Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Maybe better suited to the culture war thread, but I just had a long phone call with my friend from college, let's call her Caroline. Very atheistic, but fairly middle of the road politically. Went to Catholic School growing up, but was raised in a Jewish family (something to do with the school system in Phoenix. Recently has been getting more and more into Christianity both because she's dating a quite Christian man, and because she feels like we need God (and implicitly the Christian God is the only thing that works). I have a lot sympathy for this position, as I am a Catholic convert myself, although I haven't been to mass recently, as I no longer believe in many aspects of the faith. However this line of thinking, which is also espoused by many RETVRN posters on this forum, seems rather... myopic, both historically and just in general. Not only does 2/3 of the world's current population live without the Christian God, historically we have very successful nearly atheistic civil societies (Rome and Confucian China off the top of my head, although perhaps calling Republican Rome atheistic is a stretch). Perhaps you could argue that Christianity is better suited to the Western temperament, as it is the religion of our forefathers. This is what initially drew me into Catholicism, as Buddhism, despite being more intellectually appealing, couldn't connect with me on a cultural/spiritual level. Yet as @Hoffmeister25 has argued before, so is Germanic and Hellenic paganism, and those were violently destroyed nearly 1500 years ago.
So my question for all the RETVRN posters on this form (and also for those who agree more closely with myself) is thus. What is your best argument for why we need God as a society, and why the Christian God in particular? What were/are the flaws in previous/current societies that had at least surface level success (outside of the Modern West) that could be remedied with Christianity? For those of you who aren't Christian, I'd like to hear more about what your own spiritual/moral system looks like, and what your own vision of the future of society going forward is.
It's not a stretch, its just entirely wrong. It would be wrong for Imperial Rome as well. Like, there are many, many dissertations written about the importance and universality of religious ritual in Rome, but if you really want to experience it first hand, just go there and tour any of the hundreds of temples they built. They didnt do it for aesthetics.
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As for what I think religion is going to look like in the future, I think it’s very tough to predict what AI is going to do and how it will shape people’s religious experiences. I’m loath to make an attempt at prediction just yet.
What I’d like future religion to look like, once the hyper-advanced one-world technocracy takes over, is a paradigm that leaves room for both a High Religion and a Low Religion. The High Religion would be highly centralized, universalized, and cosmopolitan, filling a similar social role to medieval Catholicism. It’d be the religion of the State, a hierarchical and orderly religion with grand cathedrals, inspiring awe.
I’d like this to look, theologically and aesthetically, something like Zoroastrianism, or, for a fictional example, the Faith Of The Seven in A Song Of Ice And Fire. There is a central overarching godhead, but it is split into multiple personae/sub-identities which act as intermediaries between its incomprehensible hyperintelligence and mankind. Those personae don’t all share the same motivations and intentions, which can explain why so much of the world seems chaotic and not guided by some grand unified “master plan”.
The Low Religion would look more like Shinto or Proto-Indo-European religion, centered around ancestor worship and personal tutelary deities. Guardian angels, the spirits of specific locations or families, nature spirits, etc. It would allow for a far more eclectic and personalized range of worship practices rooted in specific communities, and could be theologically integrated in some way with the High Religion such that they are understood not to be in inherent tension.
As for my personal spirituality, I’m very much still trying to figure that out. Like you, I’m trying to balance the competing demands of, on the one hand, attempting to locate a worldview which intuitively seems true and meaningful, and on the other hand trying to make sure my religious practices can integrate me into a larger cultural and communal framework that isn’t a total weirdo LARP. If there was a thriving modern Hellenist community in the United States today I would probably join it in a heartbeat, but there isn’t, so I have to try and figure out what actually-existing thing works for me. I’ve been reading into Hermeticism and esotericism more generally, in the hope that it will allow me to engage in an existing religious tradition on a level beyond the literal/exoteric.
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What my mind knows to be true at the level of rational, propositional judgement: There is no meaning. There are no morals. All value judgements are nothing more than subjective sentiments. The world described by fundamental physics is the only world there is.
