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Notes -
When's the last time you checked on your local, elder millenial foids?
They have thoughts on Data Centers and Democratic Socialism, don't you know?
One of the thing that keeps me coming back to the Motte is the lack of any algorithm-ing. Posts get upvotes in the original reddit style and that's all you need. Still, one notices patterns. One style of persistently highly upvoted post is that of the personal story or extended anecdote. It's no mystery. People relate to people and the writing quality here on the Motte is generally high enough that a "human interest" story generally weaves together that emotional resonance with content rich analysis of the pressing issues of our time.
I include this preamble as a means of introducing what will be an attempt to combine some thoughts on recent data center posts, DSA (that is, Democratic Socialists of America) wins, and the current state of local foid vibes.
Why the focus on foid vibes? Mostly because I noticed this post got a lot of good comments. It seems like my "Lauren" archetype struck something of a nerve, but a generative nerve.
So, let's talk about "Lauren" (Again, not her real name and, this time, also kind of a mashing together of a few different folks I have semi-regular contact with in my little town).
Lauren Doesn't Like Elon Musk's Rich Guy Data Centers.
Lauren, like most normies, doesn't know what Anthropic is. She knows that Claude is an AI chatbot and knows that "GPT" (meaning ChatGPT) is like, a different AI chatbot, right? OpenAI is some sort of an AI company, but the connection between OAI and ChatGPT may not be solidly in place in Lauren's mind.
But Lauren knows who Elon Musk, the person, is. And, obviously, he's a Nazi because he "literally did the Nazi salute!" His desire to go to Mars is just a rich man's self indulgence and there's no real need to go to space when we have so many problems on earth. People are literally starving!
Unsaid by Lauren is that Elon is just plain weird in a weird guy kind of way. She hints at it with little jokes, but she's pretty sure he's into weird sex (probably anime stuff), and smells bad. His autistic ouevre during interviews doesn't come across as "quirky sensitive boy" who will write her poetry but as "potentially dangerous engineer dude who might show up unannounced at her home."
She (Lauren) also knows that Elon is "doing lots of AI" and, therefore, has to build a bunch of data centers - including one in our area!
Data Centers are not good. They use a ton of water and also pollute the water. They're loud. Or they make a sound or something. Lauren isn't sure where she read it, but she knows she read that being around Data Centers can cause all sorts of cognitive issues. Plus (like Elon) they're so ugly!
I'll inject my a TollBooth editorial background comment here. Lauren has recently started seeing a new therapist. Lauren tells me this therapist (female, black) is literally so much better than her last therapist - whom Lauren stopped seeing in about 2021. She's very happy that the Therapist is helping her stand up for herself and focus less on people pleasing. Lauren looks forward to reporting to the therapist how much non-people pleasing she's been doing recently (primal scream from TollBooth: MY GOD, THE IRONY).
But back to Elon's Load Bearing AI Data Centers. So much yuck! I gently tell Lauren that the water usage issue is quite fake. There's enough trust between us that after I pull up a few stories on my phone - from sources she trusts (like Vox!) - that she shrugs and agrees. Water issue aside, however, the real issue is that the local government isn't being transparent enough with how they're dealing with the Data Center developers. That's the problem; transparency!
I ask her what that means. Lauren tells me that out of the three different public town halls that the local government has hosted, two of them were delayed by 30 minutes, but then finished at the scheduled time instead of extending! They couldn't even get through all of the public comments verbally and people had to submit their concerns to the specially created data center public commentary website. Zero transparency! Zero accountability!
I emote with Lauren. I agree that when things happen people feel things about those things that have happened. She loves that I "get" her - she tells me so.
Again, gently, I point out that having all of these town halls and creating a special website for public comment seems above and beyond, no? Aren't most issues around here handled through the normal city/county calendar of public hearings etc.
Lauren cedes the point before doubling down on it (a very underrated tactic). Yes, they're doing "more than usual" - but the data center issue is so big they need to be doing even more! And that lack of doing more means, of course, that the fix is in and a deal's already been made and so that's why there's no transparency! These greedy capitalists!
Which brings me (Lauren?) to the DSA. Have I, TollBooth, seen the fun wins all of the DSA members are racking up! Isn't it AWESOME! Lauren says this, funnily enough, tongue-in-cheek. Lauren knows I am a real life conservative. She knows I am not jazzed about the DSA wins. But Lauren also thinks that I am literally Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation. She thinks my conservatism is funny ha-ha "I like guns" conservatism. Lauren sees me as actually a totally good guy who is pretty much a White Dude for Kamala but also likes Jesus a lot. So Lauren isn't worried about me flipping out over the DSA stuff. And I don't flip out, because I am not a fucking psycho.
