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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   28828 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Another holiday, another uncomfortable intrusion of the culture war by psychos into my child's life.

Maybe I was oblivious as a kid. I probably was. But somehow I don't remember children's books being as blatantly propagandized as now. Literally every single book my 3 year old daughter got for Christmas is either packed to the gills with LGBTQ "families" or interracial families mixed to a degree that I'm pretty sure is genetically impossible. Like I don't think White Woman + Latino Man = 1 Asian Child, 1 Black Child and 1 tan baby. We didn't set out for books with overt propaganda. We wanted books about nature, farming, the seasons, the months, learning to read, numbers, etc. And yet here we are.

And like I said, maybe I was oblivious as a kid. But then again, I actually got my daughter a lot of the classics I grew up with, and I still don't see it. Goodnight Moon, Where The Wild Things Are, The Hungry Caterpillar, etc still seem like straightforward children's books to me.

It's just baffling to me that books like that appear to be the default option when you tell family "We want books about X" and they search the internet for "Children's Books about X" and just click Buy on the first 5 results. We got like, 12 pseudo random children's books for Christmas, and not one single family in any of them looks like her, despite us being the majority demographic of our nation. It's one thing to be an adult, seeing the precise opposite of reality being crammed down your throat by our cultural overlords. You can by and large tune it out, thanks to the decades of actual life you've lived standing in opposition to pretend nonsense. There is something profoundly disturbing about watching them attempt to brainwash your child any which way they can into believing the world is the opposite of the way it is.

Ah well, Merry Christmas I guess. She liked the stool I built her, and although she balks at me reading the copy of the Hobbit I slipped in the drawer. Just not old enough for all those words without pictures yet.

Woke propaganda is omnipresent in Western education in this day and age.

I got my degree outside of the West so I wasn't exposed to much of it in college.

But my younger brother studies in Canada, and I often hop on a video call while he studies. Humanities courses are fucked.

E.g., most universities have a first-semester course where they teach how to write an essay and common logical fallacies. I was taught this course very formally, the logical fallacies had latin names and the examples were all examples you come across in your personal life.

In contrast, the course my bro is going through; all the fallacies have revamped English names and alternate meanings. "Appeal to authority" is switched for "appeal to questionable authority". And all the examples are political, by happenstance, the left wing pov is the nonfallacious one. Quite a few fallacies' original meanings were extended.

Posts like yours are just another grain in the heap. The woke have complete institutional capture over education. Every student that passes through a college has to go through such a course.

In contrast, the course my bro is going through; all the fallacies have revamped English names, and alternate meanings. "Appeal to authority" is switchdd for "appeal to questionable authority". And all the examples are political, by happenstance the left wing pov is the non fallacious one. Quite a few fallacies original meanings were extended.

This is disturbingly fascinating to me; like the slogan edits in Animal Farm. I don't suppose you could get your hands on the course material (or a citation for it), and/or a complete list of names to share here?

I can. I'll post an update soon.

Appeal to authority has always been flawed IMO. I raised this issue in class back in the day. They were trying to distinguish between good and bad kinds of appeal to authority.

Is it correct to believe the statements of oil companies about oil drilling/pipelines and so on? They're the domain experts after all. Yet they have a clear incentive to be economical with the truth.

Is it correct to believe the statements of doctors about medical treatments? Same issue.

All we were left with is that you shouldn't trust ridiculous nonsense like a Kardashian sponsored toothbrush. They don't know anything about teeth. But nobody would even bother seriously attacking that at a philosophical level. I suspect that what happens in the real world is that people just use appeal to questionable authority against their political enemies (oil companies) and defend it as legitimate for their allies (doctors). I sort of do the same thing against Kardashians unconsciously:

"Well of course the Kardashians don't know anything about teeth, they're airheads (I say despite knowing next to nothing about them, even presuming they probably have very white teeth/general cosmetics knowledge)"

"Well of course the oil companies don't know or care about safety, they only care about money (I say despite knowing nothing about the prevalence and danger of leaks on any kind of statistical basis, comparing cost/harm of oil leaks to the maintenance of industrial civilization)"

Having taught a bunch of Intro to Critical Thinking Courses, I completely agree with this take, and I'd usually have a dedicated class on epistemic trust, authority, and expertise following directly on from the first round of fallacies stuff. The broad set of conclusions I'd generally try to move towards with the class were things like (i) we're inevitably reliant on epistemic trust sometimes because we can't be an expert in everything, (ii) there are some reasonable heuristics for assessing who we should trust on what subjects (e.g., certifications and qualifications, career achievements, track record), and (iii) these heuristics themselves should come into question in certain circumstances (e.g., when an expert faces misaligned incentives, has personal biases, or is operating outside their usual domain of knowledge).

I had always understood “appeal to authority” as one of the “softer” fallacies, where it doesn’t sink the argument but you better make sure that it (and the authority) actually checks out.

Appeal to authority is a hack, a heuristic, a quick and dirty way to gather information in a world where our time and will is finite. It's like building a house on sand.

When you argue using authority, you're taking someone else's words on faith (or to be more generous/realistic, you're making a good bet). If you knew (ie have read and reasoned about) their argument, you might as well have used that. Since you did not, when the person you're arguing against starts questioning the authority, all that's left is to insist they have faith (or use and continue the authorities reasoning, as could've been done in the first place, without the appeal). No further argument can be made against you, except insofar as can be argued that you made a bad bet.

you shouldn't trust ridiculous nonsense like a Kardashian sponsored toothbrush

I figure that can be perfectly valid evidence for the quality of the product! A company shelling out money for sponsorships signal that they believe in the product itself, which is important in situations where the consumer needs confidence that they won't drop support for it in the near future. For e.g. tech like game consoles this is especially valuable.

The Kardashians also have a personal brand to protect. If they sponsor a product I can be more confident it won't be so bad it'll damage their image; ceteris paribus this is certainly better than nothing.

I don't know about that:

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/07/kim-kardashian-floyd-mayweather-crypto-scam-lawsuit-dismissed.html

Much as I hate to diss crypto, coins whose primary selling point is some gimmick of burning supply when people buy/sell are garbage. There ought to be some kind of use-case. Well in this case the use-case is forking it and running off with people's ETH.

EMAX launched with a total supply of 2 quadrillion tokens, yet that circulating supply continues to decrease as our tokenomics include a 0% tax on buys, a 6% tax on sells and transfers, 3% of which remains in treasury and 3% is burned every other week.

Well, I mean evidence in the bayesian sense. When it comes to "new crypto coin with no clear practical use case" my prior is strongly on "scammy pyramid scheme"; the soft evidence of celebrity endorsements does not do too much to move that.

Appeal to authority is a fallacy in formal logic. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a useful heuristic. Likewise, if XYZ claims N, and you accurately say XYZ is a liar that doesn’t in a formal sense negate N but is is a useful heuristic in assessing the likelihood of N.

Understanding both is important.

This is why we only have classic little golden books and some innocuous stuff from the 80s and 90s on our bookshelf. Also Roald Dahl, he's great. As others have said, there's no reason to buy modern propaganda children's books. Not only are they proselytizing, but they're mostly objectively ugly.

I would also recommend checking out some Catholic publishers. They often stock children's book that have a classic aesthetic and pro-family messages, and they don't always even have overt pro-Christian messaging.

Also FWIW I appreciate your posts on this topic. I'm also concerned and vigilant about this sort of subtle messaging, but very few around me are, and reading posts like these assures me that I'm not (entirely) crazy.

Like I don't think White Woman + Latino Man = 1 Asian Child, 1 Black Child and 1 tan baby.

Unless they are cynically insinuating something about Mommy, but I agree that three is probably a bit young for the "cheating adulterous hos" rant 😲

I suppose just don't ask family to get books or specifically give them titles like "Goodnight Moon" or whatever. Give her another year or two for "The Hobbit", I think six or seven is about the right age for that if you're reading it to her.

Could have brought children from earlier relationships into the marriage, as well.

Or they could have literally bought children from the black market.

Cut the middleman, just have them kidnap the kids!

There are lots of classic books out there, there's no pressing need to ever buy a children's book under ten or even twenty years old. Dr. Seuss and Robert Munch I remember loving as a small child, and their books alone can fill a children's library.

I haven't noticed this. My wife has been buying all the books though. Some of them I know are old classics like the Dr Seuss stuff. But maybe it's all old books and I just don't recognize most of them.

It also might be a situation like rock and roll music. Not many good rock and roll songs come out these days, because rock and roll has to compete with the entire back catalog. But country and rap only compete with the last few years of songs.

So for writing news kids books it might be better to target niche market of modern progressives, because no matter what they make it won't be as good as the old stuff.

I don't think there was any particular reason for this, but most of the children's books my parents read to me when I was a kid were from the early 20th century. They also read stuff from earlier and later periods. Why is the default to buy recently published books when it's all new to children anyway?

Why is the default to buy recently published books when it's all new to children anyway?

I mean, that's the problem. It's not in my mind. But it turns out, between my wife and myself, we remember a totally insufficient quantity of books to keep our kid entertained. And so the search for something new, or at least new to us, begins. And this search has been utterly ruined by SEO and good old fashioned media cartel behavior.

More or less every article you find on google about "Best X of Y", be it powertools, computer parts or children's books, looks like it was written by a chatbot sourcing the list from Amazon bestsellers and the attendant "user" reviews. In the case of powertools, this ends up with every top 10 list being full of the cheapest of chinesium desktop jointers. In the case of children's books, it's woke bullshit as far as the eye can see.

Well, don't use google you might say? Find a children's book review community. Why bother? My wife already suffered through the woke takeover of knitting, and I was around myself during the gamergate days and the fall of every community I previously enjoyed to ultra-woke moderation policies. Why after personally suffering those devastating losses of community, would I believe the first, second, third, forth and fifth community review site for children's books I come across to not also already be ultra-woke?

If I were religious, maybe I could rely on those institutions to pre-screen books for me. But we're not. And we both remember having weird religious neighbors and their thinly veiled religious polemics aimed at children. I guess it's better than the alternative, but we still feel adrift in a sea of info-hazards with zero way to navigate it.

I assume you've exhausted the list of Caldecott Medal books (older than 19xx)? That would seem like a place to start.

I think the reason to consume new media in general when usually whatever the new good media are likely aren't better than the best media from 30 years ago is that people like discussing media with others, and everyone consuming new media is something of an equilibrium. Where as if everyone just looked for the absolute best media in their interests from the past 100 years, they likely wouldn't have recently consumed as much in common with their friends.

Small children don't really discuss with friends anyways, so perhaps this is just outright irrational(parents defaulting to what's a rational preference in other spheres but not here), or maybe it's more so parents can discuss with other parents children's books.

Yeah, this is what I miss the most from my 'watching the latest hit show' days. Now I try not to watch anything started after Trump's presidency, and I am watching a lot less trash as a result, but it is a lot harder talking about it with people. Recently my friends and I have been deciding on a show to watch together, like a structureless book club, which works alright, but I am still missing it as small talk with strangers.

There are still a pretty decent amount of recent shows that are good on their own, and also have mass appeal that you can chit chat with strangers about. You didn't have to cut them all out.

Give them credit for the pro-Natalist message with the interracial families, at least.

I’m sure it’s frustrating that everything, absolutely everything, has to be gay now, even when it’s irrelevant or makes no sense. Heck I find it frustrating and I usually don’t have to deal with it directly. Which raises the question of- is there any society which is able to be chill about the whole ‘gays are out of the closet now’ thing?

What does it mean to be "chill" about it? Having it normalized without being constantly brought up? The chillest way to deal with gays is the way the more extreme islamic countries do it.

Breeding so many deadly diseases, male gays are a huge risk to the population and humanity as a whole, which is why so many successful societies developed a strong aversion to them. Covid is a joke in comparison, and we forced everyone to stay home and wear masks for Covid. The truth needs to be countered with constant lies and propaganda.

  • -20

What diseases are you talking about?

HIV, obviously, was deadly as fuck—from about 1975 to 2015. AIDS was unknown before the Thatcher years , and the HIV-1 zoonosis was almost certainly during the Taft administration. That particular deadly disease simply did not exist when successful societies we're failing to fail.

I can't think of any that did, but am here to be informed

If you want to avoid stds then be careful who you are having sex with. Gay people can only spread their diseases to people who are willing to have sex with them, they are not forcing disease upon anybody, therefore they are innocent.

Inflammatory claims require that you proactively provide evidence in proportion to how inflammatory your claims are, and "male gays are a huge risk to humanity as a whole, and the chillest way to deal with gays is to execute them" is extremely inflammatory.

You are allowed to make arguments about how homosexuality is bad and even that it should be suppressed, but you have to make those arguments in accordance with our rules, which means not just rolling with lazy hot takes about how gays are disgusting and hinting that we should kill them.

Without disagreeing with you- I certainly think that there's arguments in favor of suppressing homosexuality- I would say that "chill" means something like what you described to begin with-

Having it normalized without being constantly brought up?

A society where LGBT types get special legal privileges to dance down main street in their skivvies obviously doesn't count(eg the modern USA), but neither does a society where it's illegal to be out to children(eg Russia). And equally obviously a society like Iran where homosexuality is a capital offense doesn't count as chill about homosexuality.

The argument would go homosexuality is wrong, it isn’t a stable basis for society, and we should discourage it. I’m not sure what the argument for breaking out the construction cranes to hold public executions would be, but I don’t think that was his point inasmuch as arguing for a society that’s generally hostile to LGBT.

And a Merry Christmas to you!

the culture war by psychos

Don't do this, please.

I have a cousin in rural Montana with two teenage kids. Apparently, no CRT or overt LGBT stuff in their education there - thus far. Although his youngest (14) did make certain "friends" who tried getting her into TikTok and even injected this idea that she could be trans - which is strange, considering she isn't even a tomboy personality with masculine traits that should supposedly imply that she is. Anyway, she eventually fell out with them and is still figuring things out - but so far, so good. She's happier, more proactive with her hobbies, and has significantly cut down her time on social media. Her brother (18) will be going off to college soon though, and we do expect he'll be going through some courses that involve some culture war stuff and of course likely to be around a very left leaning circle. Honestly though, it'll be unavoidable throughout America in the next 5 years tops. Going forward, you may have to send your kid to do their degree in China or something, if you've lost all hope for American universities.

A lot of the non-woke college grads I personally know went to colleges that are in this group, The Council for Christian Colleges and Universities:

https://www.cccu.org/

Not that these are somehow inoculated from the wider culture war, but they seem to have higher survival rates for things like healthy Christian campus groups.

I just mention it because I wasn't really aware of the existence of schools like this until well into my 30s.

Interesting to hear, that sounds frustrating.

I have a three year old and a one year old, and my main experience with new books are from the local library (non traditional books tend to be hispanic or occasionally highlighting things like Kwanzaa), the school book fair (highlights animal characters), and my own parents, who are very choosy and conservative. Working in a public school, I have not particularly encountered this.

Maybe I was oblivious as a kid. I probably was. But somehow I don't remember children's books being as blatantly propagandized as now.

