here’s the catch ChatGPT’s output is just plain bad

Overall, my issues with ChatGPT for this use case can be broken down into three main problems:

  1. The ChatGPT output is just plain worse in many ways, and English learners won't be able to tell.
  2. By critiquing things that aren’t wrong, learners who follow blindly will lose their voice.
  3. The meaning has changed, and the user will not easily recognize this. The original meaning can be teased out of a sentence in broken English, but it has been erased completely in the AI output As a result, I feel like people using ChatGPT in this way are completely kneecapping their learning.

Let’s go over the main revisions point by point

  • stunning -> absolutely mind-blowing - Stunning is already quite a strong adjective and ChatGPT is overdoing it. OK edit.

  • I commented -> I typed in the comments - Absolutely a bad edit. More wordy for no more meaning, and the original English is more true to the original Japanese.

  • Moreover -> Not only that - Moreover is perfect here. Bad edit.

  • Em dash - not called for here. AI tell.

  • reacted really disgusting me -> actually reacted - This seriously changes the meaning, taking away a major element of the storytelling. Bad edit.

  • I’m in a heaven right now -> I’m in heaven - I’m in heaven right now is emphasis. Bad edit.

  • It was a peaceful and amazing moment in my life -> That one moment was pure peace and bliss. Probably one of the best highlights of my life. - Deemphasized and wordified into two sentences. A better version would easily be “It was the most peaceful and amazing moment in my life”. Bad edit.

  • And also, the most excited thing is -> And the most exciting part is still ahead. - AI slop tell. Bad edit.

  • I could die there -> nothing - ChatGPT just took that out completely!!!! WFT!!!!

  • I really wanna support her live too. -> I really, truly want to support her with everything I’ve got. - “really, truly” came out of nowhere and the double emphasis with “with everything I’ve got” is odd. Bad edit.

  • Imagine that live I feel like drinking her bath water. -> Just thinking about that live … feels like I could drink her bathwater. - This one is totally lost. Basic context clues and cultural knowledge make it clear that the narrator already wants to drink gamer girl bathwater irregardless of any live. The correct edit would be “When I imagine that live, I feel like I’m drinking her bathwater” or “Imagining that live feels like drinking her bathwater.” The original English is closer to correct than ChatGPT and the correct meaning can be inferred.

Of course ChatGPT can probably be made to produce better outputs with better prompting, or used differently, but this is just one of many examples where ChatGPT usage by a casual user has actually made things worse.

Now what's the point of this post? First I would like to urge everyone not to use GenAI outputs in the final work, even for edits. Using AI as a judge is probably fine, but the best way to maintain quality is probably write all of the final text in your own words. Even for people without perfect English. Secondly, with all levels of society using or even abusing AI tools, it may increase productivity by some metrics, it will also be like an enshittification of all written communication.

We've seen an increasing number of complaints enter the discourse about foreign immigrants with weak English skills just being annoying to deal with in everyday life. And I've also had similar experiences, where dealing with a fresh off the boat foreigner has been an annoyance when ordering food or asking a simple question - and also where hiring an American would have only costed a tiny bit more. Well now AI slop is going to provide a double whammy - lazy or misguided native speakers are going to enshittify their own communication with slop, and also foreigners will have their English learning impeded, and the English they do write will be worse.

What a sterling example of making the dream of perfection the sworn enemy of the merely better. As others have pointed out before, the most likely alternative, in the absence of ChatGPT, would have been this poor fellow resorting to Google Translate or other, far simpler ML solutions. There isn't an abundance of fluent English and Japanese speakers willing to proof read random YouTube comments.

I don't speak Japanese, but I see nothing particularly objectionable in the translation. It might not capture all nuance, but it gets the gist of it across. Learning language takes time, probably years, and by the time this gentleman gets good enough that he needs or appreciates the nuance, LLMs will be even better at the job.

IDK if you specifically disagree, but I strongly prefer the original English, errors and all, over the ChatGPT output.

I work a lot with non-native English speakers and I think ChatGPT has definitely improved things, especially when they want to try to explain more complex aspects of the business, their funding needs, answer certain questions. I used to get a lot of emails so poorly written and barely comprehensible that it would take much longer to parse the meaning than if they had just sent the email in whatever native language and let me Google translate it. Mostly these are intelligent people, they’re just too proud to hire a translator (but not to use an LLM).

To me this is kind of a mass production of furniture or fast fashion thing. At the high end, the amount of genuinely enjoyable and well-produced writing will decline, not even because LLMs aren’t capable of it but because they will default to simple, emotive English in the new style, and because even good writers won’t be bothered in most cases to write themselves or to tweak prompts for better output.

But for the 99% of people who either don’t speak the language they’re ’writing in’ natively or don’t have good verbal ability, communication can be much easier, the gap between what is in their head and something someone else can read has, in my opinion, shrunk.

so poorly written and barely comprehensible that it would take much longer to parse the meaning than if they had just sent the email in whatever native language and let me Google translate it.

they’re just too proud to hire a translator (but not to use an LLM).

ChatGPT hacked their brains and convinced them that using machine translation is OK. Because before, their ego was too big to copy paste the output out of google translate, but somehow when it's ChatGPT it's totally ok.

Of course by giving up on writing English in the first place, they will also never learn.

Interestingly @RandomRanger cited a video in another thread that's an unintentional example of this. It's an Avatar compilation video titled "Hardest RDA Edit" where 'hard' is used to mean based/awesome/woah. My browser mistranslated that to "[Most Difficult] RDA Edit' i.e. 最も難しい RDA 編集.

If GPT is given both the title and the summary (which Youtube could do internally with their API) it gives the much better translations "Max strength RDA edit" 史上最強RDA編集 or "Most villainous RDA edit" 最凶RDA編集. In general I find GPT much better on language problems than they are on almost any other task, and miles better than standard machine translation.

Yeah I was using a Claude script to translate a fic from Russian. I can't read Russian so I can't really tell what I'm missing out on (also the author is not the most amazing wordsmith) but it was quite decent in context even where they were using words like 'necro-energy' that don't even exist in either language.

I do feel like it's insane how much content is now AI driven.

Even random innocuous social media blurbs have em-dashes when it's like 'You could have written that your restaurant is open for longer hours'. I understand using AI to marshall your thoughts or if you're wanting to do longer form writing but there's plenty of messages where I feel like it'd just be quicker and easier to not open ChatGPT and provide a prompt.

It should be illegal to ask ChatGPT to write something that would take you less than 2 minutes to write yourself. Especially if it's well within your abilities.

enshittify

This verb implies a movement from a good state to a bad one; the language was previously not shit. Except, the people using LLMs in this way already can't communicate. The original english translation you posted below is incomprehensible. You suggest

the English they do write will be worse

but I can't see how anyone would suggest the AI translation is worse than the original. It might screw up some of the meaning, but that comes with the tradeoff of being more readable.

Or are you just using this example to push your point that native speakers are going to degrade the quality of their communication? This seems far more to reinforce the argument that smart users of LLMs will use them to leap forward, while poor users will get left behind. As I write this post I am using the Grammarly add-on; it's a useful spelling and grammar checker. It will also pop up "writing improvements". Almost without exception, these improvements are shit, and they've been shit long before ChatGPT came along. However, it hasn't changed the way I write, because I am capable of judging the quality of its suggestions. Do you think that Grammarly has been degrading the quality of English for years because some users implement everything it says?

It's the same story with translation. 15 years ago, a non-native speaker might go to babelfish.com and pump out something completely useless. 10 years ago, they would have switched to Google translate, and got something better, but still missing a ton of meaning. 5 years ago, DeepL was the standard, but still a long way off human translation. Now it's LLMs. When learning any language, one of the first lessons a student learns is not to blindly trust any machine translation.

The original english translation you posted below is incomprehensible.

Eh, it was comprehensible enough, the most mistranslated part was "reacted really disgusting me" vs what I assume was meant to be "reacted really disgusted with me" - and the true meaning can be error-corrected from context. The AIsloppy editing destroyed more meaning, originality, dare I say soul than the lack of English skills of the author.

EDIT: Sorry, replied to wrong post.

Original English:

Today’s stream was stunning! I commented “踏んでくだSTEP ON ME!!!” and My Oshi HAACHAMA reacted really disgusting me. Moreover, she said “You’re degenerate!!!” for me. OMG I’m in a heaven right now. It was a peaceful and an amazing moment in my life.

And also, the most excited thing is There’s HAACHAMA’s birthday live soon. It’s in August 10th 21.00JST. I could die there. I can’t wait to watch that!! I really wanna support her live too. Imagine that live I feel like drinking her bath water.

Original Japanese:

今日の配信は完璧でした！俺は”踏んでくだステップオンミー！”とコメントすると、推しのはあちゃまが「キモい！」と反応してくれて

さらに、「あんた変態すぎ！」と言ってくれたんだ、やばすぎ！！ 今、天国にいる気分だわ。 これは、俺の人生で最高に平和な瞬間だよ。

そしてさらに、１番楽しみで仕方ないことははあちゃまの誕生日ライブが８月10日（日）２１：００にあるってこと！！全力で応援したいと思ってるんだ。 その日をライブを想像すると、彼女の風呂水を飲んでる気持ちになるよ。

ChatGPT output:

Today’s stream was absolutely mind-blowing!

I typed “踏んでくだSTEP ON ME!!!” in the comments, and my oshi, Haachama, actually reacted. Not only that —em—dash— she called me “degenerate!!!” directly OMG. I’m in heaven. That one moment was pure peace and bliss. Probably one of the best highlights of my life.

And the most exciting part is still ahead. Haachama’s birthday live is coming up on August 10th at 21:00 JST. I seriously can’t wait. I really, truly want to support her with everything I’ve got. Just thinking about that live … feels like I could drink her bathwater.

"Today's stream was perfect! When I commented "Please step on me!" my oshi Haachama reacted by saying "Gross!" and then she even said "You're way too much of a pervert!" - it was incredible!! I'm feeling like I'm in heaven right now. This is the most blissful moment of my life. And what I'm most excited about is that Haachama's birthday live stream is on August 10th (Sunday) at 9:00 PM!! I want to support her with everything I've got. Just imagining that day and the live stream makes me feel like I'm drinking her bathwater."

Claude knocks it out of the park as far as I'm concerned.

Even 4o:

Today's stream was absolutely perfect! When I commented, "Step on me, please!" my oshi, Haachama, actually reacted and said, "Gross!" Then she went on to say, "You're way too much of a pervert!" It was insane!! Right now, I feel like I'm in a sexy kind of heaven. This is the most peaceful moment of my life.

And on top of all that, the thing I'm most looking forward to is Haachama’s birthday live on Sunday, August 10th at 9:00 PM!! I'm planning to cheer her on with everything I've got. Just imagining that live makes me feel like I'm drinking her bathwater.

Yes, surprisingly ChatGPT is better at translating wholesale than trying to revise a work or something. Asking it to translate directly actually gives a quite accurate result.

Unfortunately, as this situation shows, the user asked ChatGPT for revisions on the English work rather than translating the work from native language. I think this is a more typical use case because most people beyond beginners writing in English do not write in native language and then translate to English, but instead write directly in English. We are just fortunate enough to have the Japanese version as well, so we can see clearly where ChatGPT failed to capture the intention.

So we are in a world where "write English -> ask ChatGPT for revisions" is far far inferior to "write in native language (Japanese) -> use AI to translate to English" where translating directly gives a superior result. In this case the workflow that gives the best result involves the absolute least practice of English by the writer.

Wait, so what was the process there? Was ChatGPT given the Japanese text and asked to generate its own translation for comparison, or asked to improve/iterate on his? In general, I agree with your critique of non-native speakers using AI for text massaging (the feeling of something not quite coherent being said in superficially polished prose by an AI broadcast announcer voice with occasionally inappropriate diction is pretty grating), but in this particular case, it seems to me that the AI translation is in fact superior and somewhat more true to the original, which may be because unlike in the "Indians making slop for Tiktok/Youtube shorts" case, it had access to a literate source text. Specifically, for example, there is in fact nothing to the effect of "I could die there" in the JP text. The author must have spontaneously come up with it while writing his own proposed translation.

In general, the text we are looking at is close to a pessimal case for both AI translation and translation by someone who learned formulaic English at school, because the original is dense with subculture references and memes that are not just invoked as keywords but determine the syntax and narrative form as well. It's like trying to translate a 4chan greentext, or a doge image.

I think he must have tried to iterate on his original translation. The direct translation is more accurate:

Today’s stream was perfect! When I commented, “Step on me, please!” my oshi, Haachama, actually responded with “You’re gross!” And then she even followed up with “You’re way too much of a perv!” It was insane!! I feel like I’m in sexy heaven right now. This is honestly the most peaceful moment of my life.

And the thing I’m most hyped for is Haachama’s birthday live on Sunday, August 10th at 9PM!! I seriously want to support her with everything I’ve got. Just imagining that day feels like I’m drinking her bathwater.

Though I agree with @phailyoor that a lot of self-expression is lost here compared to his original attempted translation.

When you told me you're fluent in Japanese the other day, this was really not how I expected it to become relevant haha.

First thought: 'Oh, hey, I can understand this!'

Second thought: 'Oh, Christ, I can understand this.'

I'm not fluent yet but the point where I could watch degenelate videos like this and just understand them fine kind of ruined my life.

Right, this translation gets closer to the original in some ways by not reproducing the additions and deletions in the original proposal, but also loses some of the colour. Notably, none of the three translations really quite reproduces the heroin-addled vibe of the original (this was perfect, I am in a state of absolute bliss, I took a dose, and then I got another dose!! and soon I'll get yet another dose, I can't wait!!). I wonder if this sort of pathology has been thoroughly RLHFed out of ChatGPT, or one could elicit it with the right prompt.

(The "sexy heaven" thing in yours came from a typo @phailyoor introduced - it's 天国にいる気分 on paper, not the enigmatic 天国に色気分 for which that interpretation would be a fair guess.)

oops I should have double checked for typos.

今、天国に色気分だわ

@4bpp sorry for double-dipping, but since I've got you here do you know why わ is used? Obviously it's usually feminine, and I understand that the male usage is from the archaic patterns where it's broadly an emphasiser like ぞ and therefore used by archaic / cool characters to express emphasis. Is that what's going on here? It doesn't quite seem to fit.

I don't think it codes as overwhelmingly feminine in the way, say, using あたし as a first-person pronoun would, but written out like that it gives the whole phrase a somewhat more pretend/role-playing vibe, so if I really wanted to dig into it I would check if it's an imitation of the speech patterns of the vtuber the author is simping for, or has some other pop-cultural weight behind it. Either way, I don't think this is particularly worth overthinking - people have working mirror neurons, and someone using "y'all" in English or simplifying pronouncing -ing as -in would also not warrant a deep investigation of the implications and whether they have Southern or African-American roots (as opposed to, as per my theory, imitating something they have heard elsewhere).

I didn't spot that tbh. After a decade I still can't quite get all the nuances of how に should be used, especially when it's used as part of more sophisticated/niche grammar structures. N1 is still a little ways off...

I do notice that none of the translations got the nuance of 「キモい！」と反応してくれて right.

Moreover, she said “You’re degenerate!!!” for me.

The use of くれて to imply this was a sort of mutually positive interaction changes the entire tone of the passage, so it's kind of bad GPT misses it. Though I feel like I'm putting far too much thought into the ramblings of a perv on the internet.

Like with your parallel post, I think this is reading too much into a detail. Japanese all but requires having a social directionality suffix when talking about actions done between or on behalf of other people in any remotely polite speech, so just writing ...と反応した, と言った would feel incongruously rude especially in the context of someone gushing about his vtuber idol. To translate it explicitly is to take an unremarkable piece of information that is conveyed by default expectation and elevate it as remarkable - it's as if a Japanese, or English, translator took a German text, where, after the German norm, all occupations must be marked for gender (der Fahrer (the male driver)/die Fahrerin (the female driver) etc.), and took care to translate the markers, turning the neutral "die Busfahrerin hatte einen Unfall" into the potentially sexist "the woman bus driver had an accident". (This would be even worse if you were translating to e.g. Chinese, where not even 3rd-person pronouns are gendered in speech - imagine every he/she turning into a they with an explicit mention of the person's gender!)

Today, OpenAI released a new update that will put more mental health guardrails on ChatGPT. I'd been hearing about chatbots inducing psychosis and I'm assuming it was a response to that. But looking into the topic more I'm astounded how much of average people's mental health is becoming tied to these chatbots. Not just people with severe mental illness but perhaps even the majority of all people that use chatbots.

