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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   26711 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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Good morning, my fellow patriarchs, my AIPAC fellows, my Thielite dudebros and gainsmaxxing vrilchads. We gather here in memory of the dearly departed: of the progressives no longer in our midst. Of those who unironically use low human capital as an insult. They who have flounced (and who may yet remain amogus with their alts) with long, boring wordcel essays on how we're all racists, or not participating in their personal armies against Trump, or what have you. Sometimes they even delete their posts, leaving only the scathing retorts to their shaming screeds.

But why do I bring the subject up, you ask?

The reason why I bring the unpleasant topic is because it's become a distinct genre of post on the Motte. Since I am a pattern-noticer of much skill, I thought it useful to put in the effort to make a F.E.C (Frequently Expressed Crashouts) as future reference, and to hopefully save time and effort in the future to what is otherwise a pretty repetitive subject. Feel free to add onto this list, if you feel I've missed anything. I admit that I am making rote argument and there may be gaps of which clever people can argue around it.

A) I'm not comfortable with witches/HBDers/misogynists/actual racists in the Motte. That's why I'm leaving!

First of all, so long, farewell!

Secondly, why are you even here? It's not like there's a shortage of places which moderate against such people. The whole point of the Motte is to talk to weirdos and freaks such as myself with as much politeness and decorum as can be managed. If the subject matter makes you uncomfortable, tough titties. You're an adult. You can decline to participate in conversations you have no interest in. Or you can make an argument that stands on its own merits. If you can remember how to make one!

B) The moderators are terrible at their jobs! They won't ban [X] or [Y]. Here's my evidence-

@Amadan is the embodiment of the Platonic philosopher-king, and their judgement is infallible, like the pope speaking ex cathedra.

The jannies of the Motte are of a different breed than the soft, nepotistic babies of Reddit. They are veterans of forum warfare. The Navy Seals of the mop force. If you take a look at Amadan's profile and sort by top rated, you will see a long list of people they've dunked. Their rage is truly a sight to behold. The only reason they haven't torn you apart yet with their immense verbal IQ is because the other moderators have to physically restrain them from the keyboard. The fact the moderators aren't handholding every little personal spat and argument is a sign of enlightened restraint, not weakness.

C) I'm just so exhausted by the witches/HBDers/misogynists/actual racists. It's emotionally draining. For my own mental health, I have to step away.

That was always allowed. Why are you telling us this? This isn't your blog.

One of the most insidious things in internet communities is passive-aggression. Oh, if only this space wasn't so toxic, I'd participate more! This is a favorite tactic of flouncers who want to use shame but aren't aggressive enough to argue with individuals or demand change from the mods. Using therapyspeak in any other context other than therapy itself is annoying and manipulative! If you want to leave, just leave. Don't make a melodramatic show about it. No one cares.

D) I'm being oppressed because I'm going against the consensus! You guys are hypocrites!

Is the consensus in the room with us right now?

I'm not going to disagree that there is an element of groupthink to all communities. But if you come to a community with the greatest concentration of witches, contrarians, and satirical trolls per capita and you're getting pushback - maybe you should rethink things. If you feel that your position is fundamentally correct, then the number of people disagreeing with you shouldn't matter to you. So as long as you present the best version of your argument for your position, all the downvotes in the world won't change the content of your post. But if you come into the conversation expecting special treatment for being an iconoclast or going against the grain - tough luck!

Perhaps your words aren't as convincing to others as you thought it was. Get gud. Skill issue.

Funny post, tell Grok thank you for us.

This doesn’t feel AI generated to me. I liked it.

I wasted the good part of an hour writing this up, so to have the authorship attributed to Grok makes me the big sad.

The Amadan part was the main section giving me strong AI vibes - if I'm wrong, mea culpa! My thanks was not sarcastic, I did enjoy it whatever the provenance.

Ahah, that's fine.

It's kind of sad that I ping people's AI suspicions, when I've always been longwinded and rambly.

That part, and only that part, did seem a bit LLMy.

I love run-on sentences with tons of parentheticals, asides, etc., and I've found that that makes my writing less likely to get pegged as AI slop. So join the bad grammar gang (or maybe start writing like Cormac McCarthy) and you won't have to worry about it.

My fat fingers and pathological overuse of gerunds are the only things protecting me from my love of em-dashes.

Ugh, I know the feeling.

Reads like consensus building.

TheMotte is the TheMotte. Exiled weirdos call this place home, as do normies with high openness. Neither gets to define what this place is or isn't.

It's no secret that the median individual on this forum has been steadily shifting right. It's a valid concern. The place risks turning into an echo chamber. Scratch that. The risk was realized, and this place is nearing a complete transformation into an echo chamber. I don't mind a shift in the Overton window. I do mind the decreasing quality of discourse.

Sometimes it feels like TheMotte is stuck in 2020. Woke is over. Trump is president. MAGA won. Where is the America that was promised ? Consider this. What if the forum has gotten boring because people are too scared to express the true contrarian opinion?

"Maybe woke wasn't so bad after all." (kill me)

First of all, so long, farewell!

Thanks, but no thanks. I liked what this place was. In its current state, it still exceeds the bar (low as it may be) for discourse on the internet. I'll bitch and moan as much as I like. That's my right.

I was about to summon my heritage motteizan creds. I hear JD's worldview carries weight around these parts. Alas, you created an account 1 full day before me. I concede defeat.

Sometimes it feels like this forum is still stuck in 2020. Woke is over.

The anti-woke have discovered that half of them hated the process of wokeness, and the other half hated the way the process was targeted. On this forum this mostly takes the form of disputes around the Hebrews, elsewhere it revolves around Charlie Kirk or foreign wars.

Can you please expand on this? Are you arguing that there are two politically effective ways to combat the process? Maybe more?

The opposite, I'm saying the anti-woke coalition is a mixed-marriage between people who think that wokeness is wrong because the theory is bad, and people who think the theory is good it should just be applied to a different group. The former are horrified by the latter, the latter think the former are moral mutants and cowards.

Take as our basic woke concept "if you criticize the actions of BlackTM Folx, it's because you are racist and bad. Any bad outcome for BlackTM Folx is due to Systemic Racism, even if the people in power are not and would not be racist. Policies can explicitly help BlackTM Folx, but if they even implicitly hurt BlackTM Folx, then they are racist and bad."

There's a large portion of people who disagree with that concept! But they don't all disagree for the same reasons.

Some people disagree with the process. It's stupid and reductive to attribute everything to an -ism, any -ism. Identitarianism harms the group you're trying to help by stifling their drive for success, removing their internal locus of control, leading them to attribute all their failures to nebulous "haters." Every group, and every member of that group, can do bad things and be bad people, no matter how much Oppression the group may have faced before. Affirmative Action is bad because it undermines meritocracy, etc.

Other people disagree with the targets, but love the process and want to use the same process but for other groups. BlackTM Folx fail because of their bad genes or bad culture, but any criticism of Jews should be met with thought terminating screeches of ANTISEMITISM. Affirmative Action was bad when it was targeted at BlackTM Folx, but it should be targeted at white Christian Conservatives, who are the real oppressed. Etc.

Both very divergent ideologies are labeled as "anti-woke" and travel under the label, but they're diametrically opposed. One group wants free speech on campus even if the speech is offensive; the other thought it was bad for kids to be hounded for saying nigger in an instagram post but don't mind kids being hounded for saying "From the River to the Sea!" at a protest. One group thinks tracking down a twitter commenter at their job and reporting them to HR for making a joke about faggots is bad because it threatens free speech, the other group thinks that it's bad because sodomites are sinful, but are happy to track down cashiers who talk shit on Charlie Kirk. This realization is uncomfortable for the three principled libertarians, and maybe for the seven zilliion witches as well.

"No bad tactics only bad targets" etc.

It comes down a difference in views on virtue and sin.

One side thinks that you restrict tactics because they are bad for your enemy. The other thinks that you restrict tactics because those tactics are bad for you.

Like a jiu-jitsu coach that tells the white belts not to lean too hard on cheesy moves that will only work against other white belts, or caution big guys against moves that only work against smaller guys in workouts, because then as you progress or you want to compete you have to learn jiu jitsu twice.

A lot of people think sinning is winning, and that the only reason not to do bad things is out of some primitive feeling that Sky-Daddy is going to punish you when he goes through his giant ledger at the end of days. Others think that sin is bad because it destroys you, destroys a society.

Identitarianism is bad for blacks because victimhood politics holds people back. It is equally bad for whites. I'm sick and tired of hearing pissant "I coulda been a contenda" speeches from people.

So in other words, the anti-woke camp is divided on the issue of identity politics or alternatively on the issue of civic nationalism.

I would say it's divided by the question of virtue.

“Woke isn’t bad.”

I question your motives given that you are Indian. Woke was generally rhetorically at least supportive of brown people who suffered from colonialism (eg Indians)

MAGA has been very skeptically of immigrants especially Indian immigrants.

Therefore, I’m skeptical that you objectively think woke wasn’t bad compared to the status quo post. Instead, I wonder if you think the status quo post is worse for Indians and therefore don’t like it (consciously or subconsciously).

Now of course it would be fair for you to say “you too” but in reverse. I guess the difference is this is still a white country so it seems like the majority ought to be able to say “we want to benefit the majority; not the minority.”

I think you missed the 'kill me' part of my comment. Gamergate happened right as I was becoming political. I was anti-woke from the very beginning.

India has the world's most popular right wing leader - Modi. Therefore, it is hated by the woke. Western Indians are wealthy, which also puts them at the bottom of the woke totem pole. There is reason that MAGA has so many Indians. Most aspiring Indians pray at the altar of merit. It puts them at odds with the woke. 2nd gen Californian Indian women and Indian muslims have specific reasons for being woke. They're edge cases that'll take their own post. But the median Indian stem guy disagrees with woke culture and hates socialism.

at least supportive of brown people who suffered from colonialism

The woke, in their wilful ignorance, view western Indian hindus as upper class Brahmins. It treats them as oppressors. Little sympathy is extended to this lot.

Now, back to where we were....

Maybe woke wasn't so bad after all

It is an uncomfortable question I am asking myself as much as I'm asking the community.

The question isn't if woke is bad. The question is whether it is the lesser of 2 inevitable evils. Let's assume the disillusioned populace wanted to express their populist discontent by associating with a stupid and shiny movement. In that scenario, was woke the worst of all options ? MAGA and the woke are cut from the same cloth. Both view the world as a zero-sum race conflict. Demographic and loyalty points take priority over merit. Both movements have their gray tribe intellectuals and policy wonks who're kept at an arms length from power while the identarians find themselves on the throne.

If these negatives are a foregone conclusion, which flavor of it would I be able to live with ?

Idk. I genuinely don't so. That's why it is an interesting question.

95% of western woke people probably don’t know who Modi even is. They also don’t think about much of the caste system.

In the U.S., Indians are brown immigrants and therefore virtuous.

Also, from my experience Indians like meritocracy when competing with non Indians but can be rather tribal when they are able to be so. Woke permits in some ways both.

I happen to live in a predominantly Indian community. They are very upset about immigration restrictions. Perhaps I am over indexing to my local neighbors.

In the end, MAGA seems Lindy in a way woke just isn’t.

You're projecting MAGA demographics onto to woke people.

Woke people are usually aware of both Modi and the caste system. It may a couple of sentence, but they know. "Isn't Modi the hindu fascist? Isn't the caste system like slavery but worse? Are there still untouchables in India? I hear Modi is genociding the muslims in India". They know.

Indians in the west are politically homeless. Neither the woke or MAGA want them. It's mostly gray tribe 'Indians looks good on statistics' crowd that defends them.

No. Most woke people are dumb and ignorant. After all, most people are dumb and ignorant.

"Islam is in diametric opposition to feminism. Therefore, it is hated by the woke"

This is news to me. If anything it would seem to me that "the Woke" and "Radical Islam" are nominally allied. Otherwise where would all the "Queers for Palestine" and mainstream media support for the Ayatollahs be coming from?

I think you meant to reply to @FlyOnTheWall but I think the OP was using that example to prove that even though wokes should hate island we know they support it thus saying wokes dislike Indians because Modi is right wing misunderstands woke.

I think you missed the 'kill me' part of my comment. Gamergate happened right as I was becoming political. I was anti-woke from the very beginning.

I don't think zeke is suggesting you were woke, or even that you prefer woke to the pre-woke state of affairs, but that you prefer woke to the current state of affairs (because of MAGA anti-Indian sentiment)

India has the world's most popular right wing leader - Modi. Therefore, it is hated by the woke

"Islam is in diametric opposition to feminism. Therefore, it is hated by the woke"

Or less glibly, the woke have a bunch of different priorities, and sometimes they come into conflict, and they might overlook one thing for another. In this case, they would be willing to overlook Modi being right wing for India being brown.

But the median Indian stem guy disagrees with woke culture and hates socialism

Like with the Modi thing, that doesn't prove that the woke weren't trying to run cover for the Indians. On a group level, most normie Blacks didn't like wokeness either (especially with the whole LGBT thing), but wokeness benefitted them.

The woke, in their wilful ignorance, view western Indian hindus as upper class Brahmins. It treats them as oppressors. Little sympathy is extended to this lot.

I think the woke extended less sympathy to Indians (and just brown people in general) than Black people. And I think AA in the US discriminated against Indians? (this was never made clear - everything just seemed to reference "anti-Asian" discrimination)

But at the very least, wokeness provided all non-White races an immunity from being criticised on the basis of their race. Specifically, criticisms about Indian workers being less competent but taking jobs by working for less money due to lower standards, Indians being racist, Indians being scammers, Indians being rude etc - this kind of rhetoric is just unacceptable to left wing people (much less actual wokes)

MAGA and the woke are cut from the same cloth. Both view the world as a zero-sum race conflict

I will register disagreement to this strong characterisation on both points. But I agree there is undeniably a racial angle for wokism (this is not even denied by the woke), and whilst there isn't the same hard proof for MAGA, I think there is a racial angle there too (but at least for MAGA, "world as a zero-sum race conflict" is way too far - the VP's wife is Indian, and ACB has 2 Haitian adopted children)

...identarians find themselves on the throne.

Also I'll nitpick "identarian" here. I think there is a difference between being racist and being identarian - the MAGA stuff seems more like wanting to have a nice country, and being willing to think about race in service of this goal. Again I'd point to Usha and the Haitian adoptees.

It is an uncomfortable question I am asking myself as much as I'm asking the community

...

If these negatives are a foregone conclusion, which flavor of it would I be able to live with ?

But this is exactly zeke's criticism - you are doing this musing without addressing the fact that you are Indian, and how that is going to play into your feelings about the matter.

In general, I appreciate the forum culture where we focus on ideas instead of poster identities, so even if you disclose identity markers at some point you don't have to carry it with you everywhere and just state your thoughts as thoughts instead of as a White/Black/man/woman/transsexual/etc

But in a case like this, when one's [demographic marker] is so obviously tied to the issue (and [demographic marker] is unusual amongst Mottizens), and it is a subjective moral question (I don't think a poster should have to bring their own personal race into, say, a HBD writeup) and you are going mainly on vibes and what you see with your own eyes (which I am not against!)... it comes across as sort of insincere to not address it at all.

EDIT: (shortened for brevity)

Sometimes the contrarian opinion is just bad, as your suggestion is. What is interesting is the struggle to find what the actual contrarian opinion is in the post-2024 world (it's not "da joos", either).

Sometimes it feels like TheMotte is stuck in 2020. Woke is over. Trump is president. MAGA won. Where is the America that was promised ?

We're only one year in, and we're not even at a fraction of the measures put forward by the woke. Wake me up after a decade of progressives getting booted from their jobs for expressing their opinions off the clock.

Maybe woke wasn't so bad after all.

So contrarian. Much shock. How about you elaborate on what you find good about it, if you actually believe it?

I don't believe it yet. Let me sit on it.

It it'll take a few months for the acid reflux to go back down. May give it a shot then.

I know the core thesis I'll be going for:

If HBD is real, then a meritocratic world is an unfair world. If society offers no means for the 'idiot' to flourish, then one must resort to the oldest response : violence. The idiot is fooled by rhetoric and imagery. Give them representative faces and a rhetoric, to keep them docile. Elites get to be elites as long as they pay woke dues and the idiots find dignity in being part of the underclass. It's corporate harassment training implemented for society at large. No one enjoys the theater of it. But, it's a stable equilibrium and there is something to be said for stable equilibria.