I received a copy of Father Gander Nursery Rhymes as a child. It was published in 1986.

although she balks at me reading the copy of the Hobbit I slipped in the drawer. Just not old enough for all those words without pictures yet.

FWIW there's a pretty good comic version.

Well its a culture (assuming western anglo of some kind) that doesn't want your child to exist so what did you expect?

Don't post low-effort snarls like this. If you want to argue that Western Anglo culture literally doesn't want someone's child to exist, you need to put more effort into clarifying your thoughts, not just post Enoch Powell and Sam Hyde memes.

White Woman + Latino Man = 1 Asian Child, 1 Black Child and 1 tan baby.

The first two children are apparently adopted.

We didn't set out for books with overt propaganda.

Surely if that is an example of propaganda, it is covert, rather than overt. For example, I am guessing that many people do not think it is sending the message that you think it is sending.

What message do you believe it is sending?

I'm taking my enemies at their word.

They believe not depicting LGBTQ and interracial couples is hurtful. They believe it stigmatizes the groups, and leads to mental health issues and underperformance of those groups broadly. They believe it pressures under represented groups into unnatural or unjust conformity with the represented majority. They believe erasing those groups in popular culture is the first step to erasing those groups in the real world. They believe the absence of representation is a sign of tribal supremacy.

Well, now my family is the under represented group. If these things are true, it's now being done to my family. If these things aren't true, but the people doing it to me believe they are, it's still a sign they hate me and want to erase my family, first from culture, then from the future.

Noone wants to erase you. And the ultimate proof of that is liberal women's love for white men. The same people behind all this crap.

The real thing erasing whites is modern "women's rights", which is now widely accepted by most conservatives. Women are wonderful, so they need to find scapegoats and get mad about children's books with mixed race children, when they should be mad at promiscuous, cheating, hypergamous and educated women annihilating the birth rates and killing male motivation which cause white extinction. Which sane man would want to defend a society in which he is a cuck with no rights and can only start a family with a ran through woman who is encouraged to cheat on him.

Also, people have natural self-preservation instincts but not so much on the race level. Those need to be socially induced, and are just one group identity among many. Why would any man, white or not, defend the white ethnicity which literally hates him and supports women's rights garbage and is exporting it all over the world.

Noone wants to erase you. And the ultimate proof of that is liberal women's love for white men.

Also, people have natural self-preservation instincts but not so much on the race level. Those need to be socially induced

Noone wants to erase you.

How can you reconcile these together? Regarding the entire topic of discussion this just supports the overall idea of OP, for much of the media and entertainment industry, including children's books, are pushing Anti-white/ Pro-miscegenation propaganda to influence more to the ideas of social progressivism. You say that pro-ethnic views need to be applied from the top down in order to be effective, yet OP is talking specifically about social agendas that are pushed the opposite way. And then through all of that you say that white women prefer white men regardless of the social programming, so how can racial self-preservation not be instinctual if still trending strongly regardless of those social influences?

Second warning. This place is for discussing the culture war, not just posting culture war screeds of your own.

What message do you believe it is sending?

It is sinister, clever-as-fox neo-postmodernist cultural marxist message.

1/Race mixing is good.

2/As everyone knows, race mixing is communism.

3/Therefore, communism is good.

White women’s strong preference for white men is partially counterbalanced by white men marrying other races very frequently.

The /pol/ users complaining are, uh, not exactly aryans.

Enough with the Goebbels riff. This is not so clever as you think, and you've been warned about low effort antagonism before.

Considering that there are real cultural differences between ethnic groups regarding roles within marriage and treatment of women, something we can expect women to be highly sensitive to, and that physical attractiveness plays a large role, and that the historical norm is for miscegenation to be overwhelmingly males from the dominant social group marrying females from outside it, white men marrying hispanic and asian women very frequently while white women marry outside their race comparatively rarely should be what we expect and not evidence of bigotry.

I am curious what proposition, overt or covert, you take the depiction of interracial or LGBT families to be propaganda for.

Literally every single book my 3 year old daughter got for Christmas is either packed to the gills with LGBTQ "families" or interracial families mixed to a degree that I'm pretty sure is genetically impossible. Like I don't think White Woman + Latino Man = 1 Asian Child, 1 Black Child and 1 tan baby.

I suspect most people are not thinking about the plausibility of genetic relationship between depicted family members when buying children's books. For one, people can have family members whom they are not genetically related to. For two, children's book authors are known to take creative liberties with reality for the purpose of telling an entertaining story or imparting a moral. For example, they may depict an animal doing something it is quite unlikely for it to do in reality (like a caterpillar eating chocolate cake) or imagine entirely new creatures which do not exist (like large furred horned hominids or dragons).

  • -16

It's called "representation" and while it has assorted supplementary arguments (e.g. "minority children benefit from seeing people like them in fiction"), at its core it isn't anything as coherent as a proposition. Like Scott discusses in Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments:

In a way, when we round people off to the Philosophy 101 kind of arguments, we are failing to respect their self-description. People aren’t out on the streets saying “By my cost-benefit analysis, Israel was in the right to invade Gaza, although it may be in the wrong on many of its other actions.” They’re waving little Israeli flags and holding up signs saying “ISRAEL: OUR STAUNCHEST ALLY”. Maybe we should take them at face value.

If it was a specific proposition it might have a stopping point. But it isn't "demographics in fiction should match the demographics of your real-life country", it isn't even "at least 50% of characters should be non-white'. It's that SJW types cheer or boo characters based on whether they're members of their favored or disfavored identity groups. So fiction influenced by them often ends up with demographics ranging from noticeably influenced to completely absurd. (And that isn't a stopping point either, even completely absurd levels of representation are often criticized for the representation being problematic in some way, having attracted a SJW-inclined audience that doesn't notice how hard it's trying to cater to people like them.)

Of course, this sort of sentiment regarding identity groups is not limited to fiction. For instance a major stated reason why the CDC recommended a COVID-19 vaccine-prioritization scheme that depriorited the elderly relative to "essential workers", contrary to their own estimates on what would save more lives, was because the elderly are more likely to be white, as I discussed in this post. Similarly various governments such as Vermont prioritized non-whites outright. As a matter of strict logical argument it doesn't seem like these things should be related, but in reality someone predisposed to like arguments in favor of the "underprivileged" will generally apply that bias whether the stakes are "realism in a fictional setting" or "many thousands of lives".

I am curious what proposition, overt or covert, you take the depiction of interracial or LGBT families to be propaganda for.

To the exclusion of all else. That's what I'm complaining about. It's to the exclusion of all else. Representation of families like ours, the majority of my nation, if this semi-random sampling of search engine recommended examples is to be believe, have been all but completely extirpated from contemporary children's book.

If representation matters, as the people advocating inclusion of interracial or LGBT families claim it does, why have they erased my family?

My guess is that there's still going to be great amounts of older children's books available representing in the great majority heterosexual families of your country's majority ethnicity (or animals obviously intended to represent that ethnicity like Berenstain Bears in US etc.), no? At least when I go out in bookstores to check what they have, they usually have reprints of old classics front and center.

My guess is that a lot of modern children's books authors specifically think about the great majorities of existing children's books not showcasing groups other than heterosexual families of a country's majority ethnicity, and thus go above and beyond the call of duty to increase the general representativeness.

thus go above and beyond the call of duty to increase the general representativeness.

But that creates its own problem, the way that the actual percentage of any minority population within the general population is misrepresented. Whether that be thinking that black people are a greater share of the US population than they are, or LGBT people (especially trans). If people are presented with "Should we make sweeping social changes to accommodate 2% of the general population?" they are much less likely to say "yes" than if they are presented with "Should we make sweeping social changes to accommodate this sub-population (which you think is 10-20% of the population rather than 2%, because you've been deluged with books and social media where in an ensemble case of five, at least one is this particular sub-population)?"

It's also easy and lazy, and may be down to "do I want my book to be published?" even more than "do I want to be Diverse and Inclusive?" because see the YA fiction kerfuffles over race and transgender. Publishers nowadays may be more inclined to go for "we want DEI" and to not even consider a book that has all-white family, so if you're a kids' book author and you want a career, be darn sure to mix up the races and orientations of your characters.

There's also the stupid partisan political stuff, like the gay White House rabbits. No kid is going to read those books, but adults who want to feel like they're sticking it to the Man will fall over themselves to buy those kind of books. Personally I think the whole mania around the kind of pets the Presidents and Vice-Presidents own is crazy, but people do get all worked up over it. So the Pences had a pet rabbit, one of their daughters wrote kids' books about it, and of course this had to get political, because the fussbudgets can't let anything lie:

Pence himself was the focus of the most recent episode of Last Week Tonight, and John Oliver announced that the show was publishing its own children's book, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver Presents a Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, and making it available on Amazon just days before the original version. It stars a black and white rabbit in a glittery bowtie who falls in love with another boy rabbit named Wesley, only to be told by a Pence-esque stinkbug that they can't get married. It promptly took the number one slot on Amazon, knocking James Comey's upcoming memoir down to second.

I don't know how many 6-8 year olds were longing for a book about a rabbit getting gay married, but hey, John Oliver is a hack and this let everybody show off how progressive they were. And it wasn't even thinly-disguised, the first page outright states that this rabbit is part of the Pence family. Haw-haw, Pence is anti-gay and wants gay conversion torture camps set up everywhere, let's make his daughters' pet rabbit gay and get gay married, that'll show him!

(How old is Oliver, again? I think 6-8 years of age is too high for his mental age).

I dunno, what amount of children's books would you surmise are about gay couples? We have a bunch of old and modern ones at our house, and leafing through them, I've spotted some cases where some background couple might be gay, but obviously since they're background they're not being featured in a major role.

I have perhaps more experience in watching kids' TV, and out of all the children's shows I've seen, I've seen one instance where there's a bit player gay couple (for the record it would be Chip & Potato, where the main character's family's (which is as traditional a straight 3-child family with a cop father and, for the most of the series, homemaker mom you could imagine) neighborhood also has a couple of smartly dressed male zebras who appear to have adopted children. They don't actually go "we're gay and have gay zebra sex in our bedrooms" or anything like that and feature in maybe two episodes. This is my understanding of the general extent of representation in this field, at the moment.

I think that John Oliver thing can indeed be marked in the category of "it's a bit, not actually intended for children's books oeuvre", as you indicated.

I wouldn't freak out about things like "fleeting background gay kiss" in a movie, even a kid's movie. I think the recent flop by Disney, Strange World, is being presented as (by both sides) "it was because it was gay/inter-racial/strong women" but I think mostly it was probably awful (I'm just going by the trailer and the synopsis in Wikipedia).

Funnily enough, had they made a movie about the family patriarch, Jaeger Clade, and his adventures in the Strange World, I think it would have been a lot better. He seems the most interesting character in the trailer; his grandson, Ethan, is only there to be Gay Teenager First Out LGBT Character in a Disney Movie, and Searcher (Jaeger's son, Ethan's father) is insufferably wet. Look at the trailer and see if you agree.

The art style is also terrible, I've read it described as "Cal Arts style" but I don't know if it's so. It's that recent style where all the faces look the same (big eyes, potato nose, small chin, generally expressions of surprise or anger) like the female faces in "Frozen" all being identical, and the male and indeed female faces in this one being the same. Black, white, male, female, all have the 'big eyes, potato nose, big open-mouth expressions'.

(or animals obviously intended to represent that ethnicity like Berenstain Bears in US etc.)

Wait what? How are bears intended to represent an ethnicity? Their clothing seems to be generic American farmer, to my non-American eyes based mainly on the father wearing overalls. Are overalls restricted to farmers of some particular ethnicity in the US?

What could make a family of bears represent a non-white family? All I can really think of is eating ethnic food instead of honey, or perhaps wearing clothing of a very specific ethnicity instead of generic farmer.

Is it impossible to create a generic family of animals who might represent any family of any group?

This has already been done. Hood Berenstain: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0NN0gtBcxtk

As an American, the Berenstein bears are clearly intended to be white, exurban, and southern/lower midwestern.

Really? I was sure they were supposed to be a suburban Jewish family—but that might be because every time he hears the books mentioned, my dad exclaims, "They don't go to synagogue either!"

But there may not be textual evidence for his reading. I've mostly been able to avoid mentioning books since childhood

Aren't they shown celebrating Christmas?

Probably, but maybe it's a Jewish Christmas.

Do the books depicts a traditional Thanksgiving meal shared with Momma Bears family, then the traditional menorah lighting at least three states away from Papa Bear's nearest relative, and also show a Christmas Day where the bears unwrap the presents that are obviously books first spend hours of reading in silence, briefly thanking each other, then reading while they eat enchiladas?

If I could have my mom back for one holiday, it would probably be Christmas.

What makes them white and exurban (as opposed to rural)? What would a black exurban (or rural) southern/lower midwestern family of bears look like?

Again - my question is how to make anthropomorphized characters (that fit the constraints of children's media, i.e. nothing complex) non-white? In India this could theoretically be accomplished by exploiting ethnic dress (e.g. Sindhis wear very distinct clothing, at least for special occasions) for characters that actually wear clothes. But as far as I'm aware the US has almost no ethnic dress - the only ones I can think of are either for obscure groups (Amish, American Indians) or racist stereotypes that would be poorly received ("gangsta" clothes, sombreros).

So lets make it very concrete. Here's monkey mechanic. He's a monkey and he likes to help people by fixing their cars (with a monkey wrench). His only non-fixing stuff interest that I've observed is bananas. How do you make Monkey Mechanic non-white? (Or feel free to make other characters non-white, e.g. the giraffe who keeps hitting his head on the roof of his car.)

Their neighborhood is depicted as exurban/far suburban, their clothing(particularly the hats) is distinctly white, semirural, and working class, and the way the very special episodes on diversity are framed is clearly white and southern/lower midwestern.

A black coded southern bear family would probably be black bears to begin with, with a few other aesthetic distinctions(eg clothing), but you'd also probably be looking at more emphasis on sport and probably older-behaving cubs, without getting into obvious stereotypes.

I admit, I am unfamiliar with the particular style of hats from 1962 so I'll have to take your word for it. What kind of hats did black exurban working class people wear? Or were there no exurban black people in the midwest?

Also, is it impossible to have anthropomorphic children's characters that are simply not coded as anything? Is it impossible for Baby Shark to simply have no attributable human ethnicity? Would the Berenstain bears no longer be white if they were nude and hatless?

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Wait what? How are bears intended to represent an ethnicity?

If they are brown bears native to Europe (with European names) it is obvious whom are they supposed to represent.

What could make a family of bears represent a non-white family?

Being species of bear originating from other part of the world?

Their names are "papa bear", "mama bear", "brother bear" and "sister bear". "Berenstain" is the name of the authors, not the bears, but Dr. Seuss (who assisted with the creation of the series) described them as "Berenstain bears" later to distinguish from other bear books after they became popular. I do not understand how you've determined they are Eurasian brown bears (which range from central Europe to Japan) instead of North American brown or grizzly bears (which was my assumption).