But I do point out that the DSA has listed, official factions and causes that are deadly serious actual Marxists and Communists. These people think Lenin had it right and we have to commie harder in America. Lauren pauses for a second - actually pauses - and states she didn't know about things like The Marxist Unity Group who advocates for:
They literally want to overthrow America, Lauren, I say.
Well, that's not Lauren's DSA. Her DSA just wants the obvious, basic things; free healthcare, free education, a living wage! Like, hello, why are we evening talking about this in 2026? Lol!
I order another beer, smiling. Lauren veers off topic again, this time about a "Mayoral Election" for pets that is a charity effort for a local non-kill shelter. She's really excited about it. More excited about that than Elon Musk, Data Centers, and the DSA. A while later, she tells me - with mischief in her eye - about her friend, Molly, who, yes, is 41 and divorced, but is actually so smart and really cute. I lament to Lauren that while I can easily envision saxophone-accompanied nights of passion with Molly (before watching Parks and Rec afterwards, of course) I've got a lot of business travel coming up (which is true) - so I can't risk falling in love all over again. Lauren, laughing, accepts my polite decline. She shows me some photos of her niece on her phone.
Commentary
I've said it before and I stand by it: Lauren is a Basically Good Person (BGP). She's divorced and clearly heartbroken but not actually bitter. She knows in her heart of hearts she's not going to be a Mom. I genuinely feel for her on that one. She doesn't hate men. She doesn't hate America. But she's so full of emotional incontinence that anything that isn't soft and cuddly (Elon, AI, data centers) becomes a target, and anything loud and passionate that resonates with her (DSA, Kamala back in '24, the World Cup (for some reason)) becomes her sacred, personal cause....
Until she gets into what really matters; things and people that make her feel at ease and comforted; Ted Lasso, animal city council elections, the potluck that Chris from the bar is having on Saturday afternoon, Words with Friends, being the "matchmaker" for her single friends (while STAUNCHLY refusing to date on her own ... unless, like, Mark at that coffee shop asked about her?)
Lauren's problems aren't whatever her therapist is telling her. Her problem (singular) is that she is utterly disconnected from the rest of society. It doesn't look like it from the outside, and doesn't feel like it to her personally; she's out and about all the time. Her social calendar is booked up! But that social calendar is just "vibing" with people. There's no deep interpersonal anchor. No commitments.
So this means Lauren doesn't experience social issues, politics, or anything else in the way that those words traditionally imply. Lauren isn't looking at issues and plausible outcomes of policy, legislation, and local development on her local or national community. This is even more true in how Lauren relates to technology. She isn't trying to think about the downstream consequences of disrupted knowledge work or the knock-on effects of physical world (data center) construction. She hasn't thought about the revolutionary potential of nuke energy because "Hiroshima was a tragedy."
For her, all of it - literally all of her waking time - is emotional pattern matching. "Does this thing go in the "make me feel good" bucket or the "make me feel bad" bucket?. That's it. That's the rubric. There isn't even the introspection done to determine how and why she has developed various emotional attachments. Not to "Freud a Foid" too hard, but does Elon remind her of the kind austic guy she dated in college who was bad at sex yet still ended up awkwardly dumping her? Is Trump "an asshole" because he is literally the same age as her estranged father?
Nope. It's finish-the-emotion all the way down.
Which brings me to the final stanza here - the LLMification of human brains. A small thread and exchange here.
AI fucking up the corporate or commercial life of people doesn't really bother me deeply. The person who, today, thinks it is acceptable to read back LLM output verbatim during a job interview is the person who, 5-10 years ago, was mainlining hustle slop from Gary Vee and Tim Ferris before launching a podcast about crypto automation. Same agent (thank you very much) different skin.
Lauren's situation is worse. She has adopted the (lack of) introspection of LLMs as well as their simple method of "complete the x with the y most probable next token." Where "x", in Lauren's case, is a emotional-judgemental-moral reaction loop to anything. Added to that pitiful epistemic model is the sheer superficiality of it. For example, Lauren was really into the World Cup. Because soccer is left coded but it's also a sport and sports mean hot guys might be around (it is astonishing how, in her 40s, divorced, Lauren's approach to dating is essentially unchanged from her mid teens).