Doesn't sound like something I could recognize as good. Even the stability argument is falling flat on it's face, given how much pushback it's generating.

You wouldn’t be able to get an actually woke person to agree with any of that prescription, though.

I don’t think it’s stable to build a society on top of true believers and then expect them to stay docile and go along with the kayfabe.

Same is true on the right. Attempting to appeal to right-wingers in the UK whilst clearly acting against their desires and their self-perceived interests has destroyed the 200 year old Tory party only five years after they got a genuine landslide.

Woke is over.

Woke isn't over until there is a flier of FBI crime statistics (or the equivalent thereto depending on month) posted next to the HR-mandated "[allegedly oppressed group] history month" flier.

True. That said, wasn't the whole HR-mandated woke stuff kind of exaggerated to begin with? I've worked for over ten years in tech, an industry that is often considered to be a hotbed of progressive activism, and I have almost never seen it. Yes, I would get fired if I started saying ethnic slurs at the office. But I've seen almost no woke propaganda at my jobs. If I recall correctly, the closest has been some very minor but not coerced options to have custom pronouns and maybe one brief computerized inclusivity training that I think pretty much everybody just ignored and clicked through. And that's in over ten years.

That said, wasn't the whole HR-mandated woke stuff kind of exaggerated to begin with?

The Canadian NDP (fairly popular centre-left party) is literally handing out privilege cards to members of the oppression stack to determine the speaking order at their party convention -- the rankings on said stack being determined by a non-binary chairPERSON who scolds you if you call her MADAME chairperson. Nothing is over, it's just gone to ground. (in the US)

That said, wasn't the whole HR-mandated woke stuff kind of exaggerated to begin with?

Wasn't it always just a few college kids on Twitter? /s

That said, wasn't the whole HR-mandated woke stuff kind of exaggerated to begin with?

No, it's not. Thr claim was never particularly believable even at the start of the SocJus trend, and it's even less believable after years of every major company draping itself in rainbow flags every June.

Really depended on where you were. I was at a university and it was stifling. Militants took over my student union and made seats for every minority under the sun until they outnumbered representatives of actual students, and anyone who objected was unpersoned. There were the ‘how not to be a Taoist’ (really, Apple?) workshops. The endless complaints from female colleagues about all the white men they had to put up with, apparently oblivious to my gender and skin colour. The girl who went trans, putting me at serious risk of being thrown out if I ever forgot myself and used ‘she’ for the squeaky voiced 5ft ‘man’ sitting next to me. The manager at my first tech job who hinted that I hadn’t been promoted because of my failure to give sufficiently woke answers to an HR training quiz.

Above all there was just the fear. The knowledge that if you put a single foot wrong you were dead, a decade of university and research work just done in the blink of an eye.

It was bad. I’m glad it was better for you.

Got it. To be fair, I did see negative consequences of wokeness. Just not in my career. I saw it in changing attitudes to police work that, I imagine, probably explain why one of the pharmacies in my neighborhood closed and another has almost every item locked up.

I worked at Google, and the answer is no.

The motte is not an echo chamber. It is a forum with admirable diversity of right wing opinions, which doesn’t quite correspond to the typical diversity of IRL right wingers.

Revleft, back when it was a thing, wasn’t an echo chamber either- it was different kinds of communists screeching at each other for being secret reactionaries, and sûre that’s not the vibe thé motte is going for, but you don’t have to have the conventional representatives of the other side to not be an echo chamber, is my point.

Internal diversity. It's just us weirdos and freaks. But wouldn't it be a more interesting space where left leaning users participate while being held to the same moderation and quality standards so they engage without the usual social shaming dialogue (accusations of bigotry, bad faith, or moral failure)? Let the discussions move beyond status games and purity spirals toward actual arguments. I want the leftists in the conversation. Darwin was one of the few prolific leftist posters around here, though a ragebaiter admittedly. Been two years since he ditched this site and retreated to reddit.

I'm probably more of a classical liberal than a leftist but I grew up in a very leftist space so I can Steelman a lot of it. I do my best. It's fun bickering with people here.

But wouldn't it be a more interesting space where left leaning users participate while being held to the same moderation and quality standards so they engage without the usual social shaming dialogue (accusations of bigotry, bad faith, or moral failure)?

You know the story of the Scorpion and the Frog, do you not? Despite the format, it's not one of Aesop's but apparently originated in early 20th Century Russia.

I don’t mind claims of bigotry (sometimes it is true). But what I dislike is assuming bigotry is always wrong (or at least irrational) and the inability to recognize the lefts own bigotry.

The Motte is what you get when you get arguably decades of selection pressure.

I've noted this before, but let me re-elaborate what my experience has been in forums regarding left/right politics. Most forums that allow for political sub-forums to discuss such things tend to be heavily leftist. As a result, you end up with two things;

One, left-aligned individuals will find themselves in a massive echo-chamber supported by a horde of fellow leftists;

Two, right-aligned invidiuals will find themselves obscenely outnumbered and buried under mass-replies or gish-gallops, or both.

This results in a curious selection pressure; The right-aligned posters that stay and actively discuss politics despite the above conditions end up being a cut or two above normal posters. They are the White Whales, as I personally call them, hardened in debate by scars, able to smash others in one-on-one debate while still behaving well enough that the Admins can't overtly censure them, and they refuse to flame out. (Instead, things will often escalate to the point where such posters just get pushed out for other, made-up reasons, or forum rules forcing them out.)

Now, here's the other side of this; I've seen circumstances where, in another, smaller, seperate, more niche outside forum, still made up of contintuents of the larger forums for one reason or another, allowing for a political sub-forum.

Except, things are changed, now. The White Whale is still the White Whale, but the left-aligned are no longer in whaling ships. They no longer have the echo-chamber or gish-gallop to bring down the larger foe, or atleast drown them out.

Instead, they find themselves in a dinghy, up against a scarred monster, and, as a result, it's now the left-aligned posters having a severe flame out and reduced to bad behavior when, all of a sudden, thier arguements no longer work(from thier PoV) and they find themselves constantly on the backfoot.

...naturally, the sub-forum ends up closed, as the Admins just get sick and tired of having to deal with said left-aligned posters behaving so badly.

I bring up all of the above personal anecedants and observations to get to my points; Left-aligned posters have no reason to get in that dinghy, IE, the Motte. They're perfectly content in thier various echo chambers - indeed, as we've seen, when such places end up turning more neutral(such as Twitter), the left-aligned posters will end up fleeing for more safer waters(Bluesky).

Now, I'm sure there are a host of posters on the Motte thinkings 'But I'm left-aligned and don't think that way/do that'. And yes; You, instead, have made it through another selective pressure where you don't flame out, or behave badly, or expect echo-chamber backup when making your arguement.

The Motte will always have it's selection pressure, and there's never going to be a way to combat against that. Trying to find 'new blood' will always be a fools gambit, as you're never going to be able to lay down the nessecary bait to get the left-aligned posters you want. The only way to do so would be to allow special exceptions for left-aligned posters, and all that would result in would turn the Motte into yet another left-aligned echo chamber as what centric and right-aligned posters shrug and leave, as the unique charachteristics that make up the Motte would no longer exist.

If anything, your example of Darwin is very topical. People were pointing out his bad behavior and special treatment for years, and every time this was brought up, the only real defense that could be mustered was along the lines of 'Well, he had a bunch of quality posts, so...'

I agree with the overall schema of how forum cultures work but I think you have a blindspot. The motte is the equivalent to the left-wing dominated forum but for right wingers. Lefties here are absolutely dogpilled, mass-replied, gish-galloped, mass reported, or downvoted. Far more than the reverse happens here. So yes the lefties that stick around here do have a selection pressure, but lets not pretend that righties don't stoop to the same left-forum behavior when they are suddenly the majority.

EDIT: This is straight up just human tribal behavior. Attaching a political label to it is just further evidence.

Agreed. We could do better. Myself included.

Lefties here are absolutely dogpilled, mass-replied, gish-galloped, mass reported, or downvoted.

As a lefty (in multiple senses of the word) here, I disagree heavily. The rate at which this happens is orders of magnitude lower than the mirror image in a typical subreddit that has discussion about similar topics as here. By my observations, leftist posters who get treated this way are almost always treated this way in response to particularly careless or bad-faith posts*.

* Aside: these extremely low quality posts often have characteristics which appear to me as posts that would be popular on a typical subreddit; my conjecture is that these commenters are used to calibrating their arguments for the type of scrutiny in those environments and didn't properly re-calibrated for the standards of this forum before commenting.

I disagree heavily.

Then we disagree. As a centrist, I witness and have experienced it with my own eyes.

The rate at which this happens is orders of magnitude lower than the mirror image in a typical subreddit that has discussion about similar topics as here.

If this is your major point then you are making a point I am not arguing, its not about quantity it's that it happens at all. This place has orders lower magnitudes of people than the mirror image typical subreddit. This is like saying it's safer to be be next to a bear in the woods because bears kill less people then men do. It's bad stats because you interact with an astronomically large amount of men everyday, everywhere. I doubt the Motte has more than 50k-100k active users. Just went and looked at the comparative PurplePillDebate on reddit. It has 121k weekly visitors, and it is very degraded from its heyday.

I'm not really going to weigh into a discussion of "quality". That is highly subjective, to the point, that one could easily just say every post that gets dog-pilled and mass-reported was "low quality". It's a just-so-story.

I hate the centrists label because fundamentally it means you have no beliefs. If the left pushes the left Overton farther left then a centrists moves left, if the right is winning the pushing of the Overton window then you move right.

I feel confident say Trump political core is a ‘90s finance bro in NYC which would be mostly left then. Of course he has some eccentricities but he’s mostly that. A centrists political position over a life time would be like a pinball bouncing around as a npc.

It also strongly encourages Overton window pushing, if 30-40% of voters are just centrists then the best thing you can do as a political operative is push hard on boundaries. If you move the boundaries then a bunch of centrists slide in as your voters.

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If this is your major point then you are making a point I am not arguing, its not about quantity it's that it happens at all. This place has orders lower magnitudes of people than the mirror image typical subreddit. This is like saying it's safer to be be next to a bear in the woods because bears kill less people then men do.

If this is your interpretation of my point, then you are wrong. The "rate" is on a "per-[leftist/rightist] comment (implicit: that bucks the general popular trends of the forum)", not on a "per-day" or whatever. If the rate of physical injuries during a typical encounter with a bear in the woods was lower than the rate of such during a typical encounter with a man, then it absolutely would be safer to be next to a bear.

I'm not really going to weigh into a discussion of "quality". That is highly subjective, to the point, that one could easily just say every post that gets dog-pilled and mass-reported was "low quality". It's a just-so-story.

If you aren't going to weigh into "quality," then all you're really doing is commenting on the lack of equality of outcomes (as measured by things like responses that amount to dogpiling, Gish Galloping, etc.) based purely on left-right-partisanship. And that's just irrelevant here, because the point of this forum isn't to achieve such equity. Quality is highly subjective, but it's also not infinitely so, and there are certainly qualities which are agnostic to partisanship that this forum specifically demands of the comments both by rule and by norms, and it is a good thing that a comment's quality determines, in a large part, the pushback it gets from other commenters.

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Actual lefties (of the woke variety) would get absolutely eviscerated here. Darwin was the only person I can think of that was consistently left and who posted for a long time, and his posts were always lightningrods despite him being extremely polite relative to his interlocutors. And people were constantly accusing him of doing something "wrong", of violating the rules somehow, but I kept asking for examples and people could never give me any.

I recall multiple threads where evidence was provided that went nowhere, and I have no interest in going down that path again, so I'll just register that I disagree on your assessment of Darwin and how he was treated.

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To quote Scott:

How virtuous, how noble I must be! Never stooping to engage in petty tribal conflict like that silly Red Tribe, but always nobly criticizing my own tribe and striving to make it better.
Yeah. Once I’ve written a ten thousand word essay savagely attacking the Blue Tribe, either I’m a very special person or they’re my outgroup. And I’m not that special.

Your QCs are, like, almost entirely criticisms of progressives. That’s basically catnip for this site. It doesn’t mean you aren’t left-leaning, but it does suggest that you aren’t getting the typical experience.

Directionally agree, but I have seen a lot of very low-quality right-wing takes heavily upvoted while those who try to respond have from -1 to +4 vote count. I can see how that could be frustrating for someone going against the tide. Not sure why voting feature was even preserved from reddit, it only serves to enforce consensus.

The Motte and the CWR thread it birthed from, arose at a time when, on Reddit and other social platforms, expressing extreme LW opinions in most places was deemed acceptable or popular, and extreme RW views had a good chance of getting you banned.

The Motte offered a safe space, but one with a value proposition that was more attractive to the disenfranchised. This informed our starting pool, which skewed RW even if it had a large number of centrists or more heterogeneous thinkers.

I agree with netstack below that there are other strong selection effects in terms of openness to ideas, inclination to debate, and ability to be polite. I'll gloss over that.

We skew to the right of /r/SSC, our ancestor, and to the right of the typical subreddit, at least the ones that weren't founded for the purposes of gathering around RW views.

And this is... fine? At least for me. I am an Enlightened Centrist, but the based kind, where the dots on the political compass that represent my individual views form a circle with the center at the intersection point of all quadrants.

I'm the annoying type of person that usually looks at the two polarized sides of a debate and says they both make valid points. From my perspective, the average Mottizen is to my right. But I don't care, I know that the typical liberal or leftist is more eager to burn me at the stake for wrongthink or being some kind of right-wing fanatic. Adversity makes for strange but reasonable bedfellows, the kind you can trust to take out the trash. If I didn't like talking to the mix of people here almost all the time, I'd go find some other place to mentally-masturbate.

I don't think that's an issue related to quality of arguments so much as what happens in forums that are heavily slanted but don't actively ban heretics.

For instance, I came from /r/moderatepolitics . It has a similar nature to The Motte, but with a different moderation style. You can argue almost anything if you do it in a very specific way, but the mods are both hypersensitive to and arbitrarily define what is and isn't a personal attack. It leads to things like not being able to accuse someone of being disingenuous even when they do things like repeatedly attribute a belief to you that you've explained is wrong. Even though the sub was created for debate it still ends up with a consensus belief - IMO anti-Trump, somewhat left-leaning but right-leaning on guns and immigration.

That said, in my experience the people in the minority who stayed weren't necessarily better debaters, they were just people who were completely undeterred by downvotes and often just repeated the same argument and ignored reasons why their argument was bad.

Of course I'm sure The Motte would say that about the left-leaning people here. Like I remember in the not too-distant past where magicalkittycat was farming downvotes arguing something, and had to respond to an accusation of ignoring someone with "You know I get 20 responses to every comment right?"

As far as the heretic goes, the experience is "Why are you booing me? I'm right!" Your good arguments will just go ignored and be buried. The difference between a friendly forum and a hostile forum is you can say the same thing but in the latter it feels like you are talking to a wall.

For instance, I came from /r/moderatepolitics . It has a similar nature to The Motte, but with a different moderation style. You can argue almost anything if you do it in a very specific way, but the mods are both hypersensitive to and arbitrarily define what is and isn't a personal attack. It leads to things like not being able to accuse someone of being disingenuous

Limiting personal attacks and heat between posters is a good policy, one which I wish the Motte would follow more closely. It's almost never productive to accuse someone of being disingenuous if your goal is test ideas, rather than to "win debates" in some nebulously defined way.

As a first order effect this is true, it is probably not productive to the debate at hand. But at a second order effect it could be good if done appropriately. Because if someone actually is being disingenuous you want them to stop and/or leave. Discouraging and disincentivizing bad behavior increases the quality of contributions over time and prevents things from slipping down the slope of easy farmable engaging content. If done appropriately. If the accusation is false/unwarranted then it just become ad-hominem and that itself is bad behavior we want to discourage.

If it's actual clear trolling then that's something a moderator should deal with. I've rarely seen accusations of "bad faith" or being "disingenuous" from a user debating another user to ever end up going well. It's almost always little more than "I disagree with them strongly". A lot of times it happens from 2 users occupying different information bubbles, this causing them to not really understand each others' arguments, and thus putting words in each others mouths as was often the case when people debated Darwin2500.

prevents things from slipping down the slope of easy farmable engaging content

This seems like a different issue.

Yes, our users are unusually polite, patient, and so on.