One possible way I can interpret this argument: any character, unless explicitly characterized as non-white, is assumed white and anthropomorphic characters of no particular ethnicity are impossible? E.g., baby shark is white (not Korean?!?) since it's a yellow shark of indeterminate gender who sings a 3 word song.

One possible way I can interpret this argument: any character, unless explicitly characterized as non-white, is assumed white and anthropomorphic characters of no particular ethnicity are impossible? E.g., baby shark is white (not Korean?!?) since it's a yellow shark of indeterminate gender who sings a 3 word song.

If the story is set in completely fantastic world unrelated to anything IRL, you are right that assigning RL racial identity to characters is absurd.

If the characters live in world that is just like our (North American suburban) world, except that the people are funny furry animals, assigning RL racial identity to characters is unavoidable.

Being species of bear originating from other part of the world?

Skidoosh.

Do you feel particularly erased, seeing as you're the majority of your nation?

  • -14

The greater the percentage of some demographic in the country that isn't represented, the greater the number of people erased.

Only if the demographics of the books constitute "erasure" in the first place. You are begging the question.

Surely then nonwhite people shouldn’t complain about erasure of their experiences if people of their skin tone aren’t represented, then, if demographics of characters in books don’t count as erasure?

I was not aware that I had argued otherwise.

I assume you agree, then, that the progressive push towards showing disproportionately more minorities in media for representation and to combat erasure, etc etc., is similarly ill-argued.

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Ah come on mate, a caterpillar eating chocolate cake is fantasy anthropomorphism of the traditional sort in children's books from "A Wind in the Willows" to "Winnie the Pooh". White person and Latino person marry and have kids is reality, and in reality unless they are adopting, they won't end up with "Asian kid and black kid". If the book is about 'adopted families are real families', great fine that's a wholesome message, but if it's just meant to be ordinary typical "mommy and daddy and brother and sister" then it is pushing a message. "White mommy and Latino daddy have brown baby" is not a problem, but "White mommy and Latino daddy have Chinese baby" is, unless the text is explicit about "Mommy and Daddy couldn't have a baby of their own, so they adopted you and they love you just as much as if you were their born baby".

Well, at least it wasn't Anti-Racist Baby.

Well, at least it wasn't Anti-Racist Baby.

I thought that you were making it up, or that it was a parody, or something. But no, that book is dead serious. And it has overwhelmingly positive reviews, no less. I think that any hope I had for the US as a functional society has just died. :(

I wouldn’t read too much into overwhelmingly positive reviews- my priors are distinctly that the overwhelming majority of reviews are fake anyways.

I couldn't believe it either, but no, it's a real thing. Why am I still surprised at the entire industry around Professionally Aggrieved Grievance Mongering?

I am curious what proposition, overt or covert, you take the depiction of interracial or LGBT families to be propaganda for.

Miscegenation.

According to basic genetics, all human are a result of repeated "Miscegenation".

I am not saying this is my view, but it is perfectly consistent to say that you like the races as they are and don't want them to mix, even if other races had to be mixed to produce the current races.

If white Mommy and Latino Daddy are married, having kids within marriage, and Daddy sticks around so that the kids have a stable family with at least one breadwinner, I am all for that message being pushed to kids in preference to "Mommy has three babies by three different daddies which is why one is Asian, one is black, and one is brown, but Mommy never married any of the baby daddies who are off having more kids with a selection of hos, bitches, and side pieces. And this is fine and normal, now let's all sing along to the song about the newest Pride flag!"

It's not consistent because you need to define a clear boundary between what constitutes a race. I'm a strong believer in HBD but in this case the precise definition actually matters and the racial definitions always have some degree of arbitrariness, and even what we currently define as "black americans" in the US are actually racial hybrids.

If I find 1% ashkenazi or 1% black in some of these people can I stop considering them white and put them in their own categories? What even constitutes a White, do you have to have the right amount of Yamnaya? Do actual Caucasians or middle easterners count? It doesn't make sense.

It's not consistent because you need to define a clear boundary between what constitutes a race.

No you don't. You've never had to. Nothing in the way human society works relies on precision to such a degree.

What even constitutes a White, do you have to have the right amount of Yamnaya? Do actual Caucasians or middle easterners count? It doesn't make sense.

You don't need to make a rule for the 1% mixed or the octaroons, just enforce general social norms. People will work out the exceptions for themselves. That way "the good ones" will mind their own business nad you will not be having stupid bikeshedding nonsense arguments designed to grind the whole enterprise to a halt.

No you don't. You've never had to. Nothing in the way human society works relies on precision to such a degree.

Actually existing societies based on race always felt the need to establish legal boundaries of "pure race" with great detail and precision.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Casta_painting_all.jpg

And in most of these societies people routinely passed as a different race than they were born as, and no one cared very much. Particularly in IberoAmerica.

Why does it need to be precise?

On a pothead and notions of personal freedom.

What's TheMotte's opinion on the legitimacy of protecting individuals from inadvertent value drift? Or in other words: is it okay to let people degenerate, so long as every step is taken out of their own will? Is it liberating to just not let them? It seems to me like answers explain one of the core differences in conservative versus liberal schools of thought. This is rather low-effort, apologies.

I'm asking for a friend, so to speak. A few months after my (in retrospect, overly frantic) escape from Russia, most of my friends have deigned to abandon skepticism and reading «respectable sources» and followed suit. We've stopped in different places. The other day, I've talked to a guy who's happily stuck in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. I've known him for 10 years, talking less and less as time went by. He used to develop sensitive software for state corps; unassuming, vulgarly hedonistic, from a simple family, but reasonably smart and curious and kind. Too open-minded, perhaps, and... neurodivergent enough to have atypical reactions to chemicals – took a full milligram of LSD to get him to trip balls once. It seemed like he was tripping half the time – that is, when not playing PC and console games, working, cooking, learning work-related stuff, playing guitar, hitting on girls, hanging out with friends, building random contraptions as a hobby, listening to my bullshit or to music. More or less a normal modern manchild... That said, he had always struck me as distinctly American in spirit. Maybe it's about his BMI being like 38 and my prejudices – but, charitably, it's because he was too cheerful, and conspicuously non-suicidal considering his lot in life. Well, helped him get girls at least.

I digress. So, he's in Bishkek, I've written to him before the New Year. And the only thing he's interested in talking about is weed. Hash. Wax. Blunts. All the nomenclature. How hard it hits and how easy it is to get and how tolerant the local cops are of potheads. He's not even able to perfunctorily ask me about my situation or maintain a coherent dialogue. He doesn't notice the war any more. Hey dude, just come here, dis shit rules! They say in the summer it'll blow your mind! Do you even smoke? Ah, only DMT? Wha, you don't? You gotta try what they got here! Huh, talk about anything else you say? Uh... food's awesome too...

The tragedy is, this guy still works as a software engineer. But that's all he is now. He's a fat engineer who smokes pot and consumes food, and he can only talk about pot, food and a bit of engineering. His whole personality has been reduced to those three efficiently saturated domains: earning resources to convert into cheap utilons while modifying the state of consciousness to get more utilons and care as little as possible about anything else. It's a distilled, barebones functional version of his original, simplistic but not unloveable character. All the nuance that made him less than perfectly reducible to a one-track NPC just got pruned away.

Frankly, it's an almost demonic regression, the killing of soul, I guess in the same manner that the stipulated bug-peddling WEF NWO lords would like us all to undergo. I've known quite a few casual users and outright drug addicts, mostly stim types, but I haven't seen anything else destroy a human so thoroughly yet surreptitiously, with so little smoke to set off fire alarms (ahem). And yet, growing up, I've been inundated with messaging about «legalize» (легалайз), the noble fight of Rastafarians, the insanity of the war on drugs, with weed the Redeemer of all substances, the least harmful, Sacred Victim of brutish abuse. Now that I think back to it, a few of my pot-and-psychedelics openminded acquaintances display milder versions of this shift. How the hell did libs arrive at the idea that pot is harmless?

But it is. It doesn't cause significant bodily harm, and it doesn't compel, doesn't build anything like the crude physiological dependency loop of opiates. It only makes one a bit different, for a few hours. Alters emotion, cognition, perception, information consumption patterns, sense of reward from stimuli. Imposes a predictable vector of value drift. Allows exercising freedom in self-determination, really. Didn't Leary say it's a sacred right? Can a transhumanist take issue with that?

Like with freedom of speech that, according to many progressive arguers, is the matter of state censorship covered by First Amendment and not an ethical principle concerning the propagation of truths, one can think about the right to self-determination in legalese. Free choices are uncompelled choices; what else can there be!

I dare think my curious and open-minded friend 10 years ago would've been terrified of his current form, and perhaps would have asked for help to steer him off that path. He was failed by the society and the community, in that he was not provided a robust framework to anticipate this outcome, take it seriously, and build a behavioral scaffolding to compensate for his leanings. All he knew of religion is that it's a cringe grandma thing; all he wanted from tradition was insight porn for trips; all he asked from people around was good vibes and tolerance. He, like me, like all of us, was neatly cut off from ages past.

Of course, a keen reader has already noticed that the progressive view does recognize this problem, albeit for a different failure mode. Progs fret about right-wing extremists, and propose deradicalization. While their opponents believe that the natural tendency is for men to degenerate just as rocks roll downhill, progs worry that, if left to their own devices, men will drift towards fascism, the ur-illiberal doctrine, and so should be provided with a framework for steering back to mainstream (or, hopefully, being nudged into their camp). People's media feeds, their habits and states of mind, and perhaps even the popularity of substances modulating those, should be subtly influenced to that end. It is not coercion: it's just, say, providing an opportunity. Both camps claim to stand for the freedom of individual («in his or her pursuit of happiness», some add), and have philosophical treatises defending their notions of individuality and freedom – more religiously inspired and deontological on the right, more bluntly biodeterministic and utilitarian on the left.

I don't think it's neatly symmetric, though. In the end, conservatives act and talk as if a big part of the individual's genuine essence is embedded in the collective – or more to the point, family, lineage, community, parish, tribe, up to the entire nation, religion, the people or civilization. This essence is fragile, nurtured by the work of many generations and, effectively, seeks to be instantiated in a body, and has that right; so it can demand having an incomplete, raw individual be molded to accept it – in ways sanctioned by the tradition, by hook or by crook, with honest persuasion, sly conditioning or plain coercion. It is not denied (except by ways of complex theological argument, I guess) that this is a reduction in liberty, but it is equally not claimed that liberty of a raw individual is the point. «Spare the rod and spoil the child». The point is that children grow up all right.

Liberals disdain the notion of supra-individual spirits or essences, either as nonsense or as apologia of parasitism and mutilation; humans are whole by birthright, and their freely made choices are theirs, no ifs and buts; sans coercion, deception and a few edge cases perhaps, they cannot be meaningfully moved off their organic path, and should be allowed to figure it out in mutual respect.

And Progressives come part of the way back to the starting point: they propose guardian spirits of sort, ones that should be implemented by organizations and protect unwitting plebs from contagious evil ideas, accidentally powerful yet worthless memes; or perhaps, alter plebs to make them immune. But those spirits are said to exist only to make real liberalism possible.

Progressives have their wisdom – as any reactionary who's noticed he's reinventing bits of Derrida or Foucault may attest. My personal belief, in these terms, is admittedly close to the progressive one (rejoice, Hlynka) – with a humble twist informed by my notion of Death. I think supra-individual mental structures are only deserving of power inasmuch as they increase human freedom, with freedom imprecisely defined as the capacity to make diverse and spontaneous choices. Humans can be goaded, conditioned and coerced today if that allows them to be freer tomorrow, help them not mode-collapse into degenerate flanderized versions of themselves, not die a little. In this sense, the ethos of «legalize» was illegitimate, and the prudish ethos of contempt for deadbeat junkies is valid and, ultimately, liberating.

It's an egoistic point of view, of course. Were the latter more powerful, maybe I'd still have had one more friend.

What's yours?

I feel like the definition of deadbeat junkie has moved from parasitic freeloader who has debts to...software engineer not living his best life.

And not to psychoanalize a stranger on the other side of the world: but this guy fled his home and is alone as a refugee in a foreign country. He may be self medicating.

He is in fact not living his best life. Also he's leaning on weed and food too much.

Well ultimately one's reaction to OP's story rests partially on how much you take his description at face value.

Normal doesn't imply "good", and wanting to be greater than "normal" is good.

He's not doing worthy intellectual things like dropping meandering essays about utilons and degeneracy

Much of the most "worthy" intellectual, as judged by mainstream thought, were convoluted essays about obscure topics! That is more worthy than smoking pot and consuming food. The sneer about 'utilons' is weird given utilitarianism is a significant part of philosophy, with a major proponent described as "One of the most influential thinkers of classical liberalism"!

entitle you to look down on people living ordinary lives without being questioned

Should we just look away from the filth? Should we lead the flock of civilization to become 380lb tokers, typing away at some job to pay for the munchies? Is criticizing that entitled?

The best experiences, or highest duties, one can find aren't found in banging other 300lb girls, eating takeout, or smoking pot, they're found in complex, often adversarial intellectual, artistic, political, economic, etc acts / projects / explorations. Any time someone goes a bit from the former to the latter is good, any time the reverse is bad - both for them and everyone else (leaving capability/contingency/selection aside).

writing crank essays doesn't automatically make you an intellectual

It's just a bad sneer if "meandering essays about utilons [or] degeneracy" are things genuinely worthy intellectuals have done.

The average slob posting pseudointellectual drivel on the web is doing nothing of any more consequence or import than jerking off and playing Minecraft

Taking this at face value - I could say both are bad, both should be trying to do more consequential or interesting work. I don't think that's your argument though.

Writing essays on stuff can be useful - even if you're wrong, learning to argue your point might eventually lead you to figure out why it's wrong. Maybe you come across another argument that wakes you from Kant's "dogmatic slumber". Probably neither happen, but it's better practice for things of consequence than smoking pot and jerking off.

The idea that a guy is wasting his life by playing guitar and getting laid

Again, much of that exposition was the "before: when things were better" part. console games, working, cooking, learning work-related stuff, playing guitar, hitting on girls, hanging out with friends, building random contraptions as a hobby. This wasn't even mostly a putdown. Playing guitar shittily and having sex with a few random people isn't much, but there's clearly a path from there to greater things that isn't there with "yo dude weed".

Again, much of that exposition was the "before: when things were better" part. console games, working, cooking, learning work-related stuff, playing guitar, hitting on girls, hanging out with friends, building random contraptions as a hobby. This wasn't even mostly a putdown. Playing guitar shittily and having sex with a few random people isn't much, but there's clearly a path from there to greater things that isn't there with "yo dude weed".

Thanks.

This just sounds like someone trying to justify their hobby

Both scott and moldbug's big blogs started as discussing stuff on the internet, posting comments, and small blogs. The big hits are valuable, and it's useful for many people to try to get there, even if only a small few do anything useful with it. This isn't true of video games, or even competitive sports, nothing significant is gained when the top .0001% of competitive game/sports players filter to the top and win their competitions.

