Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
Does anyone else feel like there is some indulgent aspect to posting? The whole reason I began posting on the motte was that "iron sharpens iron", but talking about the same CW issue for the 100th time isn't helping much more in that regard. I realized that as of late, I have been putting comments out there just for the sake of it, even when I don't have anything meaningful to add to the discussion; With the faint rationalization that "I can be someone else's iron".
I am not making some grand announcement to the world, but rather want to hear if anyone felt as such as well. I am going to reduce commenting for a while. Instead, I'll go back to reading more. I'm going to finally address my growing backlog of books and papers to go through. I will still participate in the motte once in a while, but only if I deem it to be meaningful participation and not just pseudo-socialization. For the near future, the motte is going to be partially read-only for me.
Partially related to this, I have had some severe panic attacks and anxiety about the way I am living my life (details not necessary right now). I realized that I am not "happy" , and that around 90% of the world has a life much worse than mine. The weight of this realization is heavily weighing down on my conscience, Just the sheer volume of suffering. I don't understand the psychology behind this, but my gut tells me that living a simplistic austere life more in service of others than hedonism (even small ones such as spending too much time scrolling Instagram or ordering takeout too frequently) is the remedy.
I think that environments where iron actually sharpens iron and undeniable progress is made over time – big boy science, competitive sports and games – are very different from The Motte (except in the narrow sense of rhetorical finesse and ability to abide by arbitrary rules of polite discussion). As Daddy Peterson puts it, they constitute hierarchies of competence. I've typed a paragraph on leagues segregated by ability, on legible scoring, on frivolous weirdness getting weeded out and robust, boring paradigms rising to the top (think Sambo/Kickboxing/Wrestling vs Karate or Kung Fu in MMA), but erased it. We produce enough smartassing routinely.
The point is, a hierarchy of competence is an environment where you can undeniably lose and your entire approach can lose, deemed pointless and discarded. In this capacity, The Motte is broken by design. Not everyone gets an AAQC but everyone is welcome to participate, over and over, so long as they play nice; and they can bring their toys too. We don't even have a shared epistemology. We can't have one, because Building Consensus is actually proscribed by the rules. This prevents us from becoming a total echo chamber, but doesn't allow to build on our not-inconsiderable output and move beyond circular hobbyhorsing. As a generalist forum for discussions of social issues pertaining to the Culture War through rational lens (arguably a restrictive definition but one I'm happy with), it's an Epistemic Minor League in an environment where Major Leagues have been carpet-bombed and made unavailable; and it can't grow into a Major League.
You're one of the best new contributors, so it'd suck seeing you leave. But I wish you well on your journey of self-actualization.
I was never under the illusion that the motte is anything but a productivity sinkhole, albeit there was a disconnect between the visceral and the intellectual realization of that. The point of not being able to iterate on past work and just having output disappear into the aether (in a loose sense), whatsoever the mechanism is only further worsens that.
But yeah I needed a long-awaited recalibration of how (WHY) to spend time here (and elsewhere) and am working towards that one grain of sand at a time.
I consider that high praise coming from you, so Thanks for that. I'm not going to leave the motte, but rate limit all my online activity because in the simplest of words, there are better and more important things to spend precious time on. (I'm thinking 10-15 minutes a day total on the motte should be enough)
Most of what I said really isn't about the motte, it's about me. Did a bad job at putting it into words.
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That's been my approach for approximately a year now. Rather than getting into randomish arguments for the sake of practicing argumentation I'll try to focus in on topics I actually have insights on by dint of my career or location or experience.
Lately that's had to do with Ron Desantis and Florida politics in general, it's actually amazing to see so many people who don't seem to get what people who live in the state are experiencing and the political shenanigans that were occurring in the leadup to his first election. But that's presumably near-mode vs. far-mode issues.
I'm happy to try to clear things up if I can.
Since he's a likely presidential candidate I expect this will remain relevant and keep me posting around here for the next couple years.
Of course I still fall to the temptation of "SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET, THIS MUST NOT STAND" urges.
I went through this a while back. Based on my experience you're on the right track in reasoning. I've never had an instagram account and plan to never get one. You also have to scale back on almost all social media use. And phone apps in general.
What you are likely experiencing is basically the realization that you're not 'doing' anything with the blessed life you've been given by dint of being born in a first-world country. So many aspects of your life are likely based on interacting with the world in a 'superficial' way, likely mediated by an app that makes you feel like you're doing something meaningful but leaving you with nothing to show for it. Many apps are literally designed to get you 'addicted' to making a digitally displayed number go up, and once you leave the app... the number means nothing. You're tricking your own brain into feeling a sense of achievement without any notable personal development or tangible result. You're running up the hedonic treadmill without actually increasing the amount of joy you experienced. You fall into a routine that reinforces patterns of behavior without moving towards a particular goal or endowing you with a purpose for it all.
A few thoughts on how to improve (all things I have done myself):
A) Find and cultivate meaningful and lasting friendships. The one MAJOR benefit of social media and information tech is that if you form a strong bond with someone, you can keep in touch with them anywhere on the globe. Instead of forming dozens or hundreds of weak and ephemeral connections, work on finding some people whose lives can intertwine with yours without making either of you worse off. And avoid forming parasocial relationships with streamers or other influencer personality types.
(Easier said than done, locating 'quality' people is the hard part)
B) Engage in tasks, projects, endeavors that leave you with something tangible or some notable improvement in your quality of life once completed. Exercise is the obvious example, but it could be as basic as building something that you will use regularly from your own two hands, from scratch or close to it. This develops skills, gives you a goal/purpose in the short term, and leaves you with a meaningful/tangible result.
C) Try to minimize consumerist clutter in your local environment. You can probably, with some effort, figure out what 'objects' you own are actually contributing to your mental wellbeing and which are just taking up space and you bought on a whim but had no actual use for. Donate, sell, or throw away the stuff you own that is not contributing to your wellbeing, is not serving a useful function, or you don't have a genuine emotional/sentimental connection with.
This is HARD in practice, I have a decent urge to hoard things. And on the front end, you must work on resisting the urge to buy useless shit in the first place.
Small point about your local environment: lighting and scents are often overlooked (especially by males) for their emotional regulation effects. A space that has pleasant lighting and smells 'nice' tend to make you feel much more comfortable.