But even though Lauren was into the World Cup, she never learned about soccer. She didn't really understand even the basics like off-sides (the concept, not how it is enforced, which truly is Kafkaesque) the extra / stoppage time situation, or corner kicks versus throw-ins etc. And that's because none of those details fit into the "emote-judge-moralize" loop that seems to govern her life.
Perhaps most chilling is the fact that Lauren is not at all a heavy user of AI. She doesn't have a secret AI boyfriend or a galaxy of prompts to write her on-demand romantasy. But, somehow, through the collective-insect-brain of popular leftist, mainstream culture, she has adopted so many LLM-like habits that it's hard not to point and scream at it.
It would be reductive to call Lauren and NPC and then dismiss her. This is a real person with a legitimate claim to human dignity and an actually strong social track record. Lauren pays her taxes, stays employed, doesn't break the law more than a speeding ticket here and there, and some technically still illegal marijuana at her apartment. This is exactly the kind of person who I want to have feel like they are engaged with society so that they are thinking about society. But that's not happening. What made Lauren feel bad today? What made her feel good?
Lauren is not x, she's y - and that's the thing no one else is talking about. We should try to surface the scaffolding of the heart of the issue. Open the door and walk through it.
If you'd like, I can continue unpacking this in the comments.
This part of the tale needs more explanation.
Why Lauren pauses? What, if anything she knows about Marxism, both in theory and practice? Does she know who Lenin and Marx were?
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Ironically, your dispassionate analysis of Lauren reads more like an autistic LLM next token predictor than Lauren's emotional processing of the world around her from my view.
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I genuinely think that's how most people, most of the time, for most of history, have approached politics. Unless you're a policy wonk or you're talking about your own narrow area of expertise (perhaps your profession) then politics is mostly mood-affiliation. And I include myself and the folks of this forum in that prescription.
To give an example, you say she thinks of you as a liberal who likes guns and Jesus or whatever. But looking from the outside, it seems a little strange that there would be such a strong correlation between the belief that a Judean carpenter rose from the dead 2000 years ago and things like gun policy, immigration or tax rates. And yet, according to the fourth chart in this article, 43% of liberals are non-religious while only 12% of conservatives are. Left-wing brains and right-wing brains even light up differently when they are buying eggs.
You see her politics as crude warm-and-fuzzy pattern matching, and Obama sees rural Americans clinging to guns, religion and xenophobia because they are depressed. It's the same process. Everyone's politics looks crude from the outside, because they basicaly are.
I don't think you're wrong and I don't think that I am "above" Lauren.
After reading some of the other replies as well, I think I can refine my point more:
I think that Lauren's emotional pattern matching is actually something of a snake-eating-its-own-tail. Lauren pattern matches based on emotion so that she can immediately feel the way she wants. Maybe that's a sense of comfort, maybe that's a sense of righteous indignation.
When I pattern match emotionally in relation to politics, religion etc. I am following the classic confirmation bias trap. "Obvious belief x is right!" (unsaid: _because I already believe in thing x).
Contrast that to (what I imagine to be) Lauren's rationale loop: "Ugh! I'm pissed off. I want my pissed off-edness to relate to something. Trump is literally Hitler!"
I'm still worried I'm not doing the best job in creating a clean distinction between the two, but I think the point is clearer. Lauren, and the many, many millions like her, use politics (and social issues) as a self-looping emotional barometer. I don't think that used to be the case.
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it's not that Lauren is like LLMs in her habits, it's that LLMs are like (and have been trained to be like) Lauren.
"They taught AI to talk like a corporate middle manager and thought this meant the AI was conscious instead of realizing that corporate middle managers aren't" - Some internet rando
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Xitter has recently also lively discussion about the Lauren question, and proposal of abolishing women right to vote triggered massive xitterstorm.
According to "Wanye" nothing would happen when the 19th is repealed. Why he proposes it then? Just for clicks? He indends something to happen.
Wanye compares his proposal to DSA proposals of socialist America (which, in worst case, would result in something like Hugo Chavez, not Lenin or Stalin, which would be indeed rather bad).
So what is the worst what can happen when the 19th is gone?
TL;DR: We do not know.
Wanye does not imagine end of democracy and establishment of strong man rule. Many historical cases when voting was either formally abolished or reduced to empty charade, when no matter how you vote, El Presidente always wins and people who bitch too much about it fall out of windows.