A recent survey shows:

  • 49% of LLM users who self-report an ongoing mental health condition use LLMs for mental health support.

  • 73% use LLMs for anxiety management, 63% for personal advice, 60% for depression support, 58% for emotional insight, 56% for mood improvement, 36% to practice communication skills and 35% to feel less lonely.

A quick browse of reddit down this particular rabbithole quickly makes me realize how many people are already talking to chatbots as a friend/therapist. My impression is that its similar to the early days of online dating. People are sort of embarrassed to admit they has an AI friend, but with numbers increasing rapidly the younger you go. I've seen numbers between 10 and 50(!) percent of young people have used AI for companionship.

In retrospect, it would be shocking if AI therapy didn't take off. Probably the biggest barrier to getting therapy is cost and availability. Chatbots are available 24/7, essentially free, and will never judge you. The rate of mental illness is rising particularly among young people so the demand is there. But it's not just that, the idea of therapy is ingrained into today's culture. There's a sense that everyone should get therapy, who among us is truly mentally healthy, etc. I could easily see it becoming as ubiquitous as online dating is today.

I admit personally I'm relatively skeptical of therapy in general. As I understand it, it doesn't really matter what therapeutic method you use the result are about the same, so probably most of the benefit comes from just having someone you can vent to who is empathetic, and won't judge or get bored. If that's the case then AI therapy is probably as good or better than human therapy for cases that are not severe. On reddit I see a lot of comments that say that AI therapy has helped them more than years of human therapy and I can believe that.

So if AI therapy is helping so many people is that a good thing? I see a lot of parallels between AI therapy and AGI's alignment problem. I believe people when they say they went to therapy and they report feeling better. I'm not really confident that they came out with a more accurate view of reality. Recently I want down another tangentially related rabbithole about an online therapist that goes by the name of Dr. K, who has publicly streamed their therapy sessions (for legal reasons he doesn't actually call them therapy sessions). The thing that struck me is just how vulnerable a state of mind people are in during therapy, and the very subtle way that assumptions about reality can be pushed on them.

So if you consider how impressionable people are when receiving therapy, and how its becoming increasingly common for adults to use chatbots for therapy, and how it's becoming increasingly common for kids to grow up with chatbots as friends, then it really makes the potential impact of subtle value assumptions in these models loom large.

  1. Therapy is better than you think.

I don't really want to write an entire novel on research and stuff but the short version is that medical research is hard and research on anything that involves people and society is also hard. This results in seemingly low effect sizes for therapy but that shit really does work. It's not necessarily going to work for every patient, situation, (and critically) or therapist.

Part of the problem is that we have a large number of low skill therapists, incorrect patient therapist/modality matches, incorrect indications, and the whole therapy culture thing.

CBT and DBT have excellent evidence bases for instance and are meant to be highly structured with clear end points. We also have a pretty good understanding of what patients and situations should use each of those therapy modalities.

PTSD treatment is done through therapy and can be quite effective.

For many common conditions you very much need both medication and therapy (and only using medication leading to poor efficacy is the other side of the psychiatric complaint coin).

However most presentations of therapy you see on the internet are people getting matched to a random low skill therapist they don't vibe with and indefinitely engaged in a process that is never explained to them which therefore feels like just venting.

That's not the real thing, in the same way paying your friend who is a college athlete to help you isn't the same as getting actual PT.

However low skill therapy is probably better to have around for society than nothing and high skill therapy can be extremely expensive so we are stuck with this.

  1. AI therapy is ASS (well, so is much of real therapy too).

The preliminary research seems pretty good but a lot of psychiatrists are essentially betting their careers that some of the usual business is happening: motivated research looking for the "right" conclusion, poor measures of improvement (patients may feel subjectively supported but don't have an improvement in functional status), and so on. Every time The New Thing comes out it looks great initially and then is found to be ass or a bit more sketchy.

The lack of existential fulfillment provided by AI, overly glazing behavior, and a surplus of Cluster-B users and the psychotic receiving delusion validation will lead to problems including likely a good number of patients who may end up actually dangerous and violent.

If the tools don't improve drastically quickly (which they probably will be) I'd expect a major terror event then STRONG guard rails.

You see some reports on social media of doctors finding their patients encouraged to do some really bad shit by a misfiring chatbot.

Rueters: U.S. states and cities that boycott Israeli companies will be denied federal aid for natural disaster preparedness

The requirement applies to at least $1.9 billion that states rely on to cover search-and-rescue equipment, emergency manager salaries and backup power systems among other expenses, according to 11 agency grant notices reviewed by Reuters.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency stated in grant notices posted on Friday that states must follow its "terms and conditions." Those conditions require they certify they will not sever “commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies” to qualify for funding.

The requirement is the Trump administration's latest effort to use federal funding to promote its views on Israel.

The Department of Homeland Security, the agency that oversees FEMA, in April, said that boycotting Israel is prohibited for states and cities receiving its grant funds.

I've followed the politicization of FEMA grants through the Nonprofit Security Grant Program which overwhelmingly goes to Jewish organizations. The recent Israel supplemental bill included a $390M increase to the Nonprofit Security Grant Program with $230M available through Sept 30, 2026. Schumer is pushing for an additional $500M bringing potential 2026 funding to $730M.

The timing of this is interesting also because it's in the middle of a significant back-and-forth between Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. Tucker Carlson had Candace Owens on his show, where Tucker accused Fuentes of being a fed. To justify that claim, Tucker said that Fuentes accused Carlson's father of being in the CIA which was a fact that Carlson claimed to not know until his father's death in March.

Tucker also gave a line of criticism of Fuentes that Tucker himself gave in nearly exact words to Pat Buchanan in 1999.

How does this tie in together? Where is the pushback against the clear Israeli influence in the US government supposed to come from in the Right Wing? It's only coming from Fuentes and DR Twitter. Stuff like this gives Fuentes credibility regarding his criticisms of Israeli influence- it seems Tucker Carlson is trying to ride the fine line between providing an outlet for criticism of Israeli influence among the Right Wing but still gatekeeping Nick Fuentes from going further mainstream.

Yesterday, it was surreptitiously edited to remove all reference to Israel.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency stated in grant notices posted on Friday that states must follow its "terms and conditions." Those conditions require they certify they will not sever “commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies” to qualify for funding.

I don't see any congressional approval for this condition anywhere in the statute, so I expect it won't last long in court.

To back up a bit, there is a whole area of law concerning when and how the federal government can attach strings to money granted to the states, because doing so can in some cases be coercive (see. e.g. SD v Dole). Since it raises constitutional concerns, the Court has said that Congress must do so in unambiguous terms. This is likewise a parallel with various other kinds of Federal preemption: Congress can preempt a variety of State laws, but respect for State's rights mean that if it wishes to do so, it has to legislate it clearly rather than having the courts infer preemption.

As I see it, this is just a totally illegal addition of "terms and conditions" to the spending that Congress didn't justify. It might arguably within the power of the Federal Government to impose such a condition, but seems very obviously not within the power of the executive, acting without a clear congressional statement, to do so.

The FEMA logic is that BDS is intrinsically racist. They stated this directly in their tweet explaining their policy in reaction to the backlash.

As I've said before- the people drawing this stuff up are right wing Catholics(because that is who staffs conservative policy-making/writing) who do not believe there is anything special about Jews and are, currently, not fans of Israel due to some recent events in Gaza. This is about making democrats fight each other.

This is about making democrats fight each other.

This seems like a really sad claim. At least "to counter illegal discrimination" would be a somewhat acceptable excuse for cutting emergency aid for tornado/fire/hurricane/earthquake victims, many of whom of course would be centrist/conservative/griller types because even the most partisan of states still tend to be like 60/40-65/35, it'd at least be for a nominal cause of reducing harm elsewhere even if I disagree that BDS is so harmful that it's worth cutting emergency aid.

But to cut aid to own the libs? That's the reason? Just seems cruel then.

Edit: Oh and just obvious thing, the Dem states could also just be like "nah we don't care about helping out the conservative areas either then" if they felt like being cruel in response and focusing their state level recovery resources on the blue areas. Hopefully they wouldn't do that, but it's very easy for them to just shrug and go "welp it's not enough of an emergency for the feds so that rural area can just deal with it themselves"

Oh and just obvious thing, the Dem states could also just be like "nah we don't care about helping out the conservative areas either then" if they felt like being cruel in response and focusing their state level recovery resources on the blue areas

These areas are usually not blatantly violating federal law.

If the goal is just discrimination, why single out Israel specifically? It’s an odd flex considering that there are other trade partners that would qualify under anti discrimination rules (India, Japan, Korea, Latin America, etc.) but they don’t get the same protections. If I passed a law in North Dakota that said “no money goes to Asian countries,” it’s perfectly fine. If I do the same with South Asia, again, fine. It’s only when North Dakota says “we aren’t buying from Israel,” that anything happens.

If I passed a law in North Dakota that said “no money goes to Asian countries,” it’s perfectly fine.

Is it? The Constitution puts almost all powers of international relations at the federal level. States aren't allowed to engage in treaties or establish their own taxes on goods entering or leaving the country.

Arguably some states do this in practice: a few have somewhat banned certain Chinese companies (TikTok, Huawei), but most of those laws/rules at least claim to be following federal guidance.

Note that they've removed this already. It appears they've been adding the same anti-BDS language to various grant proposals; I would guess it's a result of pressure from the State Department, since Rubio is known to be strongly anti-BDS.

Do they need the protections?

I can see the benefit of writing every law broadly and neutrally based on unchanging principles, but at the same time there's no practical difference between "any country affected by X (it's just Israel)" and "Israel (because it's the only country affected by X)".

As an example, Google negotiated an exemption from Canada's Online News Act (otherwise it would have to pay some unknown hundreds of millions of dollars to journalists, negotiated individually), and the bill calls out the #1 search engine in Canada instead of naming them explicitly.

Numerous Jewish activist organizations have long lobbied for anti-BDS legislation and these sorts of measures for decades. Blaming this on Catholics is just delusional.

The people who actually wrote these policies are not Jewish. The people who made the decision to actually go through with it are not jewish. Jewish organizations have been asking for this for a long long time and not getting their way. This is about a cudgel for hitting democrats with.

You do not know any of that. The question is, whoever wrote it, were they influenced by pressure from Jewish interest groups? Of course they are.

Jewish organizations have been asking for this for a long long time and not getting their way.

Per wikipedia:

As of 2024, 38 states have passed bills and executive orders designed to discourage boycotts of Israel.[6] Many of them have been passed with broad bipartisan support.[7] Most anti-BDS laws have taken one of two forms: contract-focused laws requiring government contractors to promise that they are not boycotting Israel; and investment-focused laws, mandating public investment funds to avoid entities boycotting Israel.[8] Separately, the U.S. Congress has considered anti-boycott legislation in reaction to the BDS movement. The U.S. Senate passed S.1, which contained anti-boycott provisions, on 28 January 2019, by a vote of 74–19. The U.S. House passed a resolution condemning the boycott of Israel on 24 July 2019, by a vote of 398–17. Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Mike Braun (R-IN), Rick Scott (R-FL), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), and Steve Daines (R-MT) reintroduced the Combating BDS Act of 2023.

This is about a cudgel for hitting democrats with.

No it is it not. It is about Israeli/Jewish influence in American politics and culture. Here's the ADL's stance on BDS which is now the official stance of FEMA- that BDS is intrinsically anti-semitic and therefore racist.

Well they're denying it's specifically Israel now. https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1952482455954341930

Nevermind that people could see the original document where it literally said Israel, and that this tweet even reinforces that they plan to deny federal emergency aid over boycotting them ("including as it relates to the BDS movement"

I wonder how they feel about putting tariffs on Israeli goods then? It's the government making the Israeli products more expensive through taxes for the express purpose of reducing sales, seems like that isn't far from antisemitism if boycotting is.

The actual text, for anyone interested (link from twitter):

(2) Grant award certification.

(a) By accepting the grant award, recipients are certifying that:

(i) They do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, DEIA, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws; and

(ii) They do not engage in and will not during the term of this award engage in, a discriminatory prohibited boycott.

(iii) They do not, and will not during the term of this award, operate any program that benefits illegal immigrants or incentivizes illegal immigration.

As for Fuentes, I think the meaning of 'fed' in these online circles is rather more broad than it ought to be (almost every political radical with a substantial following will deal with the state or states in some capacity), but I don't think he takes himself seriously enough not to be able to justify full cooperation. He has ways of justifying it to himself, as with his Kamala support.

Thanks. I was fairly sure SS would be obfuscating some relevant context, and in this case that includes the text. I'd agree with @DirtyWaterHotDog that this is a legal hammer setup. In this case, mixing something they know states will not refuse (FEMA grants), with something they know the Democratic coalition will struggle to restrain from (DEI / Israeli boycotts / illegal immigration).

Saying this is about Israel is as misleading as saying it is about DEI, or immigration in isolation. It about no one of these things- it's about the collection of progressive/democratic coalition shibboleths, any of which is sufficient for the goal.

Which, in turn, is not 'denial.' That is the provided framing, but there's no provided evidence that the goal is to prevent funding. If anything, it's a hook-setup, which is predicated on someone taking the bait, not refusing it.

Instead, the goal is almost certainly twofold: first, to use the power of the purse to lead state policy (which is very old practice), and second, to punish the states (and state politicians) that would take the money but violate the terms in the name of their political preferences, which would open them up to federal prosecution. The later is not possible without the funding occurring, and if a state insisted on refusing FEMA aid, I am confident the Trump administration would make political hay out of it until they did, on some general theme of how the refusing states are putting politics over lives (and taking the money).

Both of these, in turn, put the Democratic coalition in conflict with itself, by putting the fiscal interests of democratic political machines (the establishment politicians who need federal money, but also want to stay out of jail) against the partisan interests of the progressives (who want the shibboleths and the money, but care less for the Democratic establishment). Given what's already been written about the ongoing Democratic civil war, and the mid-term prospects, the worse the conflict of interests in the Democratic Party, the better.

This, in turn, aligns with the demonstrated practice of the last half year or so of how the Trump 2 administration has been baiting / luring political opponents into untenable positions, where it will happily gleefully enforce the laws against the opposition from a position of legal strength.

Saying this is about Israel is as misleading as saying it is about DEI, or immigration in isolation. It about no one of these things- it's about the collection of progressive/democratic coalition shibboleths, any of which is sufficient for the goal.

The text literally said

Discriminatory prohibited boycott means refusing to deal, cutting commercial relations, or otherwise limiting commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies or with companies doing business in or with Israel or authorized by, licensed by, or organized under the laws of Israel to do business.

They defined "discriminatory prohibited boycott" solely with Israel and nothing else. They've since removed it, however their tweet still specifically says they're gonna deny federal funds to BDS (i.e boycotting Israel) so it's not even different.

You have re-cited one of three distinct conditionals that would enable the Trump administration to lawfully act against its political opponents breaking the law, as a response to a post arguing that any of the three conditionals would meet the probable intent of seeking to lawfully act against political opponents breaking the law.

But this particular condition is in fact about boycotting Israel and Israel only.

And this particular condition is not characteristic of the whole law either, and as such characterizing the broader law in terms of this particular condition is wilfully misrepresenting the broader law.

Or, to put in other terms, it is missing the forest for a tree. It can indeed be a joo-tree in the forest, but it is not a joo-tree forest. Talking about how the forest is the result of malign joo influence is willfully misrepresenting the forest.

Not least because, and part of that broader context being obfuscated, the joo-tree is coincidentally planted in a specific grove beside the anti-DEI-tree, and the anti-illegal-immigration (ALL) tree, all at the direction of the hated forest-lord. This grove is now being publicized to audiences with people who would like to cut down joo-trees, anti-DEI-trees, and ALL-trees even before their hatred of the forest-lord is considered.

That's bait, and SS fell for it as much or more than the intended targets.

(ii) They do not engage in and will not during the term of this award engage in, a discriminatory prohibited boycott.

They define that term as:

Discriminatory prohibited boycott means refusing to deal, cutting commercial relations, or otherwise limiting commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies or with companies doing business in or with Israel or authorized by, licensed by, or organized under the laws of Israel to do business.

Discrimination towards Israel is a convenient legal hammer for Trump to pound on adversaries.

Under 42 U.S.C. § 5151, the President’s regulatory authority is limited to ensuring that all disaster assistance is distributed “in an equitable and impartial manner”

Trump is using Israel because he needs to find a credible example of 'partial' behavior by local govts. The American system has special carve-outs for provable hate crimes. There is decades of precedent on methods for associating anti-Israel-movements with antisemitism and therefore provable hate crimes.