Yes, our users are also rather right-wing.

No, correlation is not causation. The underlying politeness is due to our rules. The political slant owes more to our other users.

I will note that SJ, as a rule, is not very fond of the idea of talking to racists/sexists. This is one of the defining attributes that distinguished SJ from 90s liberalism. This creates two issues:

  1. SJers are systematically likely to not see theMotte's purpose as worthwhile,
  2. SJers who do find theMotte worthwhile still have to worry about the other side of the social shaming coin - i.e., other SJers punishing them for engaging with us.

Sometimes it feels like TheMotte is stuck in 2020. Woke is over. Trump is president. MAGA won

Respectfully, this is much too short a time-horizon. Yes, Trump is president now. But he won't be in 2 years, and there has been no substantive action taken against the organizations which enabled aggressive progressive lawfare both against conservative ideas generally, and conservative activists in particular. There is precious little stopping a hypothetical Newsome or Ocasio-Cortez administration from simply reversing every single one of the anti-DEI measures Harmeet Dhillon has worked so hard on as DAG for Civil Rights, or dropping all of the ICE detainer agreements that Tom Homan has negotiated with thousands of US local police jurisdictions.

And even now, there are significant entrenched woke gains in life and society that really are quite nauseating, ranging from the symbolic (it's still mainstream journalistic style to capitalize "Black" as an enthnicity but not "white") to the really quite substantive (a continued progressive hammerlock on the education system including continued racial setasides and preferences for the melanated). The citadels of progressivism - my own beloved, beshitted California, Chicago, NYC - remain entirely undisturbed. The battle is very much still live.

Any forum is less interesting when the dominant ideological faction is in power, because it is easier to criticize and muckrake than it is to get into the nitty gritty of governing policy, which almost always underdelivers compared to rosy dreams and expectations. However let's not get carried away and assume that current trends are anything like inevitably going to continue.

Woke is over.

I have mandatory implicit bias training at work. I work for one of the largest companies on Earth by market cap. HR hasn't been informed of this happy news.

I also think there will be a backlash against Trump. Someday Democrats will be in charge and their voters will want payback. It will look something like vindictive wokeness and motivated partisan prosecutions.

Reads like consensus building.

...

It's no secret that the median individual on this forum has been steadily shifting right.

Ummm...

It’s not really though. I’m a traditionalist in most respects. There are a lot of places where I disagree with people here, especially the Groyper leaning atheists, some of HBD (at least where it’s assumed to be self evidently true without mentioning potential confounding factors like environment and nutrition and education), or tech bros who assume that turning everything over to a chatbot will naturally create utopia.

I don’t think that it’s possible for any collection of people who talk with each other for a long time to not reach a sort of consensus on main issues or at least reach the point where trying to argue about it is just no longer interesting.

I don’t think HBD can be considered witches anymore. It’s crossed the Yglesias/Noah Smith rubicon if not explicitly than implicitly. What else can it mean when Yglesias says American Muslims (filtered historically) are not like European Muslims.

The top 3-5% tend to seem to agree on it. The PMC potentially do too but for career reasons would be afraid to say things explicitly. And the rest are too dumb to have ever bought into intellectually arguments that they shouldn’t just trust their eyes (and what they see watching football on Sundays). HBD is something I knew as a 5 year old.

That is a claim not incompatible with HBD-adherents still being witches. Just, at least in the US, the kind of witch that has the power to cast a few spells if you get too uppity with the pitchfork. Good change, we need more descendants of the witches-you-couldn't-burn.

A tangentially related question: back when the Manosphere / Red Pill Sphere actually existed online, there were multiple attempts to have blogs where adult men and women can politely discuss Red Pill theories. You can imagine how it all ended up. Are you aware of these maybe?

Are the purple pill debaters still going at it?

I haven't been in a year or two, but they were still limping along in 2024. They definitely hit a sort of evaporating cooling effect where most of the intelligent discussion oriented folks left, leaving mostly people in the rage-phase of their various red/pink pill movements.

EDIT: This is /r/purplepilldebate specifically

They definitely hit a sort of evaporating cooling effect where most of the intelligent discussion oriented folks left

When was their "golden age" ?

They've been around for 12 years, it has always been a den of scum and villiany but the arguments/discussions were at least more interesting than shit-flinging. Probably 10-8 years ago was peak. so 2016-2018/2019 my memory is a bit weak on the exact period.

No more, I imagine. The sites in question went through purges initiated by women, then became deserts and died.

The motte doesn’t have a ‘consensus’, we’re all witches and wrong thinkers of course, but different kinds of wrong thinkers, a wide variation and one which is instructive to watch, as while we do exhibit blind spots and patterns, we truly cover a variety of politically incorrect opinions.

To be fair to the, uhm, contra-contrarians, there is a noticeable issue here of voting- for-agreement (as opposed to quality of argument) and dogpiling. Even if both are far better than reddit. It's human nature I suppose, I regularly catch myself wanting to downvote only to control myself since the poster is clearly arguing in good faith, I just disagree hard.

Yeah I don't entirely understand why this website has up and down votes at all. I've never once changed my sort option from "new". Although I am probably on this website more than most. I'm sure the people with self control who skim it once a week enjoy sorting by "top".

I think they should be removed though, or at least hide the score. Although I dislike that downvoted comments get buried, it's lame. And given the mods actually mod here, we don't need downvotes to ensure good signal:noise ratio.

I've never once changed my sort option from "new".

I guess there are two types of people. I've never changed mine from "old". Although I remember some people browsing directly from the firehose which seems insane to me, but all power to them.

Something about my style of participation here spurs very few replies to my comments. For example, here is the previous comment I posted to this website right before this one. Often I would have no idea anyone is even reading what I'm writing if my comments didn't have the vote counts under them.

I'll be straight up, I often simply delete any of my comments that have zero replies and zero votes (up or down!) by the time the vote count is revealed 24 hours later. Those messages-in-bottles left floating in the internet seem pathetic and embarrassing to me somehow, so I delete.

I know I'm the only one on this website who uses the votes to gauge engagement, because no one else has echoed this sentiment or even voiced agreement with it.

I have definitely done the same.

That being said, your comment is +7 there and I remember seeing it and chuckling, so you're not screaming into the void

FWIW the easiest two ways to get replies are:

  • end your post with a question
  • post something that is mildly controversial

I've never understood this, updoots and downdoots have always been retarded to me, but maybe that's my 4chan background talking. If anything, downvotes are a sign I pissed off the right people, but w/e.

Eh, I sort of agree with you but 4chan has its own version (could be argued from the reddit influx) of (You)s and image replies. One's own thread receiving invective or positive shitposting is also a form of this.

Is there a consensus somewhere that the up/downvote is not a proxy agree/disagree?

Ideally it's supposed to be related to the "objective" (lmao) quality of the comment, regardless of your personal valence towards it.

I think that was the original idea on Reddit when they added the system.

I think LessWrong splits it into two different forms of karma.

the OG redditards made the rules and they said upvoting is for useful info, downvotes for fake shit

also i wanna elaborate that i mean actual reddit, not here where the upvotes send you to valhalla

I've always felt that making upvotes and downvotes visible to anyone but the moderators (or perhaps at all) was a bad idea and that it would be better not to have them at all. If people want to agree or disagree at least make them put their name on it.

Yes, this is something that the drama website we forked our code from does well—all votes are public. (And downvotes are also counted as upvotes for algorithmic scoring purposes, which is hilarious and honestly not a terrible idea.)

As much as upboats can be farmed or warp the discussion to a popularity context, I think they serve a useful purpose. The ratio of lurkers to posters in all sites has always been lopsided in the favor of lurkers, and yet if we had no voting system these people's opinions would go unseen. The field would be dominated by those determined enough to wax lyrical at length. The upvotes serve a useful feedback system, if we are to have any discourse at all it would be meaningful to gauge the audience's reception to our arguments.

What could be done to make it a little bit more interesting is have a personal invisible tagging that the user picks. Could be a multi-axis affinity designation. The user's tags/afinity would be only visible to themselves and the backend. Then then "updoots" would also be collated so publically you would be able to see (received 10 updoots from conservatives, 5 downvotes from conservatives, 3 upvotes from progs, 7 downvotes from progs) etc. etc.

I'm not sure what the UI spec would be for this. But it would ameliorate the loss of information a raw number like 16 bears.

The bit about the ratio of lurkers to posters is something that I hadn't considered. I don't think it's enough to change my mind but it is a good point.

This is lame and while its not bad enough to report, I'm sad I spent time reading a digital version of you preening your feathers and crowing about your moral superiority by virtue of being part of the majority on an autistic (I include myself in that) debate forum.

Did I miss some flameout that prompted this?

Of those who unironically use low human capital as an insult.

Those people aren't progressives, and they're still around. It's the ones who were nodding along with Hanania right up until he started saying Orange Man Bad. And the econ-pilled ones who were mad about tariffs.

@Amadan is the embodiment of the Platonic philosopher-king, and their judgement is infallible, like the pope speaking ex cathedra. The jannies of the Motte are of a different breed than the soft, nepotistic babies of Reddit. They are veterans of forum warfare. The Navy Seals of the mop force. If you take a look at Amadan's profile and sort by top rated, you will see a long list of people they've dunked.

My pet theory is that @Amadan is Freddie DeBoer. Hear me out.

He's obviously invested in TheMotte, but rarely makes a top-level post (has he ever?) on a new subject - and he can't, because it would inevitably be about basketball or education policy or half-asian babies and destroy his opsec. When he talks about his politics, it's always how he's a true leftist but the progressives put him up on the wall for wrongthink (Freddie saying HBD-adjacent things, being cancelled). He clearly has a job that allows him to piss away hours in the middle of the workday on the sisyphean task of internet jannying. 'Classical-liberal' politics. It all fits. Giants walk among us.

The whole point of the Motte is to talk to weirdos and freaks such as myself with as much politeness and decorum as can be managed.

I'm confident most progs manage to be at least as decorous as this post.

Perhaps your words aren't as convincing to others as you thought it was. Get gud. Skill issue.

The world is too complex for anyone to properly grasp. The purpose of echo chambers is to selectively filter/spin stories that flatter their ingroup, or make the outgroup look bad. I'm fairly confident that if you perfectly swapped someone's social environment to be full of partisans of the opposite valency, and fed them a curated media diet you could change their politics fairly easily over time.

In other words, a lone prog crusader isn't going to convince TheMotte any more than you're going to turn Reddit pro-Trump, regardless of how eloquent either of you are.

Did I miss some flameout that prompted this?

Maybe I'm being narcissistic but I feel like I may be at least half responsible. I blame the other half on @KMC and @FiveHourMarathon. No disrespect intended but I share the latter's perception that if @KMC's comment had been aimed at "Negroes", "Venezuelans", or "Trump-Voters" it likely would have gone un-reported and thus un-moderated.

What that means for the forum as a whole is it's own conversation.

You said this in modmail, and repeating it doesn't make it true. @KMC has been modded for saying similar things about "Negroes." People absolutely report posts that tee off on Trump voters, blacks, and other groups.

I can't even fathom your theory of mind that says we give special protection to Indians.

At this point, you're a broken wrong record.

Not "Indians" the "Ingroup".

Which, as @FiveHourMarathon observed in that same thread, is perfectly understandable, "We're always going to have a bias towards our friends."

So, your theory of mind is that I go extra-hard on anti-Indian comments because I am (kinda sorta in a distant online way) friends with @self_made_human?

Why do you think I don't go hard on anti-MAGA posts since I'm about equally friendly with @FCfromSSC, then?

I don't know how to penetrate such obtuseness. I'm just going to keep pointing out that you're wrong, and if you want to advocate for changes in moderation, telling us we're doing things we aren't is a demonstrably unsuccessful strategy.

So, your theory of mind is that I go extra-hard on anti-Indian comments because I am (kinda sorta in a distant online way) friends with @self_made_human?

I wish. I'd settle for you going easier on me in particular, but I will note that every time we've had a disagreement (or the one time you temp banned me before I became a mod), I thought you had a good point.

On a more general note, there is little need to demonstrate favoritism towards the mods here. They were chosen because they were considered a good fit for the community and have a record of the kind of engagement we're looking for (and of course because they're willing to devote the time and energy). It is little surprise that we're not the ones usually needing to be slapped with warnings or bans, and even when we do mess up, it's usually a temporary lapse that is addressed through internal channels. The overwhelming majority of the time we end up in a fight, it was provoked by someone less sympathetic.

This is easy to mistake for favoritism towards us and harsher punishment for those we dislike, but I do not think it's true. We usually recuse ourselves from weighing in on moderation decisions when we believe that our judgement is clouded because of personal antipathy, or even because us taking action will convey the impression of a vendetta.

@JeSuisCharlie isn't just accusing us of being biased towards each other, though. He's accusing us of giving special protection to Indians because of you.

Presumably the only reason we haven't banned the Joo-posters is that none of the mods are Jewish (afaik).

That is a claim I find even more confusing. I can kinda sorta understand the reasoning behind claims that we are biased against left/right wingers if I squint, not that I think those accusations have much merit either.

(The RW claim we extend affirmative action to Leftists, the LW claims we go easy on the Right because that is the Forum Consensus)

But Indians? Really? I have no idea where that's coming from, and I think your handling of KMC's previous warning was perfect, and that you would have done the same thing for any other ethnic group. I wouldn't have touched it (not that I had the opportunity to before you did, as far as I remember) because of the potential of coming across as having a conflict of interest.

(As I've said before, Zorba's moderati must be above reproach)

People write negative comments about Indians all the time. I have done my fair share of criticism, even though I also come to our defense when I feel that the criticism is unfair/factually incorrect. Usually, that amounts to politely reminding people that India is not sub-Saharan Africa, and that assuming similar levels of dysfunction or dirt is unwarranted. Can't say I've ever modded anyone for insulting us either, though I do recall you warning Hlynka for being blatantly racist against me years ago (an opinion shared by others in writing). If I can't get away with claiming that I am extremely non-partisan about my place of birth when I have multiple comments discussing its dysfunction (or acknowledging that claims of an average IQ in the low 80s have evidence), who can?

I genuinely consider my ethnicity to be mostly incidental trivia about me, at least when it comes to my most important opinions and beliefs. I can't really help being Indian, can I, but I am nothing like the modal Indian in India, or even the other lucky bastards who made it to the West.

Eh. People will always have grievances. Some more factually warranted than others. I feel like this one can be safely ignored, while I make a cursory wave in the direction of potential personal bias while denying actual bias.

If anything, the most "anti-Indian" poster we ever had on here (though I haven't seen him here for a few months) was that actually Indian castist guy who seemed to think that most of modern India's problems could be fixed by getting rid of special treatment for the lower castes and making Brahmins truly the top dogs again. I think his name was something like MrVanillaSky? Was certainly an interesting perspective to see. But I saw him get modded a couple times, he definitely didn't seem to get special treatment.

And when everyone dogpiled on self_made_human for using AI to slopify his posts I didn't see any mods rushing to rescue him even though he's both Indian and a mod himself.

We don't really have many active Indians who have mentioned they are Indian here. From memory, it's just me and @DirtyWaterHotDog, after Vanilla left (apologies to anyone who I've forgotten, if they exist).

Vanilla was an interesting character, there are plenty of right-wing leaning Hindu-nationalist casteists in India, though I have the good fortune of knowing very few of them. As painful as it is to admit, I think it's probably true that there exist significant disparities in IQ between castes in India. I'm far from upper caste, and just above the threshold where I'd be lower-caste and entitled to affirmative action.

Speaking of said AA: I loathe it with every fiber of my being. It deprived me of the opportunity to enroll in a better med school despite decent grades and exam results. I was entirely caste-blind my entire life until that point, because I was Westernized enough to simply not care (and my family were socially liberal). The immense resentment that developed afterwards is mostly gone, because I managed to escape to a place where caste had no bearing, where everyone's performance was judged on the grounds of the performance itself.

I understand why the upper castes are mad about things, even if I'm lower-middle caste (I lack a better word for it). This AA is ruinous in India, and many have fled to the West to get away from it, even if that wasn't my primary motivation. From a purely Bayesian perspective, these mostly upper caste Indians are probably right to think that the lower castes who benefit from quotas are dumber than them on average. Should they import their casteism and rage to a Western context? Probably not. I don't. But someone who got into an IIT on the basis of caste is not of the same quality as another candidate who didn't. It might be an inscrutable and impenetrable quibble to a white recruiter in SF, but Indians from India would know better.