I believe Wanye when he says he does not want this. I believe him that he wants democracy to continue and voting staying meaningful, only with restricted franchise based on penis possession.
This, limiting of democratic franchise, never ever happened in modern recorded history.
Wanye, is proposing something far more revolutionary than all DSA combined. As a self professed conservative, he should do some soul searching and second, third and fourth order thinking.
"But in the 19th century, men only voted and things were fine! We must retvrn!"
No, 19th century was not fine. It was, among other things, age of rabid nationalism and psychopathic war mongering, leading to the great unpleasantness of 1914. If you want this back, say so.
If not, onus is on you to bring some strong evidence that today's manoids became civilized and are not the bloodthirsty beasts of recent past.
The post was about how bad the DSA is, not that we should remove a woman's right to vote. Elsewhere Wanye says he doesn't actually support repealing the 19th at all. The point is that generally people have a much stronger reaction to politics that on net, if they could be implemented painlessly(and they can't but it's a hypothetical), would cause very little change in day to day life than things like DSA marxist proposals that would destroy the nation. Which is an interesting observation albeit I'm not sure what we're supposed to do with it, could have been more easily demonstrated with like gay marriage going away being something many would fight much harder than some material tax change that would probably have a much larger impact on the lives of even gay dudes.
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The US had to be cajoled and suckered into joining the War, three years late. WWI is actually a very strange thing in that, while there was popular enthusiasm for it that we can't imagine today (essentially, the chickenhawkery seen on the right with GWOT and from libs with Slava Ukraini, but actually followed through by going to the Front), the path from assassination to war was the first disaster of modern bureaucracy. The sluggishness of Austria, the complacency of Germany, the paranoia of Russia, the confusion of France, the duplicity of the British Foreign Office, and the do-gooding sociopathy of the Wilson Administration all, when you look at the details, look far more like the spring of 2020 than they do anything out of the 19th Century.
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Uhh, Hugo Chavez would ALSO be rather bad.
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Yes, we go back to the happy days when only men had the vote, and politics was a shining beacon of sober and grave rationality, carried out on behalf of the nation by public servants of unimpeachable integrity who thought only of the common weal and the public good, and the voters considered each matter and policy with precise, logical, analysis unbesmirched by partisanship, personal advantage, prejudices and preferences, or the faintest whiff of the pork barrel.
Oh, wait... that happened?
Tammany Hall was built by men, and brought down by men too.
Is political corruption correlated with gender, are male politicians more or less corrupt than female ones?
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The worrying issue is the continuing trend toward there being a boys party and girls party. Obviously, there are more girls than boys, so eventually this means the girls party will win, right?
I'm much more worried about the racial split, which seems sharply divided between the "white party" and "Blacks (with capital B!) + associated allies party." That is a really toxic divide, and it seems to be getting worse, not better.
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I feel like my experience having been inside of datacenters, having been in charge of datacenters and being in planning meetings for new datacenters should give me some kind of edge in discussions about datacenters but I am mostly as hapless as everyone else.
They do create jobs, actually more skilled blue collar jobs than you might appreciate, but not like thousands of them. There's a ton of work to get them built but ongoing maintenance is probably tens of people employed permanently.
The water claims are mostly fake. Towns may sign bad deals on hooking them up with power instead of making them improve infrastructure.
What else is there to say.
The average datacenter, from my vantage point in the skilled trades, seems to employ ~10-15 maintenance people full time, plus 2 ish HVAC techs from contractors, 2 electricians and an apprentice from an electrical contractor.
It's also worth noting that the most reliable way to get HVAC techs of the appropriate specialty is by signing a contract to use only union labour. There are only a small number of pipelines for training these guys(datacenter HVAC is not a standard commercial package unit), and the union runs the biggest, like 'probably half or more of the total' biggest. Trane(the factory) runs the second biggest, and it's a lot slower. Most HVAC companies willing to extensively retrain their technicians do so for refrigeration instead, because refrigeration is 1)easier 2)very urgent and 3)easy to find clients for. Plus you can hire a refrigeration only tech- he'll be an odd duck, but you can find one pretty easily- to run that training, without having to sign on with some external guild-like organization.
Haha yes! Aside from those techs, my datacenter in London had a revolving door for life safety system specialists doing periodic inspections and recharges or call-outs to tinker with sensitivity on systems false alarming every Saturday morning during my hangovers.