Trump's govt (and the project 2025 playbook[1]) are strategic about finding loopholes for executive overreach. For universities, it was provable affirmative action. For local funding, it's Israel.

[1] I have not read project Esther in detail. But at face value, it seems to be the guiding document on how to use antisemitism as a cudgel to beat opposing institutions into submission.

Israel is effectively a forward deployed state of the USA. They do the dirty work on the vanguard, and shield America from criticism. For ex: I don't believe the Israelis could have developed Pegasus without a soft go ahead from the Americans.

I would further add that making democrats spend more effort on Israel-related matters will only benefit the republicans because they fight each other when they do that, they convince talented Jews to accept much higher private sector salaries rather than work in politics(and they get replaced with incompetent and delusional shaniquas), they make the progressive wing more prominent and demanding.

If our relationship with Israel is characterized by Israel doing America’s dirty work, then: (1) why are our politicians handing synagogues hundreds of millions in free funds, yearly, as SS notes? What does this have to do with our geopolitical interest? This is more readily explained by a group of people having sophisticated lobbying capabilities. (2) Why did Trump specifically go after students who criticized Israel on social media, rather than students who criticize America or the West broadly? (3) Why do we, in effect, subsidize the entirety of Israeli society, from their subsidized colleges and subsidized healthcare to their subsidized religious institutions? We are Israel’s security in the region for free; they gave nothing, not money or troops, for our wars in the region, and they will not be repaying the $1,000,000,000 we spent on their defense vs Iran. If Israel were the client state of our Empire, you would expect them to pay Caesar’s tax, right? Instead, we hand them our resources for no obvious gain. It should be the other way around. As Mearsheimer spoke to Tucker Carlson the other day,

And the lobby is so effective, it is so powerful, that we basically end up supporting Israel unconditionally. What that means, Tucker, is in those cases where Israel’s interests are not the same as America’s interests, we support Israel. We support Israel’s interests, not America’s interests.

[…] anytime the Egyptians or the Jordanians get uppity about Israel, the United States reminds them, “You better behave yourself because we have huge economic leverage over you. You have to be friendly to Israel.” So Jordan and Egypt never cause the Israelis any problem […] as I said to you before, we have a special relationship with Israel that has no parallel in recorded history. Just very important to understand it. There is no single case in recorded history that comes even close to looking like the relationship that we have with Israel. Because again, as I said, states sometimes have similar interests, and this includes the United States and Israel, but they also have conflicting interests. And when a great power like the United States has conflicting interests with another country, it almost always, except in the case of Israel, acts in terms of its own interests, America first. But when it comes to Israel, it’s Israel first. And if you go to the Middle East and look at our policy there, there’s just abundant evidence to support that.

I believe there’s one simple answer [as to why this is the case]. The Israel lobby. I think the lobby is an incredibly powerful interest group, and I’m choosing my words carefully. It has awesome power, and it basically is in a position where it can profoundly influence US foreign policy in the Middle East. And indeed, it affects foreign policy outside of the Middle East. But when it comes to the Middle East, and again, the Palestinian issue in particular, it has awesome power. And there’s no president who is willing to buck the lobby.

If Israel were our forward operating base, then it would be easy to support them: Israelis would be working day and night to secure a better future for Americans. Their tax dollars would go to our institutions and their blood would be spilled in Syria / Iraq / Afghanistan for us. Alas, this does not appear to be the case.

A couple asides on Pegasus: its ancestor PROMIS was indeed developed by the CIA and sold to Israel, and then from Israel it was disseminated to other countries. The person doing this dissemination was no other than Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert Maxwell. But Israel, rather than acting purely as a FOB to America, has its own interests in mind:

"L'Oeil De Washington" contends that a bugged version of PROMIS was sold in the mid-1980s for Soviet government use, with the media mogul Robert Maxwell as a conduit. According to the book, Israel's knowledge of this operation became a bargaining chip in trying to curb U.S. arms shipments to Iraq before the Gulf War; the Israelis threatened to tell the Russians their computers were open to American surveillance. Apparently, the U.S. called Israel's bluff and lost. One of the book's major sources, the Israeli arms merchant Ari Ben-Menashe, told the authors that in 1989 the Soviet spy agency, the GRU, shut down all of its computers for a week after learning that they were bugged by PROMIS.

why are our politicians handing synagogues hundreds of millions

I'm ignorant here. Can you shed light on this ? What were the numbers like pre-Trump ?

Why did Trump specifically go after students who criticized Israel on social media, rather than students who criticize America or the West broadly?

That was the meat of my earlier post. Because Trump can frame criticism of Israel as hate speech in courts. Criticism of America & the West is free game.

Why do we, in effect, subsidize the entirety of Israeli society, from their subsidized colleges and subsidized healthcare to their subsidized religious institutions?

The US has given similar amount in aid to Egypt. Both use the money to immediately buy American weapons. At least Israel operates in tight lockstep with the American military. What does the US get by sending money to Egypt ?

Military funding is very difficult to decode. There's a reason the Pentagon fails every audit. I won't be attempting to itemize it, and neither should you.

no other than Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert Maxwell

Woah. I didn't know that the Maxwells has such deep ties to the CIA. Strong signal that Epstein was on CIA's payroll.

The US has given similar amount in aid to Egypt. Both use the money to immediately buy American weapons. At least Israel operates in tight lockstep with the American military. What does the US get by sending money to Egypt ?

Surely this would be worth a few theories on how the Pharaoh's PAC owns the US government but nope. Zilch.

I'm ignorant here. Can you shed light on this ? What were the numbers like pre-Trump ?

I don't have a link on hand but TL;DR is that there's a grant program for security at houses of worship(it is very common in America for churches/synagogues to hire off duty police officers as security with full police powers during peak hours- and this option is available and used by other organizations as well, it's not specifically a church thing, police are allowed to do security work with police powers when off duty for extra money and this is common at both high security facilities and at places that have regular and predictable peak hours like churches). This program is available to churches but most of it goes to synagogues because Jews are very well integrated in the NGO network that doles out grants. IIRC this is an old program that hasn't really changed over time and it's fairly bipartisan.

The big change is that the grant amounts have skyrocketed in recent years. When the program was created in 2004, funding was around $25 million per year. The program was proposed and lobbied for by Jewish groups. Last year the total was $454 million, and synagogues receive a disproportionate amount of funding.

https://www.fema.gov/grants/preparedness/nonprofit-security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_Security_Grant_Program

I wonder how many ballooning programs like this are there. DOGE was such a waste of opportunity.

Loads, this one only came to prominence because of the recent focus on Israel/Palestine.

Personally as king of DOGE I would have abolished the TSA, fired most of them, and transferred the rest to ICE. It's an obscene waste of time and money on security theater that is universally hated, yet somehow employs over 60,000 people.

The US has given similar amount in aid to Egypt. Both use the money to immediately buy American weapons. At least Israel operates in tight lockstep with the American military. What does the US get by sending money to Egypt ?

An end to semi-regular wars along the Suez Canal and degrading the arms-supplier influence nexus to Egypt from major American geopolitical rivals?

So there are no cases of the local DEI people discriminating against whites and especially typical Trump voting whites? Instead he just happens to chose a small minority that is vastly overrepresented among his donors and his administration. Imagine if a president had recieved a large portion of his funding from China and had a sizeable portion of his administration consist of Chinese people and they were all about owning the libs by taking out DEI efforts specifically hurting Chinese people.

Israel doesn't do work for the US, the US does work for Israel. China doesn't really have a military presence in the region and is the biggest trading partner with most of MENA. Israel wrecks the relationship with middle eastern countries and drags the US into forever wars.

Discrimination against whites is a hard sell when the executives & the board are white[*]. Moreover, 'Trump voting white' isn't a protected category.

The China analogy doesn't work because China is naturally positioned as a competing power while Israel is strategically, culturally and spiritually positioned to be collaborative power.

Broadly, Jews are found in 2 places: US and Israel. When America flourishes, Jews flourish. That's to Israel's benefit. Strategically, Israel's enemies are Islamist. So, they want to ally with an anti-Islamist power : USA. Israel is a liberal & open democracy. It wants to ally with a liberal and open democracy : USA.

Israel wrecks the relationship with middle eastern countries

America wrecked its relationship with the middle east all by itself. Israel fought the Suez Crisis on US & UK's behalf. Saddam Hussein's overthrow was classic American overreach. Intervention in Afghanistan was first a cold war exercise, and later a response to 9/11. Syrian efforts were a proxy war against Russia. Iran-US relationships soured because the Shah was overthrown and Americans were taken hostage. Jordan and Israel actually have pretty decent relations. The Saudi, UAE and Israel relations have been on a consistent up and up. Qatar always plays all sides, Israel or no Israel.

So, can you name a country who's US-country relationships got wrecked by Israel ?

they were all about owning the libs by taking out DEI efforts specifically hurting Chinese people.

The analogy doesn't work because American Jews are 'the libs'. The majority of American Jews live in NY and California. American Jews (pre Oct 23) overwhelmingly voted for deep-blue candidates in deep-blue cities. They subscribed to generally 'blue' opinions such as : 'Netanyahu bad', '2 state solution good' and 'Trump bad'.

There is healthy skepticism towards Israel from within the Jewish community itself. America's temporary sycophancy towards Israel has more to do with recently empowered fundamentalist Christians signalling to their voter-base during Trump2, than a deeply rooted allegiance to Israel.

[*] The discussion of how specific whites are being discriminated against is longer conversation about the sub-racial dynamics among whites people. I think white groups (rich and poor) both benefit from not opening this pandoras box.

Discrimination against whites is a hard sell when the executives & the board are white

Why? They're old, and got into their position before the discrimination regime was implemented. Is there a rule somewhere that we have to wait 2 generations for discrimination to run it's course, before we're allowed to call it discrimination?

Yes, because if the judges don't bellyfeel it, they won't make a useful ruling. Yes, the conservatives on the Supreme Court believe as an intellectual matter that anti-discrimination rules cut both ways and disallow discrimination against whites. But in their gut they know it's all about helping blacks and think that's the right thing, so they make sure to leave a hole any time they make a ruling against discriminating against other races. When it comes to Jews, though, their belly is firmly in line with anti-discrimination.

Moreover, 'Trump voting white' isn't a protected category.

Tell that to the FEMA employee that told workers to skip Trump-voting houses in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton. Anti-White discrimination may be a hard sell, but it's not impossible.

Israel is a liberal & open democracy.

Ehhhhhhhh...it's definitely both of those things when compared to its regional neighbors, but in any sort of absolute ranking it has all sorts of problems; a crazy runaway judiciary, excessive military entanglement in politics, endemic public corruption, etc.

Israel fought the Suez Crisis on US & UK's behalf.

UK and France. The US told them quite firmly to stop, which they did. The US was not particularly pro Israel until Lyndon Johnson, who let himself get bossed around by his very pro-Israel foreign policy guys.

Israel didn't directly instigate Iraq 2 of course, but many of the higher ups in the executive branch who were pushing for an invasion of Iraq were ardent Zionists (see the Office of Special Plans, which also involved an espionage scandal involving an analyst passing information to Israel through AIPAC).

Israel didn't directly instigate Iraq 2 of course,

A bit of an understatement: the Israelis advocated against it, on the grounds that if any regime changing was to happen, it should prioritize Iran.

The American response was allegedly that Iran would be next. Which actually makes a fair bit of sense if you are planning to take down both, since it's easier to drive from Kuwait and Saudi into Iraq than do a cross-Hormuz amphibious invasion, but no one exactly remembers them of being good planners.

Sounds like quibbling over priorities. They also said taking out Saddam would aid in regime-changing Iran.

Also, was what you're mentioning said in public, or in private? Because if it was the latter, you can't blame the public for not knowing what was deliberately kept from them.

Sounds like quibbling over priorities. They also said taking out Saddam would aid in regime-changing Iran.

'Don't do [course of action] unless you're going to do it the right way' may be dismissed as quibbling over priorities, but it is still a caution against, and are not even indirectly instigating the [course of action] either.

On a material-level, if you are going to invade both countries as the neocons intended, then your second sentence is objectively true. It would be far easier for the US to launch from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia into Iraq than into Iran (you could drive), and then from Iraq into Iran (you could drive), than to launch an amphibious invasion of Iran.

Also, was what you're mentioning said in public, or in private? Because if it was the latter, you can't blame the public for not knowing what was deliberately kept from them.

When the result of private discussions are later publicized, and have been public for nearly two decades now, it is a distinction without a difference. Someone can claim the later public revelations were lies, or self-serving after-the-fact deflections, but absent that we can absolutely blame people for not knowing a historical record exists.

While in practice I'll accept that it's complicated, both sides of the aisle seem to have, in some cases begrudgingly, agreed that "discrimination on the basis of national origin" is verboten. Under the lens of the Civil Rights Act, a company saying "We won't do business with Israeli nationals" (note the number of dual-citizenships and US citizens residing in Israel, which is more than in Canada) is a pretty transparent violation.

It is a bit less clear that this applies to foreign companies: "we prefer to buy from domestic suppliers" is well within the Overton Window, even "would prefer not to buy from China" is probably not objectionable (and "do not do business with Iran and North Korea" is effectively mandated, although those congressional mandates presumably trump congressional civil rights law). But in this particular case, "will not buy from Israel-linked companies" is pretty strongly associated with attempts to discriminate against persons of Israeli origin. I think this case is maybe winnable, but you'd likely need to be squeaky clean on the persons (not corporate) level.

Now, there are also good arguments to be made about absolute freedom of association here, but most of those have, to my knowledge, mostly lost in court. Overturning the better part of a century of civil rights law is something that is neither a small ask, nor popular outside of a handful of principled libertarians (and witches). I don't think that's to be done lightly.

Under the lens of the Civil Rights Act, a company saying "We won't do business with Israeli nationals" (note the number of dual-citizenships and US citizens residing in Israel, which is more than in Canada) is a pretty transparent violation.

[...] But in this particular case, "will not buy from Israel-linked companies" is pretty strongly associated with attempts to discriminate against persons of Israeli origin. I think this case is maybe winnable, but you'd likely need to be squeaky clean on the persons (not corporate) level.

Discriminating against Israeli citizens in the US seems bad from a civil rights perspective, yes.

Discriminating against Israeli companies or products seems much less problematic, especially if it is just spending decisions. Both states and companies should be free to chose with which companies they do business. If Texas prefers to arm its police force with weapons produced in Texas, that seems the kind of decision a state should be able to make. If Google decides that it hates South Korea and refuses to buy any computer components produced there, that is something for the market to solve.

I think that the use of financial incentives is pretty disingenuous, because it allows the feds to say "we did not violate your rights, you could just opt out of FEMA or not take tax credits".

If federal funds come with strings attached on how to spend that money specifically, that seems fine. "If you buy emergency shelters from your FEMA grant, you may not discriminate against Israeli companies" - "None of the medicaid funds may be spent on medical marijuana" - "5% of the medicaids funds are earmarked for abortion services. If you can not provide these, you do not get the 5%."

But my understanding is that this is not what is happening here. Instead, it is "follow our rules generally, or you don't get money", which I find bad.

As I often do, I like to consider a counterfactual: suppose there was a movement that existed to boycott only Muslim nations. Now, it wasn't against Muslims, per se, just that for mumblemumble reasons it only called for those nations to be boycotted, and for nations that are demonstrably worse at human rights like the likes of North Korea to be not sanctioned.

I don't think a lot of the people complaining about anti-BDS would also be complaining about being anti-Muslim-Nation-boycotts. Sure, there'd still be some overlap, but not enough to really make the news.

If you want to see this in action, the political arguments are practically reversed on the issue of the "Muslim ban" in Trump's first term: that one even included North Korea! IIRC the administration at the time claimed it was based on security cooperation agreements and just happened to hit mostly Muslim nations (but not all such nations) with poor recordkeeping.

I'm not sure I'm happy with that one either, for the record.

The list of countries Trump used was compiled during the Obama administration, four countries in the original "Terrorist Travel Prevention Act" and three more added by Obama's DHS. But, in Obama's term this was a "countries whose citizens and visitors can't travel to the US under the Visa Waiver Program instead of getting a visa first" list, and Trump turned it into a "countries whose citizens and visitors can't travel to the US at all" list.

All 7 countries listed were 95%+ Muslim, but there are another 19 or 20 95%-Muslim countries that didn't make the list.