I consider myself fortunate not to have to worry or particularly care about it anymore, and note that I would never have if it wasn't wielded against me or used for demagoguery and identity politics.

And when everyone dogpiled on self_made_human for using AI to slopify his posts I didn't see any mods rushing to rescue him even though he's both Indian and a mod himself.

Neither did I. Amadan was one of the critics himself, and while I still advocate for my approach to LLM use, I took his dislike of it seriously. Far more than I would the average resident doing a drive-by. Negative feedback from someone I like and respect (despite his concerning takes on Reverend Insanity) means much more to me than anything thrown by the peanut gallery. I think his response, namely ignoring or skimming most of my posts, is a far more reasonable one than people calling for any LLM usage to be banned or slinging insults at me. I endorse the general principle, I agree that for many topics on this forum: if you don't like it, don't read it, instead of bitching about it.

(This has a limit. SS gets warned for joo-posting when he becomes one note. It is good for him that he tries to spice up his repertoire on occasion, though his true passion and calling still bleeds through.)

Hell, since the initial kerfuffle, I even ended up using LLMs less for editing purposes and stylistic purposes. My self-imposed standards include that if people are noticing and mentioning AI influence in my prose (regardless of their stance on it), then I've lost too much of my original voice and character. Or perhaps I took it even more seriously because people who appear intelligent and discriminate and who gave me positive feedback mentioned they noticed in passing. Even if they don't mind, I do. I like my voice, even if I think AI helps me in practical ways.

most of modern India's problems could be fixed by getting rid of special treatment for the lower castes and making Brahmins truly the top dogs again.

I've worked with many Indians in corporate America. I've even been sent to Hyderabad and Delhi a few times over the years. Its takes a while for Indian coworkers to open up to you about this stuff, if they ever do, but opinions in the same general neighborhood as this are incredibly common, though not necessarily the part about Brahmins being in control, the bits about special treatment of the scheduled castes seems universally unpopular amoung people who don't receive the treatment, and even some that did. Of note, Indians that work in corporate America in the US is a powerful filter on who you hear from.

Of note, Indians that work in corporate America in the US is a powerful filter on who you hear from.

The ones in Silicon Valley are the most notorious for it online, at the very least. I don't work in SF or in tech, or even happen to live in America, so I have no idea if it's actually common, but most other Indians not in India don't care very much. The 2nd gen ones hardly care at all.

I've stopped thinking about it entirely since I've left the country, though as my reply above will show, I haven't changed my actual views on the topic. It's good to get away with not caring, instead of it being a constant handicap or shackle around my ankles like in India.

I work with a ton of Indians at my day job (about 80% in Mumbai, 20% in the US) and I make a point of looking people's surnames up since it's a decent (if imperfect) indicator of caste. The more competent of my coworkers (though this is an obscenely low bar, they're almost all awful) definitely tend to have last names correlating with higher castes.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard Amadan talk about schooling, so that can’t be right…

Amadan is a self-proclaimed leftist? Are you sure? I kind of feel like I would have picked up on that after years of being here.

Not sure it’s that easy to change someone’s mind. I spent a lot of time on redddit. I never became a leftist. Political beliefs though due seem to align with my background and where you would expect someone of my background to end up.

How many male, rust belt town kids, who kept going to Church weekly well into 20’s vote Democrat? Might be able to shorten that today to - male and has had manual labor jobs for at least a summer.

I would guess with probably a 50% probability that without moderation Reddit would become the Third Reich in 6 months. Leftist places online seem to need to be protected to exists.

At this point non-leftists have so many discussion forums that it's possible there are no longer enough non-leftists lacking a home to cause a non-censored Reddit to be swamped by them.

Possible. I just also think right-wing ideas tend to spread online either because they hit natural tribal instincts or are simply correct.

But certainly there was a time when anywhere open to rightist was the only store open.

How many male, rust belt town kids, who kept going to Church weekly well into 20’s vote Democrat? Might be able to shorten that today to - male and has had manual labor jobs for at least a summer.

How about - how many male, rust belt town kids, who went to church throughout their childhood and then went to the northeast/west coast to a prestigious college end up voting democrat?

I would guess with probably a 50% probability that without moderation Reddit would become the Third Reich in 6 months. Leftist places online seem to need to be protected to exists.

The only reason I would pass on that bet is that there are hyper-motivated NEET-autists (see: 4chan) who would spam Hitler memes and scare off the normies. It wouldn't become the Third Reich because a bunch of middle-class redditors had a change of heart and started goose stepping down Park avenue.

The world is too complex for anyone to properly grasp. The purpose of echo chambers is to selectively filter/spin stories that flatter their ingroup, or make the outgroup look bad. I'm fairly confident that if you perfectly swapped someone's social environment to be full of partisans of the opposite valency, and fed them a curated media diet you could change their politics fairly easily over time.

I agree with this, but only to an extent. I think that there are personality based limits to this. If I'm being perfectly honest, I went from being a progressive raised in a liberal family to no longer being a progressive once the progressive social millieu I was in started saying too many things that hurt my ego/went against my personal interests. I think a lot of transitions of people politically/socially, in modern terms often people who grow up and live in one political/social group to the opposite one, come from the politics they inherit harming their ego or going against their self interest. There are tons of historical examples where people go against their social subgroup due to a harm their social subgroup dealt to them.

My pet theory is that @Amadan is Freddie DeBoer. Hear me out.

Cute theory, except I'm not a leftist, I'm exactly the kind of liberal centrist Freddie despises.

but rarely makes a top-level post (has he ever?) on a new subject

SF nerdery. Which Freddie also despises.

I'm exactly the kind of liberal centrist Freddie despises.

That's exactly the type of cover Freddie would use for opsec. @Goodguy

My pet theory is that @Amadan is Freddie DeBoer. Hear me out.

I'm sold, and I'm adding this to my list of Motte conspiracy theories that I believe (others include JD Vance lurking here).

Well, if he's around, I'm politely asking him to approve the next visa application I make to visit the States. I'll even stop liking the meme edits on Twitter.

I'm pretty sure Vance likes the memes considering he dressed up as one of them for Halloween. Maybe you should promise to make more of them.

I find this one more plausible than the Freddie deBoer one.

It's true that I've never seen Amadan act like a raging dick in the same way I've seen FdB do (and over rather small issues).

Freddie is mentally ill, and with no malice intended, it can show in some of his writing. Amadan is the polar opposite, he's even and calm-tempered to a degree I find impressive, concerning or mildly-intimidating. It takes a lot to piss him off, or to even see him lower his standards. We could use him as a benchmark for "sanity".

Reminds me, I need to take my pills or @faceh is going to make me his tulpa.

Yeah I actually like FdB, but I don’t think in a million years he’d have the patience to moderate a forum like this, lol.

Goddammit, Don, stop blowing our people’s cover!

Sigh. The most annoying part of minor forum drama is when someone uses rare, inconsequential examples as an excuse to create even more drama. Often the meta-drama is worse than whatever the problem was. You'll see this, on occasion, on Reddit: there'll be a hundred people loudly complaining and farming upvotes about some form of thought crime that happened in the comments, and then you'll scroll down and see that what kicked things off was maybe 2 or 3 comments that were downvoted to oblivion.

I think that is precisely what you're doing now. It's been weeks or months since we've had the kind of flameout you describe, for the reasons you describe. No, Dase doesn't count. He didn't quit because he thinks we're right wing retards, he just happened to be particularly disgruntled and claimed that there were too many idiots here for him to handle. While I clearly don't agree with him, I can see where he's coming from.

There have been, to the best of my knowledge, no other high profile cases of people throwing a hissy fit before their departure in ages. Turok, maybe, but that's been a while. But I doubt anyone misses him too much. Darwin? God knows it's been long enough that we've probably evolved a few new species of finch.

While we have a rule about leaving the rest of the internet at the door, we also, implicitly but perhaps even more seriously, have norms that say that your current antics aren't acceptable either. If Amadan's not going to put on his mod hat, I'm not either. We have our differences, but most of the time I do recognize he has a point and that he does an excellent job. But I will say, mostly as a user but also as a mod, that this crap belongs on rdrama. Please take it there instead.

Judging by the reports, this is not going over well. It does kind of read like a bit of trolling and dunking on your outgroup.

First of all, as much as I appreciate the (no doubt totally sincere and not at all tongue-in-cheek) flattery, I do not "rage" and I am not sure why you are they/theming me. My pronouns are "He" and "Go away."

More seriously, we have seen some of the rage-quitters and "I can't even" flouncers you mention, but really, not that many. And not all of them have been outraged leftists. For the most part, the leftists who can't stand to share space with HBDers and misogynists have already left. We do have a couple of very persistent mentally ill obsessives who keep screeching at us in filtered comments you never see, but again... not all of those are leftists.

Unfortunately, I do think evaporative cooling is leaving us with fewer and fewer posters who aren't one-note culture warriors, and very heavily skewed towards the right. I wish there was a way to recruit more people of diverse viewpoints, but even the SSC/LessWrong forums now think the Motte is a hive of scum and villainy because of who we don't ban. There really is a longer point to be made here, about how rightists have become the more ideologically "tolerant" faction. Not to say I don't get the sense that a lot of rightists are very eager to put leftists (and moderates) up against the wall - but they will at least talk to the other side while it's mostly liberals who now act like even engaging in dialog with a MAGA is starting down the dangerous path of seeing them as human beings.

The Motte regularly disheartens me and there still isn't any other place like it.

I don’t know what the ideological leanings of this place even here except that on occasion it’s a decent place for me to express an opinion and get feedback on it. People that are highly invested in any topic or community will typically overanalyze and read with much greater intensity every letter in the words someone writes. Some of my comments draw in consensus, others get blasted, but that’s part of any community.

I also agree with him somewhat about the way you ‘seem’ to moderate, Amadan. I’ve replied in kind to other posters in the past where logic has clearly left the building and ran out of gas on their part, obliged them and been every bit as much the condescending prick they come across. Strangely the finger wagging did seem to be somewhat one-sided in my case when the abuse of the rules were far more concentrated on the other side. On my last ban I didn’t even know I’d been banned at all, let alone for several months. I just voluntarily went on an extended hiatus and miraculously chose to visit the site on the exact same day the ban had been lifted.

Posters on the regular need to keep their emotions in check and ask themselves what they’re looking to get out of these conversations. And if you get little to no value out of them, then it’s better to leave the platform. Moderators on the other hand need to be somewhat charitable when someone comes along and sarcastically delivers a counter argument against someone else’s point. It’s difficult to interpret where someone is coming from through text when that’s all you have to go off of, but either be strict and apply it consistently across the board, of it there’s ambiguity, step in to clarify or otherwise let it slide.

Should we make a try at returning to Reddit in search of new blood?

The environment is different now over there.

we must retake our homeland, yes

I don't think it's the worst idea, but from a moderator perspective: Jesus Christ their tooling is awful. And as a mere user, the current reddit mobile experience is obnoxious.

I would reserve/endorse a return for very specific circumstances, such as if this community is truly dying (it's not). Or perhaps we could start posting things that aren't just the monthly AAQCs there, maybe smaller discussion threads that show evidence of life and are a springboard to the site.

We genuinely are doing pretty fine, even if we don't have the activity that the sub had at its peak. If I had the opportunity to meet Scott in person as planned, I'd have begged for him to give us even a small shout-out in a relevant Open Thread.

I don't think we are dying but I do think we are losing interesting people and shrinking in variety.

Please no.

Reddit is a publicly-traded company led by spez. They could add ID verification, kill old.reddit (and insert more ads), take over the subreddit and do whatever. They've already killed third-party apps. Enshittification is real and they're undergoing it.

Even a few days ago they banned r/theadamfriedlandshow (supposedly for a meme about Israelis dine-and-dashing, but I couldn't find confirmation).

I trust Zorba more.

I had the masculine pronouns in place, before I realized I actually didn't know your pronouns and asking you what they were for a bit of servile flattery would probably annoy you more.

The reason why there's a partisan tilt to my observation, and that's because righties do not go 'this forum is full of feminists/progressives/liberals, and I'm leaving' because A) no one says that and B) such a conservative would have already been preemptively banned a long time before they could get exasperated. I tried to be as nonpartisan as I could, but there really is a difference between righty and lefty crashouts: the former have personal animus against the mods and the latter are disgusted by the community itself.

It does kind of read like a bit of trolling and dunking on your outgroup.

It reads incredibly lame and like he's doing a victory lap. It amuses me people reported this, but it definitely brought down the average quality of this weekly culture war thread by a small amount.

I wish there was a way to recruit more people of diverse viewpoints, but even the SSC/LessWrong forums now think the Motte is a hive of scum and villainy because of who we don't ban.

I guess jettisoning the ideology of rationalism would be a start? Just thinking out loud.

I would rather hang myself, or take some of you guys with me (this is a joke, and not just for legal reasons).

What I like/love about this place is that it hasn't divorced itself from its rationalist roots entirely. Sure, it's drifted to the point where I'd personally label the Motte as rat-adjacent; yet it retains the important things - like, the popularity of clear arguments and good epistemics makes it one of the few places I care to interact with the internet. Minus any pretense of Standard Rationalist Rules For Discourse, this place would become indistinguishable from 4chan or X in a week.

I think there's also the issue that intra-maga disputes are illegible to anti-maga people, intra-right disputes are illegible to anti-right people, intra-non-left disputes are often illegible to progressives, etc. There's some equivalence for the right looking left, but mostly in bad faith on the part of right-wingers, because we get the left-wing stuff megaphoned into our brains by the prevailing culture whereas the right is, in Scott's words, "dark matter". So themotte looks to some like a place of spirited debate over important questions and to others like an echo chamber of right-wing circlejerk. I happen to be of the former view, but opinions naturally vary.

If you can identify easily what kind of persona won't do well here and summarize it in your points 1 and 3, that in itself is a consensus. Do you not see the contradiction? Not to mention the other consensus of opinions here. And with every crashout, it only gets stronger. Why you're being smug about it is beyond me.

It's like showing up to a zoo, which advertises itself with animals, and then complaining to the zookeepers: "I think animal-keeping is unethical. Why don't you get rid of them?" A Motte without the chuds and the HBDers and the holocaust deniers already exists: it's called the SCC reddit/comment page.

Admittedly, 1 and 3 are quite similar, but one is more emotionally manipulative than the other which I found annoying enough to warrant its own entry.

The subreddit is nice, albeit too quiet for my taste. The actual comment section on the ACX Substack? Pure sensory hell for me, in the sense that the terrible UI and UX makes me never quite feel like writing there. I could and should, in the sense that's a good way for me to get a boost in popularity in exchange for effort, but it's just that bad. And I'm the kind of person who begrudgingly uses the reddit mobile app, even if it's a hacked and modified version.

I wonder how soon LLMs will become cheap and fast enough that all websites can be rewritten on-the-fly to match whatever UI style and format the user wants. I feel like the tech is pretty much there in browsers, but no human has the time to write a bespoke algorithm for each site they use, which also could change at any time. A sufficiently fast AI could fill that role and do it realtime, adapting to any changes by the website devs.

Because I too dislike the substack comment UI and wish Reddit (and Twitter too, for that matter) hadn't killed all competitor apps and forced us to use theirs.

I guess it depends which action you're criticizing. I don't ask for anybody to be banned for instance. It's quite easy to simply not respond to the people I find odious.

But it is easy to notice that bad comments that agree with the Motte consensus end up fairly highly upvoted even as they get a modhat response, and if you go against said consensus you will often end up in the negative regardless of the evidence you bring. I would be pleasantly surprised if I changed even one person's mind, but usually you either get downvotes and no response or some response that boils down to belief that a nebulous outgroup is evil and acting out of malice. Not exactly intellectually stimulating debate.

but usually you either get downvotes and no response

You gotta change your frame of mind. I get so happy now when I rip a large comment with some linked support and then don't get a response back.

I used to get a dopamine hit when I saw the little red bell was lit up, now I get one when I make a good comment and then check back and it's empty.

Good morning, my fellow patriarchs, my AIPAC fellows, my Thielite dudebros and gainsmaxxing vrilchads. We gather here in memory of the dearly departed: of the progressives no longer in our midst. Of those who unironically use low human capital as an insult. They who have flounced (and who may yet remain amogus with their alts) with long, boring wordcel essays on how we're all racists,

Can you link to a couple of these "goodbye" posts so I know what you are talking about?