What my "soul" knows to be true via perceptual, lived experience: There is such a thing as meaning, and there is such a thing as "The Good" that exists outside of us, although saying anything about it in concrete terms is virtually impossible. It is the height of arrogance to think that The Good would allow itself to be encapsulated in straightforward principles like "justice" or "fairness" or "duty". The Good is a trickster; it delights in doing strange things and keeping people on their toes. The only way to know anything of The Good is to humble yourself, be quiet, and listen closely to what each individual moment is telling you. After a lifetime of cultivating this practice, it is possible that one may obtain something that could be called "knowledge", but it will only ever be one piece of a larger whole.
It'll continue to muddle on as it always has. Different races, civilizations, forms of life are always constantly ascending or declining, this is nothing new. I do believe that it's possible for the universe as a whole to reach a "bad ending", although how likely this is to happen is anyone's guess.
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I'd point to the wealth of social science evidence showing that religious people are happier, have more friends, give more money to charity, have more trust, have more children and, my personal favourite, have more satisfying sex lives. In our atomised, lonely, anxious, childless and sexless age, all that stuff seems even more important.
Answering why Christianity is a harder question, but I guess I'd point to the alternatives. Only the Abrahamic religions seem to have a strong pronatal effect (Hindus in India have fewer children than Christians and Muslims). Of those, Judaism you really need to marry into and Islam leads to gestures wildly at the Middle East.
How do you know you’re not mistaking correlation for causation, or even getting the causation reversed? Perhaps people who are inclined toward pro-social and conservative temperaments are more likely to express religious belief to pollsters because that’s the social software into which they were raised? Meanwhile the people with the same basic temperament (and same basically successful and pro-social life patterns) who live in Japan — a country where Christianity has had very little impact, and in which most people’s engagement with religious practice is extremely sporadic and surface-level — would either express wishy-washy belief in Buddhism, or honestly report that they are not sincerely religious.
Why is “having a lot of kids” the most important thing a religion can inspire its adherents to do? African and Haitian Christians routinely have families of 6-7 children, and that certainly hasn’t made their lives or their countries better. I’d much rather those places have smaller families, but for geopolitical reasons and for their own good.
Islamic societies were the most advanced in the world for centuries. Look into the Islamic Golden Age. The civilization that built the Alhambra and founded the first universities in the world, institutions which directly inspired the Europeans who founded the oldest centers of higher learning in Europe.
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Why are the current religions the only alternatives? Rome before its days of decadence around the time of the Gracchi thru to Caesar had an extremely pronatal society that was built around civic virtue. Same with Athens during the Persian wars. I'm not familiar with the exact demographics of Confucian China, but I would imagine it's also similar.
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What is the general state of online dating?
Previously, I left that particular cesspit some 10--15 years ago. Back then, I used various text-based dating websites. The dynamics were what I would describe as toxic. The platforms I used had unlimited messaging for paying users. I think the dominant strategy for guys was to message all the women they considered attractive using canned messages optimized through careful A/B testing. This lead to the women's inboxes to be full of messages which resulted in a very low response rate -- which was frustrating because I would typically put my emotional energy reserves of a few days into writing an initial message. (Today, I would experiment with sending a short comment which requires less energy. "nice shoes/helmet/whatever" or something.)
I think that with the advent of LLMs, text-based dating has probably jumped the sharks completely. If a woman gets texted by a guy who refers to her profile text, quotes her favorite authors and is generally very engaging, then 99 out of 100 times it is just some dude using an LLM who has spent five seconds looking at her profile picture before forwarding her account to his chatbot.
(I still think there is a niche for LLM-based dating where users explicitly engage with the site's LLM instead of each other and clarify their preferences through text. "Yes, I told you that I am into guys who read a lot, but the person you suggested to me just is a big nerd, I am not into that." etc. Not sure if it would offer any advantage over the status quo for women, though. Also, there is probably a cousin to Arrow's theorem stating that there is no dating system where participants are incentivised to state their true preferences.)
So how are the swiping apps these days? (Personally I think it would be more sustainable for me emotionally because swiping right is a much smaller investment. Swiping right on 100 women and not getting any matches would not significantly update my world view, while composing longer texts to three women and not getting any replies would be painful.)
Or whatever is the next hot thing in dating?
Miserable.
Both from personal experience and the sheer stats.
Every forum about online dating you can find is dominated by three genres of posts:
Male who is struggling mightily to figure out why he can't get matches.