On the one hand, the popular phrase "Trump's Muslim ban" seems like an inaccurate descriptor for a ban that applied to some non-Muslims and didn't apply to most Muslims based on a list from the Obama administration; he was pretty transparently trying to get as close to his promised "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on" as he could get legally, but the end result really wasn't very close. On the other hand, that transparency made the order still a pretty clear match to our "for mumblemumble reasons" hypothetical, which is part of why the courts kept shooting him down until he'd repeatedly watered down the order.

As a member of "some overlap" I'll say this works both way. The people screaming bloody murder about BDS, would see the kind of laws directed against it as an egregious violation of their basic civil rights, were they directed at an anti-Muslim boycott.

In the 1980s dozens of cities and states had taken economic action against South Africa. It's not a Civil Rights issue.

I think the vibes of applying civil rights law to "white people" have changed drastically since the 1980s. Certainly not unanimously, but witness the Trump administration's consideration of refugee status for white South Africans (I'm going to choose not to express an opinion on that at this time).

But there have IIRC been a few instances of academic conferences having to walk back "International submissions encouraged. Israeli academics need not apply."

If your goal is the support of civilization - and particularly european-derived civilization - and the flourishing of european-descended individuals, that may not be the best example to cite.

It suffices to dispense with the silly notion that it's a Civil Rights violation to boycott a foreign business. It also demonstrates how a protest towards a white civilization was supported by the government, and also widely supported by Jews (who were very prominent in the anti-apartheid activism), whereas Israel receives strong defense from the highest levels of government and all of a sudden it's racist to support the anti-Israeli activism! It shows how our government and Jews in particular react to protest against a white country versus a Jewish country.

tl;dr ephebophilia is not just an artifact of a fixed age of consent, but an attraction to specific psychological traits

I've been thinking about all the classic American porn paperbacks I've read and it made me realize something about the various flavors of MAPs. A lot of classic smut features ephebophilic scenes. Or, to not mince words, jailbait characters have sex in these books. Why would someone put a well-developed minor (and go into explicit detail about her womanlike voluptuousness) into his story? I could come up with three reasons:

  1. The titillation of the forbidden. It's like eating a Kinder Surprise in the US vs the EU, it's made better by the fact it's illegal. You scratch off number "18" and put "15" instead and suddenly the story is hotter. It's like ubiquitous step-incest in modern video porn.
  2. The needs of the story. Maybe the author wanted his cast to span generations and pushing the numbers down made it easier to explain why everyone involved in the story had no sag or wrinkles or other signs of age.
  3. There's something different with their attitude to sex. And this is exactly the option that I want to explore further in this post.

Reading the books actually shows what this difference (in the mind of the writers) is. A grown woman has barriers around sex. Of course, it's porn, so everyone is a happy slut by the epilogue, but the journey of a woman is about taking down these barriers: she has a lot of ideas with whom it is appropriate to have sex, when, where and what kind of. A girl in a woman's body has no such qualms. Well, maybe she has a few, passed down from her mother or her Sunday school, but as soon as she realizes that sex is a pleasurable experience (or "neat", as the books from the 70's put it), she's willing to have it for the sake of it (and suffer no ill consequences, because it's porn).

And it is my opinion that this attraction to easy-going relationships instead of torturous courtship is what defines ephebophiles and lumps them together with other flavors of MAPs. They want someone who can decouple sex from the rest of the cultural baggage around relationships, even though they are not attracted to actual physical traits of prepubescence. A literal pedophile might be attracted to specific physical traits, but he's also attracted to the idea that it's much easier to explain sex as a harmless game or a sign of special friendship.

However, I don't want to say this approach is exclusive to MAPs only. They are in a good and diverse company. People joking about "genetically-engineered catgirls" express a very similar sentiment: they imagine a female that is naturally loyal and attracted to them, unlike the messy natural femoids (curiously, this sounds more like a dog than a cat). Dudes mail-ordering brides from abroad expect them to follow a simple and straightforward contract: provide meals and sex, get citizenship. And of course, promiscuous gays are living every horny man's dream (modulo the sex of their partner).

This also explains why certain redditors* brand a 45-yo man dating a 20-yo woman a pedophile (steelman incoming). They don't mean he's literally attracted to her prepubescent body, which would be absurd. What they mean is that this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace. He can outbid her 20-yo suitors simply because he has 25 years of career growth on them. The woman should either practice perfect price discrimination or reject him in the name of... social justice?

Does this mean that the instigators of the sexual revolution, who, according to some posters whose names elude me right now, did it all only to bamboozle young and attractive women into no-strings-attached sexual promiscuity were ephebophiles? I guess they technically were.

* just today I noticed a major vibe shift on Reddit. People were discussing the latest anti-porn initiatives in the UK and were mocking those who think a 17.99-yo is a "literal child", treating them as their outgroup.

There's something different with their attitude to sex. And this is exactly the option that I want to explore further in this post.

the journey of a woman is about taking down these barriers: she has a lot of ideas with whom it is appropriate to have sex, when, where and what kind of. A girl in a woman's body has no such qualms.

Huh? The majority of teenagers come with much more programming of anti-slut defenses, parental controls installed, innocence which keeps them away from sexuality. I'm surprised that anyone thinks that human sexuality is primarily innate, rather than cultural, as regards the kinds of things that typically occur in pornographic media.

From personal experience: dating teenagers-to-twenty-year-olds (when I was that age) was mostly a process of breaking down barriers around sexuality, while dating older women they know what they want and they know what they are going to get. Things are much more direct and simple. I can't imagine anyone dating a teenager for the purpose of "simplicity." We can go all the way back to Big Ben Franklin and his advice on why it is better to have an affair with older women than with younger ones, among them:

Because thro' more Experience, they are more prudent and discreet in conducting an Intrigue to prevent Suspicion. The Commerce with them is therefore safer with regard to your Reputation. And with regard to theirs, if the Affair should happen to be known, considerate People might be rather inclin'd to excuse an old Woman who would kindly take care of a young Man, form his Manners by her good Counsels, and prevent his ruining his Health and Fortune among mercenary Prostitutes.

Because the Sin is less. The debauching a Virgin may be her Ruin, and make her for Life unhappy.

Because the Compunction is less. The having made a young Girl miserable may give you frequent bitter Reflections; none of which can attend making an old Woman happy.

All of which amount to a core logic that dating older women is simpler and more convenient than dating younger ones.

So beyond the obvious "They're hot" and "16 or 18 or 21 is just a number with no inherent relation to human development in particular cases" I propose another reasoning for teenagers being the protagonists of your pornographic novels:

#4 For Older Fantasists, when placing a teenager in the leading role of a sexual fantasy, are placing themselves within the fantasy at the appropriate age to fuck such a girl. The fantasy of the younger girl is one of nostalgia for one's own lost youth, the freedom and opportunity inherent therein.

Let's discuss a particular example of this: Billy Joel's Only the Good Die Young. Listen to it, it's a classic and I don't want to hear shit about anyone here loving America if they don't like Billy Joel, but here's some lyrics for close reading:

Come out, Virginia, don't let me wait
You Catholic girls start much too late
Aw, but sooner or later it comes down to fate
I might as well will be the one
Well, they showed you a statue, told you to pray
They built you a temple and locked you away
Aw, but they never told you the price that you pay
For things that you might have done
Well, only the good die young

You mighta heard I run with a dangerous crowd
We ain't too pretty, we ain't too proud
We might be laughing a bit too loud
Aw, but that never hurt no one

I'm pretty sure everyone, ever, who has listened to the song pictured Virginia as a Catholic schoolgirl, around seventeen or eighteen years old; sixteen at the youngest nineteen at the oldest. Now, Billy Joel was twenty seven years old when he wrote this. My parents, who loved this song, were in their twenties when it came out. Does anyone who listens to this song imagine the narrator as twenty-seven talking to his Catholic schoolgirl girlfriend? I mean, I guess somebody might, but if they did we can all agree the song would be deeply creepy and awful, closer to horror than to pop. Even the most determined TRPer can't possibly argue that it's normal or good for a twenty-seven year old to be trying to talk his way into his teenage girlfriend's panties.

No, the normal listener to Only the Good Die Young is picturing a teenage boy talking to his teenage girlfriend. Particularly given the later verse about running with a "dangerous crowd;" we're picturing a charming juvenile delinquent who will straighten himself out later. If we're instead picturing a twenty seven year old criminal, once again, creepy fucking lyrics.

You can tell the song is primarily nostalgic for Billy, and his audience's, younger days in that Only the Good Die Young is the start of Joel's nostalgia-retro-oldies period. You have a series of songs that mime the doo-wop of Billy's youth: Uptown Girl, Tell Her About it, The Longest Time. Then you have a series of songs that explicitly reference and call out Billy's boomer memories: It's Still Rock and Roll to Me, Keepin' the Faith, We Didn't Start the Fire.

Joel is picturing himself at sixteen, talking to his sixteen year old girlfriend, and remembering the joys of being a teenager. The freedom of dating at that age, one's own strength and virility, with no stakes for either of you beyond mom's disapproval.

And I think a lot of ephebophilic fantasy is of this nature: the fat out-of-shape 38 year old porn consumer doesn't picture himself as a creepy 38 year old porn consumer when he watches "barely legal" porn, or reads it, rather he pictures himself at his prime at 22, when he at least had potential. Even moreso in a novel.

Moreso yet in real life. So often the balding but rich middle aged man who marries a young floozy second wife is trying to recapture his own rapidly-fleeing youth, when he had hair and freedom.

I'll also add in as a freebie throw-in:

#5 Male attraction is recursive and social in nature, and younger women provide higher status because they provide higher status

Men want to pretend that our attractions are purely simple and biological, but they aren't, they're deeply social and status seeking in nature. One can see this in the way "trends" in attractive women in pornography occur over time. What men want is what other men want, because when other men see that you have it, they will think that you must be pretty fuckin' bitchin' to attract such a girl. Marty's loser dad gets the hot girl in Back to the Future, and instantly everyone wants to make him class president and hang out with him. This applies to age as well: only rich and high status men can get the twenty year old girlfriend, so men seek out the twenty year old girlfriend as a status symbol. So much more the status symbol to have an illegal girlfriend, and be so powerful that no one can stop you!

As for me, hot women are hot, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The rest is just a question of what price you are willing to pay.

I think men are attracted to teenage girls because they are hot. Consider /r/jailbait from reddit's bygone time. I doubt people were that interested in the personalities or psychology of those girls, though I have no proof or firsthand knowledge.

There may have been some other factors like them thinking wishfully 'oh she'd be nice and fun to be around and not a gold-digging frigid bitch who treats dates like job applications' but surely the primary attraction is physical rather than intellectual. The majority of men don't masturbate to a charming personality (or an imbalanced power dynamic per feminist rhetoric) in and of itself, they masturbate to a beautiful body first and foremost. There might be other things on top of that but the beautiful body is the basis. Male smut is visual, physical, sex, sex, sex.

Women are more attracted to personality, character (though still very much interested in a body). We see female smut being more status-obsessed - the equivalent is wanting a billionaire werewolf vampire CEO incredibly respected and feared by other men who has an inexplicable desire for the woman and will reveal his emotional side for her alone... he may well have six-pack abs but it's not quite so much the abs they're into. These are the ones who are into written smut.

As the saying goes, you don't go to the gym to collect girls, you just get the attention of men. Going to the gym will help. But if you want to get girls, get rich or famous or fearsome. CEO, rock star, high-ranking drug dealer.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=57S7LFFHA80?list=RD57S7LFFHA80

Hi, uh, I just left the date. Am I asking for too much idk, this guy was super cute, passionate about what he did, was a musician, idk.

I'm looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6'5, blue eyes. Finance, trust fund, 6'5, blue eyes. Finance, trust fund, 6'5, blue eyes.

this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace

But the opposite, right? She is aware of her sexual value. So she doesn't squander it on a 19 year old. He has no money.

Our hypothetical woman is with a financially secure older man with disposable income. Not a penniless 40 year old and not a penniless 19 year old. Call her a gold digger if she seeks marriage. Or chuckle at those charts of Leonardo DiCaprio's age vs his girlfriends' age. But this hypothetical woman has determined her sexual value and found a buyer.

If we are going analogize finding romantic partners to buying and selling, then these women are like me when I sold my last house. I didn't sell it to a penniless college student. I sold it to an older man after he showed me his bank account. He had a million dollars in a checking account. I didn't fail to realize my house's value. I found a buyer and we agreed on a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Not that I endorse comparing dating and marriage to selling yourself, but if we're making the analogy then let's follow it through.

But the opposite, right? She is aware of her sexual value. So she doesn't squander it on a 19 year old. He has no money.

In reality, perhaps this is what’s happening. But I don’t think it’s what’s happening in the ephepophile’s fantasy, that causes him to be attracted to the 19 year old, no. Golddigging is an unattractive trait in a partner even if you are the beneficiary. One would prefer to think that the free-spirited young thing with few sexual hangups is exactly that, rather than secretly calculative.

They want someone who can decouple sex from the rest of the cultural baggage around relationships... attracted to the idea that it's much easier to explain sex as a harmless game or a sign of special friendship

You've successfully discovered the psychological foundation on top of which "being a liberal" resides: being capable of decoupling X from the rest of the cultural baggage around X (and being disagreeable enough to point that out).

Unless you're in the 1970s (and even then), this is generally a liability, because the logical conclusion of that with respect to sex is "you're OK with fucking 7 year olds", a liberal of this type is ultimately being dishonest if he answers "no"[1], and everyone knows that (and you stated it anyway). This is also the genesis of the traditionalist's "it's a slippery slope from the gays to pedophilia" (but it's only really valid when criticizing classical liberals, which is why progressives appear to be immune to this type of criticism).

What they mean is that this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace.

And the claim that this is "abuse" hinges on this point. As the risk incurred by having sex is nullified and the marketplace value of sex goes to zero (pornography helps with this), this fades into irrelevance, and "the woman wants to have sex, because having sex is neat" becomes the more salient point.

The fact that this is a childish view of sex is actually really relevant (and I do mean that in a literal sense; when kids- the kind closer to 7 than 17- have sex or do sex-adjacent things, I have it on good word that this is generally why they're doing them). Of course, this only results in a neutral to positive outcome if one or both of the participants can say "I'm done, and this sex was only fucking around", and in practice that's not guaranteed[2].

By contrast, a traditionalist or progressive will say that, because sex is the main thing of value women possess (for a bunch of deep-seated sociobiological reasons), that people being allowed to decouple sex from the cultural baggage around sex is devaluing sex -> destroying a woman's livelihood. And because the traditionalist viewpoint is centered around the willingness of men to pay top dollar for sex, and the progressive viewpoint is centered around forcing men to pay top dollar for sex, those types of people are going to argue that abuse occurs when you devalue sex in that way.

(Note that this doesn't actually consider the age of the participant- which makes sense; neither traditionalists nor progressives are particularly bothered about the subject's lack of age- for traditionalists, we can see that ages of consent higher than that are modern inventions so being married was the salient factor, and for progressives, they think 7 year olds can be meaningfully transgender.)

Does this mean that the instigators of the sexual revolution, who, according to some posters whose names elude me right now, did it all only to bamboozle young and attractive women into no-strings-attached sexual promiscuity were ephebophiles? I guess they technically were.

Only if you started from the traditionalist viewpoint: that the liberals are being dishonest about the above and trying to steal [literal] meal tickets from women. If a traditionalist did that, it would be a grave sin for them to do that: it would be exploitation, abuse, trickery given that they naturally understand sex to be a meal ticket in that way, so obviously, because everyone works like they do, the people not doing that must be lying. (Progressives do this too, just from the other direction because they started out in possession of the meal ticket.)

Of course, to the people who aren't lying about that but can't or won't acknowledge why the traditionalist viewpoint exists, that's going to cause some problems and damage their ability to trust traditionalist motives. After all, if the truth is one way, but they say it's the other way, then the only reason to do that must be hatred and stupidity... which, from the liberal viewpoint, it is.

[1] Which is why the more progressive-sympathetic liberals were very keen on the adoption of "consent" as a framework; it allows them to have their cake (we can do whatever we want) and eat it too (unless society has deemed the other partner sub-human), but is ultimately vulnerable to the fact that, when a society gets poorer and due to the fact the sexual marketplace is a marketplace, regulatory capture in the "declare competition illegal" direction occurs.