I'll try not to make this a "Amadan's Greatest Dunks" compilation, but here's something roughly representative.

GematriaUnlimited, alt of banned user, hater of MAGA but from a vaguely socon perspective, hysterical calls to action, namecalling.

Clementine, nonspecific objections to subject matter, not specifically naming names. Generally wishy-washy.

AlexanderTurok, "You're all retarded low-human capital."

KulakRevolt, "It's time for the reactionary revolution, talking is pointless"

You'll have to take my word for it that this is roughly representative. Flouncers who delete their posts are unfortunately permanently removed from the historical record, so I can only characterize them generally rather than specifically. Honorable mention to GuessWho the Darwin alt who got so throughly destroyed that they didn't even make a huffy flounce post, but instead slunk away in shame.

There was(?) also @justawoman.

Still lurking, endlessly entertained from the void. Amadan continues to hemorrhage the site into an echo-chamber, self-made-human's addiction to the attention they get from here got so bad they started using A.I in an effort to make this place their Substack, faceh continues to scream, magicalkittycat puts up the good fight but since the moderation is fundamentally broken it's useless, but between the occasional Astral Codex Ten "are we the baddies?" comment, Data Secrets Lox literally rooting for the glassing of the Middle East and the Motte waiting for marching orders about birthright citizenship, I feel like a kid at a circus with too many attractions to choose from. I put my fist in the air for you though, @magicalkittycat. I know you've got good intentions.

I just can't help myself. Adrenaline is such the drug, but hope is on the horizon; I go to the gym now. I can now run 6.0mph for a sustained 7-8 minutes. I like to think if I can reach a ten minute mile, I can stop bad habits, and reading opinions I fundamentally don't respect from people who I also fundamentally don't respect in subconscious hopes of seeing their eureka moment to fuel my hope my estranged parents will have their eureka moment is one of the worst habits I own. Plus I've already seen the eureka moments from all three of my witch covens and they're never as satisfying as they are imagined in my head. Maybe when I hit my ten minute mile it'll all just slide into place and opening the Motte will never cross my mind seriously again.

Amadan continues to hemorrhage the site into an echo-chamber, self-made-human's addiction to the attention they get from here got so bad they started using A.I in an effort to make this place their Substack, faceh continues to scream, magicalkittycat puts up the good fight but since the moderation is fundamentally broken it's useless

I'm relieved to find that I think that all of the specific examples you've given are, as far as I'm concerned, bad ones or at least of questionable judgement. That genuinely makes the one that singles me out easier to ignore, so thanks?

(It is far more painful to be critiqued by people you like, and who like you, generally speaking. Especially the ones who do usually demonstrate good judgement about these things.)

For what it's worth, I do have a Substack that I use as a Substack, I also think most if not all of my posts are the type of thing that has a place here. There is plenty of stuff, including effort-posts, that I do not wish to post on the blog but do share here, and far fewer the other way around.

I should ban you for the trolling and personal attacks, but you're kind of amusing. The trolling isn't that amusing, though, so that was your one freebie.

Remember, while you feast on the schadenfreude and disrespect, the schadenfreude and disrespect is also feasting on you.

Honorable mention to GuessWho the Darwin alt who got so throughly destroyed that they didn't even make a huffy flounce post, but instead slunk away in shame.

Truly the legend of Amadan lives to this day, and shall never be forgotten.

Wait... Kulak was progressive? That's, um, certainly a definition and category...

"Progressive" is not the term I would have chosen, I would have characterized them more as an "anarchist" or "revolutionary socialist"

It is actually kind of interesting how different peoples' categorization of different ideologies depends on their ideology itself. Often they lump in different ideologies based upon the fact that their objection to those ideologies are the same. The modern left objects to both conservatives and revolutionary rightists/fascists since both oppose the left's egalitarianism/universalist values. Conservatives oppose both leftists and revolutionary rightists for trying to rebuild society based on abstract theories.

Liberal fascism is a snarl, but it also encapsulates a real aspect of how traditional conservatives view the world and what they find wrong about both ideologies.

I am neither lefty nor progressive, but I too have flounced off in my time (and then got dragged back in again). Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!

If you ever storm off declaring you're not coming back and then don't return within a few months: I'll have to check the obituaries. I say this with some degree of affection, even though we rarely see eye to eye.

That quote from the Godfather movie which I've never seen, but which everyone seems to know, applies here!

I make up my mind "Okay, all I'm doing is getting into stupid fights and collecting warnings from the mods like empty bottles, I am not learning anything, I am not doing anything, quit and stay gone".

And it lasts for a while.

And then I have something I want to discuss, but nowhere else to discuss it. Or someone makes a post or comment that is so misinformed on something I do know about - and off we go again 🤣

It’s given us some pretty good usernames, though :) I liked @FarNearEverywhere.

I am neither lefty nor progressive, but I too have flounced off in my time (and then got dragged back in again).

Hence the "HereAndGone" username I presume?

You and me both.

I'm a socially libertarian, economically moderate, tough-on-street-crime, race realist, pro-choice but can understand where pro-life is coming from, moderate-on-immigration classical liberal.

I don't post here as much as I used to because it gets boring to argue with the same few conservatives about the same few topics over and over again.

Not only that, but many of my disagreements with conservatives boil down to matters of preference that can't really be argued about on rational grounds. For example, take the matter of whether drugs should be legal. This topic can often boil down to a question of whether individual liberty is or is not more important than the government taking steps to keep society physically and mentally healthy. But that is not an answerable question. It really is just a matter of taste, odd as that might seem.

I do still find interesting ideas here pretty regularly though.

I notice that my comments often get upvoted much more than the actual written replies to them would make it seem. Which indicates that either people here are actually pretty good at upvoting for reasons other than agreeing with the material and/or that the people who post the most on the site are not actually a representative sample of all the people who vote on the site.

This topic can often boil down to a question of whether individual liberty is or is not more important than the government taking steps to keep society physically and mentally healthy. But that is not an answerable question. It really is just a matter of taste, odd as that might seem.

While I do get and agree with this, there is some useful discourse around the implications of those vibe-driven policies.

For example, I'm relatively OK with laxity on drugs, but I wish those folks would either ge% behind efforts to exclude the indigent from libraries/parks or else admit that this laxity has a real consequence in the destruction of those places and the deprivation of those that would usually benefit from them.

One doesn't have to confront the unsolvable issues to have that conversation. And maybe it helps not to talk about it directly but to work on how to accommodate it and what tradeoffs are needed.

Oh, I agree with all that. I think that drugs should be legal but that society should strongly police things like antisocial use of public spaces. And I agree that it is good to have a conversation about the tradeoffs that both the lax or the strict approach to drugs have. I just think that the fundamental issue of individual liberty to consume substances vs. use of government force to limit individual consumption of substances is not rationally arguable.

But that's a perfectly valid reason though. It's not like the Motte is homework.

Agreed. I just saw your post as an opportunity to share some related thoughts.

As one of the leftists on here the only reason I'm posting less is that I'm retiring from my day job to work full time on my own creative projects. While I'm at work my employer owns the copyright to everything I create, which is why I can't work on my creative projects here. This frees up time for the motte, because I'm totally fine with my employer retaining copyright to my cancellable rants against Israel and nuclear power.

Then again I'm very atypical for leftists in that I think HBD is real and that social justice/woke culture is a counter-productive dead-end for left wing political strategy, which is probably why I have been posting here instead of whatever the real leftist forums are.

in that I think HBD is real and that social justice/woke culture is a counter-productive dead-end for left wing political strategy, which is probably why I have been posting here instead of whatever the real leftist forums are.

My man, nice to know there are two of us.

I've basically totally left reddit, and stopped browsing there a ~year or two ago, but if you don't know about it, you may find /r/stupidpol a good time

tl;dr: It seems almost impossible to judge the validity, reliability and authenticity of the goals and states principles of those outside of your circle. Do they actually believe it, do they actually think it's true, will they actually do it? Eg, "No new wars" and the Kamala deadenders who run the D's to pick an example from each ruling tendency.

I come here to-day to humble brag about my money, but in a culture war way; and to share my sure to succeeded investment system. This is financial advice, and you can trust it! (This is not financial advice, do not trust me.)

I've recently made a bit of a small amount of a fuckton of money based on starting amounts; took my fuck around money and plowed it into you guessed it, oil futures and related industries before it became clear that no, he really is that stupid. I'm up a lot on top of my previous gains from betting (read: instructing my investment guy who tells me which southeast asian restaurants are for real) to bet as if the various Trump economic policies would:

Not meaningful increase productive employment in the US.

Not help the balance of trade issue.

Not hem china in in any way, and in fact increase their gravity as an economic center.

Not lower the debt at all, public or private; and in fact increase the debt massively. (This one didn't amount to much, there isn't much money to be made here until the US starts to go downhill for real, so it's just positioning for now.)

This compounding my gains during the Biden boom times, I am up quite a bit, so much in fact that It no longer is fun gambling haha stonks money and now I'm worried about what it does; so I'm taking it as far out of the US economic sphere as it is possible (which isn't that far) as a hedge. I would buy gold with it, but I kinda think that it might not be a good idea right now, I don't know.

As to the culture war angle: If by merely assuming that the ruling party will fail at all it's stated goals and betting against them no matter how flimsy the reasoning gets, I make a killing; how does it keep on rolling? How do people wake up and see the all the red arrows, all the "I'm warning you!"s becoming "I told you so!"s and stay hype?

It would be one thing if there was some sort of big social project that the party was ride or die for; but even it's most sacred commitment (deporting non-whites) was limited in scope (non white, but not the ones the boss or his friends or his allies rely on, H1Bs for all and Farm Scut work for everyone south of the border!) and on the optics chopping block after all.

Where is the there there? It is it all vibes, or do people really, truly believe that there is a plan?

And the actual point of the whole post: Would it be possible for such a person to convince me, even if they truly ment, and even if they were right? It's hard to imagine anything but events changing my mind at this point, especially since my fuck around money is too ballin' for the FDIC to handle anymore off of them being wrong so far.

I'm concerned I've fully closed my mind to my opponents here, but I'm also concerned that if I opened it an inch more my brain would fall out.

I've recently made a bit of a small amount of a fuckton of money based on starting amounts

Congratulations! I am always happy to hear about a fellow Mottizen prospering.

It would be one thing if there was some sort of big social project that the party was ride or die for

There are several major administration priorities, including (1) beefing up immigration enforcement (such as by increasing integration between federal immigration authorities and local law enforcement), (2) going after racial and gendered DEI policies and set asides (e.g., the VRA's "majority minority" districts, which SCOTUS seems likely to strike down and federal contracting laws), and (3) clearing state voter rolls and voting policies of tactics amenable to machine-style vote banks (e.g. the practice of receiving mail-in-ballots after election day)

It's just that a lot of this stuff is being done in quiet backrooms with a lot of very unsexy administrative law wrangling, and so doesn't make headlines.

However, on the broader point about there not being some sort of "plan," I completely agree with you. Trump clearly plays things by the seat of his pants, and there simply isn't the personnel infrastructure around him, either qualitatively or quantitatively, to carry through some sort of grand bizarro-Great Society-level legislative initiative. Plus, Congress is very close to becoming a completely vestigial organ, and so is in no fit state to draft, amend, approve, and push through such legislation anyways.

It's just that a lot of this stuff is being done in quiet backrooms with a lot of very unsexy administrative law wrangling, and so doesn't make headlines.

I just don't believe any of that is real, I guess. DEI to me was always a pride flag on the lockheed martin float type of situation; the only population that REALLY got anything out of it was women, specifically white women, specifically white upper middle class women, and they are still going to get exactly as much preferential treatment (deserved or not; I'm not even making a value judgment here) as before.

On top of that, until I see movement on actually enforcing use of E verify with universal fines, It's all immigration theater. We know what actually stops people from coming, we simply choose not to do it because it hurts the bottom line for the people in the R coalition with the juice.

Attributing one's own win in one of the many money lotteries that exist is a form of the fundamental attribution error. Most of the time, such a win is just a lucky windfall, although most people nonetheless claim they „deserve“ their luck due to being a „predictive genius“ by winning at gambling or a „hard worker“ by spending a lot of time buying figurative lottery tickets, which can take the form of oil futures, polymarket bets, or cryptocurrency. If money were distributed on a „deserving“ basis, the correlation between wealth and age would be near-zero, since existing longer does not make one morally better and therefore more deserving. But lotteries have entry fees and take time to play, so they produce a positive relationship between age and wealth.

Attributing one's own win in one of the many money lotteries that exist is a form of the fundamental attribution error.

I think centrally, the fundamental attribution error is more the inverse, the attribution of outcomes to character traits in others while blaming the situation for one's own outcomes. "He is late because he is unreliable, whereas I am late because I got stuck in traffic." Or, more on the theme, "She lost money because she gambled irresponsibly, whereas I had really bad luck with my stock portfolio."

What you describe here is something along the lines of "my good fortunes come from being hard-working and smart, whereas she merely got lucky."

That being said, I think this bias exists. Anyone can win a hand of poker, or double their investment with some financial instrument. Someone being good at investing would be them making many appropriately-sized bets over a longer period and winning enough of them.

If money were distributed on a „deserving“ basis, the correlation between wealth and age would be near-zero,

Wouldn't it be the opposite? People who have worked longer are deserving of more?

I don't see most work that is done in reality today as being related morally to its wage, and consequently to whatever savings are accumulated from it. For example, a lot of San Fransisco 50 year olds made way too much money in a software boom, often being head button style changer for Google for 10 years. I don't see this as entitling them to the $1 million they probably saved from that career. Yes, it's how they made their money and got it to be legally recognized as theirs, but morally they did nothing to „deserve“ it. Another way of looking at this is that I think the correlation between market wages for an occupation and deserved wage is zero, or maybe even negative. Someone who works for decades in cargo driving has done a lot to fuel the actual economy, but since their job pays close to subsistence wages, they will not have a lot of wealth at the end of a long career. But by the labor theory of deserving, they deserve a lot more than an ex-Googler.

But I reject the labor theory of deserving too, because it assigns preeminent value to people who happen to exist right now. The cargo driver may have fed his neighbors, but why do they deserve that? Why would that entitle the feeder to anything? Through the preeminent value of the people who are alive right now? How do we justify that?

If you do not take egalitarianism as an axiom, then people have different moral worths. And these worths precede anything they do, including labor. And also, serving the labor market does not actually fulfill a duty to people of higher moral worth, since the labor market is a mixture of random (in the case of the Googler's wage) and egalitarian (in the case of the trucker deserving a lot of wealth).

Either moral worth does not change with age, or it does. If it does, I think it seems the most sensible to say that it peaks during the reproductive window. This is when people need the most resources, so they can have children, and when they are the most capable in all aspects of life. So again, it seems off that old retirees would be the most deserving class of people when it comes to having wealth. They are definitely not the highest value age group, and whatever they spent their career doing probably did not increase their moral worth.

Someone submitting code that broke the Google search button would cost the company on the order of a million per minute; it's only natural that Google would pay a lot to minimize that risk. Of course, there are automated processes in place to prevent and mitigate those kinds of mistakes, but that makes the work more complicated than messing around with some CSS. And even that doesn't cover all the work involved in something as seemingly simple as maintaining a button--accessibility, brand consistency, i18n, framework migrations, etc. This work is very lame but also very necessary, and not something a random trucker could do or even (unfortunately) the average CS grad could do.

Also, just informationally, as others have pointed out it's pretty much impossible for any SWE (not even the head button changer, who's probably some L7 taking home a million per year) at Google to take a decade to accumulate a million. Maybe five years or so, depending on your career progression, especially with the bull market of the past decade.

Either moral worth does not change with age, or it does. If it does, I think it seems the most sensible to say that it peaks during the reproductive window.

Perhaps (past life)1 × (expected future life)3.

Someone who works for decades in cargo driving has done a lot to fuel the actual economy, but since their job pays close to subsistence wages, they will not have a lot of wealth at the end of a long career. But by the labor theory of deserving, they deserve a lot more than an ex-Googler.

The "I hate knowledge workers theory of value". You've said elsewhere that you are a libertarian, does that cash out to anything? You don't think people are entitled to the wage their employers have freely elected to pay them? You instead think, almost exactly, "to each according to their need"? You can make a case for communism, but this isn't really what it looks like.