D) Spend more time in natural spaces. Maybe it's just me, but being surrounded by greenery and wildlife (even the more boring types) and 'authentic' natural spaces (vs. curated gardens, for instance) is inherently relaxing to me. If you have no access to such spaces within an easy walk/bike/drive... move.
E) A pet, if you can manage it. Constant companionship, a modicum of responsibility and purpose in ensuring another creature's wellbeing, and they can just be damned fun.
There's a meme about the modern male turning into a "bugman/soyboy" who has few useful skills, defines himself via consumption, and is thus entirely reliant on the 'hive' (i.e. mainstream culture) to tell him how to behave, what to think, believe, and what to buy. I think there's some truth to it. If you're heavily plugged in to mainstream culture, and mainstream culture isn't healthy... it will negatively impact your health. I think this is self-evident.
I think mainstream culture is not healthy along virtually any axis that actually correlates with human happiness/flourishing.
Cutting out most of said culture and limiting your exposure to it (not cutting it out entirely!) seems a necessary precondition to achieving your personal happiness.
Just some thoughts.
That is some of it. But the entire feeling is hard to describe, It feels like a guilt response. I have a tendency to complain about things a whole lot. And it feels like I used up the limited amount of complaining allowed in the universe when there are so many people who deserve to use that specific resource more. As you can tell, it's not exactly a rational thought process.
In the lowest resolution view, it's the stereotypical first-worlder realizing that his phone had child labor embedded in it. But it's not exactly that, I know being in a mining camp is preferable to that kid than starving. My dread feels more abstract, that kids have to be in mining camps at all. Of course, I know there is no quick fix to this. The problems of the world are far too large for one man to bear, regardless of how arrogant he is. I just had that realization at a very visceral level, which is a trip regardless of how you try to rationalize it.
Since we are talking about feelings. It feels disrespectful to all the suffering souls, if I just sit on my ass and eat takeout, scroll videos for hours, argue with strangers online, or just drink and render myself retarded for significant portions of the day. I should be at the front lines fighting to reduce that suffering. Who else is better equipped to do it? I understand this is supremely naive and arrogant.
I appreciate your advice. Making my immediate surroundings better is the correction to my internal miscalibration/confusion as opposed to becoming a fulltime volunteer monk.
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You probably don't need a massive lifestyle change. Odds are that putting some time into helping people you care about will make you feel better.
Try something small. Help a friend or relative with some yard work or clean up their house.
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I definitely feel this. There was a comment from a few years back about how early in The Motte's life there was more genuine curiosity and good faith engagement because many users were embarking for the first time (in their own experience) on a grand adventure to try to understand the Outgroup. Some were repelled and went away confirmed in their belief that the Outgroup were irredeemable scum, many others gained newfound respect and empathy for the Outgroup, and a small group actually converted to Outgroupism. Those who remain here years later are jaded culture warriors in it for the intellectual stimulation (and/or the perverse pleasure) of litigating with rhetorical flourish the minute details of our 99th abortion/HBD/transgender/holocaust/woke-takeover/AGI-apocalypse debate. Every now and then a newbie stumbles in wide-eyed and innocent and asks a question that triggers another beating of one of our old dead horses, and he usually gets snapped at for being a troll because the userbase here is just tired (and perhaps justifiably so).
If I'm being completely honest with myself, I probably come here more for entertainment than to have my mind changed. I could blame this on the decline in quality posts, but that's only part of it. I think that I too am tired, I've seen the elephant, I've read what the other side has to say and I was unimpressed, though it was very interesting to learn where our root differences lie. That said, I still believe in treating my Outgroup with charity and I still enjoy reading their posts. I do sometimes end up having my stances softened or my eyes opened to additional nuance in spite of my disposition.
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Is the motte perfect? No, but what community is? I will probably not stop posting. The motte is the only community that actually is truly committed to debate and the expression of ideas, especially non-mainstream ones, which is becoming increasingly hard. I have been banned from many reddit subs (usually when disagreeing with the sole moderator, which almost never ends well), but in 5+ years on SSC and The Motte , only got maybe 3 temp bans total. Admittedly, as a mod of some subs ,I have issued bans, but they are always well-earned (spam or insulting yours truly), not out of disagreement. Same for Scott's blog (the comments). If anything, I am not using this site to its fullest potential.
Find new things to discuss?
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I'm not sure I really understand the difference. When I see something I disagree with I register the disagreement with whatever, sometimes feeble, justification I can muster on the grounds that people here who disagree with me likely have some reason for doing so. Then if I'm engaged with we sharpen eachother. If I don't that's unfortunate but this is the benefit of the CW issue coming back another 100 times, either I changed their mind such that they didn't need to engage, I understand this is not frequently the case, or I did not make my point well enough and will wait until the opportunity comes again.
Now if you're engaging with things you agree on I can see how that would quickly lose it's interest but I don't often do that, even people I mostly agree with I can find some dissonance worth addressing.
You have my condolences, we cannot help how we feel nearly as much as we wish. I won't give unrequested advice but you are not alone in this feeling and others have overcome it.
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Yeah. To reply to the first part, my answer to that is to realize that knowledge is valuable insofar as it changes decisions, and to try to generate knowledge that changes decisions that are important. YMMV.
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It's entertainment so of course it's indulgent. I post here occasionally because I like talking about these things and I especially like talking about these things with the kind of people who can make coherent arguments. I also enjoy reading other people's posts. But that's about it. I don't think that posting here is improving my real life arguing skills or having any other effect on my real-world self, and if it is than it's only incidental. If you want to post half-baked comments for the sake of argument, then go for it. There's no higher purpose that you're going to be disturbing by doing this. Obviously keep things within the usual standards of discourse, but keep in mind that the vast majority of people on here have no specialized knowledge about the vast majority of things that they post about. And by "specialized knowledge" I mean "do this for a living" or at the very minimum have a degree in the field because otherwise it's just a contest of "I read something" propositions, and anyone can become an expert by dint of having read more articles. We're just a bunch of lay people arguing about stuff that we're never going to have any real influence over, and that's perfectly fine.
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If anything, the motte has a deficit in comments, most especially a deficit in comments answering a parent comment.