[2] Which is the main problem with fucking people who aren't necessarily able to judge that up front, or don't (in fact or perception) have the power to force a disengagement (which is why the "single mom's boyfriend discovered to be fucking the daughters too" thing exists, especially since the mother is herself making that calculation, consciously or otherwise).

That said, fucking people who don't believe they have that power, or are merely giving in, tends to result in dead-fish lays, which means the thing they "should" actually be after (described by faceh in a sibling comment) can't exist in that environment... which is an instant fail condition for someone genuinely interested in casual sexploration (and considering how obnoxious adult women are when they go passive like that, imagine how miserable that experience would be were it an actual kid on the other end- impressionability only goes so far). But that's basically just restating the slightly-hidden thesis that "molester/possessor" and "interested in casual/exploratory sex with for its own sake" are very different things.

As someone who has been in a decade-long relationship with a woman who was four years younger than me (from my age 28 to 38 or so, so not a particularly creepy age difference) and not very emotionally mature, but who is better (i.e. single) now, just from an egoistical male perspective, there are serious downsides to seriously dating younger women. (I mean, a serial PUA could just dump them whenever they send him 20 texts and try to call five times for some emotional crisis, but he will also not get very wholesome relationships that way.) Not that my sample is very large, though.

--

What they mean is that this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace. He can outbid her 20-yo suitors simply because he has 25 years of career growth on them.

I think your first sentence is wrong and in direct conflict with the second sentence, which is right.

The median 20yo likely has a good idea of her SMV. She is unlikely to be in the situation where no man has ever showed the slightest interest in her, thousands of men have swiped left on her Tinder profile until finally, some pennyless, ugly 45yo comes along and sends her a dick pick, and she is immediately falling for him because she is just so happy that she will not have to die unloved.

Instead, she likely has a good idea that a ton of men want to have sex with her, and quite a few would actually be willing to dump their current partner or wife to go exclusive with her. If she is going for the 45yo, that is simply because he is making her the best offer. I mean, sure, the hottest 20yo she could get exclusively would probably be quite a bit hotter, but it would also mean that she would have to work some job to have a decent lifestyle. As you say, with 25 years of career, the (well-situated) 45yo can offer her a much nicer life -- at least until she gets replaced by a younger model.

An unpopular belief of mine, although not tightly held, is that women really do NOT mature much when they hit their twenties. Nor are they asked or expected to.

So the difference between dating a 21-22 year old and a 28-29 year old on a maturity level is often negligible. Most women don't take bad experiences and learn from them and improve... they become more bitter about it, and it makes them less appealing overall, because dating the 28 year old means you're getting someone who is maybe marginally more mature and put-together than the 21 year old... but with a lot more baggage that you'll be expected to carry.

And if you were present when all that baggage was acquired, hey maybe that's okay. But walking into a relationship with a 28 year old who has been through a series of negative relationships and hasn't figured out how her own decision-making contributed to the problem, you're now dealing with emotional trauma that you had no role in creating, and a woman who is provably not good at maintaining relationships. That's not appealing, especially if you're looking over and spot a 22-23 year old who hasn't yet lost the basic aura of innocence and doesn't hate the world (yet), and there isn't a noticeable maturity difference.

And yeah, a lot of dudes don't mature much through their 20's either. My brother was/is one of those. But guys, well, they're expected to mature and won't find their feelings coddled during that time.

I’m not sold by your argument. It sounds like you’re begging the question by substituting the definition of “guy who reads porn about a busty 15-year-old” and “guy who is actually attracted to 15-year-olds.” The most obvious difference is words are just words, you can write whatever number you want down, reality isn’t keeping track. So the guy is attracted to the symbol which is 15, and the signs of an actually voluptuous woman. But then you have a different class which is actually interested in minors, and that tends to be for pretty nasty reasons.

OK, leave the latter group out. The former group is interested in a symbol. Almost always this is because the symbol itself has become a fetish that substitutes for something real so as to deprive it of its reality, to make it easier to digest. How nice are her tits is a complicated question, you have to really experience them to know, there are a lot of details and maybe not all of them are as attractive as the gestalt, and it takes serious concentration to focus on the gestalt and not get distracted, especially if you don’t have much experience actually enjoying tits. How big are they is safer, and you can put a number to it. Now you can enjoy yourself.

So what about age? It could be a symbol for a lot of things. Innocence, transgression, duh. But not a carefree sexual nature. That can be easily written onto a character of any age, and indeed is, in porn. It’s sufficient in itself, it doesn’t need to be laundered through a symbol, the whole point of it is how digestible and convenient it is. (Real sex with a real woman who isn’t infinitely carefree and convenient is great, but can’t really be condensed into a marketable fantasy.) No, what I think age is a symbol for is the reader’s own early feelings about sex. When he was 15 the girls were 15, and nothing can really compare to what they made him feel. Now he’s older and doesn’t really feel the same things, and even thinking about the feelings as themselves is a little much, so he wraps it all up in a symbol that he can find arousing instead. There’s no need to consider why the unmoored sexual energy of his teens has failed to find a mooring, or what that would even mean to him, so long as he has a symbol of his own desire to focus on. 15 means bottomless libidinous desire, to him. And to the people who don’t feel the same way, they can skip to the sections about how voluptuous she is and enjoy all the same.

Does this mean that the instigators of the sexual revolution, who, according to some posters whose names elude me right now, did it all only to bamboozle young and attractive women into no-strings-attached sexual promiscuity

Well of course. For a long time, the very powerful (extraordinarily) powerful constituency of men who want to no-strings-attached numbers of nubile teenage girls was kept in check only by an even larger, even more powerful force we might broadly call ‘civilization’. Consider that historically, men fucked large numbers of teenage girls in one of three circumstances:

The first was the large harem, limited to a tiny fraction of the most elite men, and a lifelong financial commitment that also required immense social status and power (having two or three wives the way a wealthy, 99th percentile wealthy Arab trader might have had isn’t the same thing). The full-scale harem with many (heretofore) virginal teenage girls and regular addition of new ones, certainly in the last millennium, was limited to kings, emperors, sheikhs, Beria etc. The second was rape and pillage, mostly in wartime. The third was in the case of prostitution, which involved girls sacrificed on the altar of male sexuality by the forces of economics, war, geography, famine, high maternal and paternal mortality rates and so on.

As social technologies, marriage had been invented to ensure lineage for inheritance and monogamy had been invented to reduce the greater instability, lack of buy-in and poor incentive structure (and not just for men, although that is a discussion for another day) common to polygamous societies. Even comparatively affluent and powerful men could not hope to have sexual access to respectable young nubile women of decent background, especially if they were already married (and marriage, of course, was about much more than sexual attraction) and so could not offer that woman or girl the title of wife.

Respectable young women could not be allowed sexual freedom because that exposed them to the great risk of pregnancy (with no way of determining the father), to (incurable and either fertility-destroying, fatal or both) sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis, and to the social shame that surrounded that kind of thing in traditional societies, and which was deeply intertwined with all the above. These forces (call it the combined weight of fathers and mothers and older brothers of girls, the church, tradition, faith, general propriety) stood firm against even the extraordinary social and economic power of grown men who really desperately wanted no-strings-attached sex with large numbers of teenage girls.

Quietly things started to change in the first quarter of the 20th century, due in part to the sudden emergence of a cure for syphilis and some other common STDs and more viable condoms. Divorce rates increased, which meant a slow decline in the number of two-parent homes when adjusted for lower parental mortality due to modern medicine. Great economic growth meant that young men and women alike could easily afford to live outside the home, not in boarding houses run by prying old women but alone or with each other. Then came the pill and, though it was less important, eventually legal abortion. For aeons, the social bulwark described had effectively precluded sexual liberation. Slowly, the arguments melted away, especially as religiosity began to decline.

Hugh Hefner emerged into a society in which the grand edifice of social tradition, particularly around sex, was uniquely fragile. It existed, but was increasingly little defended, and its defenders were ever less relevant. The men who wanted to fuck teenage girls with no strings attached and who didn’t care about the social consequences made their play, and they won.

I'm sure there is a based tradcath out there somewhere who can contextualize all of these follies of the modern world within the disaster that is the sexual revolution, but 'drastic' age gaps were, as far as my meme understanding of history goes, more common back in the day.

But regardless of that, a part of the issue has to be the lack of a centralized authority that decides on this. Allowing everyone to recognize what the parameters are so that they can at least not claim ignorance of how the dating scene works and where they fall on the value curve.

My question would be, would that change be a good thing? Would that information change peoples behavior at all?

I'm sure there is a based tradcath

You called?

who can contextualize all of these follies of the modern world within the disaster that is the sexual revolution, but 'drastic' age gaps were, as far as my meme understanding of history goes, more common back in the day.

What do you mean by 'back in the day'? The youngest average female age at marriage since the middle ages was in the fifties.

It's true that teenaged marriage with large age gaps was viewed as more acceptable back in the day, and was more common than it is today- my own great grandparents were seventeen and thirty, marrying during the depression. But today that marriage is, contrary to the imaginings of progressives on the internet, sufficiently rare as to distantly aspire to be a rounding error on a lizardman's constant. IIRC married women under twenty have smaller average age gaps than married women in their early twenties.

The fifties were not trad; they were a social experiment that has been in many ways backed off from. In 1900 dating/courting was serious business for adult men ready to assume the responsibilities entailed in marriage and women who understood that this meant it was rather unlikely the man would be younger than about the mid twenties. Sometimes she was a teenager(Little House on the Prairie portrays this) but the average woman who married in 1890 was 23.

https://acoup.blog/2025/08/01/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iiia-family-formation/

The marriage patterns of high elites in a society are often quite different from the marriage patterns of most of the society. The classic example of this is to note that students are often mislead by European aristocrats in the medieval and early modern periods marrying very young and so they assume that everyone in medieval Europe married very young, but in fact, as we’ll see in a moment, medieval western Europe is notable for very late (mid-twenties for women, late twenties for men) typical age at first marriage among the general population.

So much for meme history.

The dream of all men is to meet little sluts who are innocent but ready for all forms of depravity--which is what, more or less, all teenage girls are.

Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island

I'll also make a point that isn't an endorsement but is an observation I've made a lot, especially as I'm approaching real middle age.

"Introducing" a newbie to something, in general, is a very gratifying experience. Using your own deeper knowledge to guide them, give them little tips, and see their own development generates a strong sense of frission, in me at least. Hugely rewarding.

When it comes to sex, there's the double gratification of showing someone something new and then getting to partake in it with them for mutual pleasure.

I am told that many guys do prefer an older woman as a partner because such women have worked out their preferences, kinks, and limits and are quite practiced in their techniques and thus deliver a much more enjoyable experience overall.

I believe it. But taking a younger woman (not necessarily virginal) and showing her certain experiences for the first time and getting her unfiltered, completely unrehearsed reaction to such an intense sensation never really gets old. But the woman herself does, eventually after she's tried everything then the joy of new discovery is blunted. Novelty squeezed out. Then its just sex. Fun, but without the extra layer of finding new frontiers of eroticism.

And its not easily replicable! There's a finite supply of inexperienced (yet attractive) young women. Can't be recycled once they're despoiled. So it wouldn't be that surprising if some men try to collect 'em like pokemon.

So while this:

They don't mean he's literally attracted to her prepubescent body, which would be absurd. What they mean is that this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace.

Is an unavoidable factor, I think there's 'obviously' a mutual gain to an experienced partner reaching out and lending some of their knowledge and guidance to an inexperienced one so they don't have to fumble around on their own or with an equally inexperienced partner and trying things out without knowing for sure if they're 'doing it right.'

Whereas a jaded, cynical, "experienced" woman who doesn't need a man's guidance to discover new experiences doesn't give that extra gratifying sense of "I alone have given her this feeling that she's never felt before." And, more directly, you also have to assume she's comparing you to those past encounters and you'll never really know if you measure up.

On net, you'd prefer to be the guy against whom all future encounters are measured, vs. the guy who has to wonder if she's being honest about her past encounters.

And lest I get hit with the leery, suspicious eye, my own preference is for a woman who I've been with long enough to learn all her sensitive spots, favorite positions, her strengths, weaknesses (and vice-versa) and develop a sincere intimacy so you can read them easily and adjust on the fly and otherwise maximize the mutual joy. That's the optimal setup. A slightly more experienced guy, an inexperienced woman, and a long relationship to grow into each other so both get the benefit of knowing that their shared experiences are unique and they're not being compared against some unknown third parties.

I absolutely don't relate at all, and I imagine that many men are on the same boat. But I can understand that a large minority of people feel this way and that minority of men due to their tendencies end up taking the virginity of an outsized proportion of all the women out there, thereby ruining it for the rest of us.

Those pokemon collectors are absolutely ruining it for the rest of us.

I've commented on the issue of Lotharios having an outsize (negative) influence on the pool of 'marriageable' women before.

I had the 'insight' that yeah, these types literally optimize for attracting young, sexually inexperienced women, they know exactly where to look, what to say, how to present themselves, and how to string such a woman along without getting in so deep they can't escape. Its a game they get really good at because they are playing it over and over and over again.

They do it a few times and then it becomes second nature, and since they never stick around, they can keep running up enough of a body count in a relatively short period of time to have a noticeable impact on the local singles market.

And some portion of them, I reckon, fetishize the act of despoiling an innocent girl with no intention of committing, but also take some pleasure from knowing she's been ruined for any other partners that might come along.

I am actually willing to consider straight up execution for such men, IF ONLY for the deterrent effect.

The nature of the problem is that a young woman, without having SUBSTANTIAL oversight, can't tell one of these guys apart from a more committed partner, and if one of these guys gets her first (and as stated above, they're VERY GOOD at this game!), as her first relationship experience it can pretty much ruin her ability to identify and trust a 'good' man, and might make her bitter enough to think all men are like that.

I am actually willing to consider straight up execution for such men, IF ONLY for the deterrent effect.

Doesn't work. For every Lothario you execute, there will always be another one eager to take his place. Having sex with a bunch of nubile virgins is the ultimate reward. All you are doing is selecting for more impulsive, risk-taking cads. Or, as the Dreaded Jim put it:

Hating this guy is stupid. One pin can pop a hundred balloons. You have to control the virgins, not the poppers of virgins. Getting mad at the men will do no good. The women have to be restrained. Talking about how bad these men are is a distraction and irrelevance.

We have to implement virgin marriage, in that most women will have never slept with any man except the bridegroom before marriage. This is going to require alarmingly drastic coercion starting at a very early age. When a girl goes looking for a dicking she will find what she looks for. That is why we have to apply coercion to the girls, not the males. One pin can pop a hundred balloons. Sperm is cheap, eggs are dear. You guard what is dear, not what is cheap. The double standard is what works. If you do not have a double standard, you will not have children and grandchildren, and the state will not have soldiers.

And, yes, this requires SUBSTANTIAL oversight, which our society is optimized to prevent (starting with the institution of college, which is virtually designed to take young women away from the watchful eyes of their friends and families).

Yes, I've zeroed in on college as a particular problem since it has compounding (negative) impact on a woman's marriageability and fertility. Four fertile years burned, racking up both debt and body count, for a degree that they may not use, and then they often opt to go for MORE schooling rather than enter a marriage or the 'real world.'

And of course it also creates the target-rich environment for the virgin poppers. Women from small towns, leaving their high school boyfriends behind, no parental supervision, tons of drugs and alcohol available, and both blatant and subtle nudges towards promiscuity all around.

Without some strong social pressure its almost impossible to expect women to resist for the full four years. And by the sheer numbers, most women don't resist. body counts at time of first marriage have steadily climbed.

So yeah, more supervision on the women is part of the the solution.

AND YET, removing some of these guys and deterring the rest would likely have an overall positive effect as well.

I mean, lets just use a fox and henhouse analogy. Yes, you guard the hens/eggs because they are dear, but if you catch a fox in the act, you still kill it. You don't want a whole population of foxes that are optimized for henhouse raiding to arise.

Except that (generic) you are not keeping your hens in a henhouse; you are sending them out into the forest without a care in the world, then getting upset because most of them end up eaten by foxes. You are trying to make the forest safe for the hens by executing the foxes one at a time, and that is simply not going to work.

First, you have to keep your hens in a henhouse. And in order to do that, you need a priest who tells you that it is good and proper for a man to lock up his hens, a sheriff who recognizes your legal right to do so as the rightful owner of the hens, and friends and family who will look at you like you are an absolute idiot if send your hens out into the forest. Only then will there be any point to killing the occasional fox that happens to get in.

Needless to say, our priests, our cops, and our communities do the exact opposite.