I don't see this as entitling them to the $1 million they probably saved from that career.

$1 million? Were they a janitor?

their job pays close to subsistence wages

This is untrue and easily checkable.

The "I hate knowledge workers theory of value".

You read into it too much. This is not Marxism. I like knowledge workers at least as much as truck drivers. I am a knowledge worker, and I am trying to make Google-tier funny money. But I would never justify my entitlement to that money with the mere fact of acquiring it. A lot of people acquired it who did not deserve it, and some people who deserve it did not and will not acquire it.

If we take a consequentialist libertarian perspective then wages are heavily correlated morally to wage. That is, whenever two people transact in a mutually consensual exchange, profit is generated and split between them in some way. That is

Total Value Produced = Consumer Value - Producer Cost

If producer can produce good X for $10 and consumer values it at $30 (subjective internal evaluation), then them buying the product generates $20 of value, distributed between the two depending on the price. If the producer sells it for $20 then both of them profit $10. If the producer sells it for $29 then the producer pockets $19 and the consumer profits $1 (in terms of getting a thing that they wanted more than they want the money they spend)

There is some ambiguity about what a fair/reasonable split should be, which is not automatically identical to the ultimate market price, but for any level of split the amount of profit someone earns will be proportional to the value created by their transactions. Which in turn means that the value someone creates is heavily correlated with the amount of money they earn. One exchange which produces 10x as much value as another exchange will result in 10x as much profit to be distributed, and likely result in both the producer and the consumer(s) getting approximately 10x as much. Google probably generates trillions of dollars of value for consumers (though the exact amount is subjective and hard to measure), and in turn earns billions of dollars of revenue. Which they deserve, because they create value. A button engineer who works at Google and does their job competently helps generate this value, in that Google would not be as convenient and usable without their work, and would have outages or errors if they messed up. The difficulty of their job is one component in the cost, but the dominant term in the moral desserts is the consumer value. The Google button engineer has done a LOT to fuel the actual economy, it just doesn't seem like a lot because the indirectness of the value they produce is hard to parse as a human, and the amount of actual labor they needed to leverage to this effect was low.

Working hard at a fixed task will create more value, so on average moral desserts will correlate with working hard. But it would be silly to Goodhart this by thinking that working hard IS moral desserts. Value created is what actually matters. Any system of moral desserts which rewards people for being inefficient is absurd.

Now, obviously there are tons of counterexamples where people get paid despite not creating value. If Google hires 30 employees for a team and one of them does the actual meaningful labor and provides $100 million of value while the others do stupid stuff, and each gets paid $1 million, then the competent one deserves more than they got while the other 29 deserve less. But somewhere in that system the $100 million is actually being earned.

Even a step up, you can have an entire company which is rentseeking, bullying competitors, squatting on legal loopholes, etc, and earns lots of profit despite not providing value to anyone. But by necessity this is rare because someone somewhere has to create the value for them to earn. I'm not saying the correlation between moral dessert and wages is 1. But it's high, even when the value someone creates is indirect. A lot of white collar work is incredibly important and impactful, which is why selfish greedy investors are willing to pay for it in the first place.

You're just assuming my trucker logic applies ten-fold to a Googler. But that begs the question of value and moral worth: the Googler only deserves what he has in that case if the trucker does too. But I was skeptical that even the trucker deserves it. Because why should economic productivity determine moral worth? This is implicitly egalitarian, because productivity is defined as serving anybody, and privileges people who have simply been alive longer, because they will have more total lifetime productivity. I think it's more fruitful to debate egalitarianism and elderly privilege directly, instead of assuming that economic productivity as normally defined in 2026 is a perfectly just way of determining who gets what.

Your total net worth is not equivalent to your lifetime productivity, because people spend and consume things. Your per-moment income is (or should be) equivalent to your lifetime productivity, because that's inherently fair. You do things for other people, other people do things to you. You get what you do. Your profit is equivalent to the amount of value you've provided to others that you have not yet been compensated for. If you provide labor which is worth $1000 of value when consumed by other people, and they pay you $1000 for it, the $1000 is literally pieces of paper. You have done good in the world and you haven't yet received a real reward for it. You deserve to have other people do stuff for you, because you've done stuff for them. Until you spend it. If you buy $500 worth of food, that represents farmers in the world doing labor on your behalf, in exchange for you having done whatever it is that you did, which is either directly on their behalf, or more likely on the behalf of someone else who did labor on the behalf of someone else who... eventually somewhere along the chain the farmer benefits from labor that someone did who benefited from labor that you did. But half as much. Because you earned $1000 and only spent $500. If you eat $500 worth of food and save $500 in your bank account, that means you have provided $500 worth of value that you still haven't been rewarded for. You're a net moral positive, in that you've created more than you've consumed. Money represents favors owed to you by society because you (or whoever legitimately earned the money you currently possess) did favors for society and hasn't received the equivalent reward in real material goods and services yet.

If someone legitimately* earns $10 million and then spends all $10 million on themselves, they're a net neutral. They produce and consume in equal measure. They do good by stimulating the economy by the consumer surplus that other people extract on top of what they themselves earn from their work. It's not an exact science, but it's proportional. On average, people who do this are probably fine, and we should consider them to be neither a saint nor a monster.

If someone legitimately earns $10 million, spends $1 million on themselves, and then donates $9 million to charity, that represents $6 million worth of real value they've provided to someone and then chose to give the rewards to someone else. This person is a saint. They create value and keep only a fraction of it for themself.

If someone legitimately earns $10 million and then spends $1 million on themselves and keeps the $9 million in their bank account to spend later, that represents $9 million worth of real value that they have provided to someone and have held the remainder in abeyance for the moment. They deserve $9 million worth of goods from society because they have done work that society has deemed to be worth $10 million, and society has promised them $10 million in exchange for their work, and they probably only did the work in the first place because they were promised this $10 million. And they've only used up 1/10 of that promise, they are entitled to the remainder. In truth, due to consumer surplus they have enabled more than $10 million to society as a whole, with the rest being captured by their employer, customers, business partners, and taxes. The $10 million is the remainder they've been promised themselves for their contributions.

If by "moral worth" you mean "is this a good and kind charitable person who sacrifices things for other people at their own expense" then no. But I reject that entire premise. Economics is not zero sum. If you are clever and efficient there's no reason you have to sacrifice your own good for other people when you can both mutually profit. A person who creates $10 million over the course of 20 years has done 10x as much for society as a younger person who has created $1 million over the course of 2 years. It's not that the former is a "better person" than the latter. Both are providing $500k to society every year, both receive $500k per year. It's that the former has chosen to behave like an intelligent long-term thinker and stockpile their rewards over time. Someone's net worth represents the total contributions they've made to society that they haven't yet cashed in. They've produced more than they've consumed. Someone who is older has had more time to do more good.

*Note that my use of the word "legitimately" is doing a lot of work here and almost begging the question. There are exceptions where people get paid money for not creating value. But, on average, as a rule of thumb, this is the case for most people. If everyone involved is mutually consenting and there aren't weird monopolies, government regulations, excessive taxes, government waste, subsidies, or rentseeking distorting things, the base case capitalist exchange creates legitimate profit for everyone involved, in which case people do morally deserve the fruits of their labor.

Two different issues are here, the nature of the economy and the moral question. Regarding the first, you take simple deterministic equations seriously. Balance = Promise Given - Promise Spent, Total Value Produced = Consumer Value - Producer Cost. I think this is a mistake. It's too simple. Econophysicists showed that random agents trading randomly will end up with exponentially distributed net worth. Income among people who are not in finance or entrepreneurship can be modeled that way. Those in entrepreneurship and finance play multiplicative games with their money, so they get a Pareto distribution which has an extremely fat tail. Those who end up at the far right edge of the Pareto distribution can just be repeatedly lucky; the model does not require intrinsic talent differences. In other words, the economy is largely a stochastic process, not a simple equation. So the person who ends up with more „promises from society“ probably just won a hidden lottery. Their luck in crypto, web software, their career, their business, does not at all trump a good moral claim to their excess wealth. You can see this in the person of Elon Musk. He ran twitter into the ground. He bought Tesla and got lucky. He originally made his money riding his wave on a fad with a company that went no where except to the typical old merger and acquisition murder-execution (t. Patrick Bateman) of a company. He won some hidden lotteries 2 or 3 times, which is expected given the size of the population, and that's why he's the richest man in the world. He's actually not smarter or harder working than a lot of FAANG developers who didn't get so lucky and who have 1/100.000th or less of his wealth as a consequence.

On morality you mention „fairness“ and „society.“ But this is more assumed egalitarianism. What if fairness and society matter less than the best individuals? Why not? I think fairness and society stand against the true, beautiful, and just. We currently have a very fair and society-approved system. Some people noticed it was not as fair as it could be, but it turned out trying to make all wealth equal, which was super fair and society-approved, actually made everyone worse off, because modest meritocracy with a lot of random slack actually brings up the median wealth a lot more than setting variance to exactly null.

What has never been tried is progressive redistribution of wealth. We currently have a moderate amount of regressive redistribution (based on progressive taxation). You know how IQ and income correlate at .4? What if we cranked that up to .9? Society would hate it, and it wouldn't be fair, but I think it would be just.

I aknowledge that there is quite a bit of randomness in the realized outcomes of money, but note that the expected value is still pretty close to average production. Lotteries in the economy are not the zero sum scenarios set up by a greedy casino in order give you negative expected value and enrich themselves in the process. They are a complicated mess of scenarios with different expectations. Some of them are good, some of them are bad. Someone who chooses good lotteries, invests in promising companies, dissolves unprofitable money sink companies, will on average end up winning more often than someone who chooses bad lotteries. Therefore the actual people with lots of money will tend to be people who had both luck AND intelligent choices that benefited the economy. Once again, this leads to a "money held" to "value provided to others" with a correlation solidly between 0 and 1.

But this is more assumed egalitarianism.

Where did that come from? Money earned is money deserved is very unegalitarian, unless you're a blank-slatist who believes that equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are the same thing, which you clearly aren't. When I use the word fair here, I mostly mean something pretty similar to what you mean by just. This is a pointless strawman nitpick on language use, and doesn't matter.

What has never been tried is progressive redistribution of wealth. We currently have a moderate amount of regressive redistribution (based on progressive taxation). You know how IQ and income correlate at .4? What if we cranked that up to .9? Society would hate it, and it wouldn't be fair, but I think it would be just.

This is absurd. Why would we favor intelligence like this? Intelligence only matters in-so-far as it allows you to make better choices and thus accomplish more stuff more efficiently. To that effect, making a meritocratic system that rewards economic output measures the actual thing that we care about. And is easier and more direct that some Goodhart measure of IQ. Your idea makes about as much sense as observing that cows eating more grass are correlated with producing more milk, and then selective breeding cows to maximize the amount of grass they eat and ignoring milk production. Why would you optimize a proxy for the thing you care about, when the proxy is actually harder to measure and select for, and only vaguely correlated with it. Someone of average intelligence who works really hard is more valuable to society than someone of great intelligence who doesn't do anything with it. The latter might as well not even exist. And it's not like high IQ people are necessarily good people who do good things, there are plenty of intelligent sociopaths who leverage their great intelligence to commit more evil. If an intelligent person is 3x as powerful as an average person, able to accomplish 3x as much at whatever they try to do, then an evil intelligent person sabotaging society is 3x as horrible as an evil average person. You might as well award the Medal of Honor to powerful enemy soldiers who were especially horrible and slaughtered your own side's soldiers. Good people do good things for other people. We want to incentivize more good things, so we should reward people proportional to how much good they do.

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I don't see this as entitling them to the $1 million they probably saved from that career.

You seem to be using "entitled" and "deserve" interchangeably, but I think the distinction is very important. You can have your judgements about the desert of someone who got a lucky position at the right time, but if they had an employment contract they're damn well entitled to what that contract stipulates.

Are you operating under the assumption that our economic system should be set up to give people what they deserve? We have a system that (sorta) entitles people to the products of free exchange of goods and labor. This is a good system to have in place, as it provides prosperity and forms the foundation of a complex interactive society. I don't care if people deserve it or not. The reason the Googler makes more money than the trucker is because of the value they provide above the next-best guy they could hire to their employer, regardless if how much the truck driver "fuels the actual economy" (and you're kind of question-begging here: if people are paying for the Google guy's work, how's that less real than the cargo driver?)

Your argument is is one that proves too much, unless you are a skeptic about morals in general. Does a person who just happened to be taught good morals and suffered through just enough adversity and had the natural disposition to go out and be [your definition of a saint] deserve praise for the good they've done? Or were they just lucky in the same way the Google employee or even the cargo driver was?

You seem to be using "entitled" and "deserve" interchangeably

They are interchangeable. You seem to confuse being entitled to with having. They certainly have what the contract stipulated. Are they morally entitled? Not necessarily. A lot of people are overpaid morally speaking, a lot are underpayed, a lot make money doing something morally wrong.

Are you operating under the assumption that our economic system should be set up to give people what they deserve?

I suppose so, it seems to follow from the meaning of should. I certainly don't think it is set up that way.

The reason the Googler makes more money than the trucker is because of the value they provide above the next-best guy they could hire to their employer

Tangent; nobody is that good at hiring. Hiring is messy, noisy, arbitrary, feels based, not a science. Googlers were good enough, not the best just because they were paid the most. To think otherwise assigns supernatural abilities to hiring personnel, which they clearly don't have. They don't even use the best scientific techniques available for measuring talent, much less are they supernatural. But this isn't core to the main issue of moral economics, since software engineering skill isn't necessarily a moral quality anyway.

if people are paying for the Google guy's work, how's that less real than the cargo driver?

Why should a heroin trafficker go to jail if people naturally pay him more than the Googler? How is his work less real or important than Google's?

Your argument is is one that proves too much, unless you are a skeptic about morals in general.

How did it prove too much? I'm not skeptical of morals in general, I'm applying morals to the economy. It seems obviously that the current system is not a moral one.

Does a person who just happened to be taught good morals and suffered through just enough adversity and had the natural disposition to go out and be [your definition of a saint] deserve praise for the good they've done? Or were they just lucky in the same way the Google employee or even the cargo driver was?

Yes, someone born with superior moral qualities deserves praise (and wealth) while somebody who merely wins a lottery does not deserve their winnings.

For example, a lot of San Fransisco 50 year olds made way too much money in a software boom, often being head button style changer for Google for 10 years. I don't see this as entitling them to the $1 million they probably saved from that career. Yes, it's how they made their money and got it to be legally recognized as theirs, but morally they did nothing to „deserve“ it.

Since this seems like the subthread for this sort of thing, I'll point out that if they only saved $1M from 10 years at Google, they were absolutely terrible with money.

But also, if you don't think people deserve the wages paid for their labor, you're basically at odds with almost everyone. Even Marx wouldn't say workers didn't deserve their wages.

you're basically at odds with almost everyone.

I think Nietzsche would agree. But yes, I definitely hold a minority view. Isn't it the more logical view, though? It seems obvious to me why cognitive bias would lead most people to be wrong on this topic.

I think I agree with you; given my experience making basically nothing doing productive labor, then making lots and lots actively making the world a more hostile place to the average human, and now making at least a bit of my money eg from people ruining their lives gambling.

At no point in my life have a felt there was a meaningful positive connection between what I did, the societal value of what I did, the economic value of what I did, the moral value of what I did, and how I was compensated; if there was any correlation it was the anti-type.

A bitter pill for me, I got indoctrinated early into the cult of hard work and moral capitalism, it was a real shock to the system when I realized I was the only one who actually believed it.

Isn't it the more logical view, though?

No. First of all, the idea that those with the most "moral worth" should be the wealthiest is bizarre. You then connect moral worth to "need", which is also rather strange (I guess this borrows from Marx). Then the resulting system is incoherent; as long as you're working you should be wealthy, but if you dare to retire you should not be. You could certainly build a (totalitarian) system based on these ideas, but I don't think the thing would be called "wealth" -- it would be a form of status granted by the state, not an accumulation of value.

You then connect moral worth to "need", which is also rather strange (I guess this borrows from Marx).

It is need in the since of something being required for reproduction of moral people, so that there are more moral people afterwards. It's not borrowed from Marx at all. Not need in the socialist sense, as in feeding the hungry.