See my post history for yourself, I write well argumented, semantically very rich content/micro-essays especially but not only on (ineptly) polarizing topics and to me it is clear the semantic value I add to the motte is unparalleled, yet the level of engagement I receive, be it intellectually curious questions or constructive additional facts or argumentations, is very low, low in quality but most importantly low in numbers. Most of my comments are IMO remarkably interesting and information rich for the internet and yet people don't seem to react to that nor seem to appreciate that unique proposition value in the semantic space. So feel free to indulge some comments on mines.
see e.g. https://www.themotte.org/post/317/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/56897?context=8#context
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I found this archive of Scott's LiveJournal, but I'm wondering of there's a list somewhere picking out the most interesting articles to read. https://archive.fo/fCFQx
He had this absolutely mind-blowing ten-post sequence on gender, sex, etc. It was his best work until "Meditations on Moloch".
Ten Short Scenes from India
The First Meditation on Privilege
The Second Meditation on Privilege
The Third Meditation on Privilege
The Fourth Meditation on Creepiness
The Fifth Meditation on Creepiness
The Sixth Meditation on Superweapons
The Seventh Meditation on The War On Applause Lights
The Eight Meditation on Superweapons and Bingo
The Ninth Meta-tation on Meta
@Lepidus already mentioned Scott's redpilling stint in Haiti.
A few more, from #ThingsIWillRegretWriting: "Stuff", "Libya", and "I believe the correct term is 'straw individual'".
Finally, a personal favorite on school and teacher incentives.
Top tier comedy. Love watching "white privilege" go the other way. 23 years in India, and have never had any of these happen to me. (except crying beggars, that's a daily exercise)
Varanasi is a headscratcher. Indians have millennia long memories tied to the once great place, and visit it begrudgingly. But, it makes no sense for a white person to go to Varanasi. Set on the border of Bihar and UP, you are looking at the most underdeveloped parts of the world. By the point the Ganga reaches Varanasi, it's turned into a filthy gutter. Varanasi is far from any other tourist spot, the architecture is sub-par, the important buildings have all been rebuilt recently & the large swaths of domestic tourists make it intolerably claustrophobic.
Indians have sentimental reasons to go to Varanasi, so it makes sense. Others, less so. Imagine if Indians started visiting the Memphis Bass-pro Pyramid one because it has importance to people in American South. I mean, if you find yourself in Memphis for some reason, go ahead. But, why would you go to Memphis for any reason ?
Comments like this are how you end up sprawled atop the Memphis Bass-Pro Pyramid, bleeding out, an Elvis impersonator in his ceremonial garb standing over your body with a wicked obsidian knife in his left hand and your still-beating heart in his right as throngs of intoxicated middle aged Kid Rock fans cheer and scream for more, more blood!
Do not mock the Memphis Bass-Pro Pyramid.
I was in Memphis for a weekend (my wife and I had combined a holiday hiking in the Mountain West with a trip to LibertyCon in Chattanooga, and needed to spend a weekend somewhere within a day's drive of Chattanooga to make flights work) and visited the Memphis Bass-Pro Pyramid. As an outdoorsy Brit who was completely unfamiliar with US Red Tribe outdoor culture, I was erm... enlightened
Do not mock the Memphis Bass-Pro Pyramid.
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Thanks, I appreciate this list!
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Ever wonder how the world's bluest person starts engaging with reactionary thought and HBD honestly? It's the power of (strike)rationality(strike) volunteering in Haiti and seeing every western institution replicated in cargo cult form.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150407223525/http://squid314.livejournal.com/297579.html
Excerpt:
"It has proven hard for me to appreciate exactly how confused the Haitians are about some things. Gail, our program director, explained that she has a lot of trouble with her Haitian office staff because they don't understand the concept of sorting numerically. Not just "they don't want to do it" or "it never occurred to them", but after months and months of attempted explanation they don't understand that sorting alphabetically or numerically is even a thing. Not only has this messed up her office work, but it makes dealing with the Haitian bureaucracy - harrowing at the best of times - positively unbearable."
Chicken or egg? The converse is that after spending a few years in east Africa you realize that the dude living in a dirt-floor hut who speaks multiple languages fluently and could run circles around the median ivy-league grad student is the norm rather than the exception because anyone who isn't speaking at least two languages and working three side hustles either emigrated or starved to death decades ago.
I don't think the "dirt-floor hut" part is very applicable to Haiti, and in fact is sort of racist. And as for Africa – at this point, hundreds of millions of Africans are, despite all their problems, not literally premodern tribal savages (who might know languages and stuff). They have nations, schools, institutions, and their urbanization rate is closing in on 50%. These mid-20th century excuses about cultural bias of Western metrics ring hollow when they are increasingly raised in the same universal West-derived culture.
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Yeah, we may underestimate two tendencies:
People who are truly uneducated in basic concepts may appear much "dumber" than an educated person would think. I've seen this with coding: I once eavesdropped on an older person being taught coding and things I thought were intuitive like program flow seemed to take too long. Of course, I can't remember how intuitive it was for me in the early days either, because I overlearned it so long ago.
People who are working in impersonal institutions where direct consequences for inefficiency can be deferred or it is hard to identify in the first place can appear very "lazy" and irrational (in terms of just not caring about maximizing their productivity or effort, even if there's low-hanging fruit) to people who've actually been disciplined by the modern workplace with its focus on efficiency and time. This is probably worse in corrupt countries.
I've heard Western-educated Africans complain especially about #2, talking about their own people, in ways that might cause trouble for a white man in a progressive space.
That said...if a person legitimately can't sort things numerically (as opposed to not giving a shit and stonewalling gringos)...I'm inclined to believe that they're actually facing an intelligence deficit.
#2 is absolutely something I've encountered numerous times in the wild and one of the major reasons I think that "culture" is way more important than most commenters here seem to treat it. A somewhat related phenomena I've seen both in countries with major unrest (EG Sudan, the Middle east etc...) and poorer neighborhoods in the states is almost an antipathy towards savings and capital accumulation based on a (largely justified) assumption that if someone does start to pull ahead, someone else will just come a long and steal it from them. A sort of preemptive "crab bucket" effect where instead of being torn down they avoid climbing in the first place lest they make themselves a target. Another one you see in a lot of is the old "honesty is for suckers" trope. IE "Why should I 'cooperate' when I know the game is rigged?". After all being the one honest cop in a otherwise corrupt department, or the one guy in the neighborhood who isn't in on the local organized crime racket generally isn't conducive to one's long term survival.
Local minima and a "defect-defect" equilibrium are a hell of a drug.
It's not a fictional hypothetical.