Male and Female who are struggling to understand why someone they connected with, maybe even went on dates with, ghosted them or otherwise rejected them without warning.
Male and Female who post aggressively toxic interactions they had with their matches, and often insinuating that this is a problem with the entirety of the opposite sex.
And some people in the comments pointing out how these issues interact. (To be explicit: Most men don't get matches, so women are choosing to match with a small subset of guys who turn out to be toxic (but they're hot), and they use this experience to justify being toxic to other guys, and it ends up mostly being toxic interactions that get posted and get attention, so it makes it look like everybody is toxic.)
Admittedly there's the occasional 'hey this app worked for me, I'm getting married!' post, but rare enough that they're not representative.
Nobody, I repeat NOBODY is having a good time on these apps, and yet they all feel stuck because that's where they perceive the equilibrium is. And they repeat the various 'copes' to each other like mantras. "Its a numbers game" "their behavior doesn't reflect on you" "you dodged a bullet, keep looking!" Actually, a handful of sociopathic dudes are probably having an alright time.
Its generally known that paying money for the apps is a waste and doesn't help, yet they don't take the next logical leap and see that being on the apps at all is probably a waste.
Yeah that's the thing.
Try swiping right on thousands of women, of varying degrees of attractiveness, and getting nothing. Quantity has a quality all its own, indeed.
The dating apps have managed to cheapen the value of any individual connection to almost zero. And most of what we're seeing now is downstream of that.
Swiping-style apps are just a plague. Its easier to see that if you remember long enough ago when there were apps that sort of worked. Now they literally gameify things and pretend they're doing you a favor... whilst also denying any responsibility if the quality of your matches is terrible (but they don't let you search for what you want!) and in fact implying its really your fault altogether.
I recommend avoiding.
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It's pretty bad. At least in my case it's the combination of relatively few matches (about 1 new match a week), plus the lack of response to relatively thought out initially messages (+sometimes follow-ups). What's worse is one of my roommates has loads of success, but he's pretty scummy when it comes to women on dating apps. Leading 3-4 of them along at once pretending that he's going to commit. It feels really bad: I've decided to delete the apps and have been focusing on running and work while still socializing with friends.
And this is a vicious cycle — getting played leads women to leave, or the stories lead them to never download. I met my girlfriend in college, and she told me she’d be scared to use the apps and she’s glad she met me in person.
Yea dude. I've called this guy out on it multiple times, but he never changes. Starting to come round to the idea that this type of man needs to be castrated (or forcibly married). Women do eventually learn, but for some reason there's always more to take their places.
I feel like as I get older I realize more and more why there’s so much suspicion against men among women. That said, it’s bewildering how… lacking in instinct for manipulation a lot of young women are. Or even basic “don’t do something completely insane” instinct. I went on a date with someone once who told me she’d met a man in a park in the middle of the night. You did what?
And putting up with bad behavior in a relationship for absurdly long amounts of time. This same guy has had a "girlfriend" in California for nearly 3 years. Cheats on her constantly. She must know unless she's being extremely willfully blind. He won't officially claim her as his girlfriend unless it's convenient. Yet they still talk on the phone every single day.
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Has anyone here used the new AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 all-in-one chipset for running local AI? Like Apple M, it uses a unified memory model, so you can dedicate up to 96GB to GPGPU/NPU tasks.
It's a laptop cpu...? Do people buy expensive laptops in order to run local llms on them? Just curious.
It's a workstation laptop CPU that is faster than my 5600X and a bunch of Chinese manufacturers (plus Framework) are making mini-desktops around it.
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You see it on /r/locallama a bit. It’s usually slow, but for async tasks that may not matter as much, and being able to run higher bpw helps a lot.
If you can use online services, they’ll absolutely paste most local llms at this scale, but there’s a lot of use cases where online services aren’t an option, or philosophically unpalatable.
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Why do so many people think it's trivially easy for a "new religion" (as opposed to a new church/temple/whatever you want to call it within an existing and well-established denomination) to get tax-exempt status in the US? Because I keep encountering people blithely asserting this, despite it being my understanding that the IRS treats every "new religion" as nothing but an attempted tax-evasion scheme unless and until conclusively proven otherwise.
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