The fire department got to take a trip over a few times to confirm our VESDA was false alarming.
If I had credits I would make a heart warming promotional video for datacenters and how they give opportunity to so many noble professionals who work with more than just keyboard muscles.
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Yeah, this is about it, though I can't really speak for the data centers that I've not been involved with. My work more concerns the environmental compliance and property management, and everything I've been involved in has really went over and above the call of duty to do things right. Frankly, a lot of these places will be better after the data center than they were before. While I personally don't want a data center next door, there are many worse things.
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I was talking about roughly this with some friends recently, and it came up that in some ways post-industrial humans seem to be suffering the same sorts of malaise that zoo animals do. Sure, we have plenty of food and are kept safe, but we've socially isolated ourselves, and many of us are, at a fundamental level, mentally and physically unhealthy. We engage in over-grooming and self-destructive activities. Can't get pandas in captivity to maintain species-wide TFR either.
But this is entirely of our own making, and we're not truly stuck here. I wish I could say exactly which factors it is here: I really don't know. The Right would tell you we're coddled and incapable of facing the real-world situations. The Left would tell you we're just not comfortable enough. I'm not really convinced by either case there, but certain elements of both ring true. If I were a sci-fi writer, I think Do Not Create the Human Zoo would be an interesting book to write.
Related idea: "Humans won't breed in captivity" by Devon Eriksen. https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1918506702267175234
Not a bad summary, but it misses that men have been taught for decades, explicitly, that receiving "hints" is not reason to believe a woman wishes to be approached. Stuff like "Just because she smiles at you doesn't mean she likes you".
Do those decades happen to be the decades that passed since the emergence of third-wave feminism?
They happen to be the most recent decades, so I assume yes, but I don't know if the start coincided closely.
I meant to suggest that this was in fact not a coincidence. I'm assuming some sort of cultural change had to happen for girls and young women to lose their ability and/or willingness to efficiently drop plausibly deniable hints, and third-wave feminism was probably driving this.
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I live nested inside filter bubbles where the fertility is above replacement and they're all pretty post-industrial? This sounds like a skill issue.
Do your bubbles iterate? Speaking from experience, there are plenty of somewhat wealthy conservative neighborhoods where successful people move and have 3-5 kids. But then their kids aren't quite as successful, some marry late, some don't marry, and within a single generation fertility has fallen below replacement.
Bubbles:
Fellow tradesmen, coworkers and the like- above replacement. Hard to say what 'generation' means here though.
Extended family scattered across half of Texas and part of Louisiana- fertility definitely declined since the seventies but not seemingly since the nineties. Above replacment.
Actual IRL tradcaths- fertility is slightly rising over the generations. It remains to be seen if the next generation will achieve Sahel-level TFR, but it's already above Israel.
Neighbors- Gringos maintain above replacement fertility over the generations. Hispanics seem to decline generationally.
A few of these people are farmers, but none of them engage in unmechanized subsistence farming, and most of them have normal waged labor jobs.
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Nice article, illustrating in practice famous quip of Winston Churchill (or someone else): "The best argument against democracy is five minute talk with average voter."
Good complement would be writeup of Billy Bob, lifelong Republican.
"Bob loves America, guns and Jesus. Bob hates communists and terrorists. Bob believes that America must stand with Israel for all time and fight communists of Russia and China and terrorists of Iranistan to the victorious end. Bob is certain that America is the greatest power in the world, and if she took her gloves off, she could easily finish communists and terrorists in single afternoon ... etc, etc."
Obviously, neither Lauren nor Bob are qualified to make decisions about policy both domestic and foreign. And, even more obviously, neither of them is, despite their eager participation in democratic process, really making any decisions.
The experts, the best and the brightest are making the decisions, but how bright and how good they really are?
Writeup of Edward E. Expert, graduate from one of most prestigious universities of the world with long career in most prestigious govt, private and NGO organizations, description how he thinks, how he feels and what he knows about the world is needed the most.
There's a natural desire for symmetry, equivalence, in these things, but symmetry in intranational political psychology is by definition rare. The data center thread earlier gives a better view into the mindset of the modern Republican - he is essentially moved by suspicion. Where Lauren is over-credulous, Bob is over-suspicious (well, accurately suspicious with respect to Our Institutions, but it takes incredible epistemic depravity to justify Bob's level of suspicion).