Then the resulting system is incoherent; as long as you're working you should be wealthy, but if you dare to retire you should not be.

I did not say that, but it is also not incoherent. „He who does not work, neither shall he eat.“

You could certainly build a (totalitarian) system

It would not be any more totalitarian than the income taxes and old age pensions of the current West. It would simply tax different people and afford pensions to different people.

but I don't think the thing would be called "wealth" -- it would be a form of status granted by the state, not an accumulation of value.

Actually it would be more like wealth than now. Many wealthy people today are weak and rely on the state to defend their wealth from the strong through granted ownership status. Under my idea, wealth would shift to a degree from the old and weak to the young and strong. My idea would be more libertarian because it would involve the state recognizing the natural order to a greater extent, which requires less energy to defend from exogenous shocks like individual crime and market crashes.

the idea that those with the most "moral worth" should be the wealthiest is bizarre.

How so?

Not meaningful increase productive employment in the US.

Not help the balance of trade issue.

Not hem china in in any way, and in fact increase their gravity as an economic center.

Not lower the debt at all, public or private; and in fact increase the debt massively. (This one didn't amount to much, there isn't much money to be made here until the US starts to go downhill for real, so it's just positioning for now.)

What's the actual position you can take that tracks any of this.

Investing in sin stocks that go up when everything else goes down; investing in companies that either provide or service debt until the recession hits, investing not in the RMB directly because damn those currency controls hit hard, but yes investing in chinese indexes and chinese growth growth stocks (fees are killer, but growth was really good so it evened out), gutting out of USD and investing in things that track weakening in USD relative to RMB and the euro, all the normal shit.

I know some things about it, but I have my guy do most of it. He has similar opinions to me and does this as his job instead of just doing it for fun.

Not lower the debt at all, public or private; and in fact increase the debt massively. (This one didn't amount to much, there isn't much money to be made here until the US starts to go downhill for real, so it's just positioning for now.)

The US has seemingly defied every prediction of its debt being unsustainable. GDP keeps going up,so the debt is inflated away. Those who keep predicting collapse or other crisis keep being wrong.

I've recently made a bit of a small amount of a fuckton of money based on starting amounts; took my fuck around money and plowed it into you guessed it, oil futures and related industries before it became clear that no, he really is that stupid. I'm up a lot on top of my previous gains from betting (read: instructing my investment guy who tells me which southeast asian restaurants are for real) to bet as if the various Trump economic policies would:

The second trump term has been a huge boon for me investment-wise: correctly shorted Bitcoin, anticipating Trump would not follow-through on the widely anticipated or hoped BTC reserve.

Bought dips during Liberation-day selloffs ('TACO' meme)

Continued to trade various dips and rallies by selling various option spreads anticipating quick recoveries from selloffs and inflated implied volatility, and rangebound markets

The anticipated post-tariff inflation surge never came to be, so I profited by being invested in tech stocks and the overall economy doing well.

Also made $ on polymarket betting against Trump mentioning Bitcoin (these are called "mention markets") and against the Bitcoin reserve.

I think it's possible to make $ following whales on Polymarket/Kalshi who possibly have insider info, but haven't looked into it much. I noticed on the 28th, the eve of the attack on Iran, someone placed a $20k bet on the contract "strikes in the next 24 hours", an hour before it jumped off. The contract surged from 14 cents to 20 cents almost instant and the stayed at 20 cents for 40 minutes until finally going to $1.

The US has seemingly defied every prediction of its debt being unsustainable.

To his credit, Trump is working on that. The oil trade was long denominated in dollars because the US had an outsized influence on it. Being readily convertible to fossil fuels is one of the reasons why the US$ made a good reserve currency, which is a reason why many countries are stockpiling it and thus subsidizing the US debt (as inflation slowly eats up the value of their dollar reserves).

Under Trump, the US has not been a good steward of the global oil trade. When Iran predictably closed the Strait (because this is the one way they can exert pressure on the rest of the world), Trump loudly declared that this was not his mess to fix. Let Europe deal with it if they want the oil. And I am sure that Europe will deal with it eventually, though not through military means. At the end of the day, we will probably just pay Iran to let the ships through. But at that point we might decide to trade the oil in yuan instead.

After all, China seems like a sane, reliable superpower. Sure, they are troublesome for their neighbors (Taiwan first and foremost, though Venezuela might claim that their regional superpower does not respect the autonomy of smaller states), but unlikely to invade Spain or Germany. So far, China has refrained to wreck the world economy in some military adventure.

But at that point we might decide to trade the oil in yuan instead.

Come on man, at least ask an AI if this is plausible before suggesting it. China exercises capital controls, if they allowed free convertibility then Chinese people could invest overseas and earn better returns than their horrific internal market which would collapse their whole investment model. And you can see how China has treated Australia or Lithuania using their economic influence when the nations displeased them, the devil you don't know is hardly some stable partner.

You could maybe make an argument for a euro swap but it has its own problem, like that there isn't one unified euro bond market, each state has its own so there is no equivalent to a US treasury. And to be a reserve currency you need to have a huge amount of outstanding accounts, There literally are not enough euros in existence to make this kind of thing work and the process of printing and spending them would very likely wreck the European economy.

Finally Who is protecting the rest of the seas? Who owns the other straights? If we're going to enter a US isn't responsible for foreign shipping protection and in fact being able to threaten shipping entitles you to extracting rents from shipping then I know of an entity that is able to threaten every ship everywhere.

The US dollar, bond yields, and S&P 500 have held up well despite oil having gone up so much, suggesting market participants are not concerned.

https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/TVC-DXY/?timeframe=1M

People again have made this argument of the US losing the petrol dollar and it has not borne out

The US has seemingly defied every prediction of its debt being unsustainable. GDP keeps going up,so the debt is inflated away. Those who keep predicting collapse or other crisis keep being wrong.

Looking historically, sovereign debt crises generally are less "things get gradually worse" and more "the fundamentals get worse without affecting day to day operations too much, then a crisis hits and immediate consequences are felt." Generally its multiple different factors gradually building up until you get a polycrisis that makes the debt unresolvable. Will this be the time the bears are right? Looking at their previous predictions, probably not. Without course correction, or a spanner in the works like AGI, will the US in the medium term face a debt crisis? I think quite likely.

The bears may be right eventually, but the market may have gone up so much in the interim it will not matter. If the Nasdaq gains 20% year for the next 10 years , that is a 6x return I am leaving on the table waiting for something which may never happen in my lifetime.

I'm a bogglehead, so I agree with the approach that in the end, the market will increase. My argument is there likely will be a debt crisis that will cause pain in the future. The pain it causes will be less than the benefits of market growth, however.

GDP keeps going up,so the debt is inflated away.

But the debt grows even more, hence the ratio of debt to GDP is increasing. And the tiny bit that was inflated away after COVID part was also not so free, the bondholders are no longer willing to give their money for peanuts and the interest rates are much higher than a few years ago.

The problem with debt is that it can be meaningless for a long time and then it can matter a lot. Like the famous Lenin quote "There are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen".

The problem with debt is that it can be meaningless for a long time and then it can matter a lot. Like the famous Lenin quote "There are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen".

This can be true , but when people make this prediction every year and nothing happens, it comes off as crying wolf. This is much more applicable for smaller economies which do not have reserve currency status, which cannot inflate their debt as the US can.

This can be true , but when people make this prediction every year and nothing happens, it comes off as crying wolf.

If there's a clear indicator that's getting worse all the time but disaster hasn't struck yet, it's hard to see this as the same as crying wolf. You'll recall that in the fable it was, in fact, not clear that there was even was a wolf. We can all agree that debt to GDP is increasing.

Is it crying wolf to be concerned about a small moon on course to collide with the earth? It gets closer every day but nothing has happened yet!

If you are making a prediction about a small moon on course to collide with the Earth, hopefully your predictions are going to be "the moon will collide on so-and-so day". If you predict that the moon will collide next week, and it doesn't, and you predict that it will collide the week after that, and it still doesn't, and you keep that up, people will be justified in ignoring you.

Orbital mechanics permit a degree of certainty that's rare in most other human affairs.

We can pick another metaphor. If you keep OD'ing on fent on Market Street and people keep narcaning you from the brink of oblivion and telling you that you're gonna die if you do this again, but you haven't died yet and you've done this tons of times should you ignore them?

The laws of physics are much more reliable than economic forecasts or the relation between debt vs. sustainability. Since 2008 there has been no shortage of smart-sounding people who make this type of prediction invoking charts and other data. It sounds persuasive, but it's of no actionable value. Sitting out of the market in the expectation of a crisis means loss of real wealth as inflation keeps growing at 2-5%/ year, and homes become more unaffordable. Ask people who waited to buy a home in 2010 fearing things would get worse or in 2020 during Covid.

The laws of physics are much more reliable than economic forecasts or the relation between debt vs. sustainability.

Agreed.

Sitting out of the market in the expectation of a crisis means loss of real wealth as inflation keeps growing at 2-5%/ year, and homes become more unaffordable.

I am long the market, so yes, agreed. But presumably there are ways that the national debt can become a problem without the S&P500 crashing.

Nevertheless, looking at the countries that had a higher debt to GDP ratio than the US right now, it's not a great collection - Japan, post-WWII UK, Sudan, Lebanon, Greece. Maybe it's not the debt that made these places suck, but it seems reasonable to be concerned about where this road leads.

Indeed, the debt/GDP ratio reaching problematic levels is a very recent development (post-covid, getting much worse in Trump 2).

Funny, my real net worth dropped during the "Biden boom times" and increased significantly during the first year of Trump's second term, enough that I retired in January.

had trump been reelected in 2020, do you think the 2022 selloff would not have happened? I think it still would have happened.

My point is that including the "Biden boom times" in this makes it less likely to be true politically motivated gloating and more likely to be false politically motivated gloating.

I think that part of OP's point here is the availability of very specific TACO/horrible policy trades under Trump 2. Personally, though, I'm not sure how one figures out that tariffs will be a TACO dip opportunity and that the equally horrible idea of Iran not - seems like a lucky guess to me.

In contrast, the Biden correction was broad-based in response to the rise of interest rates due to the post-pandemic inflation. This seems harder to take levered retail bets on that would turn screw-around money into screw-you money.

You could make money on Iran by selling oil futures when they spiked; I think there were several spikes which dropped within a day.

While obviously any volatility creates trading opportunities, it seems like OP is just trading big picture ideas. Here, it means "expensive oil" rather than some fundamentals-bases idea of "oil price target is X" because of impact of policy on supply, so they are not really in a position to take wins on moves down since they don't really have a thesis beyond "closer to $95 than $75".

Yup. I do this shit for fun on the side when I'm tired and don't feel like reading, I'm gonna spend more time woodworking and model building than situation monitoring.

I just tell the guy who actually Monitores "I think it will be like that, so put this amount of my money in the maximum risk 'like that' pile and let me know if it doesn't go to zero".

I'm making this post because it went up enough that it's scaring me, the hoe, too much to not have it in something boring.

I would say that it you have reached fuck-off money it is probably time to put the amount of money that it takes for that back into target date funds or something. One consequence of your various theses is that Treasury interest rates are going to remain pretty high for a while...

No, the biden times were actually really good if you just had a normal ass portfolio and normal ass hedges; just buy the index, secure with bonds, hedge with precious metals. The standard 101. If you were out here doing wall street bets tomfoolery there was less for you to bite on.

Now that trump is back you can make some real money off the fact that shit is crazy and moving in a bad direction.

The thing that seems to let someone make money is movement in general; it doesn't matter if the movement is up or down or real or bubble; if people are jumping in and out of investments in a panic or in a stratagem, if you pick right twice you can part a fool (retirement fund, old person, degenerate gambler) from his money (what they need to not die).

Because Trump is so inconsistent but in a consistent way, and so many people with conservative leanings gaslit themselves into thinking "He won't actually do it, it wasn't that bad in the first term" some cynical hater moves really payed out.

Or you just YOLO into AI stocks and try to time the bubble, and make the same or more money without all the maneuvering; I'm just too much of a coward to put it all on 00 at the table.

Funny, my real net worth dropped during the "Biden boom times" and increased significantly during the first year of Trump's second term, enough that I retired in January.

As the saying goes, congratulations and Go Fuck Yourself.

It's a a good point, number went up during Biden's term, but in real terms it mostly treaded water for us. It has gone up significantly during Trump's second term (not through any particular investing insight, mostly own broad funds plus some extra in oil/resource stocks and tech stocks). We have also 'retired', if involuntarily (both got laid off), which prompted looking at our finances and realizing that under any non-extreme-blackpilled assumptions there is enough there (and in those situations the skills are probably worth more then any extra money), which hadn't really been on the radar given we are in our mid-40s with 3 kids. 'Retired' is in quotes though as within 6 months old colleagues began bugging us to take on some contracting projects which we did to help out folks, stay up to date, make some side money, etc. My wife ended up making more last year doing that then she did working full time and I made about 1/2 so we'll just see how it goes. Congrats on retiring.

Contracting does seem to be where the money is, if you can get enough work on the side. Sorry to hear about the lay-offs and glad to hear you guys managed to get something going. Mid-40s with 3 kids is a hell of a time for both parents to be laid off.

if you can get enough work

That's the part that absolutely terrifies me when contracting otherwise sounds attractive. I don't know how people find business. Is it networking? I'm awful at that!

a bit of a small amount of a fuckton of money

I'm a bit confused whether you're just being humble here and downplaying it, or if you're just talking about a relatively modest gain. The stock market has been going gangbusters for the past 10 years, so lots of people have made great returns as long as you're not panic selling everything.

He means an actual ton of money.

You could have 50x'd your money before/at the start of this Iran war.

How? Oil futures are up 82% over the past 3 months, very good, but hardly 50x.

By leveraging the hell out of it.

Fair enough, I have zero risk appetite for options.

That applies to any possible market movement.

Yeah, this. You can get massively rich on anything with enough leverage. Like what WallStreetBets calls "Faggot's Delight" options- very far out the money options with short expirations. You have to completely nail the timing and price point to make any money that way at all, its not enough to just say "turmoil in the mideast will make oil prices go up."

its not enough to just say "turmoil in the mideast will make oil prices go up."

Hmm actually it was.

Trump announces something insane and then the stock market hits an all time high after a brief freakout, which may or may not involve a backpedal. It's been like 9 times so far. Did you predict that?

so predictable, like free money at this point, hence TACO meme.

I mostly only saw Trump announce insane thing, people sold off expecting the crisis to deepen and then lock in a loss when Trump backpedaled.

At some point the rubberband is gonna break, though. Like the stock market has decoupled from anything beyond worship of the number but 'I'm just gonna bid any pullback no matter what' can't work forever.

The thing is, tech stocks are actually quite cheap. META's PE ratio is under 19, for example. So it's not as if they have decoupled from fundamentals.

whenever I see these "I got so rich now i'm retired" posts all can I wonder is not "how do I emulate you" but rather "what is your advise for the mass of peasants with some money to their name who are not you, and cannot become you"

They should simply have been born a couple years earlier and gotten luckier; given that they haven't done either of those things by Working Hard (tm), they should instead fucking die.

For real though, I think all they can do is not waste money on things like new cloths, meat, restaurants, child care, medical expenses, any food that costs more than 3$ a pound, getting their car fixed, having hot water, etc etc. They must learn how to make everything, fix everything, where to buy everything cheaply, and live a buddha like existence of self denial until they reach escape velocity, which they probably will never reach.

If you want to get out of the low income section of the economy, it isn't enough to work hard and smart, you have to also be lucky and have the knowledge that it's all zero sum until you get about 75,000 in free, un-earmarked cash in the bank. If you can't buy yourself a decent car in cash RIGHT NOW / you don't have at least 1 entire years worth of housing lined up, either by owning or having the rent to hand, you are still poor.

This is why I think I should be taxed way harder; I make more money from having money than I ever did doing productive labor.

do you see 75k as "you now have enough money to avoid living wildly inefficiently, you can now start putting the extra into the market" or as "if you've already saved up to this point, 75k compounding with everything in VTI will keep you safe for the rest of your life. even if you're incapable of picking stocks"

A combo. The efficiencies that come from never paying interest, always being able to wait for your moment, having money to cover whatever happens when it happens instead of letting it become more expensive with time add up.

On top of that, once you get to a big floating cash pile, you have developed the mental habits that help you not lose it.