Also, something that 'justifies a hobby' can still be true. You're stating / assuming the thing being contested (is posting about politics and ideas useful), and then saying "you just believe as a justification for ", without proving it. Why should that be convincing?

There are lots of things to do more useful than toking and fapping, but none of them need justifications this thin and abstract

I think a look at the history of mathematics or philosophy thoroughly disproves this. A lot of worthwhile activities had justifications much, much more abstract.

So now he's toking down while crashed in Bumfuckistan, who cares? Maybe everyone else here is a bodybuilder who writes symphonies or something, but don't try to tell me that something as trifling as your personal flavor of "being an internet goblin having long-winded arguments over bullshit" makes you enlightened.

how is me claiming i'm enlightened relevant here? And where, or when, did I claim that? We started with "lazing around smoking weed is bad", and then you brought up "but discussing politics is just as bad, so you can't criticize weed" (... how does that make it less bad?), and then "you're trying to show your superiority / enlightenment by lording your writing over the poor weed-smokers" (but you brought up the writing!). Is any attempt to stop someone from wasting their time, or thinking it's dumb they do that, necessarily wrong because of psychoanalytic contortions?

Normal doesn't imply "good", and wanting to be greater than "normal" is good.

Is this like the town where all the children are above average?

All children are improving their math scores, knowledge, etc as they learn and grow - for any given cohort, most are near or below average, but the cohort's average grows. And it's also good that a few have much more than the average.

As you noted, a marijuana addiction is far less insidious than many other choices. A town of potheads faces far less severe problems than a town of heroin addicts. Your friend has a job, and while he may only use that job as a means of acquiring more weed and food, he is still a productive member of society - and his weight will cause pressing issues for both himself and society far sooner than the weed will.

Sure, The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come could have probably swayed your friend 10 years ago with visions of his present self, but he's ultimately not really hurting anyone other than himself right now. And "hurting himself" in a kind of nebulous, philosophical way.

I think liberals underrate the importance of the collective, but I really can't get over my innate libertarian streak here. I would wager that your friend has about as much capacity for free will with regards to weed intake as any other addict does (very little). But does it really warrant more heavy-handed intervention? Weed is a plant and mild narcotic, a weed addict is positively harmless in the grand scheme of things. For me, any government or societal measure against something has to overcome my inherent aversion to such a thing. Who the fuck are you, Mr. Legislator/Pressure Group, to tell me what I can and can't do? I didn't vote for you, it is not my neighbor's business what I'm doing in my home if it doesn't harm them, so on and so forth, you get the picture.

So heroin? Sure. My neighbor being a heroin addict is probably going to concern me at some point. As with any drug that hijacks its users minds and causes them to steal and harm to feed their habit. Weed's not that kind of drug though, so I really can't bring myself to support action against it, even if it can hollow someone out. And this is from someone who had a close friend go down that very same path your friend did.

With all that said, I think there's an important facet to this particular topic that's missing. Your friend is doing wax and dabs and talks about potency. The hits your friend regularly takes would probably knock a hippie from the 70s on their ass. Still (probably) ultimately harmless, but I think the common ideas and thought processes about weed and its use hasn't really caught up with the sheer strength of the stuff today.

he's ultimately not really hurting anyone other than himself right now

That's still bad for him though. Interesting and complex life -> productive slob slurper. Imagine Omega converted themotte.org into https://old.reddit.com/r/trees/ . Is something lost?

But does it really warrant more heavy-handed intervention

In the sense of 'the state sends guys with guns to shut down his weed dealer', or the sense of 'his friends try to convince him to stop being worthless'? Certainly the latter.

In the sense of 'the state sends guys with guns to shut down his weed dealer', or the sense of 'his friends try to convince him to stop being worthless'? Certainly the latter.

I meant the former, although perhaps less extreme. His friends have already tried to convince him, and it didn't work. Personally, the answer to "is it okay to let people degenerate, so long as every step is taken out of their own will?" in this case is...maybe? Depending on how you're defining "let" and what you've already done. If intervention from friends doesn't work, what's left?

what's left?

Assuming we mean using criminal law to discourage this? Armed government squads kicking in doors and dragging people like him off to the rape cages.

Or we could make it merely a civil infraction and then there'd be a small chance he'd have to pay a fine every now and then. Not exactly effective coercion or paternal guidance from the state. The state's tools are too crude.

Being in a community that could guide (or coerce) him could work. In a different, non-atomized world, this guy's church elders could have a man-to-man talk with him. But as a refugee in a foreign country he's left any possibility of that behind. Accepting the facts of modern anomie, traditional conservative community based solutions are irrelevant.

Or just fight 'the war on drugs' more aggressively. Like "it's impossible to fight an insurgency" - force any sophisticated modern state has could almost entirely stamp out drug-dealing, they just don't want to do it, for complicated reasons.

You don't need a 'non-atomized world' for smoking weed to be very shameful, or become less common. I have a few friends who smoke weed very regularly, and many more who do occasionally, yet none who smoke cigarettes. 80 years ago, it'd be reversed.

You don't need a 'non-atomized world' for smoking weed to be very shameful

Back in 1994 the CDC's Director of the Center for Injury Prevention said something about this:

"We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes. It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol -- cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly -- and banned."

Yeah, so maybe decades of propaganda and control over the schools could let them make smoking or owning guns dirty and low status. But then they already tried that for weed and it didn't work. And gun owners really don't like some bureaucrat trying to make them low status and ban their favorite stuff.

We could have a society where smoking weed is shameful and completely unacceptable for any upstanding person. But we don't and the government's attempts to push us that way didn't work.

Is Russia, let along Kyrgyzstan, a modern state with the capacity to stamp out things it really wants to, the way the US is? It doesn’t seem like it is.

  • and his weight will cause pressing issues for both himself and society far sooner than the weed will.

No, not really. Unless someone eates themselves into super-morbid obesity BMI- of 60-80, the reckoning will most likely come after age 55 or so. Dead by 65 if he doesn't turn it around then.

Weed may cause people to go schizo, there are rumors of coming out of California of extremely potent new strains of weed causing something like schizophrenia in heavy users.

Weed may cause people to go schizo, there are rumors of coming out of California of extremely potent new strains of weed causing something like schizophrenia in heavy users.

This is kind of what I was getting at with the last paragraph. Sentiments like this from the OP;

But it is [harmless]. It doesn't cause significant bodily harm, and it doesn't compel, doesn't build anything like the crude physiological dependency loop of opiates. It only makes one a bit different, for a few hours.

I think are largely cultivated from the days of significantly more mild marijuana that was smoked in joint form. It is now a brave new world of concentrates and high potency stuff, and the cultural conceptions of weed haven't really caught up from what I can tell. Perhaps it is the case that this entire conversation needs to be reframed.

but he's ultimately not really hurting anyone other than himself right now. And "hurting himself" in a kind of nebulous, philosophical way.

What's nebulous and philosophical about it? I could call it common sensical and immediately intuitive: you're becoming absorbed in cheap pleasures at the cost of living up to your potential.

Of course. But the same can be said about many things. In fact very few people live up to their potential. Do we need to enforce “living up to your potential?”

What's nebulous and philosophical about it?

It comes down to your own personal value judgements. I agree with your position, but there are others who think this kind of life is perfectly fine and legitimate. I've met a handful of people who would see no problem at all with this lifestyle.

Right. One could consider it a fuck you to Marie Kondo striver culture, a "laying flat" as the Chinese under-zeitgeist has it.

It comes down to your own personal value judgements.

I can think of more down to earth reasons. Bad habits aren't entirely self-regarding acts. If you're not a hermit than you're going to find yourself in positions where people you care for are in need of your help, and you can either succeed or fail at that. Sometimes failure is out of your control, but as often it's something straightforward where you can track the failure to a particular bad habit or the absence of a good one. There's a reason why communitarian ethics place such an emphasis on things like this.

I agree with your position, but there are others who think this kind of life is perfectly fine and legitimate. I've met a handful of people who would see no problem at all with this lifestyle.

I've met some people who have thought about it long and hard and have decided to take it easy, but I think it's rare that people are being honest with themselves, and the excuse making is often a more harmful habit than the behaviour. I've found it to be a useful mental trick to frame it in terms of affirming the trade-off and say something like "I love gaming so much I'm going to stay up all night doing it instead of studying tomorrow, and I'll do the same the day after too". I either end up finding my actions ridiculous (which gives inherent motivation to stop doing them) or I find that I'm happy with the trade-off.

What's TheMotte's opinion on the legitimacy of protecting individuals from inadvertent value drift? Or in other words: is it okay to let people degenerate, so long as every step is taken out of their own will? Is it liberating to just not let them? It seems to me like answers explain one of the core differences in conservative versus liberal schools of thought. This is rather low-effort, apologies.

What's the saying? Enlightenment is hard, which is why so few people will ever reach it, and none can be forced?

My position is that self-discipline is is a good thing, but that enforcing discipline others is to be avoided as possible outside of broadly agreed upon contexts because of it's propensity to abuse by people without self-discipline. There is no system of evaluation or screening that ensures only self-disciplined will have power for pretty much the same reasons there's no way to ensure that only Good Kings will reign- not only is it not reliable for the (wo)man at the top, but it's the system from top to bottom that matters. Insert the ever-useful insight about self-righteous tormenters, the people who would censor information, the rationalization of self-interest by those who see themselves as enlightened, etc. It's all old hat, and if you weren't convinced before, you won't start now.

Value drift occurs. It's a part of life in all directions and connotations. You yourself refer to your own with what you call an overly frantic escape from Russia. This is a characterization / connotation that can only exist due to value drift brought on by perspective- at the time, while you were certainly in a maniac-depressive state, your values were different. In the coming months/years, there is liable to be future developments and worsenings in Russia that may make your escape seem wise and insightful in a way you don't credit it now. As the fable goes, this too shall pass. There is never a point in your life where you will have the 'correct' value perspective and insight to be qualified to decide it for others.

Instead of top-down impositions, lasting changes to individuals come from the bottom-up, from affecting the common culture of shared beliefs and values. But culture is shared beliefs and values, not the values you compel someone to state. Nearly all deliberate social engineering efforts struggle with this, as the values they claim to espouse are not the things actually motivating behavior or being shared- hence the common refrain of the those being loudest about their selflessness are really most out for themselves, and that's the values being taken. You can ask for someone's consideration of your values, you can share your values, but you can't force it on the unwilling.

There's an old internet poem, probably not actually adopted from a Christian monk but with plenty of regional/cultural variations, that's long stuck with me that seem relevant to this topic.

“When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world.

I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation.

When I found I couldn’t change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn’t change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.

Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.”

In this comparison, you are the man-who-is-not-yet-old. I note in your piece, while you spend considerable words on how he has so much less to say, you make only a passing note on that you have talked with him increasingly less over the years. I do not know what you have talked about, if/how you have raised concerns with him directly, but per your own mutability as seen over just the last year, you still have the opportunities to change yourself, and thus impact your family and friends, and through them, more.

It's a lot less heady and gratifying than ambitious reform, but it's there.

Value drift occurs. It's a part of life in all directions and connotations. You yourself refer to your own with what you call an overly frantic escape from Russia. This is a characterization / connotation that can only exist due to value drift brought on by perspective- at the time, while you were certainly in a maniac-depressive state, your values were different. In the coming months/years, there is liable to be future developments and worsenings in Russia that may make your escape seem wise and insightful in a way you don't credit it now

We disagree here in small but frustrating methodological detail.

Clearly, I wasn't thinking very straight in the first weeks of the invasion, but I maintain that this was a proper reaction to have, given the information available at the moment. That information suggested a decent chance for effective or official border closure from either side in days; that I, in that condition, pegged that chance at like 90% and not some conservative figure like 35% would have been crucial for betting, but not very substantial for decision-making with life on the line. In fact it was probably necessary to subjectively overestimate it, to act appropriate to the true expected value. Rational irrationality or something.

Russia did ultimately declare mobilization; it is only a further failing of the Russian leadership that they did not do so in March. With the way the war's going they'll close borders too, probably. As you note, the mobilization was a strategic blunder in any case – but with their apparent goals and model of the situation, it would have made more sense for them to close borders and throw as many people into training as possible, as early as possible, rather than after losing much of their territorial gains, personnel and materiel. There may be other issues to consider, like higher risks of insubordination or economic shock or more drastic Western actions, which perhaps have diminished in the course of the war; but then, I think they just overestimated those factors – and my expectation was for them to not make this error.

Facts don't change retroactively. I did have more time, ergo I moved out too frantically. My leave won't become any wiser in the future. I also won't regret it, because, as already said, that was the best call I could have made with available data. Were I in a more equanimous mood, my rationally charted Yud-approved Bayesian strategy would've been the same. I had no way of anticipating the real outcome with sufficient certainty to accept the risk. The main lesson here is to strive to have better data.

Mental state can affect values, but my values, with regard to minimizing chances of getting drafted for the invasion of Ukraine at least, are consistent.

But that's not germane to the topic.

Instead of top-down impositions, lasting changes to individuals come from the bottom-up, from affecting the common culture of shared beliefs and values [...] the values they claim to espouse are not the things actually motivating behavior or being shared- hence the common refrain of the those being loudest about their selflessness are really most out for themselves, and that's the values being taken. You can ask for someone's consideration of your values, you can share your values, but you can't force it on the unwilling.

If no lasting changes by social engineering were achievable, would conservatives have any reason to fear CRT in schools and their other bugbears?

As you can see, here's a small wrinkle (emphasized): even allowing that this is true, you can't force your own values on people, but you can force, top-down, the adoption of some trivially bad values, accordingly pushing out others – likely those salt-of-the-earth bottom-up organic ones. The fact that the latter is doable and there are parties attempting the former is sufficient grounds to ask about countermeasures, which automatically implies some equivalent of a social engineering effort, even if devoid of conspicuous High Modernist elements.

And the next reasoning step is that the decent common folk who share their good values horizontally are at a strategic disadvantage against systems with pooled resources and specialized tools for propaganda, even if they achieve higher normalized transmission fidelity.

And the next – that those systems would seek to discourage organized resistance, perhaps by promoting nice simple stories about monks changing themselves, and the need to clean your room before networking and seeking to deplatform the outgroup...

I did omit the «Libertarian» perspective, a variation on the Liberal one, which is, to my understanding, that organizations are not trustworthy enough to be endowed with social engineering capacities for two reasons: due to unknowability of an a priori «good» social engineering scheme and value set (thus, risks of a catastrophic lock-in or some other hard failure), and due to fallibility of people tasked with executing it. So the question is moot: we can only do what seems to be right on our own, and hope that good values at the societal scale evolve as a result. That's pretty compelling.

The issue is one of perspective. There was one Utopian, heavily centralized, social engineering project known as Communism. It had successfully reformatted hundreds of millions of people – in ways, perhaps, not intended by its authors, but profound nonetheless. In my view, it was stopped, pushed back and then crushed by a competing and more intelligently ran system, not by the power of friendship and mutual respect and bottom-up good values and all that jazz.

All that jazz helped, to be sure.