For Edward E. Expert, my experience is that they basically say what they think. If you read The Economist and Foreign Policy, and I guess some academic journals about race and so on, you have his number.
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"Bob believes America is the greatest country in the world and is the single key to preventing the global triumph of communism. He probably believes democrats have stolen elections before; depending on social class this can variously include 1960, 2020, and various congressional by-elections. He thinks further expansions of welfare for specifically the low income are subsidizing underemployment. He follows football; if wealthy, this is college football, not NFL, usually the team of the school he went to(but not always), and also follows another sport- often baseball, but sometimes whatever his nearest city happens to be best at, or hockey if he's into contact sports, etc. He spends more energy on this than he does on politics. He believes that black culture is mostly a negative and that things like hip hop are very bad, but supports freedom of speech rather than measures to discourage them- he can't understand why his black neighbors insist on doing things wrong, when their culture is so obviously bad. But they're good people. He also believes that Islam is a bad culture, and may well believe that measures need to be taken to discourage it or keep it out of the country. He will probably clarify that more people should go to church, he's not racist but Islam has bad teachings that need to be discouraged- have you seen how they treat women? He believes that if the US doesn't stand with Israel God will punish the country, but does not think that it is possible to bring about the events of the book of revelation through human action.
He is very upset about rising prices, and depending on social class may blame taxes, government regulations, China, immigrants, or environmentalists. One thing he probably doesn't blame is boomers. He has some sympathies for young people struggling to get established, but also thinks they should get good- maybe those dastardly environmentalists/bureaucrats should get out of the way, but there's no excuse not to try. He 100% believes there is no replacement for fossil fuels, and thinks climate change is example #9000 of unhinged democrat hysteria. It's got to be a mental illness at this point, why else would they arrive at the conclusions they've come to about gender? Come on. He is very confused as to why his black neighbors continue to vote democrat when they have common sense."
This Bob is not equivalent of Lauren, this Bob is far more politically advanced person with ideas and opinions formed beyond mere icks, yucks and yikes.
Maybe it's a class distinction, but republicans mostly have some opinions, even if poorly formed or informed ones. Of course, Bob is implied to be older than Lauren. Possibly by a lot, possibly by a little.
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I suspect that much of human cognition functions more or less like an LLM. I don't think it's the whole story of human cognition, but something like naturally evolved LLMs are doing most of the work most of the time for most people. Most artists have basically been exposed already. No wonder they can rarely ever explain what they're doing.
The LLMs in Lauren's head are optimized to operate in a small village with regular labor and lots of children running around. The daily problems and challenges that her brain has adapted to solve are now either absent or much attenuated, while there are novel and unprecedented obstacles and pitfalls that her psychology has no appropriate response to. Ecologically speaking, this is a habitat mismatch. The future of humanity will presumably include fewer Laurens, because her loop longer reproduces itself, but rather it gets misdirected and trapped in a self-abnegating spiral.
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Damn man, if a female acquaintance thought of me as a [X] Dude for Harris and tried to matchmake me with a 41 year-old divorcee, I’d book a physician appointment for a check-up on aura deficiency.
Also because, for women, the World Cup is another opportunity to paint their faces and dress up in CUTE, colorful outfits. Yay!
Middle-aged woman can’t even make it through a week without validation and direction from an authority figure :laughing_crying_emoji:
The issue with basic leftist BGPs (indeed, basic leftist Basically Good Persons) is that their feels get implemented into policies and practices, which results in outcomes deleterious to men and law-abiding, net-tax paying Americans—even if they don’t hate men or America per se. They help, enable, or support the proliferation of stuff like racial and other identity preferences in schools and workplaces, repeat criminals getting let back into the street with a slap on the wrist, letting millions of illegal immigrants into the country to have birthright citizen’d children and making the Jameses of the country subsidize them. People like Lauren make me think relatively less of humans and more of LLMs.
Sloot, I'm surprised at you! Swapping the subject and the object like this.
First, the "White Dude for Harris" is Lauren's way of fitting me into her mental model of eligible men. She's too staunchly against "republicans" (whatever that means) to deal with the idea that she could have a friendly relationship with a real life one. Nope, does not compute. So she mangles "me" (to be fair her own self-conception of me) into the slot (or sloot?) in her world that is the closest fit - white dudes for harris.