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Is this a fictional hypothetical or do you seriously believe this? I've read anecdotes from people who have visited the underdeveloped parts of Africa and they don't square with your comment. And then there's IQ results.
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The norm? There are ofc plenty of africans who could succeed in academia, but in a country where average iq is optimistically, ~ 82 (2010) and gdp/capita is 1k - 10k ... how can they compare to a median iq of (from harvard undergrads in 2002, but should ballpark grad students) 128? You aren't just saying 'africans are as smart as random americans', you're comparing africans to americans who are heavily selected for test scores and academic achievement (even the AA-admitted blacks or hispanics are still the best available). (Even if the average white/black iq difference is entirely environmental, that still applies - starving, parasites, malaria, etc as a child does make one dumber).
Yes, "the norm" because mental plasticity, resilience, and ability to recognize and intergrate new information is only tangentially (if at all) related how high one scores on an IQ test. Ditto "academic achievement".
Attempts to study this empirically get results more like this,
rather than no relation.
What is "educational achievement" supposed to be a proxy for in this context?
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Do you think IQ measures anything of meaning?
Africa has ~1.4B people. If at least 500M of those are as able to recognize and integrate new information as the median ivy-league grad - does that mean, e.g., most of them could learn to code and be productive software engineers? Or be productive research scientists?
If that was true ... bryan caplan guessed open borders would double world GDP. But unlocking the potential of 500M people, who can do complex technical work only done by a few % of the american population would quadruple it, at least. We must abolish borders, and teach all the refugees javascript.
... unless your point was merely a dig at ivy league grads, implying they're just as capable as the average american and african. But that's just facially untrue, observing the technical accomplishments of (some) ivy league grads, even in areas totally unrelated to prestige like 'anonymous internet software development', many of them are much smarter than the average. yud post Competent Elites
(he's generally right, although lmao at "smart enough for your cognitive mechanisms to reliably decide to sign up for cryonics" as a measure of intelligence as an example for "astronomically high threshold of intelligence + experience + rationality before a screwup becomes surprising" - looks like not making mistakes is quite hard)
The use of 'ivy league grads' in that statement just makes it confusing - yeah, it insults the lib elites, but I now have no idea how smart you're implying the african actually is!
I think it's positively correlated with things like conscientiousness and academic inclination, but I don't think it actually measures the thing that IQ fetishists like to believe that it measures, IE genuine intelligence or competency. It's Ironic that you should bring up Bryan Caplan because in my view he is perhaps one of the quintessential examples of someone who is academically accomplished, and clearly has a very high IQ, while simultaneously being a fucking moron.
As for how smart I think the average African is, I'd say they're on par with the average used car salesman here in the states and while some might see that as a "diss" that's whole lot smarter than a lot of folks here, especially the gay autistic Bay Area crowd, give them credit for. Fact is that I've met more idiots with prestigious degrees, than I've met idiots in living Africa or working in sales. My theory regarding the mechanism is that societies and trades with less wealth and narrower margins don't have the luxury of tolerating incompetence and/or free riders to the degree that academia does.
Your average car salesman can sort alphabetically.
It appears you use 'intelligence' is sense 'personality which I like'. This is not a useful meaning.
So can the average African, and I could just easily accuse you and the rest of the rat-sphere pf doing the same. Equating Intelligence with nueroticism and holding blue-tribe values rather than ability to think
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Self-deleted original response which expressed the view that cartoonish red tribe's mockery of blue tribe intelligence is seriously challenged by the reality of blue tribe's basically unchallenged rule over red tribe. I apologize for it's boo ?ingroup but not really ingroup...? nature.
It's a common theme with both tribes. My enemy is both incredibly stupid but also somehow also a giant threat. The cognitive dissonance never seems to register.
But only one accused the other of being the only one to think in such a manner. Eco claimed of facists in his 8th out of 14 points:
TBH Eco can go fuck himself with his uncharitable bullshit. One can be both in a position of political and economic power and still be a spineless coward (in a personal way), with weak morals and not enough "will to power".
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Reading Eco is good mental exercise. He is quite smart, capable and well-read, not without fault, but still well-read and smart. I think The Prague Cemetery could be something that wold interest many Motte users just for peeking at the sheer amount Eco has read about the 19th century politics to write it. (Never mind the plot.)
Concerning Eco's definition of fascism. If you read the original, it appears that Eco gets that because something fits his definition is not eternally always equal to Mussolini's fascism. Truncated quotes (apologies, but Eco does not write succinctly)
More briefly, I don't think Eco would have had any problem acknowledging that his list does not overdetermine "fascism". He says he is trying to gesture at a syncretic fuzzy ball of ideas but want to argues the fuzzy ball "ur-Fascism" can meaningfully still be called "fascism" in post-Mussolini era. He quite clearly gestures that many of his points are generally unpleasant types of political thought that the free world would be better without and people wearing black shirts do not have a monopoly over them. And what would be "the most innocent of disguises" if not a political ideologue who argues to be antifascist yet deploys the same tactics and ideas?
The uncharitability is more on the people who take a distilled list of his in Wikipedia and choose to apply it like Der Hexenhammer to identify witches they want to identify as witches.
edit. this was intended as a reply to @FistfullOfCrows here edit2 @ not /u/
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Define "rule" because if anything the 30 last years have seen a precipitous decline in both the prestige and de-facto power of blue tribe "experts".
By what metric?
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You might have to hunt down archives of some broken links, but:
The Library of Scott Alexandria
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A while back on 4chan, I saw an interesting quote from a book that said something along the lines of:
Now, I didn't save the picture, and it was photograph of a page of a book. I tried searching for "larger" "system" "less diversity" "support", but you know how terrible google is about finding anything that isn't an "approved" mainstream news article nowdays. I ended up finding a paper called Why do several small patches hold more species than few large patches? that was tangentially related, but it seems to be more focused on conservation. Any idea what I could search for to find more information about this as a general topic? I feel like this could "The larger a system is, the less diversity it can support" is a very interesting premise that could describe a lot of topics, especially sociological and economic topics.
As has been mentioned below, it depends what you mean by "more biodiversity". I seriously doubt this is true in an absolute sense - North America covers a much larger range of biomes than the Galapagos and therefore likely has a higher total number of species. On the other hand, the Galapagos might win out if you're measuring biodiversity by species per square inch, but that's to be expected given that the Galapagos is situated in a warm equatorial environment whereas North America is a much larger landmass that includes extremely cold northerly environments and contains biomes like taiga where biodiversity is generally low, so that drags down the average.