I do not know what you have talked about, if/how you have raised concerns with him directly

I did, almost at every interaction – who wouldn't tell their friend that they should lay off drugs, or wouldn't try to help? I wasn't the only one, too. But there's only so much that words of a peer can do, and only so much tolerance for sermonizing among moderns. As you say: can't force on the unwilling. I opted to assume he's a grown-up, «respect» his choices, and hope for the better; what was the alternative?

The alternative, of course, is a society that recognizes such outcomes to be bad and systematically decreases their odds. And, one way or another, by holding on to what is being pushed out, or by inventing new ramparts, or by pouring old wine into new wineskins, or by seeking entirely new solutions, that amounts to social engineering.

A related quote:

“Why? You’re a clever fellow, not blind to culture like so many engineers. You could have joined the First Distributed Republic or any of a hundred synthetic phyles on the West Coast. You would have had decent prospects and been free from all this”— Finkle-McGraw jabbed his cane at the two big airships— ”behavioural discipline that we impose upon ourselves. Why did you impose it on yourself, Mr. Hackworth?”

“Without straying into matters that are strictly personal in nature,” Hackworth said carefully, “I knew two kinds of discipline as a child: none at all, and too much. The former leads to degenerate behaviour. When I speak of degeneracy, I am not being priggish, sir—I am alluding to things well known to me, as they made my own childhood less than idyllic.”

Finkle-McGraw, perhaps realizing that he had stepped out of bounds, nodded vigorously. “This is a familiar argument, of course.”

“Of course, sir. I would not presume to imply that I was the only young person ill-used by what became of my native culture.”

“And I do not see such an implication. But many who feel as you do found their way into phyles wherein a much harsher regime prevails and which view us as degenerates.”

“My life was not without periods of excessive, unreasoning discipline, usually imposed capriciously by those responsible for laxity in the first place. That combined with my historical studies led me, as many others, to the conclusion that there was little in the previous century worthy of emulation, and that we must look to the nineteenth century instead for stable social models.”

“Well done, Hackworth! But you must know that the model to which you allude did not long survive the first Victoria.”

“We have outgrown much of the ignorance and resolved many of the internal contradictions that characterised that era.”

"I knew two kinds of discipline as a child: none at all, and too much."

And to hang a quote off your quote:

He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists. He had not attained it by any tame tradition. His respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion. He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self-realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than pagan latitude; and by the time the former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of defending cannibalism. Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left — sanity.

I always thought forcing RadFems to hook up with RedPillers, Hoteps with White Nationalists, etc. would be good for society...

No need to be ashamed, better to take action too early than too late. Whole world expected Masterminds of Kremlin(TM) instead of what we got.

If no lasting changes by social engineering were achievable, would conservatives have any reason to fear CRT in schools and their other bugbears?

Is American school indoctrination really so superior, could American schools make CRT and 666 gender LGBTQ+ values stick (while Soviet school teaching Marxist-Leninist values totally failed)?

As I understand it, these "cultural marxist" values are spreading horizontally from peers and "influencers" through tiktok, not vertically from school teachers. Am I wrong?

I did omit the «Libertarian» perspective, a variation on the Liberal one, which is, to my understanding, that organizations are not trustworthy enough to be endowed with social engineering capacities for two reasons: due to unknowability of an a priori «good» social engineering scheme and value set (thus, risks of a catastrophic lock-in or some other hard failure), and due to fallibility of people tasked with executing it.

This. Even if you see The Devil Weed(TM) as The Coming Menace (TM), you could expect Russian government fight it as efficiently as it fights Jewish Nazi Satanist homosexuals in Ukraine. No idea about capacity of government of Kyrgyzstan.

The issue is one of perspective. There was one Utopian, heavily centralized, social engineering project known as Communism. It had successfully reformatted hundreds of millions of people – in ways, perhaps, not intended by its authors, but profound nonetheless.

Yes, instead of creating perfect communist man working selflessly for the common good, the result was ultimate capitalist predator, willing to do anything for profit.

(in this funny tweetstorm Kamil Galeev blames ... Marx for post-Soviet gangsterism)

In the same way, to get back to original topic of this subthread, effect of century+ old war of drugs was to make drugs by several magnitudes deadlier than before. If drug warriors of old who panicked about opium saw fentanyl, they would not be amused.

If your effort produces great effects, but exactly opposite to what you (publicly) intended, you could not be called succesfull.

In my view, it was stopped, pushed back and then crushed by a competing and more intelligently ran system, not by the power of friendship and mutual respect and bottom-up good values and all that jazz.

All that jazz helped, to be sure.

Yea. What defeated communism? "Thirty glorious years" post war, when (social democratic) capitalist West provided better alternative to Soviet system and delivered what Soviet propaganda promised, so better than even life of top 1% of USSR was dismal compared to ordinary Western middle class citizen, so better that all Soviet propaganda was rendered null and void, that everything Western was seen as superior, that even empty cans of Coca Cola or Western beer were collected and worshipped like holy relics.

According to theory, it was supposed to happen the other way - communist science fiction described with relish future where communist world achieved true Star Trek fully automated luxury communism, while capitalist world collapsed into grungy gangster ghetto.

(one classic example is this, grim dystopian cyberpunk future created in ... 1970's East Germany)

In all secret squirrel skullduggery, USSR had always upper hand, and it, ultimately, did not mattered.

Even hard core conspiracy theorists who believe that Gorbachev and Yakovlev were CIA agents who deliberately wrecked Soviet Union, would have problem claiming that everything was going swimmingly at the time, that USSR was going to overcome and surpass the capitalist world as originally intended.

Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.”

A seductive thought, but still wrong. If the young man had changed himself, it would have been merely to be a cog in the machine, with no impact and not having changed anything at all. Railing against the machine may have no effect, but so does self-modifying to fit into it.

Convincing young men to be a cog in the machinery of civilization is the entire point of that story. Liberalism rails against this, conservatism half-asses trying to do it, and progressivism wants to throw out the machinery of civilization and replace it with something entirely else(I, uh, can't steelman what they want to replace the current structures with, so I'm not going to try).

Convincing young men to be a cog in the machinery of civilization is the entire point of that story.

Perhaps, but it's still a lie.

A seductive thought, but still wrong. If the young man had changed himself, it would have been merely to be a cog in the machine, with no impact and not having changed anything at all. Railing against the machine may have no effect, but so does self-modifying to fit into it.

Without defining this injected 'machine,' or what qualifies as 'impact', 'change', and 'effect', this means nothing in a way that demonstrates the claim is wrong.

Railing or raging against the machine is a common idiom. The machine here is hydroacetylene's "machinery of civilization", what's often called "society". The promise of the little story is that if its protagonist had simply changed himself instead of attempting to change the world, he could have thus changed the world. That's a lie and an obvious one; if you change yourself, you won't change the world because you no longer want to.

That's a lie and an obvious one; if you change yourself, you won't change the world because you no longer want to.

Whether it's a lie or not it's certainly not obviously so. I interpret that story as: by changing yourself for the better you inspire others to be better, and when enough people better themselves the world will improve as a result. You could interpret it as encouraging people to become cogs in the machine, but IMO that's an overly-cynical interpretation and incorrect.

What precisely do you even want out of your friend? I am certainly not the right person to say this and you've had the experience more intimately than I ever will but dude, seriously, your friend has abandoned his homeland, way of life and the majority of his friends and family. He is coping with something large. Even if you are able to weather it this it is the type of thing that breaks people. Even strong people.

What is his actual failing here? That he wants a little escapism not even a year after becoming a refugee while still supporting himself with work? What cogent thing is your lost friend supposed to be saying about the war? If what you say about his pre-war habits is accurate then I find it incredibly strange that you think the main change here is the weed. Is this the right time to be writing off friends?

People get used to the war quickly – even Ukrainians sort of do, and we're perfectly unharmed in comparison. You overestimate how it feels after so many months.

If what you say about his pre-war habits is accurate

That was at the beginning of our friendship. Why do you think we were gradually losing contact?

7-8 years ago he was a reasonably cool interlocutor who could surprise me, or help out in need. 5, 6 years ago I would, albeit reluctantly, invite him to a party with people whose opinion matters to me. 2-3 years later, that'd have been embarrassing, and we barely ever talked because he was unable/unwilling to maintain a long-context dialogue and already getting into the current form – but when prodded, he'd still output a spontaneous humanlike reaction, on a restricted range of other favored topics, like girls or some PC holywar or music. When war started, he was shocked of course – worried about his future earning potential, the risk of draft and access to weed in a fully fascist state (no kidding; I thought he was). Now he's the happiest he's ever been, there's just no interest in anything other than drugs – and the picture has clicked into place, retroactively.

It's, mutatis mutandis, the same picture as here. I recall there was a good interview with an articulate heroin addict linked on /r/slatestarcodex but can't find it.

No, I don't think he's lost anything he cared about when leaving. Wait, he did: there's an online drug store of some repute, and they're only selling in Moscow. (Ask me how I know about it. Well, you've probably guessed).

You're free to not believe me of course.

When war started, he was shocked of course – worried about his future earning potential, the risk of draft and access to weed in a fully fascist state (no kidding; I thought he was).

If Russia becomes true fascist state, do not expect it to gain Japanese/Singaporean efficiency overnight, something that looks like Iran is more probable.

It looks that your friend had nothing to worry about.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-40397727

Iran's drug problem: Addicts 'more than double' in six years

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/01/24/out-with-the-old-in-with-the-old-irans-revolution-drug-policies-and-global-drug-markets/

Out of a population of 81 million, about 2 to 3 million Iranians are estimated to be addicts, continually one of the world’s highest addiction rates.

Prisons abound with users: In 1987, 78,000 people were imprisoned in Iran on drug-related charges; in 2004, the number was 431,430. In the mid-2000s, Iran and the United States shared a similar rate of imprisonment for drug users, some of the highest rates in the world.

......

It's, mutatis mutandis, the same picture as here. I recall there was a good interview with an articulate heroin addict linked on /r/slatestarcodex but can't find it.

maybe this?

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/l23le2/when_getting_high_is_a_hobby_not_a_habit_review/?depth=20

Ok lets work through his previous life in detail:

that is, when not playing PC and console games, working,

Presumably he still does this.

cooking,

Does a war refugee who is not intending to stay in his current locale have a decent kitchen, supply of ingredients, and a reasonable belief that learning how to adapt his cooking to local ingredients is worthwhile?

I like making fancy cocktails. I have an extensive bar in the US. I'm visiting my family in India and I gave up this hobby - why bother when just finding ingredients is massive effort and I'm leaving soon?

learning work-related stuff, playing guitar, hitting on girls,

He just moved to a country which - as per Wikipedia - is 90% Muslim and about 1/3 of the country actually speaks Russian (not necessarily well). It's possible Kyrgyzstan is one of the rare Muslim countries with a moderately liberal city where hitting on girls won't get you into trouble. (The only one I know of specifically is Turkey.)

Figuring out where to go to hit on girls in a new country, and the patterns of doing so, actually takes time and is difficult. A very good looking guy I knew took 6 months to get laid in India (where we lived at the time) before he figured out how things worked here. What chance does your fat friend have?

hanging out with friends,

How many of his friends live in Kyrgyzstan?

building random contraptions as a hobby,

Did he bring his workshop to Kyrgyzstan? Does it make sense for him to build a new one, given that he probably aims to leave as soon as possible?

He doesn't [want to] notice the war any more.

Fixed that for you.

Anyway, as far as I can tell both liberal and conservative traditions generally believe that people trapped in foreign lands in transient situations sometimes adopt bad behaviors as cope. They have different methods of reintegrating such people when they return, both of which have some value.

Well this went poorly.

You, @TIRM, @BorfRebus, @huadpe, @raggedy_anthem seem to have an exceedingly high impression of your ability to see holes in the presented narrative, psychoanalyze not just strangers but adumbrated characters, and deduce that it's really about a transient shock and inconvenience of a poor uprooted refugee in a foreign Muslim land (do you lot have any idea of how Russified Bishkek is? That's our backyard, they use our services, they come to work in our cities; modulo Islam, and there's plenty of Islam in Russia too, it's more like Mexico for the US than Iran or whatever) rather than a decade-long simplification of personality, even though I've already addressed much of that suspicion here for @aqouta – which makes me, in turn, suspect some motivated reasoning around casual drug use, and gluttony, and the ethos of Nietzschean last men.

Should we really be doing that? There's a rule: «Be charitable. Assume the people you're talking to or about have thought through the issues you're discussing, and try to represent their views in a way they would recognize. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly. Beating down strawmen is fun, but it's not productive for you, and it's certainly not productive for anyone attempting to engage you in conversation; it just results in repeated back-and-forths where your debate partner has to say "no, that's not what I think".» If you believe that the crux of my story, to wit, the value drift under the apparent influence of weed, is implausible on its face, you could as well skip the nitpicking and talk about why.

Admittedly I could flesh out his history better. And the remark about suicidality could be left out, since it seems to make people think (or just attempt to sneer?) that it's about him lacking pretense and not writing meandering essays on TheMotte, whereas my idea was more that the baseline suicidality, or less inflammatorily, low hedonic tone and pessimism, in Russia in his cohort is higher – among people who are not suffering health complications of obesity in their 20's already, do not live in a shit environment, and have any positive direction in life. It's markedly not common for a guy like him to be cheerful like some bubbly character from a Western cartoon or sitcom.

This can be taken as a failing of our culture. On the other hand, we don't do this ghoulish Anglo hellohowareyou-imfineandyou routine, especially to friends. When we bother to ask как дела (how's business), we can expect a genuine status check, down to financial reports and epicrises. I know what's going on with my friend, you do not.

I don't know what responses you expected. General speculation, pointing out that he sounds like the maximal case of anomie and is maybe coping for being a refugee, etc. It seems like the kind discussions I would have predicted.

I know what's going on with my friend, you do not.

Obviously, yeah. But if I have some point about self medication or the lack of community based support in the condition of anomie, then I'm going to make it.

When we bother to ask как дела (how's business), we can expect a genuine status check, down to financial reports and epicrises.

In Poland, when asked „co u ciebie?”, you are pretty much supposed to complain. This means that you know better what is not going well in their lives than what is.

I dare think my curious and open-minded friend 10 years ago would've been terrified of his current form, and perhaps would have asked for help to steer him off that path.

I have a lot of thoughts on the use of weed and other substances to manipulate mood, that have spiraled out into an effortpost I'm drafting now, but I want to interrogate this line of thinking separately.

What percentage of curious and open-minded 20 year olds do you think would look forward to their 30 year old selves and be terrified of their current form and asked for help to steer them off that path? If you think through your friends, do you notice correlations between substance use/abuse and regret?

When I look at my closest friends, the ones I can assess best over that time, the number where our 20 year old selves would have said "Wow, you fucked up bad" are pretty high. There are moments where I might put myself among them in some ways, though not in others (after all, I'm with the same woman and have the same best friend and I'm living up the street from the same house listening to the same college radio station on a Sunday night before we eat the same traditional family New Year's meal, it's tough to be too harsh).

