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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29324 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Why is Lex Fridman single?

(I apologize if this is brief for a top level post. I just want the community's take on it.)

  • -52

(I apologize if this is brief for a top level post. I just want the community's take on it.)

Then give the community your take, or something. If you want to post small questions, post in a small-scale Sunday thread.

Took you (plural) long enough.

The inappropriateness of the comment should have been obvious to the OP by now thanks to all the downvotes and the multiple comments explicitly saying it's inappropriate. (I wonder, could that be the most downvoted comment ever on The Motte?)

I wonder, could that be the most downvoted comment ever on The Motte?

Yes, it could be.

Huh, it was surprisingly close.

Congratulations on beating Droog. We should have a badge for this

Who is Lex Fridman and why should I care about his romantic life?

who knows, who cares. gossip goes in small questions thread

In the spirit of brutal honesty.

Autistic, 'nerdy conservative'-coded, I'd imagine is attempting to find a woman of similar academic achievements/intellect (which skews pretty damned left), unsure if he's sufficiently culturally Jewish to tap that market/soft arrangement marriage space, I'd guess his particular slice of Austin (Moneyed, conservative, techy) skews overwhelmingly male as well.

I'm sure there's women who'd be up for the task, but from how he talks about relationships he's probably pretty narrow-focus in terms of who exactly he'd accept.

The whole nerdy conservatism thing is just increasingly toxic to getting laid. My own misadventures on dating apps found that presenting anything adjacent to that had a dramatic panty aridification effect even in wealthy, educated circles and geographies.

His podcast seems like the exact kind of thing I should be into and yet I can't stand to listen to it. Perhaps women get the same feeling from him on dates.

My strategy is to only listen to episodes with an interesting guest, skip any boring parts, and stop listening if it seems like the guest isn't that interesting after all. This has been working out great; for example, I really enjoyed the recent interview with Tim Dodd (of Everyday Astronaut) where the guest goes into a bunch of long and interesting monologues about rocket engineering.

It's because he could easily be replaced by a chatbot. He talks frequently about "love" and yet seems completely incapable of expressing love.

He has also had some morons on his show, and he acts like they're providing some sort of profound insight on life. For instance: Destiny, Chamath. He also let the founder of Cardano on his show, and let him spew absolute verbal diarrhea for like 5 hours. Lex is supposed to be some sort of intelligent computer programmer, but was unable to identify this guys completely nonsensical technobabble. And I'm not kidding, this went on for 5 motherfucking hours.

He also constantly preaches love and how we should be willing to have difficult conversations, and yet is pretty notorious on reddit for banning anybody from his subreddit who even vaguely questions him.

Finally...he really leaned into "MIT artificial intelligence researcher" but his degrees actually come from Drexel University, where his father is a physics professor. He isn't exactly lying about his education, since it does seem like he did something at MIT at some point, but he isn't really being honest either. It also seems sortof rude/insulting towards his dad to imply that Drexel isn't good enough to be proud of.

I don't know. I really used to like Lex, and I really should like the people he has on his podcast, but he just seems so fake that it's hard to get past him anymore.

For instance: Destiny, Chamath.

Any bitcoin person for that matter: Michael Saylor, Balaji Srinivasan, etc.

i don't think he researches his guests that well before he interviews them, so his questions tend to be vague instead of specific . This does not mean it's bad. his success demonstrates that whatever he does is working. Sometimes just letting an expert talk for hours works, too.

I thought the same, but most of his podcasts are really shallow. Last one I checked is the most recent with Python creator, the conversation started and the guest asked what's the target audience, to understand how much deep can he go explaining a concept:

Fridman: Imagine my listeners vary from a normal fisherman to an experienced elite programmer.

Guest: so programming is like a kitchen recipe...

And so a whole conversation by analogy ensues. I didn't catch any detail that would be interesting for a programmer.

Maybe that's okay, but I always expected something more interesting given his brand as an academic. To be fair, more detailed information would probably be better in another format like text.

But anyway, the original question of OP is not related to culture war thread.

too long. a good use for AI would be to compress a 3 hour show into 30 minutes by removing filler and speeding it up

A better use would combining this with transcription, since it's far easier for me to read text than listen even 30 minutes of prattle anyhow.

If this is worth posting at all (ehhhh) it belongs in the "Friday Fun Thread", not here, "main thread" comments should have an interesting topic and at least a few paragraphs of context/commentary.

He's a fed and disclosing his wife and kids would blow his cover, clearly.

I'd guess a combination of high standards on his part, social ackwardness, lack of time to go out due to working on stuff, and a strong desire not to be in a relationship with the kind of woman who'd want to date him for his fame and money. Lex seems to hold a very Romantic and idealistic view of relationships and love, and he wants to find someone with the same point of view who isn't a gold digger, and there are probably incredibly few social opportunities for him to meet someone like that.

What social opportunities exist to find someone who believes in love?

Well, social opportunities that aren't full of social climbers. If he goes to the sort of parties thrown by Musk, Rogan, etc., then any single young woman there is immediately under suspicion of being a gold digger or worse.

The real mystery is when it went from "Friedman" to "Fridman". Or am I going crazy?

I had a similar thing with Josh Zepps/Szeps and thought I'd dropped into an alternate timeline for a while there.

The real mystery is when it went from "Friedman" to "Fridman". Or am I going crazy?

Friedman is more common.

What the fuck, I vividly remember it being Friedman with an e.

Is this the Berenstin timeline?

Is that meant to be a third timeline, or did you mis-spell the mis-spelling Berenstein?

Here in the Berenstain timeline, I now have to do penance for calling out a spelling mistake in a spelling flame. Hail Mary, full of Grace...

Pretty much only he could answer such a question. I'd imagine it's not for lack of options.

Better to ask in the small questions thread.

Who cares?

If you have nothing to say, don't say anything.

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