Also Also, the missing stress from knowing that if three big problems happen back to back you won't be on the street is worth any amount of money. You don't know the weight of that monkey till he's finally off your back.

Blessed is he who can avoid lifestyle inflation

If you don't have the income you can't save yourself rich. Contrariwise, if you do, you don't need $75,000 or anything to not be poor -- though you CAN spend yourself poor at any income.

Income comes and goes, is the thing. Your income is never guaranteed, credit is an illusion of the false world which will disappear when you need it most, and expenses can scale infinitly.

I would say if everything you 'own' is leveraged and you are reallying on income/returns/debt to finance your life in exchange for having more exposure to the market; you are trading security for potential profit, and the thing that makes you not poor is security, not some arbitrary number.

75k in the bank + a decent income is a good level of security, enough to feel like you are no longer poor. That is ONE car blowing up and ONE roof blowing off and ONE leg getting broken without the need to sell the farm.

Income comes and goes, is the thing. Your income is never guaranteed, credit is an illusion of the false world which will disappear when you need it most, and expenses can scale infinitly.

Nothing is guaranteed. Unless your wealth is in non-perishable food, weapons, and the loyalty of fighting men, you're already in a finance world rather than a primitive physical one -- anything dollar-denominated is. In that world -- which is fortunately the one most of us live in, because it's a lot less harsh than the primitive one -- you don't need any particular amount to not be poor.

For real though, I think all they can do is not waste money on things like new cloths, meat, restaurants, child care, medical expenses, any food that costs more than 3$ a pound, getting their car fixed, having hot water, etc etc. They must learn how to make everything, fix everything, where to buy everything cheaply, and live a buddha like existence of self denial until they reach escape velocity, which they probably will never reach.

I know you mean this as snark, but also this, unironically.

To benchmark - I currently have enough in tax advantaged accounts that I can retire comfortably at 65 even with a great depression-scale market correction in between now and then, and depending on how things go, I might be able to retire in as little as two years.

I was born into a poor family. I grew up so poor that I got in trouble at school more than once for not wearing shoes because my existing pair fell apart and we couldn't afford new ones. Even food wasn't a guarantee.

I managed to get from there to where I am now by pretty much doing what you described above. I worked 15-20 hours a week all through high school. I smoked the SATs, which got me accepted into several different schools. I chose to go to a fairly pedestrian state school rather than a prestigious engineering college because they offered a much larger aid package. I chose a major that wasn't my passion because I estimated that it would represent my best chance at not being poor. I learned how to cook my own meals and fix my own car.

When I graduated, I took a job at a relatively "safe" employer and I've been there for over 20 years. I kept my head down during the global financial crisis and did what I could to be at the bottom of the layoff pile. For the first three years I worked, I lived like a monk in a busted-up apartment that didn't even have hot water half the time. I used every spare penny I had to pay off my student debts.

Once I paid off my debts, I started putting 15% of my income into a 401(k) and maxing out a Roth IRA. It meant that I couldn't afford a nice car and I wasn't going to go on a vacation every year, but starting early meant that my gains had a chance to compound.

Even today I try to live simply. I try to keep my entertainment cheap. I don't take extravagant trips. I only have beef a handful of times a year because it's expensive. I live in a low cost of living area and have kept the same small, simple house for the last fifteen years.

I did what you suggested above, and it's working pretty well.

It was snark but also real for me as well.

I did my own cooking, plumbing, car repair, everything; and if I couldn't do it myself it simply didn't get done. Can't fix the water heater? Simply take cold showers, you won't die.

I just think that isn't sufficient; you also need to get lucky.

That said like you, have that shit baked in. I have the same old 99 camry I bought when I had no choice, and I can't bring myself to get rid of it until it finally dies. I do have the hybrid second car because there are two people who need cars, so that softens the urgency.

Be born in a booming economy to wealthy families. Go to extremely cheap college when college graduates a rare enough to be valuable.

I don’t think most people really benefit from most financial advice simply because until you have enough generational wealth to invest, you’re stuck in the lower middle class or below where you have nothing but the income you can get from working for someone else. I just sort of laugh at retirement advice simply because if you have enough money to be able to invest a substantial sum of money, you already have enough experience with money to do okay. If you don’t, the advice of “just invest 10,000 dollars” kinda assumes a person having a spare ten grand laying around. Most would struggle to find enough to save for emergencies, and have no money to invest on the idea of retirement.

I just sort of laugh at retirement advice simply because if you have enough money to be able to invest a substantial sum of money, you already have enough experience with money to do okay.

There are some pretty depressing statistics on "people who just leave money in their corporate 401k as cash", even amongst smart people. A lot of people really do need that advice.

Honestly that was me until like a year ago, and I'm a mid-30's lawyer. Not proud of it, but facts are facts.

I consider myself fortunate that my dad taught me "always contribute at least enough to get the company match; it's free money" and my first company automatically picked a target date fund as the default. Meant I was in a good spot by the time I finally did become a bit more financially literate.

The ability to become wealthier or at least improve one's financial salutation is one of the few things anyone has some control over, unlike talent or traits (e.g. HBD). Anyone can invest in the S&P 500 or not waste money on frivolous purchases.

Sadly, as time goes by, I've become more and more convinced that finance is one of those realms that you either get or you don't, and alot of people - even ones that are highly intelligent in other fields - simply don't.

You just need to get your head straight. It's a game of probabilities. A casino may lose 5 rounds of blackjack in a row, but over the course of a month or a year they rake in the money. One bet or a few bets comes down to chance. A thousand bets? That's never down to chance.

If the results were random, there wouldn't be any consistent winners. But there are. Believing the market moves randomly gives individuals an excuse to not take full responsibility for their own actions and long term results. Those who take responsibility, and review their mistakes regularly and learn from them, will become consistent winners as long as they're willing to keep doing what 90% of people are unwilling to do.

Keep in mind I'm speaking as someone who actually 'gets it'. To a degree.

Maybe I'm expecting to much, but when you're hashing stuff out with an actual medical graduate on managing their college loan payouts and they're more than a little clueless while a friend of mine and I are just going 'No... this is easy', it kind of makes you re-think alot of things.

Granted, you seem to be less talking about financial acumen and more market management strategy. I would say they're a little bit different, and good market management strategy is alot harder than learning finance. IMO, and from my observations.

Maybe I'm expecting to much, but when you're hashing stuff out with an actual medical graduate on managing their college loan payouts and they're more than a little clueless while a friend of mine and I are just going 'No... this is easy', it kind of makes you re-think alot of things.

Gellmann's amnesia comes to mind (possibly not quite the right term here). Most people have only studied a select few things in any depth at all, but we still assume that the smart doctor will know a lot about many things for some reason. Status and authority confers construals of wider credibility and competence in the observer's head. The actual polymath or renaissance man is rare, it seems.

Granted, you seem to be less talking about financial acumen and more market management strategy. I would say they're a little bit different, and good market management strategy is alot harder than learning finance. IMO, and from my observations.

Do you mean facts and foundational knowledge versus applied action here? Financial acumen = knowing what EPS means and how to read a balance sheet, the difference between price and value, etc etc?

What most people miss is how much of investing is a mental game, requiring an adoption of new beliefs and discarding many old ones. The person born into a family of highly successful investors would know this, while most of the rest of us chumps seem to pick up more misinformation and limiting beliefs than any sort of solid mentoring.

Do you mean facts and foundational knowledge versus applied action here? Financial acumen = knowing what EPS means and how to read a balance sheet, the difference between price and value, etc etc?

What most people miss is how much of investing is a mental game, requiring an adoption of new beliefs and discarding many old ones. The person born into a family of highly successful investors would know this, while most of the rest of us chumps seem to pick up more misinformation and limiting beliefs than any sort of solid mentoring.

Pretty much. I've seen a bunch of egregious attitudes in regards to, for example, day trading, where alot of people fall into the attitude that they have to trade, despite the market not matching thier models, which turns what should be good tactics into basically betting on the market.

Or, for another example, people who flock in after a boom has occurred, asking if they should invest in your material of choice. (Looking at you, gold.)

Much like in comedy, timing is everything. That's a thing most people think can't be done. They'll parrot platitudes like "time in the market beats timing the market" and talk about how it's basically impossible to do it.

'Sitting out strength' is part of the mental game. I've come to believe that having patience before placing a trade is perhaps even more important than having the patience to wait for the flower to bloom afterwards. Trades are like farts: if you have to force it, it's probably shit.

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Maybe I'm expecting to much, but when you're hashing stuff out with an actual medical graduate on managing their college loan payouts and they're more than a little clueless while a friend of mine and I are just going 'No... this is easy', it kind of makes you re-think alot of things.

I’ve heard colleagues grouse about needing to do mathematics when “the reason [they] got into medicine was to get away from maths!” I’ve also seen frankly shocking levels of statistical ignorance in the doctor population.

One thing that stuck with me is an informal experiment a friend of mine did many years ago — he asked a few dozen consultants what a p-value indicates. I think he got a grand total of one correct answer. And these are people who are supposed to be regularly reading (and sometimes writing) academic papers!

That tracks with what I've been told. I've half-joked about somehow finding a medical Doctor Sugar Momma to get married to, in exchange for managing her financials.

The 'somehow' in that sentence is doing alot of heavy lifting, though. Among other things.

The 'somehow' in that sentence is doing alot of heavy lifting, though. Among other things.

To be fair, you probably would be doing a lot of it too, if you managed to wrangle such an arrangement.

If the results were random, there wouldn't be any consistent winners.

Are there consistent winners who (1) win consistently with short-term plays; and (2) don't rely on inside information? Based on my limited knowledge that such people are either extremely rare or non-existent.

I do think that there are people who win consistently with long-term plays. With "winning" being defined as either making a good return, like in the neighborhood of 8 percent, or outperforming the market indices in general. By all accounts, people who can consistently outperform the markets in general are very rare, but I am willing to believe that some exist.

People who consistently make money on short term swings? That's something I'm extremely skeptical about. If I hear about a short-term player consistently making money, I think he's either a liar or a cheater. But I'm open to evidence to the contrary.

And by the way, I myself made a bunch of money a few months back on a short term play. I bought QQQ right after it tanked due to a Trump tariff announcement and it seemed obvious that the market had overreacted. I've never tried anything like that before and it paid off very well. But I think that kind of situation is extremely unusual.

I think a strategy of keeping most of your investments in SPY, and then occasionally (every couple of years, but only when a real opportunity presents itself) making strong, reasonable bets during major events where you have high confidence can get you outsized returns (e.g. I almost doubled my net worth during the first couple months of COVID).

The issue is that psychologically, waiting around for those types of events is really boring. And success begets failure, as you really want to start looking for opportunities where your edge is smaller or realistically non-existent.

I think a strategy of keeping most of your investments in SPY, and then occasionally (every couple of years, but only when a real opportunity presents itself) making strong, reasonable bets during major events where you have high confidence can get you outsized returns (e.g. I almost doubled my net worth during the first couple months of COVID).

This seems extremely tempting to me (and in fact I kinda used this strategy) but ultimately I am skeptical. I would worry that inevitably, some small percentage of these "reasonable bets" will turn out disasterously, enough to wipe out the gains and then some. Look at it this way: In order to double your money during the first couple months Covid, it wasn't enough to buy into a general index fund. You had to use options; or buy on margin; or whatever. Which means that even if you were right, you'd still be screwed if your timing was off.

But then again, you may be right, I don't know.

I'd add the qualifier consistent high volume winners.

It's one thing to take a chance where you see one, it's another to produce enough ideas to run a fund.

Probably related to getting math, right?

You don't need more than arithmetic.

You can't be dumb if you're going to become a consistent winner in the markets. But you don't need to be smart.

Eh, I'd say at least a decent grasp of algebra helps quite a bit

In what situations?

If you have a target retirement (or investment or whatever) amount you need to solve some fairly simple algebra to figure out how much you need to invest per month etc. But I also think algebra is generally useful in a lot of different circumstances and knowing it makes a lot of financial planning easier.

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Before I took my finance courses, I would have told you I was horrible at math.

Now, I'm just convinced that math teachers are horrible at their job.

And worse comes to worse, that's what excel spreadsheets are for.

Math teachers in general are bad at their jobs, because they're people who 'just get it' and don't need much teaching, so they assume everyone else is like that too. The best math teacher I ever had was a seminarian randomly assigned by his superior to teach high school algebra- clearly very intelligent, but had needed to actually study to learn the material.

It takes money to make money, as they say.

The ability to become wealthier or at least improve one's financial salutation is one of the few things anyone has some control over, unlike talent or traits (e.g. HBD). Anyone can invest in the S&P 500 or not waste money on frivolous purchases.

I agree, but it's pretty hard to use that strategy to get to the point where you have "fuck you" money, i.e. enough money so that work is optional. Which makes sense, because having "fuck you" money means you can sit back and live it up while other people work for you. It's logically impossible to be in a situation where anything more than a small minority of the population gets to sit back and live it up while other people work for them.

Basically, for most people it will require (1) being born in a wealthy country; and (2) a lifetime of careful saving and investing.

I come here to-day to humble brag about my money, but in a culture war way; and to share my sure to succeeded investment system.

If you are telling the truth, congratulations. But of course anyone can claim after the fact that they predicted something. If you want the boost in credibility which comes from having made a correct prediction, I would ask you to (1) make your predictions in advance; and (2) share with the group some trades you made in which you lost big.

1: the advanced predictions are displayed in my big pile of money and

2: I lost out big in AI boom stocks. I just refused to get on board half for ideological half for practical reasons, so I only made a lot of money with my weighted index funds instead of an unimaginable amount of money by going in hard.

Possibly sounding like sour grapes, but I wonder about the feasibility of investing in AI. Yeah, right now it's booming, but I do think a crash (or at least a readjustment) will come, and how do you predict just precisely which day the market wakes up and decides SELL SELL SELL and not BUY BUY BUY?

It's the same problem with crypto: some people rode it and timed it right and made a killing, some people held on too long and lost whatever they gained, and some people regret they got out when they did and didn't stick around just that bit longer when the price went even higher.

I think if you ended up with "made a ton of money but not the yuuuuuge amount I could have done", you ended up ahead of the game. That's a better complaint than "god damn it, I sunk every cent into AI and the bloody market crashed on me".

I'm just talking about my risky bet fuck around money, is the thing. My borring "Don't starve when I'm old" money is locked down for the long haul.

I'm out of it now because the pile got too big and I got scared; but this was the type of money I was willing to take a 100% loss on, so not having the stomach to bet it all on AI related areas before it took off was a major failure on my part.

Ultimately, that's the rub. The greater the return, the greater the risk, and there isn't a reliable way to make high return investments without the risk. Only 10% of the best who best know the market on the planet reliable do better than them over a 20 year window, and most of those folks do worse the 20 years after that statistically. There is no non-luck way to hit a jackpot.

The key, like with silver booms, is probably not to try to ride it to the absolute peak- yes you don't make the most profit selling when there's still room to go up, but you get more than if it's started to decline.

the advanced predictions are displayed in my big pile of money

My apologies, I have no idea what this means. Are you referring to some kind of online portfolio document? If so, can you link it?

I lost out big in AI boom stocks. I just refused to get on board half for ideological half for practical reasons, so I only made a lot of money with my weighted index funds instead of an unimaginable amount of money by going in hard.

That's pretty great if your big loss was that you "only made a lot of money" when you could have made an "unimaginable amount of money."

Most people who "go in hard" have the occasional loss.

Maybe you should consider opening up some kind of investment fund? It seems like you are right up there with guys like David Lynch and Jimmy Buffet.

I can only do it now when Trump is in office making everything weird, is the thing; and I'm not confident enough to bet the farm. If I keep making these bets I'm going to lose eventually; That's what I got out (as noted in the post). I don't have the sauce that dudes like Buffet do.

Jimmy Buffet

I don't think he made his money from stock picking so much as guitar picking...

I don't think he made his money from stock picking so much as guitar picking...

I think you are confusing Jimmy Buffett (the musician), with Jimmy Buffet, the legendary investor who partnered with Charlie Hunger.

I had no idea there were two Buffets in the investing business, so yes, apparently I was!

Which one of them is Warren's cousin? 😁

You're thinking of the 29th president Warren G Hunger, who also appeared on Snoop Dogg's early recordings.

Ah, a spinoff of the comic "Peanuts", was it?

seconded. create a blog or post on twitter predictions


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