It makes sense that this would be the case. The geographical isolation of populations from each other allows for allopatric speciation, where two populations of the same species diverge because they get to develop in isolation without gene flow between the groups (example: the Abert and Kaibab squirrels). Populations being dispersed into several small patches of habitat as opposed to a few larger ones clearly helps enable this process.
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Is that actually true? And in which terms "more biodiversity" - more species in general, starting from Archaea and viruses up to primates? More species per square inch? Did somebody really conduct such a research? How did they count the species and what was the result?
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This is a wild guess. But my intuition is that:
Let's model a system as follows.
There exists a space where multiple agents have to compete for some finite and some infinite resources.
Some of these agents spawn stochastically.
Agents can grow and die. (Assume some randomness here too)
Agents can destroy other agents and absorb them.
Agents have some kind of gravitational field, where a larger size is a competitive advantage.
The above feature ensures power law distributed size.
Leading to; In a large system, given enough time; Certain agents can gather such 'mass' that they just immediately kill or absorb any new agents that pop up. And they are disproportionately harder to fight against as time goes on.
Think monopolies, think mainstream culture, think religions. The system I intuited above can describe memetic systems at a certain level of abstraction.
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I think a large area allows for generalist - specialist creatures. That's not a great term, but animals that evolve that can counter common survival strategies.
It's probably more clear if I give some examples.
Giant bugs are common on islands. At least until humans accidentally introduce rats. Then suddenly all the giants bugs are gone.
House cats are amazing at wiping out unique bird species.
Australia is famous for its large number of venomous species. It also doesn't have any mustelidae. Honey badgers would be very successsful.
I really don't think honey badgers will be able to evolve resistance to the entire palette of Australians venomous critters, much less come pre-equipped.
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House cats are really good at destroying wildlife overall. very efficient killers
Feral house cats, the ones who were born on the streets and raised by nature, are terrific at killing. Those raised in houses by humans are quite inefficient. especially those who know they have a home to return to, and food to eat.
Take care to spay or neuter your captive fluffy descendants of the beasts who hunted your ancestors. Those who can spawn will inevitably screw.
I suspect the disparity between island bird species vs continental bird species capacity to protect are much greater than between-cats attack capacity disparity.
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If you know the thread title, or any sequence of words in the thread, you can search on the 4plebs archive website to try to find it.
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So, what are you reading? (Also, see another good book thread here in the Fun Thread)
I'm picking up Alan Watts' The Way of Zen. Watts has often been in the back of my mind, but I never read him deeply. Extremely vague links to Korzybski has stirred my interest.
Finished Anathem by Neal Stephenson, my first Stephenson read since dropping out halfway through the Baroque cycle. Set in another world suspiciously analogous to our own except that most intellectuals live in cloistered atheist monasteries, with a gimmick where different subgroups only communicate with the outside world every 1/10/100/1000 years. Conceptually it's basically (concept spoilers)Asimov's Foundation meets Egan's Quarantine , but with actual character development.
The book combines fun world-building at the start with gripping thriller action towards the end, enough that I got through the 900+ pages in a week despite a sagging middle devoted to lectures on a tired mix of real and fake/pop science (quantum computers don't work like that!).
Published in 2008 it already feels a bit dated, especially the parts expressing a Bush-era fear and disdain of ~Protestant fundamentalists. Still I really enjoyed it overall and unlike Stephenson's earlier works it even features a proper denouement.
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The Three Musketeers in spurts. Right now I’m reading as much as I can to my baby at bedtime before they get fussy. I don’t read it every day, and the average is less than a chapter at once, so it’s slow going. On good nights my baby is cooing and laughing at me the whole time, and I get to teach them that French is a nonsense language I have no idea how to pronounce. On bad nights I get a couple of paragraphs in before I have to put the baby to sleep. It’s a fun read. I was worried it might be one of those older books that feels old, but once it got going it’s been pretty easy. Many chuckles to be had.
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The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by HP Lovecraft. About halfway through it, and so far it seems like one of his better stories.
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Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success - by a couple of economists who assembled data on hundreds of thousands of immigrants and traced them through census and tax records to examine social mobility of immigrants and their children over the past 100 years or so.
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Back with Albion's Seed, and it's really just making me want to dive deep into every aspect of American history. I'd love any book recommendations!
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I just finished Moonfleet by J. Meade Falkner.
I was randomly downloading books that I thought were from the golden age of sci-fi off the gutenburg project, and accidentally downloaded a Treasure Island contemporary.
It was pretty good. Young adult caught up with smugglers, pirate treasure, the law, jail, and final return to his home after completing his Hero's Journey. Not bad. I like this sort of escapism when I'm dealing with the stress of the modern world.
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Watts is great! I love that book.
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The Zombie Knight, a fun web serial that picked up again recently after a 2 year hiatus. About a guy who gets revived by a grim reaper and given super powers, and is thrust into the world of fight/politics between all the super powered factions. It's pretty obvious at times the author changed his mind or didn't properly plan out certain world building aspects, which is natural in a serial running 10 years, but it's still really funny and exciting.
I remember reading the first chunk of that. I can definitely see the appeal, though in the end I didn't find the power theming to be right enough. My impression was its built-in zenkai boost mechanic was a way for the author to add new toys regularly, and coming off Worm, it wasn't what I was looking for.
What did you think of some other serials from that era? Like that one with the narrative powers in an evil empire. Can't remember the name.
That is probably The Practical Guide to Evil, which is fantastic, finished, and really stuck the landing. Unfortunately, the author signed a publishing deal with some asinine company called Yonder that has an absurd microtransaction business plan. I believe it is still available for free on the WordPress site, but that will be ending at some point.
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It's definitely a bit of a cheap narrative device, but personally the excitement it adds outweighs its cheapness for me. And it's still better imo than series that in practice do basically the same thing of characters inventing new powers on the fly but just asspulling an idea or using the "I need to win for me friends!" boost.
You're thinking of A Practical Guide to Evil. I've dropped it then gone back to it a few times, usually just not bothering to keep up with the updates when I drop it, but most recently I got a good chunk through to the Dead Kingdom arc when I gave up on it. To me it just had the MC whining too much about morality. Imo she should've either decided morals matter and just become a hero, because she was basically a hero in all but name, or if the author had the balls to really make a villain protagonist, decide to screw morals and work cold heartedly towards her goals. The in between state where she'd spend half of any given arc feeling guilty about tough but necessary decisions, and Heroes who wanted to kill her solely because she was nominally but not really aligned with evil, annoyed me.