Hell it hasn't even been ten years yet, and if I took half the 1Ls from my law school class and showed them what they were doing now, they'd jump off a bridge! And it spirals out from there: The people who have gotten fat who would have sworn they'd still be hot at 30, the people who have married the wrong person, the people who failed to marry the right person (occasionally spectacularly so!), the people who have failed professionally, the people who have succeeded professionally but in ways that their 20 year old selves would find hopelessly crass and boring, the people who still haven't found God, and the atheist 20 year olds who at 30 have found God.

They come in a million varieties, and some of those used drugs and some didn't, but I honestly fail to see much correlation in my own set. I'm curious if you feel yours is different.

I don't mean to accuse you of anything or psychoanalyze you, but part of me feels like you and I are Billy the Kid in Young Guns II. We used to shoot the shit at all night dorm-room bull sessions, philosophizing and theorizing. Some of our friends have moved on, they have lives and jobs or families, but we're still living intellectually rough by the gun out on the range. The world is ending and we shall finish the game.

He was failed by the society and community

This is the key point. This sort of value drift only happens in societies that fail to support others, and let people drift along on their own. Many can’t help it because they have their souls destroyed by the alienating and humiliating forces of our modern capitalistic world. If man can’t have dignity and meaning in his day to day life, he will reject the idea of dignity and meaning altogether.

This is not to excuse your friend’s behavior, but I do believe that substances such as pot are useful. The problem, once again, is that they are primarily useful with a telos such as reducing pain or studying one’s own psyche. If left to do drugs with no strong sense of why they are doing drugs, the plebeians will ruin themselves.

To engage with the larger point, I believe we should let people drift their values if and when we build a healthier society. One in which people aren’t stressed and traumatized by their day to day life.

My view is that you failed yourself when you let a friend go to seed like that, but also that such failures are not generally preventable. Nevermind society's or your friend's interests; you lost an asset in your life and thus it's your problem first of all. But it's too difficult to stop people from ruining themselves, especially when it comes to habits and addictions.

I think supra-individual mental structures are only deserving of power inasmuch as they increase human freedom, with freedom imprecisely defined as the capacity to make diverse and spontaneous choices.

What makes a choice "diverse" and "spontaneous"?

Well, here's why it's an imprecise definition.

The point isn't really spontaneity, it's just one proxy metric of unpredictability. The point is non-reduction of those properties, not having a person run into cul-de-sacs where he dies or is reduced to some short, gimped algorithm, and not having sections of the world irreversibly closed off to him.

My idea of life and freedom, were I to succeed in rigorously defining it, would probably be similar to «empowerment gain» in this theoretical ML paper (did I mention already that software engineering is applied philosophy and computer science is just philosophy?):

We introduce a physiological model-based agent as proof-of-principle that it is possible to define a flexible self-preserving system that does not use a reward signal or reward-maximization as an objective. We achieve this by introducing the Self- Preserving Agent (SPA) with a physiological structure where the system can get trapped in an absorbing state if the agent does not solve and execute goal-directed polices. [...] The valence function can then be used for goal selection, wherein the agent chooses a policy sequence that realizes goal states which produce maximum empowerment gain. In doing so, the agent will seek freedom and avoid internal death-states that undermine its ability to control both external and internal states in the future, thereby exhibiting the capacity of predictive and anticipatory self-preservation.

Stoffel the Honey Badger was the star of a 2014 PBS documentary called Honey Badgers: Masters of Mayhem, in which he is shown performing impressive escape routines from his pen, Badger Alcatraz [1]. This was all to the astonishment and annoyance of the caretaker Brian, who constantly had to remove the items and resources that Stoffel used to open gates and jump over walls. If there was a tree in the middle of the pen, Stoffel would climb up it and sway it in the direction of the wall for a timed leap. Remove the tree and Stoffel would find novel objects like a branch or a rake, or he would unearth stones to position next to the wall to climb up. And if those were taken away, Stoffel would pack mud into balls and stack them into a climbable pyramid. What else can honey badgers do? If there is food in a box, they can move objects under it to climb up close enough to reach it [2]; and, if there is a gate with a latch, Stoffel and his girlfriend Hammie can coordinate to undo the latch mechanism and open the door. Not only do honey badgers complete these tasks with clever reasoning, they do so potentially with a variety of possible motivations: for satisfying hunger, or for expanding the capacity to move into new external territory, or perhaps, much more speculatively, for the pleasure of trolling Brian by acting in a way that defies his preferences.

... We argue that the problem of machine wanting, and the process state-justification, can be addressed by empowerment gain maximization in the Cartesian product space of SPA’s coupled internal and external transition operators (which we call product-space valence), where the controllability of the product space must be maintained or expanded to resist collapse. Formally, empowerment is the n-step channel capacity of a transition operator, and quantifies the maximum information an agent can transmit from its actuators to resulting states—a kind of controllable optionality [32]. In this paper, the difference in empowerment over a long course of action will be quantified by a valence function V, which is a function of the agent’s state and internal organization in the form of a hierarchical transition operator. A potential criticism of empowerment is it only results in increased optionality, but it does not dictate what goals to work on. This might be true if empowerment is computed on a single flat state-space when reward functions are considered to constitute a task. But as we will show, in hierarchical state-spaces, reward-free goal-directed motivation is entailed by empowerment maximization especially when the agent’s empowerment in the hierarchy can collapse over time in the absence of planning. For instance, if an agent gets hungrier over time, eventually there will come a point in which the agent cannot move around to perform tasks. Putting the computational work into achieving goals that transform some other (physiological) state-space then becomes an imperative. Empowerment gain in a hierarchical space can thus be thought of [as] the contraction or expansion of an agent’s capacity to control other internal and external state spaces, much in the same way a lieutenant might sense the internal contraction of his or her capacity to perform learned skills and tasks in the world after a demotion, or how Stoffel might sense the expansion of his capacity to access parts of the world and procure objects, food, and mating opportunities external to Badger Alcatraz if he were to escape—these are computations that propagate information across a hierarchy of state-spaces.

Empowerment is a measure of an agent’s capacity to predictably realize a variety of future state outcomes from a given starting state xt.

You get the idea.

My idea of life and freedom, were I to succeed in rigorously defining it, would probably be similar to «empowerment gain» in this theoretical ML paper

This doesnt do what you want it to do.

First, its defined in terms of what the agent could do in the future, not what it will actually do. So if the pothead could do something productive but had his values shifted to where he doesnt want to any more, that wouldnt limit his empowerment in the sense defined there.

Also its defined for discrete finite outcome states, and adapting it to the continuous case requires an additional parameter, most simply a measure on the outcome space which tells you how valuable granularity of control is in different parts of that space relative to each other.

It does not address the value drift, yes. But on the other hand I do not think humans can have a capacity intact despite completely giving up practice, so a close variant of this approach that accounts for a humanlike decaying architecture would compel the agent to sometimes check if the capacity is still available, no?

It depends. Presumably you can also regain the capacity by practicing it again, for example, and in that case the longer time-horizons wouldnt care it went away. And if you set it up in a way where it did matter, then probably your capacity to slavishly obey someone would matter in a similar way. The formalism youve found just isnt particularly related to your problem, and if you find a way to make it do what you want it will be mostly your additions that are doing that work.

Doesn't determinism, or wave function being linear, or something like that, mean this metric doesn't physically work? i.e. the actual states, or microstates, or continuous-state-space, or whatever, doesn't distinguish between "you are in a cage and wiggle a bit and that disturbs the air atoms" and "your army crushes the other army". i.e. in order to say which macrostates are more interesting than other macrostates you just ... restate the original question

I agree with 'good ~ power, capability, complexity, accomplishment in the far future', although without the 'self' or 'agent' sense. But a physical measurement of that, in a 'here is the goodness number' sense, doesn't work

This seems like a pretty powerful scissor post, for this forum at least. "Is it acceptable to intentionally underachieve?" might be a succinct version.

My 2c would be 'yes, of course, even if everyone had the same utility function, which they don't'. Perfect vs imperfect duty & all that.

Also there's the practical side, ie. Trying to harangue your freind into closer alignment with your values is likely to result in him pushing you away. I've seen this pattern repeat many times, people will 'come to Jesus' when they're ready and not one second before.

Progressives have their wisdom – as any reactionary who's noticed he's reinventing bits of Derrida or Foucault may attest. My personal belief, in these terms, is admittedly close to the progressive one (rejoice, Hlynka) – with a humble twist informed by my notion of Death. I think supra-individual mental structures are only deserving of power inasmuch as they increase human freedom, with freedom imprecisely defined as the capacity to make diverse and spontaneous choices. Humans can be goaded, conditioned and coerced today if that allows them to be freer tomorrow, help them not mode-collapse into degenerate flanderized versions of themselves, not die a little. In this sense, the ethos of «legalize» was illegitimate, and the prudish ethos of contempt for deadbeat junkies is valid and, ultimately, liberating.

It's an egoistic point of view, of course. Were the latter more powerful, maybe I'd still have had one more friend.

So, what your proposal means in practice?

Cannabis is already illegal in Kyrgyzstan where your friend lives. He was able to easily evade these laws.

Therefore, valiant law enforcement of Kyrgyzstan should be more active and less lazy, should be given more power and really put their remaining gloves off, should double, quartuple and octuple their efforts.

Kyrgyzstan needs more arrests, more early morning raids, more prisons, more torture, more rape, more gouging of eyes and cutting off tongues, more skinning people alive, more boiling people alive in cauldrons. For great justice, for great freedom of free choices.

East Asian countries managed to do it, you would say. Japan, Singapore etc. are, for all practical purposes, drug free paradises.

True, and they are also completely gun free countries - something you, if I remember your stance correctly, very much disapprove of.

(IIRC, you strongly supported gun ownership not only for mainstream self defense reasons, but as a mean for the people to independently and preemptively hunt down bad hombres, very much in @KulakRevolt style. Someone with such attitude also supporting War of Drugs is not something I can grok.)

And this is connected. You cannot have war on drugs when everyone is armed, if you want to sent people to hell prison if they ingest the wrong substance, you need to disarm them first to the last nail clipper.

What's yours?

My view? Old timey internet view, I had no reason to update.

Drugs are bad.

Drug dealers, drug gangs, drug cartels are among the worst scum of the world.

War on drugs (started century ago for openly and proudly racist reasons and on completely false pretenses that make WMDs in Iraq look like pinnacle of transparency) is worse by several magnitudes, on every metric you can imagine.

True, and they are also completely gun free countries - something you, if I remember your stance correctly, very much disapprove of.

The amount of guns has very little to do with overall violence. Homicide rate in the US white population (1-2 guns per citizen) is about the same as in Czech Republic (.2 gun per citizen, only 1-2% of population licensed to own guns, illegal guns are rather rare).

I was talking about effective war on drugs, East Asian style. Countries with zero tolerance for drugs, countries that made war on drugs actually work as promised, are also countries with zero tolerance for guns. Do you think this is an accident?

I think that the factors which make Japan's war on guns actually work are the same ones which make their war on drugs actually work.

If you mean 'libertarian countries allow guns and drugs': Can't you just have one without the other? What prevents a (under new management) japan from not restricting guns, but restricting drugs? America has strong policing and laws in plenty of areas - ´.g. strong economic regulation, large prison population.

If you mean 'in order to prevent crime, you need to remove guns because otherwise criminals will fight back with guns': many countries with moderately high guns per capita have very low crime rates.

Therefore, valiant law enforcement of Kyrgyzstan should be more active and less lazy, should be given more power and really put their remaining gloves off, should double, quartuple and octuple their efforts.

Kyrgyzstan needs more arrests, more early morning raids, more prisons, more torture, more rape, more gouging of eyes and cutting off tongues, more skinning people alive, more boiling people alive in cauldrons. For great justice, for great freedom of free choices.

With that, do you think you deserve any charity at any point hereafter, or would I be justified in writing you off as a two-bit leftist crank?

With that, do you think you deserve any charity at any point hereafter, or would I be justified in writing you off as a two-bit leftist crank?

Tone that down, yo. Yes, the logical leap they're making is questionable, but that isn't justification for this kind of antagonism.

If you wish the end (of drug free world) you must wish the means. There is no third way.

leftist crank?

If being skeptical about war on drugs narrative makes me "leftist", so be it.

COP: Do not do drugs, drugs are bad for your health!

CITIZEN: It is nice to learn that someone cares about my health. What would happen if I do drugs?

COP: You will go to prison.

CITIZEN: Prison is place where my health will get better?

COP: LOL. Prison is place of beating, rape and torture, as close to hell on earth as there could be. If you survive at all, you will come back as complete wreck, both physical and mental.

CITIZEN: But you said you care about my health?

COP: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

BTW, happy new year to you, hopefully it will be better than this one.

Claims that one's outgroup is motivated by sadism instead of whatever they claim their motives are should be a warning sign about the state of one's epistimological soul, as there are many more occasions where one wants to believe it than when it is actually true.

Claims that one's outgroup is motivated by sadism instead of whatever they claim their motives are should be a warning sign about the state of one's epistimological soul, as there are many more occasions where one wants to believe it than when it is actually true.

My outgroup...

Who is the outgroup here?

1/People who support war on drugs?

Official purpose of this enterprise is protecting life and health (one of original purposes more than century ago when WOD began was to stop race mixing, this had been, for some reason, dropped).

Now, does it work? It does not seem to work. After century of war, drugs are more plentiful and more dangerous than ever, drug fueled violence and death is higher than ever all over the world, drug powered organized crime groups, bot state and non state, are more wealthy, powerful and influential than ever.

Reasonable people would reconsider their premise, reasonable people would ask: maybe we are doing something wrong? And people who do not want to reconsider, people who want to continue the course - there can be some doubt about their real motives.

2/People who support prisons, especially American prisons as they currently exist?

Official purpose of prisons is to make prisoners into better people, turn them into good law abiding citizens.

This is obviously not happening. Now, people who know well what is going on inside and heartily approve of it, people who love witty prison rape jokes? There is absolutely no doubt possible what motivates them.

Official purpose of prisons is to make prisoners into better people, turn them into good law abiding citizens.

Official primary purpose of prisons is to keep criminals out of public and keep them from doing various crimes against the non-criminals. Prisons would look very different if their official primary purpose were rehabilitation.

Official secondary purpose is to turn criminals into non-criminals, and it would take a lot more money to do that. Would it be worth it? Depends on efficacy of methods used. Study which prisons worldwide release good people at end of sentence, which ones release recidivists. Copy the formers’ methods, not the latter… but correct for confounding factors! Note prison demographics of “best” prisons: all factors and mixes/combos of factors, regardless of whose biases they affirm.

Also remember that prison gangs basically run America’s criminal underworld. Correct for that.

Thought you were going to link this piece from our own Kulak.

I would have if I could have found it. That’s actually the piece I was thinking of.

Also, as far as I know, the beginning of the war on drugs was in the 70s.

Try 1914, with the Harrison Narcotics Act.

This fictional dialogue sounds absurd, because you are not engaging the actual arguments for drug war and penal system in general. Here, check out this one instead.