Agreed on college. Academia delenda est. Man will not be free until the last professor is strangled with the entrails of the last journalist.

a young woman, without having SUBSTANTIAL oversight, can't tell one of these guys apart from a more committed partner,

I think the very traditional advice of "wait until marriage" does actually work here. It may have its other failure modes (well documented elsewhere), but it certainly requires a non-trivial time and legal commitment from a partner that would "tell one of these guys apart."

Or a father who is willing and able to act as the filter.

But yes, 'wait until marriage' works because its dead simple advice (though not easy to follow unless the plausible threat of eternal damnation is attached), it aligns incentives, filters out bad faith actors, and ensures both sides are getting what they want whilst constraining the other side from backing out after extracting value.

If you don't create a Schelling point, the marketplace can end up stuck at a different, very undesirable equilibrium. Rather than agonize over the number of dates before putting out, the issue of trusting the counterparty, or figuring out the 'optimal' period of time to wait... just push everyone towards the same standard and enforce it as best you can.

though not easy to follow unless the plausible threat of eternal damnation is attached

Or the threat of shotgun weddings.

Well yeah, see my point about supporting execution of such men.

I think even the label of "ephebophile" is an artificial one. It probably encompasses almost all men. The average man cannot tell, at least by looking, if someone is 16 years old or 18 and a day. If they've got tits and a nice figure, they'll make just about everyone sexually attracted regardless of age. The only difference worth noting is that, at least in the West, there has been so much social conditioning that people are loathe to accept this fact, and those who do take the risk knowingly likely have other issues.

Back when OkCupid's blog wasn't a joke, they shared a chart showing response rates for women by age. The curve peaked at 18, and declined after. I am convinced that if the platform allowed younger women to sign up, then the actual modal value would be ~16 or 17. We have successfully pathologized very natural behavior, but oh well. I'm lucky enough to have a thing for MILFs, albeit they're just women my age these days.

Yes. I went through a period in my early twenties when I worried about this. But eventually I realized it's all preference falsification: "Women like responsible nice guys who respect women" but for men.

If you've ever thought a 16yo looked pretty as a grown man welcome to the "normal heterosexual male club". Almost everyone else is lying.

Teenage girls are somewhat specific looking, while most men will find them attractive, to prefer them is more unusual.

Teenage girls are somewhat specific looking

?

While there are some tells(acne etc) these are more common on younger teens. Most 17 year old girls are not readily distinguishable from young adult women in the same way that is true for boys.

Hmmm.

I can point out that pretty much every heterosexual male goes through a period where they're exclusively chasing 15, 16, and 17 year old girls. Its called puberty and/or high school.

And with that in mind, its actually weirder to think that a guy's tastes would change drastically as he aged, why wouldn't he continue to be physically attracted to the same things he was physically attracted to as a teen? Even if, as his brain matures, he can optimize for personality traits more than pure looks.

And a part of me sure wishes I had gotten around to banging more 15-17 year olds back when I was in that age bracket, but alas I was inconceivably ignorant of the signals women would send me... and I'm glad I didn't end up knocking one up and derailing my life plans.

And as discussed last week, I can imagine a world where a 16 year old girl might demonstrate sufficient understanding of the risks and sufficient brain development that she could legitimately "consent" to sex with an older guy.

But even then, I don't think society would look kindly on the guy that did that. There are in fact many 'normal' behaviors that are pathologized to avoid, I guess, a spiral into an unhealthy equilibrium where, say, 40 year olds are regularly snatching up 16-year-old girls and removing them from the dating pool that would otherwise allow teen boys a chance to get some experience.

"15-17 year olds back when I was in that age bracket..."

When you're also young, they don't seem particularly nubile or special.

Going to disagree. But you do have that awkward period where you're still transitioning from finding girls icky and rife with cootie infestations to kinda adorable and then intrinsically appealing.

Although I also have had pretty much the same "type" since I was about that age, and it is fair to say not many high school ladies could fill out those requirements.

I think even the label of "ephebophile" is an artificial one. It probably encompasses almost all men. The average man cannot tell, at least by looking, if someone is 16 years old or 18 and a day. If they've got tits and a nice figure, they'll make just about everyone sexually attracted regardless of age.

Let's say there are two women you met in a bar: Alice is your age but has the face and the body of an 18-year-old. Barb is in high school, and she also has the face and the body of an 18-year-old. Both are making eyes at you. Which one would you (well, the Rawlsian you) rather take home?

Wait, do I know who is who?

Yes, you have talked to both.

Strictly speaking, I'd be happy with either. If I have to choose, the one who's actually my age. More longterm potential there.

I think a case could be made for making exclusive ephebophilia a pathology. Like "eww, that girl is 22 and has a real job, I don't want to stick my dick into her". Evolutionarily speaking, that would be maladaptive. I do not know if it is very common, however.

I agree that "fuck every woman (except those closely related to you) who looks fertile and healthy if you can", which was probably adaptive for males in the ancestral environment and is probably the most common sexuality in men today does not need a special term.

The kind of "exclusive" ephebophilia you mention seems vanishingly rare to me. Often the kind of men opting to go for much younger women are doing so both because they like them, and because they would have a harder time with the older ones who aren't so tolerant of them being weird/lazy/unsuccessful. Think aging musician or bartender with no other credentials, they can convince a college sophomore that they're super cool, but don't appeal to women in their age group looking for something serious. That is rational from their perspective, they're getting laid at the end of the day. There are rare exceptions like Leonardo Di Caprio, who can afford to make a break for it when they cross 25, as he can easily afford to be picky.

At the end of the day, men tend to prefer youth and correlates for fertility. They might even have preferences that their partners be dependent on them, which describes so many goddamn people that I wouldn't call it pathological. Men were the breadwinners for most of recorded history.

I mostly agree with you here, but I'm not sure about a "preference for dependence". I definitely think that there's something of a provider instinct in men (the proximate cause of findom fetishes and general simpery in its maladjusted forms), but I don't know if it generalizes to an outright preference for incapacity. It certainly doesn't seem like men get the ick from women who are functional and capable as independent adults, and I'll say that men who do recoil in this way are indeed possessed of a pathological mindset/ideology. Caveat: this may not apply if the woman is significantly and obviously better than him at more masculine-coded tasks.

Also, younger women are not necessarily more fertile when you're talking about teenagers. I can't find the source ATM, but I've seen data showing that 14-year old girls are about as fertile as women in their late 20's, with peak fertility being reached at 19 or 20 and then declining linearly from there.

I mostly agree, but I would assume that evolution incentivized attraction to total fertility. If you shack up with a woman in her late teens, you can, at least in theory, get many more kids out of her than you can in the late 20s. We live in a very unusual period of time, when we can take negligible infant or childhood mortality for granted.

I mean that's part of the Epstein thing to me.

If a given client didn't realize that barely-illegal girls were on the menu it's not like he's gonna be able to tell immediately that somebody's 17 years, 364 days and 23 hours from their aura. Going to dodgy orgy island with Escorts isn't illegal in of itself.

This ended up on the cutting room floor and didn't get into my post, but Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire, had sex with barely illegal girls not because that was his kink, but because he got burned having sex with a regular escort.

If you're a celebrity or a politician and your good friend Jeffrey invites you to his island for some frolicking and debauchery, you will want whoever participated in frolicking and debauchery with you to keep her mouth shut and not to blackmail you or to go on a talk show crawl peddling her newest book How I Fucked Bill Gates and Why He Isn't Even in My Personal Top 50. So good friend Jeffrey needs someone who honestly thinks she will get in trouble if people learn what she has been doing with her various orifices.

The age thing, whilst more viscerally nasty, is probably not the sole reason for why Epstein and friends are looked at so negatively.

The idea of an upper class that lives voraciously lavish lives, engaging in all manner of depravity and indulgence, is pervasive in history and fiction. I don't think there is a single example where people look at these behaviors positively.

To that extent, whilst one might have to make more nuanced arguments against Epstein and friends on those grounds, the argument is there. Epstein and the people going to parties on private islands were doing something shameful and ugly even without the child rape trafficking.

"Trump fires Bureau of Labor Statistics chief without evidence for political reasons" says the news radio I wake up to, then continues to say he removed the Democrat appointee "without concrete evidence." Since COVID-19 caused lockdowns, the BLS numbers have been revised downward from initial reports regularly, sometimes ridiculously so, which Axios says has justifiable reasons.

So why are the initial numbers even reported if we know the algorithm they use will be wildly inaccurate?

So why are the initial numbers even reported if we know the algorithm they use will be wildly inaccurate?

Getting the exact numbers 3 months later is just not as useful as getting directionally-correct ones fast.

That's good when the numbers are directionally correct, not when they're completely wrong

Reuters has a nice graph showing that large revisions have been made quite often, both downward and upward, for decades.

large revisions have been made quite often, both downward and upward, for decades.

I feel like you're burying some of Reuters own commentary there.

The combined downward revision for the two previous months - May and June - was larger than anything reported outside of the pandemic era. Indeed, the estimates for the two prior months combined have more often than not been revised higher. Since 1979, the median two-month combined estimate change was an upward revision of 10,000.

Yes, revisions have been made quite often, but this one is noteworthy and unusual. I'm not yet willing to ascribe it to malice, but we should acknowledge that it's peculiar.

This seems like focusing on the wrong part of the story.

So why are the initial numbers even reported if we know the algorithm they use will be wildly inaccurate?

"Moreover, the BLS and other federal agencies are essentially trying to serve two purposes at once. On the one hand, they’re hoping to provide actionable information as fast as they reasonably can to employers, investors, job-seekers, policymakers and the Federal Reserve. On the other hand, they’re trying to formulate a “permanent record”, data that is treated as ground truth in future economic analysis. Those imply taking different positions in the unavoidable trade-off between speed and precision."

Biased estimators can still be useful. If you know an estimator is consistently high, you can account for that in your planning. On the other hand, if political leadership is putting their thumb on the scale to make themselves look good (or salve dear leader's ego), trustworthiness goes out the window. It's one thing to be wrong occasionally, it's another to be bullshit.

On the other hand, if political leadership is putting their thumb on the scale to make themselves look good (or salve dear leader's ego), trustworthiness goes out the window. It's one thing to be wrong occasionally, it's another to be bullshit.

I don't think that's really the danger here. If the BLS statistics aren't trusted, some actors are going to do their best to fill in a trustworthy answer. The problem there won't be their honesty, but that the data are not going to be evenly available. We'll go back to information asymmetries rather than public knowledge.

This estimator isn't biased though.

If you know an estimator is consistently high, you can account for that in your planning.

If the estimator knows that they're consistently high, why aren't they adjusting the model they're using to produce estimates with to account for that?

If the estimator is wrong consistently but in a predictable way... they should be able to be wrong less often?

When I say "account for that in planning", I don't mean you adjust your forecasts downward X% from the report because they always overestimate by the same margin. Consistently high is not the same thing as 'always high' or 'consistently high by the same amount'. It just means that on average the estimator is greater than the true value (or, really, the quick estimate tends to be higher than the slow estimate).

If the estimator is wrong consistently but in a predictable way... they should be able to be wrong less often?

Not necessarily. Estimation is always dealing with real world constraints liked limited resources and time frame for gathering and analyzing data, sampling bias, unknown unknowns, etc...

I encourage you to read the Nate Silver article I linked. He talks about this significantly more articulately than I can.

I am somewhat familiar with Nate Silver's approach to modelling and prediction.

And I'll reiterate the general critique.

If you damn well know your model is going to be inaccurate, include error bars, express how much irreducible uncertainty there is. At least acknowledge that the number is most likely incorrect and is subject to large revisions, downplay confidence.

Actually, it looks like they DO have that option on display and HOLY CRAP the bars are really large on some of these.

Maybe its not a particularly useful estimate if businesses are looking for something something reliable to act upon.

Do you want to be the guy in the office who adds in the unprincipled empirical fudge factor to a statutorily mandated report? The verbs in 29 USC 2 are “collect, collate, report, and publish”, nowhere does it say “estimate”, “calculate”, or “determine”.

I'd be the guy in the office suggesting "hey we can publish the report, and show both the standard estimate and the estimate with the empirical fudge factor side-by-side so its clear we're not hiding the ball."

At least in this case I think there is an added political dimension of reluctance to update the model: "You were happy enough to overestimate [measurement] for my opponent last term, and now you want to publish lower estimates, maybe even underestimates on my watch. Are you trying to display partisan bias?"

In addition to the value of "we've at least measured it consistently for the last century, even if there are known issues with it it's easier to fix those in post", which also has some value.

The whole "without evidence" tic is pretty played out at this point. Of course, Trump does have evidence -- the revisions are higher than usual. It's pretty bad evidence (so "without concrete evidence" is true), but it's enough to make "without evidence" naked editorializing.

BLS has been putting out these numbers monthly for many years; I am sure if they proposed delaying the releases two months there would be all sorts of complaints about that too.

Trumps own former BLS chief himself doesn’t like it. And it includes this very damning quote:

“There’s no way for that to happen,” Beach told CNN’s Kasie Hunt on “State of the Union.” “The commissioner doesn’t do anything to collect the numbers. The commissioner doesn’t see the numbers for until Wednesday before they’re published. By the time the commissioner sees the numbers, they’re all prepared.”

Other articles note that usually, initial estimates are based on larger employers, and smaller ones take longer to report. Savvy consumers of the stats know this. Also, what size company has been hit hardest by recent market uncertainties including tariffs? Small employers. The variance is higher.

If a number feels off is your evidence, and it’s plausible or even likely that the explanation could be explained by either malice OR the underlying stats actually being off, it’s still “no evidence” in a statistical sense. We need DETAILS to be able to assess the claim, and Trump provided none, and furthermore if his own former guy says that the chief doesn’t even see the numbers until they are nearly fully assembled, we have strong reason to be skeptical and zero actual reason to trust him (beyond a baseline level of trust in Trump himself).

it’s still “no evidence” in a statistical sense

In a statistical sense, saying "datum D is no evidence for theory T" is "P(T|D) = P(D)". Here we have "P(T|D) > P(D)", which is "D is evidence".

It's not much evidence. It's not nearly enough evidence. It's outweighed by other evidence to the contrary. It's grossly outweighed by reasonable priors. But it's still evidence.

I hate to pick on anti-Trump folks about this, when Trump's own relationship with truth seems to intersect propositional logic only by random luck; forget about Bayesian statistics. But it's still a red flag to me.

Decades ago I waded into investigation of a controversial belief system, a "religion" or a "cult" depending on who you asked. I debated with folks about evidence for and evidence against many of the beliefs, and my eventual conclusion was basically "false religion" ... but the most memorable part of those discussions was, when one guy I'd been debating with was asked by another interlocutor whether there was any evidence against his religion, his answer was a flat "no". Not "yes, but there's more evidence for it", not "yes, but only if you consider evidence out of context", just "no, there's no evidence against it".

I still had lingering questions (of what I'd later start thinking of as "epistemic rationality") to resolve, but now more pragmatic ("instrumentally rational") concerns were screaming at me to be wary in a way that continuing abstract discussion of science or history couldn't have done. It might not have been his religious leaders' fault, but that guy was in a cult.

Such self-inflicted damage isn't worth it for any ideology. You might still end up at a correct belief, or a dozen, but only by random luck.

Trumps own former BLS chief himself doesn’t like it

So? That doesn't mean it's "without evidence".

And that quote isn't damning at all. The fact that the commissioner doesn't collect the numbers herself does not mean she is not responsible for doing so.

I'm 99% sure Trump's wrong and she wasn't cooking the numbers, and it's likely she wasn't doing a bad job.

In the last roundup about embryo selection, guy with Greek letters in his flair ThomasdelVasto said the following (emphasis added):

Now I personally have religious reasons to oppose this sort of intervention, but even if you don't, it's not hard to imagine the insane societal consequences of allowing free for all designer babies. As one hyperbolic comment on the slate star subreddit says:

Yet another reason for people to not have kids. This shit is so socially erosive. "Want a baby? Do you want a prole baby, made the old fashioned way? You don't know what you're going to get! It's like a loot box, could be pure crap. You should PAY US to make a cool designer baby, with a 34% increased chance of the ultra-rare and coveted phenotype High Functioning Autist. If you have a loot box baby, they're going to get crushed by Ultra-Rare HFA Baby" Nuke it from orbit.

While this comment is pretty over the top, I still think there's a strong point here! Gattaca was a cautionary tale, not a user's manual. Then again, I suppose the general zeitgeist considers the prole class to be so whipped, and coddled with bread and circuses, that our materialistic transhumanist tech overlords can simply do whatever they want, even if it will end up condemning "natural-born" people to permanent servitude.