I read a number of other serials from that era too but didn't finish any of them I think. The Gods are Bastards made some world building choices I found dissatisfying. Twisted Cogs I never picked up again after one of its hiatus' but I might get around to it, I remember liking it a lot.
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Can anyone recommend any good books about the 20th century overpopulation scare / population control movement?
I've been reading some books that touch on the topic (mostly in terms of its overlap with the eugenics movement), and a thought I can't get out of my head (which maybe I'll turn into a top-level CWR post sometime) is how similar it feels to the climate change movement today. It's largely forgotten today, but from what I can tell, it really penetrated the public consciousness in the 60's and 70's, and it was really treated as a crisis and an imminent existential threat. e.g. Paul Ehrlich predicted in 1970: "In the next 15 years the end will come, and by the end I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity."
One aspect of the comparison I'm interested in teasing out some more is how the movement's opponents were treated. It seems critics of the climate change movement ("denialists") are shunned by the scientific community and vilified in mainstream media. Was it a similar case with overpopulation skeptics during the height of the movement, or was there more space for robust debate? I'd be interested in pointers to any prominent contemporary critics of the movement.
I believe some prominent contemporary critics of overpopulation as a crisis would include Malcolm muggeridge and the Roman Catholic Church.
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I read Merchants of Despair by Robert Zubrin a few years ago and while the crux of the book is an examination of what he calls "anti-humanism", the first several chapters discuss the population control movement in about as much detail as you could want without reading some ponderous academic work. It should be noted, though, that Zubrin's areas of expertise are aerospace and nuclear engineering, not history, and he's best known as an advocate for Mars colonization, so take that for what it's worth. The book is pretty good, though, and he does talk about climate change a great deal as being similar to the overpopulation scare. In other words, it seems to be exactly what you're looking for.
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What's the best way to copy long passages from a physical book?
Typing takes forever, so that's out. I've tried Googling a digital copy of the book, but a lot of times the books I read aren't scanned or are in the form of PDFs without copiable text. I usually usethe Google Lens function of my Camera app to grab text using OCR, but it's only about 95% accurate, meaning I often have to go back through and correct a lot of erroneous letters and punctuation. Is there a smarter way to do this?
Good OCR (something like recent versions of Tesseract, see here for a good frontend, though using the cli on PDF files works great) and going through the output to find the inevitable mistakes is the fastest method in my experience. Typing it all yourself is less annoying but takes more time and isn't any less error prone.
You can also pay someone to do it if your time is worth too much.
That might actually help quite a bit. Thanks, I'll check this out.
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Depends on why you are doing it. If it is for reference and retention, you'd probably be best off taking a picture and then writing your own summary and thoughts than just typing it all out.
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You might be interested in the approach described in this blog post. TL;DR take a first pass with OCR and then pass it through GPT-3 with a prompt like "The following text contains typos; please fix them." The author claims it's very accurate (enough so to support a paid product), and I thought it was a pretty clever trick when I read about it.
This is awesome, thank you!
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Type faster.
Been trying since middle school, I'm just a shitty typist.
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When should we privilege the phenomenological over the pharmacological?
There are herbal remedies that people swear induce some certain desired state. Scientists attempt to discover the underlying chemical structures that induce the state, but they don’t always get it right. I’ve come across some interesting cases of this. There’s valerian root, which only recently was found to interact with adenosine (having previously been discarded as an insomnia treatment). There’s California Poppy, which was only recently discovered to contain Reticuline, which in turn was only recently discovered to induce an opioid response in the brain. There are all sorts of things going on with cannabis which are not related to THC but instead implicate a THC/CBD synergy and plausibly the addition of chemical structures known as terpenes. There are the essential oil studies that clearly indicate certain odors induce alertness (bitter lemon) or relaxation (lavender). Then there’s the science of things like serotonin which are hardly understood at all — only recently did we learn that tryptophan will selectively unbind with albumin at the blood brain barrier, and only recently has the consensus shifted to serotonin deficiency lacking a role in depression (although I have my own views on this).
Essentially, if a person asserts “the aerial parts of the Phenomena Logicila plant make me happy”, and a scientist looking at a paper finds no clear mechanism for this to occur… what do we say? The science is never conclusive or half-finished, and maybe the person has a unique physiological or genetic profile that corresponds to the feeling. What should a reasonable person do?
Empirical results > logic and theoretical mechanisms. The most clear demonstration of this is general anaesthesia, which continues to lack an agreed-upon theoretical mechanism, makes no logical sense, and yet very clearly works. Anything less than taking empirical results above neat theories ceases to be science.
Is there a relatively simple explanation somewhere about why anesthesia makes no sense? I keep hearing this without anyone ever going into details, and it sounds like exactly the kind of thing I would find very amusing.
So there's this way to get a human, and knock them out, that's safe! And not only that, but while they've lost consciousness, they have no memory of this happening. And they don't feel pain. And then, once the anaesthesia wears off, they wake up, almost entirely side-effect free! When the closest alternative is to whack someone in the head hard enough that they fall unconscious, which is significant more dangerous, it sure awfully convenient. The sum effects are equivalent to a coma or severe brain damage, but entirely reversible! Like it is some specific procedure that exists purely for the purpose of enabling surgery. How nonsensical it is for the body to have the ability to do this, given there would be no possible use for this back when we wandered the savanna 100,000 years ago? And yet, we do have this ability. A hidden off switch that can be controllably flicked with a few relatively easy to acquire gases.
Aliens?
More seriously, is it that we don't understand how it works, or why it evolved?
There are competing hypotheses for how it works, but nothing conclusive.
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Try to confirm that the risks of harm are low and then continue to use them?
My general impression is that part of the reason people like "herbal" and "natural" remedies is due to fear of outsized side-effects from pharmaceuticals and the perception that herbal remedies are less dangerous. I have an aunt who would rather drink chamomile and valerian and tough out insomnia than get hooked on sleeping pills.
If the risk is low and the subjective experience is better...track it and continue?
phytochemicals are extremely interesting actually and a surprisingly high number of synthetic drugs are derivatives or imitations of phytos or endogenous molecules.