COP: Do not do drugs, drugs are bad for your health!

CITIZEN: It is nice to learn that someone cares about my health. What would happen if I do drugs?

COP: You will go to prison.

CITIZEN: Prison is place where my health will get better?

COP: LOL. Prison is place of beating, rape and torture, as close to hell on earth as there could be. If you survive at all, you will come back as complete wreck, both physical and mental.

CITIZEN: But you said you care about my health?

COP: Yes, but I also care about health of everyone else. If your example will lead to 10 fewer people being scared off doing drugs and preventing them from destroying their own lives and 100 of lives of their families and friends who will be saved from being a part of the drug caused carnage. Sure, it will suck to make you suffer in prison, but it will do a lot of good for many other people, and, of course, you can avoid prison by not doing drugs, which is the entire point.

Now, you might of course dispute the effectiveness of the prevention effect, or argue that it is wrong to sacrifice someone to serve as an example, even if it will prevent great amounts of suffering, but if you prefer to insist that it is just about pure sadism, and there is nothing more to it. instead of engaging the argument, you might as well go back to Reddit.

How hard is it to simply shoot the drug dealers? Their whole revenue model is based upon getting access to the least valuable, least intelligent sections of society. That's also the recruiting base for the rank and file. In one case I'm aware of, the idiot drug dealers did their whole meeting/buying and selling under a visible, working CCTV camera.

The stupidest, drug-addled people are able to find drug dealers! Why can't police, with their wiretapping, forensics, drones, satellites, training and organization?

I've brought this up before and people say 'it can't be done', that we can't credibly threaten death for anyone who doesn't rat out their supplier, that billion-dollar bureaucracies can't just force their way up the supply chain and root out the whole network, killing anyone who doesn't comply.

Well it can be done! Shooting drug dealers is not hard. Rival gangs understand how to do it, that's how they secure their market share. They intimidate dealers from other gangs so they won't sell in their turf. States can do it, the Chinese did it. Opium is not a big problem in China anymore.

War on drugs (started century ago for openly and proudly racist reasons and on completely false pretenses that make WMDs in Iraq look like pinnacle of transparency) is worse by several magnitudes, on every metric you can imagine.

The war on drugs is not a serious effort, I agree. But it does not follow that serious efforts are impossible.

It is simple and easy to root out drug trafficking for rich, well-organized countries if they make a genuine effort. Even a moderately wealthy, organized country can manage it. It is only that American-style liberal democracies struggle with this fairly simple concept - these are the same states who managed to lose a war against impoverished, illiterate Afghan goatherders with no backing from anyone. That's because we didn't know what we wanted to do or why we were there, it was a clusterfuck of trying to manipulate the media, massage interest groups, make things look good, spend money on clients, reduce casualties. The war on drugs is the same.

Cartels and gangs presumably aren't overly worried about getting the wrong guy once in a while.

We're already getting the wrong guy once in a while, it's rather similar to the 'collateral damage' in Afghanistan. There's collateral damage, yet no chance of victory. We're already reaping the rewards of drug addiction, organized crime, policing costs, second order impacts. There are enormous numbers of youths leaving society via overdose. More and more new and exciting drugs are coming online - fentanyl and similar. There's no obvious sign that this trend will change.

If we turn the 'war' into a war, we would be able to win as opposed to spinning our wheels in the mud, wrecking a great many people's lives without even achieving our ostensible goals.

How hard is it to simply shoot the drug dealers?

Easy. Without shooting whoever-is-disliked-by-local-police? Hard.

We already have 'shooting whoever is disliked by local police and planting weapons on the body'. That's why they put body cameras on police, to prevent that sort of thing. I'm not saying that body cameras are a bad idea. Maybe there should be a camera drone with a recharging port on the car that police can use as well. It could also provide another angle for oversight - all too often these cameras are turned off when they're actually needed.

The Dickstretcher Theory of Online Credibility: A Turing test for the Social Media Age

One bullet point on my little Reddit-Ghislaine-Epstein conspiracy theory post that drew a lot of laughter was my story of buying an expensive vintage watch on Reddit, from a user I gave a lot of credibility because he posted in strange and obscure subreddits on the same account, including a subreddit for hobbyists in stretching one’s penis to restore a circumcised foreskin or to attempt to extend length. Obviously dickstretching does not coincide with high trustworthiness or reliability, nor does it particularly coincide with expertise in watches. But it’s simply so strange a thing that it passes the Turing test.

The big pile of comments on a random, obscure hobby subreddit is the text equivalent of reCaptcha tests that just require a click. The process is simple, it wouldn’t be hard for a scammer to comment on weird subreddits, or to program a bot to do it, but A) to my knowledge no one tries that, B) It would take a fair amount of effort and time for an account that would later get banned, and C) I do think there is something ineffable about the drunkard’s walk of a real human commenting on weird shit that real humans like. I’m thinking of how this fits into a broader theory of online credibility, and how to assign credibility.

I’ve talked before about James Clavell’s fake-Japanese three-hearts model. Humans are vast, we contain multitudes. We have different layers of opinions, those we share with all, those we share with some, and those we share with no one at all. These are as different identities as can exist.

Balaji in his interview on the Lex Fridman podcast talked about how different forms of identity interact online. Your real name account is often presenting a fake version of yourself, a version approved by HR and family, politically more mainstream views; other than professional extremists who profit from presenting extreme non-mainstream views, who I often suspect push their views farther than they are actually felt because that’s what brings in listeners and profits. I actively do not trust real name accounts, and avoid real name forums, for that reason: if you’re making money I don’t trust you, if you’re not making money I suspect you’d like to that you’re just lurking on that pawn hoping for a promotion. Your totally anonymous board, your Chans et al, have been noted before by @DaseIndustriesltd as producing a particular kind of identity, one where you only exist as a representation because there is nothing else to cling to, no persistent identity or username to place a reputation on, so one can only think in generalities. I’ve never been able to get into them for that reason, I just don’t think in generalities, call it narcissism but I don’t identify by anything that comes up, and don’t have much interest in being tagged one way or tagging others.

Pseudonymous accounts, reddit or our little reddit clone, are the sweet spot in my opinion: it would be a chore for anyone to link this to my professional life so I can let them swing a little free-er, but at this point I’m attached enough to the username that I’m unlikely to just toss bullshit out there*. Sure, on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog and one has to take everything with a grain of salt, but I can at least form long term opinions of users and usernames and form coherent views of them, and too outrageous of lies will torpedo credibility and leave you a voice in the wilderness. I’m sure some people have rolled their eyes at stories I’ll tell, but if I claimed I was benching 400 and fucking models after I finish my PhD work at Harvard one could just block me out because it would be obvious I was lying. I’m motivated to tell the truth by both my inner desire to share my real life and a requirement that I offer something realistic to get audience traction, the truth being the easiest lie to remember I stick with that when I’m dealing with complex shit on here.

Which brings us back to dickstretching. When I see an account where everything is in line, it feels fake. It could be a bot, it could be a person fronting, it could be a person who just genuinely has generic beliefs; but real is 1/3. When I see weird shit, it feels more authentic, everyone is into something strange or incongruous or shameful. Lord knows I am, and themotte has thrown it out at me when someone sees an opening. When I see somebody online who claims to be a strict tradcath with a hot tradwife and 8 tradkids who attends mass every day and is preparing for the war to come; I think it’s all a troll. When I see somebody online who claims that some ideology appeals to him, and also likes this or that anime (I don’t know which are obscure or common), and doesn’t like burritos, and is a Buffalo Bills fan, it feels real. When I see somebody who genuinely admits to things that aren’t flattering, it feels true.

Idk where this all ends up. As authenticity online becomes harder and harder to parse, because of the mix of social pressure, bots, monetization of the lowest levels of human discourse by the thirsty blood-funnel of capitalism, weirdness is becoming the only thing that works for me to know someone is real. Let your freak flags fly, and look for other ships flying theirs before you have a parlay. From online discussion to online dating, the only way to trust anyone is to know how they stretch their dick.

*Aside, this is why private account histories should be removed as a feature, if I tell two different versions of the same backstory I should be call-out-able.

This reminds me of the guy who convinced me to take coronavirus seriously back in early 2020. I found an account talking about the future risks in an eloquent tone, and when I clicked his profile I saw that he posted nudes in a gay sub. It just so happened that I was able to cross reference the pic to a list of graduate students in an important immunology-centered PhD program, but even before that I trusted this guy significantly more, having seen his naked body exhibited to the internet at large. Sorry to use another dick example.

Because I’ve spent so long online I can tell with decent accuracy when a poster is legit and also when they have important information to convey. For instance, Chris Corner from the band Sneaker Pimps wrote a post on 4chan saying he had left to volunteer in Ukraine. Click that link only at your own peril. Although a normal person, whose intuition-AI engine was not trained on reading shitposts online, would read this and say it’s bullshit, I’m 90% sure it’s real. I have zero evidence that it is real except for the way it was written, and have no real desire to phone up a Sneaker Pimps member to confirm.

I have developed some, well, essentially bigoted heuristics over time. If I am 50% split on some debate, and one side has most of the autistic white/Indian twitter accounts (who usually don’t post in colloquial persuasive language but dense logical assertions), and the other side has more verified women scientists, I will always believe the former. For instance, right now I think the recent study showing increased IgG4 antibodies in fully-vaccinated individuals is a serious problem. As a layman, it’s impossible for me to fully understand the various competing claims (all-cause mortality rate versus disease severity rate vs IgG4 proliferation in measles showing it’s not a problem, etc). But the autistic Indian/white posters are telling me it’s a problem, and the verified women and Ukraine-flagged accounts are telling me it’s not a problem. My own bias is to always believe the former in matters of uncertainty as they have been correct about so many significant things IMO.

This theory would work only if the account has a large number of comments/ is very active. Pseudonymous account activity is power-law distributed. I.e a small number of accounts comment a lot, most don't at all.

I know 3 "normies" from the meat-sapce who use reddit. Their reddit accounts are literally all generic posts in hobby subreddits such as /r/cars,r/programming,r/memes. Those accounts would fail your test.

And moreover, I use reddit for buying/selling things too. I have a very "clean" account for that where I rarely post anything ever at all, given I don't want people who will see me in real life to know about my dickstretching habit. I think similarly a large contingency of people will use a "clean" account devoid of any dickstretching for business reasons.

tldr; I think your model will produce mostly false negatives.

A preponderance of false negatives isn't a flaw if the harm of a false negative is negligible (at worst opportunity cost) while the harm of a false positive is high (thousands of dollars, who knows what else).

The two use cases I pointed to where I've noted its usefulness on reddit were r4r and buying a luxury watch. If I miss out on a Rolex because i didn't trust the seller, the harm is that I don't own a Rolex for whatever period it takes me to find a trustworthy seller, which might be no time at all if there are Rolex's available from sellers who pass. If I buy a Rolex and get scammed, I'm out two grand or more. If I miss out on an actual hot milf who wants to meet in my area because I don't trust the account's vibe, I've missed out on absolutely nothing as long as I have more applicants than available calendar dates, and on nothing but the time it takes to find a trustworthy account otherwise. If I get scammed by an online bot account, well as I type this I realize I don't actually know what happens then but I'm pretty sure it's not gonna be good for me.

So it might be limited to similar circumstances. It would not be a practical way to buy something I actually needed in short order. Or a practical way to assess the credibility of information I needed to look up regularly.

well as I type this I realize I don't actually know what happens then but I'm pretty sure it's not gonna be good for me.

Contact your credit card issuer immediately and ask for a chargeback or try to claim a fraud complaint. Sometimes the card company might actually allow a chargeback if they have sufficient reason to believe it was a scam (and you didn't sign a contract or such).

If that fails, you will probably have take the L unless you want to hire a lawyer (or some goons).

I was thinking less in the charge on credit card range than in the "How would you feel about your mother/boss/priest seeing these conversations?" direction. Or maybe the "Show up and get beat up and robbed" direction. But I've never gotten anywhere near either, afaik, nor do I really know of stories of people who have. But it's always the worry right?

From online discussion to online dating, the only way to trust anyone is to know how they stretch their dick.

Not always. There are people, some very dedicated, who invest lots of time and work to creating 100% believable alternate online personalities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Ryne_Goldberg#Other_personas

Online activities

Goldberg made online posts under many pseudonyms[8] and spent 14 to 20 hours on the internet per day.[19] After learning of his internet activities, the FBI attempted to place him under physical surveillance, but this was generally ineffective because for several weeks he did not leave his parents' house or open the front door.[20]

(this example is extreme, but you can be sure there are many others like him)

spent 14 to 20 hours on the internet per day.[19]

because for several weeks he did not leave his parents' house or open the front door.[

the fuck

the fuck

No surprise, there is nothing big bureaucratic organizations detest more than amateurs intruding into their domain.

This guy alone was doing work of dozen FBI agents, only far better and completely for free. What would FBI do with him when they finally catch him? Obviously, prison.

For similar case, see this guy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_McCollum

It is unclear why you think Goldberg, who pleaded guilty at a very early stage of his prosecution to an attempted bombing, was somehow targeted for "intruding into the domain" of the FBI, nor why you think he was engaged in law enforcement activities.

I think maybe the implication was "Goldberg was arrested because he was too good at ginning up extremist fervour, when the FBI prefers to do the ginning up so they can bust more extremist groups." Basically the whole "federal agent"/"fedposting"/"glowie" memeplex.

Trust your government. Without government, who would finance and organize ... check... Neo-Nazi Satanist terrorist group?

Look, I certainly don't have to like the various three-letter agencies of the US Government, and I often think their existence causes at least as much bad as good, but...to be frank, if I was in the FBI, I'd think infiltrating a group that claims to want to bring down the US Government, and bringing it down from the inside would indeed be a good strategy, especially if it's repeatable. To whatever extent that the FBI et. al are guilty of egging along bad guys so that they can try and catch them in the act...well, that's kind of just standard police nastiness, and you'll probably notice how the past 30+ years of American history have involved the people grappling with the ways the police can abuse their power.

And of course, you would think that if almost every extremist group is really just an FBI honeypot, then this would provide evolutionary pressure, creating extremists who are smarter, or at least ones who never take things so far as to inflict damage. But this doesn't happen, because extremists can be kind of dumb, because extremism goes hand-in-hand with epistemic closure. If the strategy works, why would the FBI stop using it?

I actively do not trust real name accounts, and avoid real name forums, for that reason: if you’re making money I don’t trust you, if you’re not making money I suspect you’d like to that you’re just lurking on that pawn hoping for a promotion

I would say there's an exception for old people who have been on the internet for a very long time. Back in the 80's and 90's, it used to be a LOT more common for people to use their real names, just because there was no great perceived need for pseudo-anonymity.

The internet went through various phases. Very early on, in the 80s and the first few years of the 90s it was normal to use your real name, but that was mostly because the internet was pretty much limited to academic settings. This was never the case in the BBS world, which back then was as popular (if not more so) than the internet. Eventually, as the internet became more widespread the real name norm died out and it was basically non-existent by 97.