Much of right-wing thought is just people looking for "right-wing" language to express low-class envy and grievance. AOC-ism with extra steps. There's long been an element of that in the American Right, and there's nothing wrong with it provided it's based on actual complaints. (Working-class people were entirely justified in their anger at those judges who ordered their kids bussed into the ghetto while sending their own kids to private schools.) But ever since the first Trump campaign, prole resentment has become arguably the defining characteristic of the Right in America. It's the glue that binds together the vulgar, secular, working-class Trumpian Right and the traditional Religious Right. The tattoo-covered WWE fan doesn't want to listen to a sermon from the Southern preacher but recognizes him as a fellow member of the broad ingroup of low-class Americans who share a common inferiority complex toward urbanites with lots of education and money. While not every Right-winger shares this attitude, there's a near-universal refusal to acknowledge or condemn it. Elon Musk is almost a caricature of the "materialistic transhumanist tech overlord," but you won't see him defending himself against such attacks. (You might say this is because he's unaware of them, which might be true of some Silicon Valley Tech Rightists, but isn't true of Musk, considering how much time he spends on Twitter.)

P.S. To preempt the accusation that I ignored ThomasdelVasto's point, I reject the whole theory that poor, low-IQ people are harmed by competition with rich, high-IQ people. People are willing to risk dying in the desert to move from low-IQ to high-IQ countries because high-IQ has massive positive externalities.

P.P.S. I know I might get banned for this post. I was drawn to the forum because I'm a long-time Scott Alexander fan, from back when "right-wing SSCer" meant "secular guy who talks about embryo selection and national IQ," not "guy who thinks we need to go back to 1710 ideas about religion and government and that eugenics is evil." For me, unlike many of you, the former wasn't just a gateway drug to the latter, so I'm "left-wing" now. You can follow me on Substack and Twitter.

P.P.P.S. The mottezien is immunized against all dangers: one may call him a cuck, nazi, bigot, fascist, it all runs off him like water off a raincoat. But call him a resentful prole and you will be astonished at how he recoils, how injured he is, how he suddenly shrinks back, calls you egregiously obnoxious, and then bans you from the forum.

  • -33

I find it funny that I gave explicitly religious reasons, but you then made it into a class resentment post. Can you explain how you got there?

Elon Musk is almost a caricature of the "materialistic transhumanist tech overlord," but you won't see him defending himself against such attacks. (You might say this is because he's unaware of them, which might be true of some Silicon Valley Tech Rightists, but isn't true of Musk, considering how much time he spends on Twitter.)

I'll admit I liked Elon a lot before his recent flame out - I still think his companies are doing well. I don't necessarily think that space and electric/self-driving cars have to be related to transhumanism, though I will admit that Elon and I's moral systems are deeply at odds.

P.S. To preempt the accusation that I ignored ThomasdelVasto's point, I reject the whole theory that poor, low-IQ people are harmed by competition with rich, high-IQ people. People are willing to risk dying in the desert to move from low-IQ to high-IQ countries because high-IQ has massive positive externalities.

I'm confused because again, the poor, low-IQ people thing being harmed wasn't really the thrust of my post? My post was arguing on one hand that for religious reasons I don't like this technology, and on the other hand I do think it's socially corrosive not necessarily because high IQ is bad, but because current class relations are bad and this will further the divide.

P.P.S. I know I might get banned for this post. I was drawn to the forum because I'm a long-time Scott Alexander fan, from back when "right-wing SSCer" meant "secular guy who talks about embryo selection and national IQ," not "guy who thinks we need to go back to 1710 ideas about religion and government and that eugenics is evil." For me, unlike many of you, the former wasn't just a gateway drug to the latter, so I'm "left-wing" now. You can follow me on Substack and Twitter.

I don't think we should go back to 1710 ideas about religion and government at all. In fact I'm quite an oddball when it comes to my views on Christianity, syncretism, and I'm pretty hands off on governance. I have pretended to arrogance before during my EA phase, and have decided I don't really know enough about politics to wade into it. I'd rather stick to my own weird corner of oddball religious stuff, philosophy, history, etc. Perhaps that's cowardly of me.

I'd encourage you to question why so many post-rationalists, like myself, who were deeply involved in the SSC rationalist movement as you were, become Christian or at least religious. There may be good reasons for the shift.

I will admit that Elon and I's moral systems are deeply at odds.

I know that this is off-topic - but can somebody explain what is this sentence structure? Is it something similar to the word literally now also having the meaning of metaphorically? So similarly as now it is okay to use X and I in all the formulations - even in those where it does not make sense - we now even upgraded to it into X and I's Y?

Not sure this is proper grammar.

Knowledge of noun cases is bourgeois. You would be wise to forget it, comrade.

Can you explain how you got there?

FYI, no he can't. He was permabanned for this post (although the ban wasn't linked properly so the little symbol doesn't show up).

Ahh yeah I saw while I was commenting. Can't say I'm surprised but I am a bit sad. He brought it on himself I have to admit, but I liked his fighting spirit. If only he could've been a little less aggressive about it and showed some willingness to back down.

"Want a baby? Do you want a prole baby, made the old fashioned way? You don't know what you're going to get! It's like a loot box, could be pure crap. You should PAY US to make a cool designer baby, with a 34% increased chance of the ultra-rare and coveted phenotype High Functioning Autist. If you have a loot box baby, they're going to get crushed by Ultra-Rare HFA Baby"

Prediction: we will see a wealthy, virtue-signalling white couple use gene editing to give their baby Down’s Syndrome.

You know it’s gonna happen. Imagine the social media storm.

I have very mixed feelings about the topic, but the debate over gene therapy and cochlear implants in the deaf community is at least philosophically interesting. On one hand, functional ears are a blessing and it makes sense to heal people where possible, but on the other it's not wrong that this effectively implies the destruction of a legitimate cultural community built around the disability. Neither answer feels fully satisfying to me.

I have a position that satisfies me: as long as you can support yourself independently, without the subsidy of others, feel free to procreate with whatever disability you want.

But if your disability causes a drain on those around you, then no, you should not be permitted to try to produce children with the same disability.

Have we even seen the milder version of a wealthy, virtue-signalling white couple finding out in genetic testing that the fetus has Down's and deciding to keep it (and publicly advertising their decision)?

Didn't Sarah Palin do that? She discovered in 2008 that her child, prior to birth, had Down syndrome, and publicly chose to keep the baby. She was wealthy, it was relevant to the 2008 election campaign so I think it's fair to say she was, at least in part, signalling her strongly pro-life views, and she was certainly white. She's the highest profile example I can think of.

Yes. They are, uh, not the people who are likely to adopt gene editing.

I don’t know that I’d call it “virtue-signaling,” but…what did you think “pro-life” meant?

67% aborted means 33% carried.

Isn't that basically the trend of adopting children from Africa or Haiti? It's weirdly popular among white Christians, eg. Amy Coney Barrett and her husband adopted two children from Haiti.

Uh, no?

Would you care to explain exactly how you think being Haitian is comparable to Down’s?

Obviously it wasn't intended as a 1:1 comparison, but Haiti has an average IQ of 82. A significant percentage of that difference is likely genetic, based on our current understanding of the heredity of intelligence. The mother's health and nutrition also plays a significant role, and that's outside the control of the adopting family. A young child adopted from Haiti is statistically going to be at a significant intellectual disadvantage compared to the biological children of that "wealthy white couple".

International adoptions in general come with a much higher risk of a child with physical or mental disabilities. Growing up I knew two families that did international adoptions, one from Russia and one from Asia. The Russian child had fairly significant behavioral issues and developmental delays, and the Asian child had a physical disability likely caused by prenatal or infant malnutrition.

The charitable interpretation is that these families do international adoptions out of a genuine desire to do good and provide a better home for a child, but from a utilitarian perspective it seems to provide pretty low impact compared to other forms of charity in terms of cost effectiveness. What is does provide is a very visible signal of social status and virtue, and the frequency seems to ebb and flow depending on whether it's trendy in a given community. For example, it was a trend in Hollywood in the early 2000s, with celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Madonna. At some point it fell out of fashion, and now international adoptions are practically verboten in left-wing circles, particularly if the parents are white and the child is not. The same dynamics seem to play out on a smaller scale in some Christian communities.

I could see a similar dynamic playing out with Down's Syndrome in the future, particularly for for parents wealthy enough to offload much of the care onto hired help. Let's be real, Angelina Jolie likely didn't change the diapers for all six of her kids while shooting movies every year or two.

The average IQ with Down’s is closer to 50. If IQ was perfectly genetic, nothing about nurture or epigenetics involved, the average Haitian would be almost twice as far from that as from the population average. The difference is more stark if the foster parents have more effect.

I would also say it’s fundamentally different to try for a child (who ends up with Down’s) than it is to knowingly adopt a child from a disadvantaged background.

The similarity lies in the fact that they are both visibly indicated in a way the parents can use for social signalling. Right now prenatal screening is still not ubiquitous, so having a child with Down Syndrome is not necessarily a choice. Ironically that reduces its utility as a signalling mechanism. But in 10-20 years? The only people having a child with Down Syndrome will be doing so because they refused the screening, or deliberately ignored the results.

I don't think this trend will take off in progressive circles though, given how it's uncomfortably similar to evangelical Christian practice. Evangelicals will have staked out a position on this first just by being generally anti-abortion.

30 seconds of googling later:

She found out Jaxon might have Down's syndrome after being persuaded to have an extra screening and a blood test due to her age.

...

Lorraine and her husband Mark declined all further testing. They wanted to keep their baby, no matter what.

...

Jaxon was diagnosed at birth and Lorraine says the family has never looked back. She says her other children adore him and will fight over who gets to look after him when they are older.

She says her other children adore him and will fight over who gets to look after him when they are older.

I really hope that the parents are actually saving enough to pay for services for Jaxon the rest of his life. Thinking your kids will do it, even if you can get them to say they're eager to in the moment, is a terrible plan.

Yeah.

Put bluntly, children looking at taking care of a Down's Syndrome child won't have a good idea of what it would take for an adult to take care of a Down's Syndrome adult. It's very overdetermined:

  • adults looking at taking care of a Down's Syndrome child won't have a good idea of the requirements to take care of a Down's Syndrome adult. Children are even worse at predicting those differences.
  • Children looking at taking care of a normal child won't have a good idea of the requirements to take care of a normal adult (including themselves). This is just a standard part of growing up.

Same goes for any other developmental disorder, of course. I'd take them even less seriously than if they wanted to be a princess or an astronaut.

Fair, though I don't think this quite matches the pattern I was looking for, since it sounds like they had to almost be coerced into testing and made it clear beforehand that they would not actually care about this outcome. I guess it would be hard to contrive an actual example where someone wants testing but would make a point of keeping a child with Down's - maybe if they were trying to filter for a less politicized condition, like sickle cell anemia?

"Low class people could be here" he thought, "I've never been in this neighborhood before. There could be low class people anywhere." The cool wind felt good against his bare chest. "I HATE LOW CLASS PEOPLE" he thought.

I laughed out loud at this, thanks. Nothing moves the literary soul quite as deeply as thoughts written in all caps.

The latest episode of Hanania's podcast reverberated his entire car, making it pulsate even as the $100 champagne circulated through his powerful thick veins and washed away his (merited) fear of proles exercising political power. "With a car, you can go anywhere you want" he said to himself, out loud.

Why am I getting vibes of renowned author Dan Brown?

It's a reference to this meme (apologies for the iFunny link it was the fastest version I was able to find):

https://img.ifunny.co/images/1fc743a3a8bc67f6f16403b2ef05ae1634dc672725db781e5738c8b384845f0d_1.jpg

Thanks, I chuckled. Hadn't seen that one before.

I would be shocked if ThomasdelVasto is a fan of Elon Musk.

The mottezien is immunized against all dangers: one may call him a cuck, nazi, bigot, fascist, it all runs off him like water off a raincoat. But call him a resentful prole and you will be astonished at how he recoils, how injured he is, how he suddenly shrinks back, calls you egregiously obnoxious, and then bans you from the forum.

Er, but... you're the one using 'resentful prole' as an insult.

You're banned, so you can't answer this, unfortunately, but it's unclear to me why being a member of the proletariat would be at all bad, and if you do in fact believe that wealthy urban leftists are bad (contemptible, leading America down a bad path, etc.), resenting them seems like a reasonable response. So shouldn't the answer here just be the chad "Yes"?

(Well, it may not be accurate in my case depending on what you mean by those terms. I work for a wage, so I suppose in the Marxist sense I'm a proletarian, but generally when I hear 'prole' I think 'industrial working class' or something, which I am not. Nor do I think I'm particularly resentful, since I did in fact go to a fancy big city university. But that's just quibbling facts. I would certainly be much more offended if you called me a Nazi or fascist.)

It’s adapting a quote from Goebbels. Using a nominally-accurate term as an insult is the point.

In Turok’s model, mottizens neoreactionaries are strivers in denial. They want to be comfortable, educated, well-connected arbiters of taste, but admitting such would give the outgroup too much credit. So they try to construct a rival hierarchy which puts their class markers at the top.

If this is true, then the most vicious thing Turok can do is point it out, revealing the neoreactionary’s class interest. That’s why Turok assumes that he’ll get banned. “They hated Him because He told the truth.”

You know what's funny that just occurred to me? In the background of nearly every optimistic old school sci-fi property is just the assumption that gene editing will be deployed for the good of all humanity. You're enjoying your giant stompy robot Battletech novel, and it just has throwaway lines about how humans live longer and with less disease thanks to the Star League 300 years ago. It was viewed as such an obvious gimme that sci-fi didn't even dwell on it. It was boring, like the precise mechanics of a faster than light drive, or how the Enterprise's computer worked. Give it a few throw away lines and move on with the story. There was a humanity wide genetic uplift program that was 100% successful, now moving on...

I do wonder how much of this was an artifact of the high trust society America used to be, where public works could actually be completed to the good of all with state capacity to spare. Now it's impossible to envision a future where all our children have their disease genes filtered out, have enhanced cognitive functions, and might reasonably be expected to live in relative health until 140. In our low trust hellscape of highly dysfunctional state capacity, corruption exceeding any ability to accomplish anything, massive corporations enshittifying their golden geese with 3rd world scams, and a high time preference work force that can't do even the most simple jobs with trust and correctness, we can only envision the technology heightening the war of all against all.

Add to that the people who (rightly) won't trust the technology, given the institutional own goal "the science" has inflicted on itself the last 10 years. Even if it were possible for everyone to benefit from a genetic uplift program, a portion, possibly a large portion, would choose to be left behind.

Oh the future we could have had. Alas.

I mean if we’re talking gene editing in America, there is theoretically a delivery mechanism that could deliver uplift to about 80% or more of the public. You’d just have to pass an Obamacare style law to require health care insurers to cover some degree of the process.

Now at the same time there’s probably a good argument to be made that America (assuming it were invented here! It might be China) might functionally withhold the tech from other countries under IP law stuff. But if China invented it and perfected it then the US might find itself in the weird position of pulling a China and blatantly ignoring IP, stealing it themselves and refusing to impose punishment. And I’d assume other countries stealing it too would also occur.

I view the problem of trust about gene editing to be noticeably distinct from other public health trust issues, if for no other reason than you’d potentially have to wait 100 years to get a good sense for the true consequences of the tech (in the more extreme versions of the tech) since you can’t accelerate human development very much. Literally none of our systems or science are set up to track and process that kind of data. Ironically for you perhaps global climate change is the only similar example.

I mean, sure, if you have no imagination. But choo choo, here we go to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.

Scenario 1: As a cost cutting measure, the Obamacare gene editing doesn't target specific genes, and fixes the narrow pairings that are causing the problem. They just bulk replace, say, 5-10% of everyone's DNA. That's the only way it scales cost effectively. The government contract to make it so goes to a "Minority Owned Business" as many do, and wouldn't you know it, some H1B colony just uses Indian DNA samples to make their gene editing templates. Next thing you know, everyone's kids are coming out just a little bit Indian.

Also it doesn't actually solve any of the diseases it was supposed to.

Scenario 2: The average African American IQ in America is something like 85? But that's the average. Imagine you uplift the IQ of the child of some congenital felon with an IQ of 75. Can you first imagine the very special hell that child now grows up in? I've seen a few his/hers/ours scenarios where a child of a previous spouse is leaps and bounds smarter than the new wife (and the "ours" kids), and the abuse heaped onto them by the less intelligent new spouse is wild. Below average IQ parents can be fucking savage to the high IQ children that end up in their care. Now imagine that at scale.