People use to joke/ridiculize them but there is nothing more ridicule than a human that ridiculize billion of years parallel bidirectional (both the molecule and the body adapt) optimization of phamacological pathways towards maximizing host or symbionts survival or other advantageous metrics.
The issue with phyto (some can be toxic btw) is that many have bad bioavailability and sometimes suboptimal pharmacokinetics or half-lives.
Both of those problems can be trivially solved, either by bypassing first pass metabolism via vitamin C and or increasing lipophilia absorption via co-administration of omega-3 and or via inhibiting the CYP 450 enzymes via e.g. piperine or grappefruit juice (beware can be dangerous with many synthetic drugs as it potentiate wildly their metabolism hence dose potency, profile and half lives)
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I'm not certain to understand what your goal is with that question,
a pharmacological causative model is heuristically useful to make predictions, about effectiveness for condition X and to establish a safety, tolerance, toxicity and interaction profile.
All those things are useful but mostly unecessary for the layman.
If there is a non-negligible community that takes plant X since years in quantity Y and that doesn't report huge terrifying side effects and that they report potent effectiveness then its probably worth a try for acute use although for long term use there will always be a toxicity/accelerated ageing question but in many cases we never know for certain however in most cases we do know reasonably somewhat the safety profiles.
It has actually become very rare to find phytochemicals that have not been extensively studied regarding their pharmacology and hence the causative model is often well established assuming you take time to research the research.
But beyond annecdtotal evidence, doing a blind test scientific trial about wether X is effective for Y, e.g. depression is very cheap and therefore even without said causative model we often know wether X has elicited a potent response for Y in N people empirically following precise protocol.
Empiricisms as always trumps a priori reasoning regarding effort efficiency and indeed people should considering the mostly safe profile of phytochemicals (generalization see e.g. cyclopamide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclopamine#/media/File:Cyclopelamb2.jpg) play much more the lab rats, this would drive very significantly the speed of empirical scientific research and therefore discovery of treatments for ineptly considered incurable diseases.
edit:
What does that imply? We already knew tryptophan cross the BBB. You mean the competition with tyrosine?
What?
Serotonergics are euphorisant see e.g. MDMA, MDAI, 5MAPB, shrooms, etc
The effect of SSRIs is less intuitive (reduction of sert receptors density) but still sert driven.
No, the original thought on how tryptophan crosses BBB was extremely murky, because it a lesser competitor to other LNAAs. So we knew that we could toggle greater crossing by reducing the competitors (see wurtman lab) by flushing LNAA to to muscle via pure carbohydrate insulin spike (tryptophan stays bound to albumin). We also knew exercise increases serotonin synthesis, and tryptophan depletion decreases this. What was relatively new, I believe from 2015-2018, was that tryptophan selectively unbinds with albumin at the BBB, so the albumin-bound tryptophan will release uniquely there. It’s an example of how we know little about the mechanisms of serotonin. There’s also controversy about whether how important T:LNAA ratio is to sum total T, the mice studies are not clear. Maybe I’ll dig up the metastudy I read a bit ago
Re: serotonin, I don’t actually disagree, but the consensus I read was that “more serotonin” does not decrease depression.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0
The distinction I would make is that these studies are flawed and there is actually very limited ways to organically increase serotonin production in the brain: increasing dietary T:LNAA ratio (also found to be widely healthful per a large Japanese population cohort study, on things like sleep); using fruit to flush LNAA muscle tissue; or exercise (somehow; possibly by using up LNAAs).
There are some other interesting things about this: certain human domesticated crops have higher tryptophan than wild-type; there’s a possibility fruit consumption in humans is kind of evolved to increase serotonin, and certain fruit actually have serotonin itself, like kiwi and strawberry, which is fascinating
Thanks Cafe, that is a great comment, exactly the kind of informatively rich comments the motte desperately lacks.
I will give you a proper answer tomorrow but when I said that tryptophan cross the BBB, I actually meant about 5 hydroxy tryptophan (5htp), which has good bioavailability, cross the BBB and bypass the rate limiting enzyme conversion of L-tryptophan to 5htp (which itself downstream will again be converted to serotonin in a rate limited manner)
1998:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9727088/
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How does substack moderate itself?
They seem able to walk the fine line where it's a mostly respected outlet yet allowing heterodox views, and while I've heard the occasional handwringer complain, I've not noticed any serious smear campaigns against it, or it having the 10000 witch issues.
Are any writers being cancelled or quietly deboosted?
There were plenty of smear campaigns against it, they just braved them.
The "7 zillion witches issue" was always mostly fiction, there aren't that many witches. If you can get a reasonable amount of normal people to hang out somewhere, they will be the ones eclipsing the witches, not the other way around. This was (and maybe still is being) done by sponsorship deals for authors with pretty big following (Greenwald, Taibi, deBoer, and lots of others that I don't follow).
Moderation is done on a per-author basis. It's like running your Youtube channel, or subreddit. The only thing I can think of that could have a moderating effect, is that there's something clunky about the website, that discourages high-frequency low-effort posting.
The witch issue is really easy to avoid, too, if you have a credible reason for your platform to be attractive to non-witches. Reddit could have ignored the moderation issue and not had a witch problem, voat couldn’t avoid the witch problem no matter how closely it’s moderated. You see a similar dynamic with twitter- it’s not a witch hive even after moderation was loosened, but mastodon and gab both are, albeit practicing very different kinds of witchcraft.
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Yeah, I think OP may just not remember because it was ineffective but they did the usual "start a drumbeat about how 'concerning' this is". It just didn't work.
Probably because there really wasn't a hook for the average person to get up in arms about; people can pay or not for commentary from people they like. So what?
It came across as jealousy/turf-protection on the part of the mainstream media and Substack obviously had very little incentive to fold to claims that Matthew Yglesias was a witch.
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Isn't deBoer a pro-HBD leftist? Closer to witch than "normal people".
DeBoer elliptically acknowledges the HBD-IQ aspect of reality and then doubles down from a materialist-socialist (real Marxist, not trendy 'Marxist') perspective that he wants from each according to his abilities (HBD-IQ is here) to each according to his needs (not here).
He wrote a book called The Cult of Smart. This book has valuable insights about how charter schools can IQ poach out of normal public schools to make themselves look very impressive.
Does he also propose soon abolishing of capitalism (like classical Marxists do)?