On matchmaking, this is even more obvious and established -- women beyond a certain age who are married and/or divorced try to matchmake men they like to fantasize about with their friends as a means of vicarious dating. Like I said in my original post, Lauren isn't an NPC and isn't particularly dim. She "gets" on some level that she has zero shot with me (to be clear here: "me" isn't TollBooth in specific). Rejection is very hard for her (see: Divorce), so she likes to fantasize though multiple layers by teasing me about matchmaking. She isn't even really that serious about the matchmaking. This is nested layers of indirect self-fantasy flirting. The Last Psychiatrist would paint a far more vivid picture.
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I might be out of the loop there, but does this term actually have a more specific meaning or is it just "woman" with a layer of incel sneering ("woman (gross and stupid in the way women are)")?
Paragraphs like this make me think that if you want to really understand your outgroup, talking to someone like a divorced elder millennial woman is a fundamentally misguided approach, for you in particular. Your story could be more or less glossed as "this person believes things that are diagonally opposed to what I believe. I don't see a coherent way that anyone could arrive at this, but well, she is a primitive, pathetic creature that is not at all like me. I figure she believes those things for some primitive creature reasons". You are making it entirely too easy for yourself, and wind up with a conclusion that is largely useless. What you should instead be doing is seeking out people that are the most like you, who you will not be tempted to explain away as motivated by feelings or daddy issues, and still come to the same conclusions. There is no shortage of male contrarians out there who also sympathise with the DSA, find Elon disgusting and think Trump is an asshole. Try to talk to them, and understand why they believe those things.
But, like, dude, I also wrote this in the original post:
So, I'm a little ticked that your less-than-charitable characterization of what I wrote also discards a direct statement to the contrary.
More importantly, you're missing the larger point. I'm not here to sneer about the Lauren archetype. I'm here to try to impart what I'm seeing on the ground as a means of figuring out better ways to engage with it.
Ehhh slow down there, dude.
But I already understand these kind of people deeply. Definitely my conservative buds, and to a very significant extent the non-conservative dudes who are yet demographically very similar to me. There isn't a lot of mystery there. A lot of them do, indeed, have valid reasons for voting different from me. Mostly, it's a different prioritization of values.
With "Laurens" I don't think it's just another permutation of relative value of values. I think it's a different system of reasoning altogether. I don't think it's "lesser than" mine (to point back to your original baseless allegation). I think it's different.
Yeah, but what about Lauren? She's important.
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He or I could write the same post about DSA guys in barcade neighbourhoods of big cities (though I don't have much reason to - everyone on this site is familiar with redditors) and you'd give it the exact same response. Also, it's "diametrically", not "diagonally".
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I'd be open to it meaning an Online, but Basic woman. The sort who sneers and snarls when seeing a Tesla, says things along the lines of Men Are all Such Trash, Amirite?, gets pissy about age gaps and calls the men in such Pedos, and is generally a walking collection of stereotypes.
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Also, the femcels have moid, and the geometrycels have…
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My understanding is that it was originally a disparaging term for a woman in online incel culture, a contraction of femoid. But then the very online relative normies started using it as ironically faux-self-deprecating humor – the joke being on the poster for using incel slang, not on the woman under discussion. In many online spaces today it's a playful and informal term for a woman, the way I might use dudette, with no disrespect intended.
Foids and moids, we're all one or the other!
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Yeah, it's basically the gender flipped version of chud. Which means it needs to be used almost 1000x more often to achieve parity.
What’s also funny is that terms like “foid” and “roastie” still make internet women and white knights seethe, and now even “female” too when used as a noun.
In contrast, “chud” has been reclaimed by wrongthinkers and the attempted revenge terms of “moid” and “scrote” never really struck a chord, as moids and scrotes were unbothered, laughed them off, or adopted them to use ironically. And, of course, males don’t get butthurt about “male” being used as a noun.
... isn't that a small potato?
Has it? Or is it just becoming universal? I still see it more from left-leaning people than right.
Large labia → [roast] beef curtains → roastie (all derogatory)
I thought it was to do with spit-roasting.
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I'm probably showing my years here, and maybe my autism as well, but I've never understood why that's supposed to be a bad thing!
Not that I'm saying you personally feel that way or anything, just one of those things that my brain sees and says, "why, tho?"
Most 2D pornography is drawn with small labia. It is a common sentiment that large labia are considered ugly. I think it is also a commonly-believed urban myth that promiscuity causes large labia (along with a loose vagina).
Maybe it's not a good idea to ask this but why are you claiming that it's just an urban myth?