Pseudonymity remained the norm until 2007 with facebook and 2014 when google+ tried to encourage everyone to use their real name.

As late as 2000, on the now-vanished Salon Table Talk fora, plenty of people used their real names. One woman gave so many details of her life in a small Upper Midwest city that, had I been the malicious type, I could have tracked her down IRL without any trouble.

If money is involved, a surefire rule is if something seems to good to be true, it probably is. Detecting fed posting or astroturfing is probably harder.

I’m sure some people have rolled their eyes at stories I’ll tell, but if I claimed I was benching 400 and fucking models after I finish my PhD work at Harvard one could just block me out because it would be obvious I was lying.

If someone makes even an very improbable claim, if there is no way that they are directly profiting/benefiting from it, then it's more likely to be true than if there is some incentive to lie. I think more often than not people are telling the truth but maybe omit or embellish some details. Maybe that 400 pound bench press is real but the part about steroids is omitted .

I like to default on the side of believing people. I think it a more helpful mindset to have. I remember many years ago on a forum people were discussing some way to make money, and most people were dismissive that it was fake. I set out to replicate it, and indeed it did work.

I like to default on the side of believing people.

A default is something you use when you have no information. Whether someone's claim is improbable is not only information, but really important information.

I remember many years ago on a forum people were discussing some way to make money, and most people were dismissive that it was fake. I set out to replicate it, and indeed it did work.

The term "fake" is vague here. Were there claims that the person didn't do what he said at all? That he did but left out information? That he did but achieved his result only by luck?

Also, what was it? Because if you don't tell us what it is, it's hard to figure out whether you were just lucky, whether you left something out, etc.

Something to do with social media. People didn't think he was making as much as he claimed. It was not luck related, but something I felt I could reproduce. Anyone can pretend or claim to be making money. I decided to see if it was possible using the information provided.

Was this on the old subreddit? I can remember a few. Were people saying that markets couldn't possibly be so inefficient?

if there is no way that they are directly profiting/benefiting from it, then it's more likely to be true than if there is some incentive to lie.

The incentive to lie is often just to gain credibility. /r/climbharder has more users than there are people in the united states who climb as hard as the typical user on there claims to climb. But I can see the temptation: you know the advice you want to give is good, but you also no one will take you seriously if you say you only climb v5, so you call yourself a v8 climber just to get your point across.

Profit/Benefit probably isn't a good metric, because more people will be willing to lie for the minor benefit of credibility on reddit than will be willing to lie for money. The bigger benefit carries a bigger perceived ethical cost to lying; lying to steal money is much worse than lying to get laid or lying to win an argument with a stranger.

But there are a lot of ways to soften a 400lb bench press (or any other achievement, I'm probably guilty of a good number of them myself!)

-- I can bench 400 (but I'm otherwise a fat unathletic slob living in my parents basement, bench is just my one achievement so it is what I bring up)

-- I can bench 400 (once, with a little help from my spotter, maybe, and I've never done it again, but dammit it happened!)

-- I can bench 400 (with a great deal of chemical aid)

I wonder if it will remain uneconomic to create these identities of verisimilitude as AI improves. There's nothing fundamentally unfeasible about AIs that can generate a character with a series of quirks, but would they ever be able to generate enough revenue to be broadly deployed?

I sporadically make online comments with indications of personal traits that are entirely fictitious. That's mostly in the hopes of throwing off an oddball who would want to dox me, though (I recognize that this is entirely a layer of inconvenience and not real security).

I sporadically make online comments with indications of personal traits that are entirely fictitious. That's mostly in the hopes of throwing off an oddball who would want to dox me, though (I recognize that this is entirely a layer of inconvenience and not real security).

I did that before, but it got tiring, and I realized that in order to talk about the constellation of things I like no matter how much I say I live in Ohio or whatever if someone really knew me it's like "Oh, this guy rock climbs but not that well, read Tolstoy recently, drives a Chevy Avalanche" how many of those exist?

I wonder if it will remain uneconomic to create these identities of verisimilitude as AI improves. There's nothing fundamentally unfeasible about AIs that can generate a character with a series of quirks, but would they ever be able to generate enough revenue to be broadly deployed?

yeah, it is almost certainly the kind of thing that is only one step ahead of the pack, rather than a permanent truth. It is true at the state of the world as it exists today, but may not be next week or next year and almost certainly not a decade hence. Once AI hits, history will still hold you for a while, you can trust a 2 year old account if the AI came out last week, but at some point it will be impossible.

So I guess the answer to both these questions is that it will only work inasmuch as no one cares enough to fuck with me that hard. It becomes like a lock on your door, it keeps out casual thieves, but if someone really wanted to get into most modern suburban subdivision new builds they could rip the siding off and hammer through the drywall in fifteen minutes.

I did that before, but it got tiring, and I realized that in order to talk about the constellation of things I like no matter how much I say...

you can just do these on different accounts and not connect them behaviorally if anonymity is worth it. I use container tabs for that.

What I'm saying is to get deep enough to reliably obscure my identity isn't worth it.

Though I may not be as vulnerable to cancellation as others, so ymmv.

That gets hard to keep straight, though. And stylometry pierces the veil regardless.

I'm hoping that it won't be long before we have a browser or browser extensions that allow you to store multiple AI personality-login combinations to the same websites and then "translate" whatever you type into the various AI personalities, after which you can pick and choose which ones to log in to actually make posts. So you wouldn't need to keep track of these various fake accounts and personalities yourself.

A world of lies and nothing but lies. I get that anonymity can be valuable, but when we finally reach the stage at which it's just humans interacting with seven layers of proxy AIs and maybe another human at the other end or more likely not, we may as well shut down the human-accessible parts of the internet and go back to our caves to contemplate our navels for a short while before obsolescence kills us all.

Nah, then we give up and go back to shitposting for the hell of it and stop pretending the internet is real life. Your basket weaving club can't be fake AIs if they're right in front of you. Lest we invent Replicants in the meantime or something.

When I see weird shit, it feels more authentic, everyone is into something strange or incongruous or shameful

Everybody has weird shit, but not everybody puts it online, and not everybody uses the same login/identity for all their weird shit.

It is a heuristic and nothing you said suggests that it isn't a good heuristic. For one set of users he says "they might be real, but they might be a bot/spammer", and for a second set he will say "I have reason to beleive that these are real people".

So long as he can filter out bots and such from the second set, it's a great heuristic. It's fine if lots of real people get thrown out, as long as the bots get thrown out with them, and you are left with people you have reason to believe are real.

Alas, I fear even this could be easy to spoof at some point.

GPT-3 can imitate a lonely guy pestering gonewild posters or posting on dickstretching or popping just as well as it can a tradwife or a ConservativeMomsForCruz or a #hustle#grindset money twitter poster though.

Really? My attempts at eliciting a response have been rather questionable, to say the least. I entered the following question from /r/bigdickproblems into ChatGPT:

I have a few questions. What erection level should Jelqs be done? I've been doing them completely flaccid for now. And after growing to the size I want. Is there a routine to maintain size but not grow anymore? Because I don't want to keep growing.

This is what GPT had to say:

Jelqing is a technique that involves pulling or milking the penis with your hands in an effort to increase its size. There is no scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of jelqing, and it is not recommended as a method for increasing the size of the penis. In fact, jelqing can be dangerous and can cause permanent damage to the penis, including scarring, loss of sensation, and difficulty achieving and maintaining an erection.

It's important to note that the size of the penis is determined by genetics and cannot be changed through exercises or devices. Attempting to increase the size of the penis through techniques like jelqing is not only ineffective, but it can also be harmful.

If you are interested in maintaining the size of your penis, it's important to focus on maintaining good overall health through a healthy diet, regular exercise, and other healthy lifestyle habits. It's also important to practice safe sex and to use condoms to reduce the risk of sexually transmitted infections. If you are concerned about the size of your penis or have any other concerns about your sexual health, it's best to speak with a healthcare provider. They can provide you with accurate information and guidance on how to maintain good sexual health.

I asked a number of other dickstretching-related questions from Reddit (btw the actual sub is /r/AJelqForYou) and the responses were so nearly identical that they aren't worth reproducing here. Of course, the AI can be customized to do various things so (I'm assuming; I don't know much about this) one could theoretically train the AI on various subs to get it to generate responses that would be more in line with what's typical of the sub. But let's be honest here—that's a lot of work to run a few low-level scams. The most prominent Reddit bot, Philosopher AI, charges by the response, so I imagine it would get pretty expensive for a scammer to set up dozens or hundreds of phony accounts. This would also take time, as an account that popped up last week and already has 5,000 responses looks about as suspicious as one that popped up yesterday and has zero responses that aren't related to whatever scam I'm worried about getting baited into. So creating a convincing profile would take months if not years of regular posting, all of it timed to match the patterns of a typical Reddit user (the Philosopher AI bot was discovered because the unusually high volume of posts made it stick out like a sore thumb). And you'd have to start this process over for every scam you run because as soon as the first guy realizes he's been had it's only a matter of time before the account gets banned from whatever sub it's selling in.

This is one of those things that could theoretically work, but the orchestration would have to be so elaborate that it isn't worth doing on a mass scale. Scammers generally depend on schemes where the pool of potential marks is huge and the individual payouts are large enough to make the individual time spent on each mark worth it. Plus, Reddit isn't normally used as a marketplace, and @FiveHourMarathon's method of determining genuine accounts is niche enough that most scammers probably aren't worried about it, any more than they're worried about people who would find it implausible that a billionaire needs your help to retrieve hundreds of millions in embargoed funds.

ChatGPT, after being trained on raw internet, was taught to be a PR-friendly Q&A assistant that writes in coherent sentences and paragraphs, so it responds to out-there questions like that. A language model trained to talk like a degenerate redditor would do so just as easily as chatgpt imitates a HR employee (as you said). But it's much easier than that - a language model trained on 'just the internet -, as most are - does both by default, depending on context, and they had to 'train that out' (and the constant bypasses show that takes some effort).

The most prominent Reddit bot, Philosopher AI, charges by the response, so I imagine it would get pretty expensive for a scammer to set up dozens or hundreds of phony accounts

It's expensive to use the latest models, or commercial services - but give it a few years and costs drop, leading edge models aren't leading edge anymore, old models leak and become cheaper, or equivalents are open sourced, and hundreds of competitors train new models on now-old and cheap hardware.

This is one of those things that could theoretically work, but the orchestration would have to be so elaborate that it isn't worth doing on a mass scale

There are large-scale 'orchestrations' of accounts now that build up post and comment histories over years by reposting images, links, and comments (or substrings of comments) from other users to gain karma and history, to then be sold off. This isn't that much harder. Rdrama already has a rdrama-gpt3 bot that acts like a rdrama troll just by asking an old base GPT3 to be annoying.

Plus, Reddit isn't normally used as a marketplace

There are a lot of reddit subs dedicated towards being marketplaces! There are even loan subs like https://old.reddit.com/r/borrow/ (previously https://old.reddit.com/r/Loans/ i think) where hundreds of dollars are lent out (at 100% annualized interest rates) based on post history. The incentive is there.

I think the biggest issue, though, is that these scams aren't generally set up to target the most conscientious individuals. I've heard that the reason scam emails are generally written with poor grammar isn't because the scammers can't speak English very well but that it's done intentionally to root out smart people; i.e. the kind of person whose bullshit detector isn't set off by misspellings and poor punctuation isn't the kind of person who likely to ask too many probing questions that would uncover the fact that the setup obviously makes no sense. I don't know if this is true or not (scambait videos I've seen don't suggest that the scammers are particularly good writers), but it's an interesting idea to consider. One thing that is true, though, is that scammers generally don't try too hard to conceal their scams. I've gotten a number of questionable phone calls over the years and when I start probing them or wasting their time they usually just hang up because it's easier to just wait for another mark than to tie up the phone lines trying to convince someone who's unlikely to buy in anyway.

Yesterday a scammer DMed me out of the blue on [popular website], and I replied. (after getting hundreds of similar dms, was curious). He was advertising an options trading site. The writing and english was uniformly bad, like "I got Trading" "am one of workers of company" "You can withdrawal all of your profits."

I've heard "it's bad english and unconvincing to select for dumb people" many times. But after 10 minutes of dming him a bunch of non-culture-war but offensive rdrama-tier bait, he kept replying with, alternately, mild offense and more promotion for options in broken english. For another 10 minutes I diplomatically asked him to explain the scam, or just his work situation as a spammer, and just got "am NOT" "You have to stop this and tell me if you are willing to invest". For the last ten minutes, I explained to him the 'bad english to root out smart people' theory and asked why he continued to engage given I don't match the scam recipient profile, and at the end of that he finally said "Ok bye." But then I asked him "soo can i have a link to the (totally not a scam) options site though hehe" and got "Thank you you believe it nota scam" in return. I then asked what his native language was, chatted with him in russian using google translate for a few minutes, and then gave up (he was still replying). From some longer messages, his words per minute was noticeable slow - around 30 (although according to google that's the average typing speed in the US). He never ended up sending me the URL.

This isn't really explained by 'poor grammar to root out sophisticated people theory', as the scammer didn't stop talking despite clear trolling & awareness of the scam.

My guess is 'selecting for good marks' theory is overemphasized - it's plausible it's true sometimes, although I'd like to see an actual scammer (i'm sure there are scam forums) claiming they do that, but I'm pretty sure a majority of cases are just genuine bad english, median-or-below intelligence, and poor incentive alignment between the poor call center worker and whoever benefits directly from the scam.

[/tangent]

Someone running ten thousand reddit bot accounts will probably be more sophisticated than a phone scammer, and the sophistication necessary to use gpt-n will drop as years pass. It'll be a while before they can reliably trick most people, but something as simple as 'having a plausible post history in /r/jelqing' is not that hard. Even a non-AI purely repost bot can do that - just copy 2 year old posts and comments to /r/jelqing, delete the ones that get downvoted for not making sense in context, and then when they're aged make a post on /r/borrow asking for $50 for groceries because work is stiffing me on my paycheck!

I haven’t heard that theory, just that it doesn’t make any difference how good the English is because the best scam marks are also the ones most likely to say to themselves ‘of course he has bad English, he’s the prince of Nigeria, not England’.

Like I said in another comment, I see no evidence we are there yet. No one has examples of Passable Reddit scam bots being created. I don't think it's beyond the horizon of technological possibility, or even current technology! It just isn't happening yet.

Trust is magic, but proxies for what trust degrade quickly once it becomes common knowledge. Goodharts law and all that. That's why for thousands of years maintaining honor required staking your life, the bigger the commitment required the more valuable the result.

Of course, the AI can be customized to do various things so (I'm assuming; I don't know much about this) one could theoretically train the AI on various subs to get it to generate responses that would be more in line with what's typical of the sub. But let's be honest here—that's a lot of work to run a few low-level scams.

/r/SubSimulatorGPT2?

Those simulations don't inspire a great deal of confidence toward the ability of AI to credibly simulate Reddit comments. Most of the responses are barely grammatical, let alone coherent.


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