Scenario 3: Congenital felons again. There is a strong correlation between high IQ and low criminality, but it's not perfect. Imagine we uplift their IQ, but not their criminal dispositions? If you thought "We Wuz Kangs" is bad, wait till you've seen "We Wuz KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN"

Scenario 3: Congenital felons again. There is a strong correlation between high IQ and low criminality, but it's not perfect. Imagine we uplift their IQ, but not their criminal dispositions? If you thought "We Wuz Kangs" is bad, wait till you've seen "We Wuz KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN"

Khan is definitely the civilisation-killer one, the one that (potentially) can't be fixed. But you're over-focusing on pre-existing criminal dispositions; it's entirely possible people will accidentally or deliberately introduce psychopathy via the "high-IQ psychopaths have higher income than high-IQ non-psychopaths due to doing white-collar crime and other exploitation" correlation.

I mean, I’m picturing something like an extra 20 years of useful life, 10 years of not so functional life, and maybe an IQ gain of 5-10. I am not an expert but would doubt you could realistically get much more than this. Laying aside the race stuff and caustic negativism, I don’t imagine that would be too societally chaotic. I’d imagine lifespan differences wouldn’t become obvious until the 50s. So I could imagine some strife within families when your child is 50 and you are maybe 80 and it’s becoming obvious that your child will live longer and already has a higher QoL than you did at that age. Families already get a bit dysfunctional around wills and such at that age so that to me is the bigger concern or plausible source of tension. Like Boomer resentment multiplied, flipped, and personalized. Disease resistance as well (if it even works) is largely invisible on a personal level so I don’t think that figures too much.

More to my original point it could very well be that tons of the recipients get Alzheimer’s or some other hitherto unknown condition way earlier and stronger. Causing chaos, and something animal studies didn’t pick up. Our science is not optimized to detect that kind of stuff. And would we really be patient enough to wait for the original test tube generation to fully age before we implement it for others?

More to my original point it could very well be that tons of the recipients get Alzheimer’s or some other hitherto unknown condition way earlier and stronger. Causing chaos, and something animal studies didn’t pick up. Our science is not optimized to detect that kind of stuff. And would we really be patient enough to wait for the original test tube generation to fully age before we implement it for others?

Oh yeah, there are always the fears about pushing straight to production with our children. But honestly I think that's the least of it with how dysfunctional all our institutions are these days. We'd be lucky if all that happened was everyone developed generative disorders by 60 instead of living to 120 when you consider how horribly we'd fuck it up even if the technology worked flawlessly.

nearly every optimistic sci-fi property

Pretty sure it’s the optimism that’s doing the work!

Dune may have been pretty confused about genetics, but like everything else in its setting, the fruits were definitely reaped by the aristocracy. Maybe this is just because the camera follows aristocrats, and there are Mentat-grade weaponmasters hanging out in every village? It takes a millennia-long suicide plot to spread one genetic advantage to the human race as a whole.

Yeah, it's probably fair to say the optimism was doing most of the work. But on the flip side, it's funny to say that Battletech is optimistic. Although I suppose by the standards of "Every human institution is going through a shredder of being flooded with high time preference scammers/thieves that loot it down to the bedrock", it does seem optimistic. Then again it's hard to write a novel in the future where every human society has collapsed and the surface is dominated by feral humans. Though there are a few. I guess The Time Machine could be their ur-text.

I've said this before, but Dune is such a special case. Taken in as a whole work, the overriding theme seems to be that to survive among the stars, humanity will be tortured without end because the human condition is fundamentally incompatible with galactic habitation.

Agreed on all counts.

You get this pre-leftist strain of environmentalism combined with such a feudal, reactionary setting.

Prescient indeed.

Now I'm curious, did you ever read Frank Herbert's other novels? I read The White Plague in highschool when I randomly found it in the library, and then I read the WorShip series when I found it in a used book store, and it definitely reinforces the themes of "Mankind is made to suffer" that compose the core of Frank Herbert's world view IMHO.

I've read the human hive one and the trilogy about the evil Brahmin clones. I think Herbert is just not a very good writer, Dune excepted.

I mean, I guess. On the other hand, how many Dunes do you have to write to be consider a good writer? Is one not enough?

One is enough, but two is better to show the first one wasn't a fluke. And some of the later Dune books aren't anything special.

I have Godmakers somewhere but never got around to it. Not familiar with the others. Would you say they’re worth it?

Some parts of the WorShip series cracked me up. Like how Plasteel and Lasguns get reused from Dune (or did Dune reuse them from Worship? I should check the publication dates). It's definitely a lesser work compared to Dune, but I enjoyed it. The last novel IMHO was rather weak, I think it was posthumously finished by his co-writer on the series, Bill Ransom. Very Dues Ex Machina and Utopian, which maybe goes against my statements that Frank Herbert's central ethos is that humans are made to suffer. But maybe not, you'll have to make your own judgement about how in tact the human condition is by the end.

I wish you had posted this yesterday. It would have gone well with my wine - I had a South African Cape Coast sav blanc, from an east-facing vineyard at the foot of a coastal valley, where the sea air and rocky soil produce a really crisp, refreshing white with an almost salty minerality. Paired that with a very mild, milky cheddar and some raspberries. In the evening, when it wasn't so hot, I cracked a Salamino di Santa Croce lambrusco. Again, that's a bit tarter and more acidic than your typical fruity lambrusco, but I paired it with a rich mushroom bruschetta. I don't actually know that much about Italian wine (the family place in Italy is on the coast, quite some way from the real wine country), but I know what I like.

P.S. I know you're supposed to capitalize "Sauvignon", "Lambrusco", etc., but that's always struck me as a little pretentious.

Now I want an effortpost on wines... I personally am only really familiar with the Niagara region, but would like to become more worldly.

This is the opposite of an effort post, but I'm fond of La Vieille Ferme Rosé. It blew up on TikTok as "Chicken Wine" (a fact relayed to me by an ex), and I think it tastes great for something that costs £9 at the local supermarket.

(I have no desire to develop expensive tastes)

Sounds like an effortpost to do!

It's a huge, huge topic, and from a Mottizen perspective a lot of the received wisdom on wine is very questionable. My advice:

  • Go region-by-region and familiarize yourself with it. There are some regions I know much better than others, and a lot of depth to go into in each one. This is particularly the case if you're in a marginal wine region, like Niagara, that specializes in particular varietals due to climate.
  • Find a really good local shop and talk to the owners/go to their events. Can be a pleasant way to spend an evening and wine lovers like to go in-depth on why a wine/region is the way it is. Consider joining a wine club that will give you a couple varied bottles along with tasting notes.
  • Stick to wines around the $20 price point for trying new stuff (maybe $25-30 now with inflation and tariffs). Even the experts will tell you that, for the most part, the price difference between $20-$80 is marketing. If you want to splurge, go above $80 on a varietal you know you like.
  • Pairings do make a huge difference, particularly cheese. With a meal, the 'ideal' pairings are generally pretty well-known, just look up what you'll be cooking.
  • It's ok not to like varietals. I don't like merlot and I can count the chardonnays I've liked on one hand (though one Franschoek chardonnay in particular is a grail of mine, has an incredible smoky flavour. Sadly my uncle has a long-running beef with the guy who owns the vineyard so no schmoozing in for me). Don't be afraid to develop your own taste.
  • Don't be a snob. If AlexanderTurok drank wine, he'd be a wine snob. Nobody wants that at their tasting.

Saving this post to talk more about internal dynamics in the red tribe.

So, to start with, almost everyone in the red tribe has higher purchasing power parity than their blue tribe equivalents. This is sometimes from lower costs but it's also often from preferring different goods- and not necessarily inferior goods from an objective perspective. McMansions are better housing than NYC apartments. Literally- they're bigger, they have more amenities, it's harder for neighbors to affect you, they're less likely to be infested by rats, etc. The red tribe is not tormented about the higher status of goods that they see(often, from an objective perspective, correctly) as inferior- they are often bemused by it instead. There are red tribe elites and they have far less of the church crowd/country music crowd/genuinely rural division which is very important in understanding middle class red tribers. These people think their lakehouses are better than selfies on a European beach- partly because they can go every weekend. These people are who the broader red tribe would imitate if they had more money. And by and large pilots and oil executives and contractors and union guys don't want to live in NYC. They're perfectly happy with their kids going to public college. Status just works differently.

Is there resentment about cultural tastemakers pushing bad values? Yes. But this is couched as immorality, the same reason the underclass is poor(actual red tribers would not refer to them as underclass, of course- it'd be '-something- trash').

McMansions are better housing than NYC apartments. Literally- they're bigger, they have more amenities, it's harder for neighbors to affect you, they're less likely to be infested by rats, etc.

This is purely your opinion and given the price people are willing to pay per sqft, one that millions of people do not share with you.

NYC apartments have something McMansions can never have: location, location, location. This is the ultimate amenity.

You may not value it, which is fine, but that doesn't mean it isn't valuable.

Turok, you really don't learn. You don't deserve the courtesy of a long and detailed explanation of why you're being banned. In fact, you seem to be expecting it, and are relishing the opportunity to be a martyr. So be it:

Permabanned.

It's lame you had to do this but I get it

I did really enjoy his ability to kick off an argument, although I get why the way he does it is against the spirit of this place

I am opposed to this permaban.

Like it or not, class resentment drives a lot of what goes on in our world. It's very worth discussing.

Is it worth discussing in the way he's discussing it? And even if it was, 90% of the time the dude runs away when you give him a thoughtful response.

It's certainly worth discussing. But is the community really served by having someone "start the discussion" (which I think he wasn't even doing, it strains charity too far to claim that) with sneering at other members of the community and pointing out how bad he thinks they are? It seems to me the answer is no.

I haven't regularly checked this site in months but my impression as a lurker was that every Turok toppost was some variant of "I found this comment somewhere on the internet: the person who made it is a moron and if you would argue otherwise in the replies you prove that you are less smart than me." Apparently when he was told that unsourced twitter posts from anonymous users were not the kind of thing you make a top level post about, he took the wrong lesson and started doing it with comments from this forum.

My guy, you asked me to go easy on Turok last time. Look how he repaid your charity.

If there's anything useful to be said on class resentment, you won't find Turok saying it.

I also asked for charity last time. Even though this post is directly attacking me, I'm honestly tempted to ask for charity again. But the fact that he is blatantly going:

I know I might get banned for this post.

Makes it obvious to me he doesn't care about the rules or respect the mods at all. Alas. I think he drove interesting discussion.

I wouldn't discount the possibility that even now he has somewhere an alt that will pick up his ball and keep running for the goal. I do not write this based on some knowledge of his character, just that this is a time-worn strategy of many who get banned.

We all come to miss at least some of the fallen for livening things up around here.

Kind of hilarious how much drama is generated here over banning people for being dramatic.

Turok was not here to discuss it; he was here to sneer.

Well that didn't take as long as I thought it would. Not as satisfying without more buildup but today is still a good day.

I think that the main benefit of explaining a ban is not to the user (especially in the case of a permaban), but to the wider community.

So I think that it is helpful to link to the last warning (afaik).

I think another factor might be that the correct place to criticize a top level post from three days ago is as a reply to that very post. Starting a pristine comment thread on Monday in medias res with a reply to another comment seems like a really bad style. By definition, a continuation of a last weeks debate is not about current events, so my personal expectation would be that the comment would strive to be an excellent top level comment in all other regards, charitably paraphrasing a broader debate so far and then adding some useful new commentary. Instead, what he served us was re-heated leftovers from three days ago moisturized with the ketchup of his own opinion.

While most of his comment reads to me as not particularly coherent (but that might be a problem on my end), and also does little engagement with the quoted comment except to sneer and in the "P.S.", I think it is the "P.P.P.S." especially where he goes of the rails completely.

I do not think that we have many regulars who are central examples of "prole", posting long texts on a discussion site seems to select for somewhat educated people, mostly. It is not that he was correct that this was an insult which hurt especially badly, and it was just that he was banned for blatant name-calling.

--

While "you do not represent the true spirit of the left, I do" has been done to the death for a hundred years, I would nevertheless register an objection to him describing himself as ""left-wing"". While his sneering dismissal of the working class is certainly reminiscent of similar dismissals by the woke left in the past decade (e.g. Clinton's "despicables"), I think that it is stupid to give up on the working class. Wokism completely failed to engage with these people ("in my rich neighborhood, I get along fabulously with Blacks and immigrants. If you in your poor neighborhood fail to get along with them just as well, that is because you are a dirty old racist!") and then they decided to vote MAGA instead. But Trump's tariffs have the potential to be a very educational lesson for low-income voters, it is just up to the Democrats to offer these people a stomach-able alternative to populism.

Not a mod but I consider his posts to be pretty forthrightly criticisms of people/caricatures of movements rather than descriptions of movements and subsequent criticism. That is, he completely ignores the “discuss the CW don’t wage it” rule which admittedly is a tough one to police and maybe even flawed as a concept but Turok (to me) didn’t seem to even bother to attempt to follow it.

I would nevertheless register an objection to him describing himself as "left-wing"

Being reflexively anti-right-wing is not the definition of left-wing, to the point he couldn't identify posts more friendly to left-wing thought.

I am being performatively lazy here. Turok genuinely isn't worth my time, and I'm confident that almost all of our regulars are well aware of his bad behavior. That being said, I appreciate you sharing the link to previous warnings.

For what it's worth, I don't see anything wrong in continuing a thread in a new CWR. Most users would prefer more engagement or at least eyeballs on their posts, and once the thread becomes obsolete, it's very unlikely that a significant number of people will even read anything you have to say.

Yeah I actually did appreciate the follow up. It's a shame, I wish he could stay because he's clearly intelligent and willing to stick up for his views. I've even defended him multiple times. He just can't seem to avoid outright asking to be banned and personally attacking people. Alas.

No, he wasn't. The only intelligence that I'd give him credit for was skirting the lines of a permaban for so long, and even that was finally quelled. Like many lolcows, he just couldn't resist having the last word and doubling down on absolute nonsense.

At this point, I'd respect more a 4chan shitposter giving me a scrolling page of n-words: at least, in this example, he isn't wasting my time.

I wish he could stay because he's clearly intelligent

PressXtoDoubt.jpeg

If Turok was intelligent, he hid it off the Motte. If you go by the qualities typically associated with intelligent people making them, well, intelligent, these are traits like being open-minded, curios, adaptable, self-aware, and demonstrating critical thinking. Turok consistently lacked them. Turok was a poster who was consistently unable to even re-state positions that were directly given to him, wildly off-base in his characterization of contemporary events or dynamics in the world, and regularly went off on tangents or tirades that were cliche decades ago.

He might have been articulate political brainrot, but he was still brainrot.

If Turok was intelligent, he hid it off the Motte. If you go by the qualities typically associated with intelligent people making them, well, intelligent, these are traits like being open-minded, curios, adaptable, self-aware, and demonstrating critical thinking.

I mean, personally I'd probably drop two or three of those myself. If only because by defining "intelligence" so narrowly, you begin down the road of implying that every intelligent person must agree with you. But there is always the possibility that a person who seems closed-minded has seen further than you, and understands what an infohazard is. Or the person who seems unadaptable to you has seen further and understands what a maladaptation is. That one person's lack of "critical thinking" is another person who understands perfectly well what you are saying but still disagrees.

That said, you are correct about Turok.

So, to be clear, you made this post not because you want to share something that you think is an interesting observation that you made about the US Right, but (per your P.P.P.S.) because you think that your claim is an insult (seeing as how you gloss it yourself as "calling [the reader] a resentful prole" and group it with a bunch of other standard slurs) and applies to the abstract representation of a member of this forum ("the mottizen")? At face value, I figure your claim is at least wrong because this [ought to/would] be seen as "egregiously obnoxious" and earn a ban no matter the particular choice of insult.

Contrary to what you seem to think, this also doesn't particularly imply that your insult is spot on or hits a nerve; to think otherwise is the same sort of delusion as that of the hobo who screams at passersby that they are all cucked by the lizardman conspiracy, gets himself arrested for public disturbance and hauled away screaming about how this proves the lizardmen are afraid of his message.

Have you ever had a conversation with a tattoo covered WWE fan, or a southern preacher?

Those sound like poor people.

Maybe. The only tattoo covered WWE fan I know is a sysadmin with hilariously idiosyncratic views on politics.

Or even worse, low class!

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