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He accepts that IQ is heritable, he also accepts that average IQ differs between self-identified racial groups, but not that the latter is explained by the former.
WTF you mean? It looks like you're describing mainstream academic anti-HBD where phenotypic IQ differs between racial groups but genotypic IQ is same.
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Your point is unclear.
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When people talk about witches, I tend to picture people who are single-mindedly obsessed with discussing issues that would get them booted from polite society, which is why they scare away the normies, which is why they are supposedly a problem for the formation of non-witchy pro free speech communities. De Boer mostly posts short stories, comments on media, and only every once in while talks about politics. I think I literally never read anything from him about HBD.
It certainly isn't his main topic, but he has posts like this or this that basically say the same thing in slightly different terms. In the first one he is quite clear that he thinks that the inability of education to close achievement gaps is due in large part due to genetics, but he also wishes for that aspect to be worked around and deemphasized.
I know they exist, the entire reason I'm following him is that he's a canceled lefty, so he had to be canceled for something.
My point is that he's not a witch, for that he would have to be obsessed with the subject, to the point he's turning everyone off except for people with similar obsessions.
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They have a "pass the buck" moderation system.
Substack's monetization is done using Square or Stripe. I don't recall which. I'll say Stripe for the rest of this post for simplicity.
But the important thing is Substack never holds the money. The readers pay the author using Stripe. Stripe takes the money and gives Substack its cut.
If an author ever says anything really bad then Stripe will kill their merchant account. Substack doesn't need to get involved.
As a result Substack doesn't need to hire a bunch of people in SF to police the tone of articles. That means that there's no one to push for quiet moderation like deboosting.
If a bunch of angry activists come at them on Twitter they can just point at Stripe.
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It's at core not a social media platform. This makes comparisons to Twitter/Reddit and their clones/subgroups somewhat tendentious. There is no really convenient way for a substack post or comment to "go viral" on the platform in the way a tweet or Reddit post will. As of yet, we also haven't seen substacks/comment sections that will rally the troops for raids on other substacks, which is generally the dynamic that leads to witch-covens becoming an issue.
It's just a different animal.
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Garden variety karma farming? Generating pre-good standing and aged accounts for later sale?
Wait everyone is saying karma farming but why? There is no value to high karma accounts. Once you get above a low minimum threshold to post in a sub, there is no further value to more karma. It doesn't make one's content more discoverable.
There is value if you resell them. Some subs have high but hidden thresholds, especially for comment scores.
How much can you sell them for? What's the threshold? I feel like the threshold is low as is the resale value. It's pretty trivial to get big karma by just posting "orange man bad" level takes on a popular sub.
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reposting old memes, reposting old links
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I suspect the goal isn't to maximise karma, but generate a reasonable amount to make the account look as if it's owned by a real person.
Copying top comments is obvious and easy to see. Copying mid comments attracts less attention.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are farming bots designed to look as human as possible, including posting at the average rate of a reasonable human. It may not be quite as fast, but it's easy enough to automate, and no reason you couldn't have a single bot run tens of thousands of accounts like this, so you might still get a reasonable number of decent karma accounts after a month or so.
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It is just karma farming by copying old comments. It's inefficient on a per-comment basis, but it can be automated and done on many accounts at the same time, so it works. It's a very common strategy that's been used by reddit bots for years. Another user noticed something similar a while ago.
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Might be a more complex karma farming dynamic? Like most big subs require a minimum karma to post, so getting started might go that way?
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Bots that copy old Reddit posts or old comments on the same submission have been around for years. There are ones that copy Youtube comments on a video into Reddit submissions of that video too, I remember a /r/videos thread where one of those attracted attention because the Youtube comment mentioned the current year and the Reddit comment copying it was in a different year. The goal is presumably to automatically create large numbers of spam accounts with a human-like history of upvoted comments to get past Reddit's anti-spam measures. The only new thing I'm seeing here is that it looks like they've worked in some program to rephrase the comment, maybe Reddit implemented some measure to detect the direct copies.
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My parents have a wireless phone charger. Problem is that it basically doesn't work when they have a case on their phones. Is there a solution to this (other than removing their phone case)?
Other than getting another kind of charger no. Those chargers are horrendously innefective, what little they can charge with all the losses is a miracle.
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Googling, there are wireless charging compatible phone cases.
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Maybe it's just the extra distance caused by the thickness of the case. Does charging work if you take off the case and put a piece of cardboard between the phone and the charger? The inductive coupling only works real close.
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I find the health aspects of radiations through induction charging worrying in principle, I have no idea how the potency compare to WIFI/5G radiation though but I would'nt risk it without studying the topic, it is absolutely not reasonable to trust our broken civilization on health topics, especially hypothetical oxidative and mutagenic long term only observable accelerated ageing.
They basically do not radiate*. It is a near-field system, not an efficient antenna. Being near-field only means that the field strength drops off powerfully with distance. Sitting at your desk with a wireless charger on it has virtually no H-fields from the charger getting into your body. And those aren't dangerous anyways. There's absolutely no concern here.
*I mean, not more than all other electronics. Every conductor is a weak antenna and the FCC limits farfield emissions of all electronics so they don't cause interference.
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Physically, it works the same way a transformer works -- induction. When you plug your phone (or computer, etc) into the wall, there is a transformer in the circuit stepping down the voltage. There is no basis to be worried about risks from inductive chargers any more than you worry about risks from transformers. Also this isn't some "new untested science" this is Maxwell's Equations, stuff we've understood since the 1860s.
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Good for you man!
Thanks, man, Posted it on a month-old thread thought, don't even know how that happened, I reposted it in the current FFthread.
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I don't know a HBD forum where to ask.
How strong are various MAOA alleles associated with criminal offending (chiefly, homicide and violent assault)?
Difference between 3R and 4R seems relatively minor and smaller than IQ~crime association. And there's 2R.
It also appears that a 1.5 repeat allele was discovered in Middle East countries.
Somewhat unrelated notice, the rare good faith answer to mentioning 2R allele I saw on reddit was like that:
"Yes, it's true that %X% are likely to have 2R allele, which increases offending probability, but then %Y% are more likely to have "crime alleles" in other genes, but they don't talk about it as much". I say it because some people think that it's in current environment that alleles "cause crime", but environemnt should be changed. And in a
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Dumb question: the absorption of a water soluble vitamin is not affected if it’s taken with fat, right?