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I didn't realise we were running a DEI program to increase right-wing representation in tribal brainrot here.
If we do it too hard, the betrayal will be great when it inevitably comes out that our latest 3x AAQC awarded MGTOW knuckledragger faked his CV and is actually secretly a stay-at-home husband for a muscle mommy female CEO.
This is just such a reddit-y thing to say. The sarcastic, passive voice phrasing flowing into the boo outgroup "brainrot" / "muslce mommy" comment.
I'd encourage you to say what you mean. If I had to take a shot at it, I think it's something like:
"Using terms like 'foid' doesn't help with discourse because they come pre-loaded with a heavily meme'd and polemic connotation. It makes the point any author is trying to make more difficult to honestly engage with because readers who are predisposed to agree will chuckle at the terminology and let shaky analysis slide, while those predisposed to disagree will discount perhaps valid evidence too quickly."
But maybe I'm wrong here?
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I didn't realize there was another kind of MGTOW internet personality.
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LLMs, as impressive as (some) of them are, have reduced my opinion of human intelligence more than increased my opinion of machine intelligence. Many (most?) people go through life pattern matching, producing actions and words that could just as easily be modeled by an LLM. My hunch is that people have always been this way. Our machines doing the same thing puts the behavior in stark relief.
“Have you met the average human?” is my internal reaction when people poo-poo LLMs as being stochastic parrots incapable of True Thought.
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https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4AHXDwcGab5PhKhHT/humans-who-are-not-concentrating-are-not-general
Some interesting commentary on this point, from the GPT-2 era.
Sometimes when you are in a conversation you are bored in and your mind is elsewhere you start responding to only the last few words in the previous sentence from the other person that represent the only part of their last three minutes of monologuing that you actually remember. You extrapolate theme, topic, tone, narrative from them and then immediately respond. At least I do this. This is pretty simply next token prediction.
And again, not to call Hanson unoriginal, but various people - albeit a minority - predicted for decades or even centuries that the brain was essentially just a complex statistical modelling tool and that intelligence, language, consciousness etc were really all pretty basic probability/statistics functions. It’s not a new thought, it’s just one that’s been proven correct.
Point of order: that a model can, under certain conditions, replicate aspects of behaviour does not in any way indicate that the brain operates using those principles. Every time we make a new mechanical process, people decide that's how the brain works on some fundamental level. Switchboards, electrical fields, computer logic. Last decade it was Reinforcement Learning (S.A. still asserts this is settled science in his posts and in academic neuroscience it's popular but far from settled), this decade it's autoencoders (predictive coding) or LLMs.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying we're far, far off proving it's true.
FWIW I agree on the core point that statistical analysis is batting much stronger than formal logic, but against that you do have to weight the fact that for some reason LLMs need 10,000x the amount of data to go the same distance. Probably some combination of specialised circuits and us missing serious statistical factors IMO.
Yeah, and this is mostly what people mean when they say this:
Victorians or Edwardians who imagined the mind as comprised of millions of tiny gears and levers like Babbage’s computer had obviously dissected brains, they mostly recognized it wasn’t literally like that, it was always more about the kind of operation than the exact physical mechanism.
Is it settled science that the human mind is a specific kind of ML model that maps to a category computer scientists would recognize? Obviously not, it’s unlikely something that evolved by circumstance on a completely different kind of computer we don’t understand would be comparable in that way. But it probably is a neural network or something comparable to a neural network of some kind.
Probably, but that's a biiiiig space. Neurons are weird. Like, really weird. As with junk DNA there's a huge chunk of them which exist purely to mediate the interaction of other ones, they change their behaviour based on the +ve/-ve sign of the timing between electricial signals, all the individual connections are running surprisingly complicated and hard-to-tease-out statistical models of their own. Plus you have all the area specialisation: speech areas, vision, motor, limbic etc. and all the heritage structure from evolution.
It may turn out that these are really a very bad, overtuned method of running a simple system, which is what the RL and the predictive-coding people are hoping for. It might also turn out that the brain is a lot cooler and weirder than we know. I don't think we're even in a position to speculate at the moment.
It might turn out that there are just many ways to do the same thing. It might also be true that all language models, being essentially ‘distillation’ (via training sets which are the sum of human art, writing, knowledge, etc) of our wisdom, can replicate and build on our achievements but also required, in that fundamental sense, the ramshackle evolutionarily derived networks we have in our own heads that were built for the multimodal real world environment biological life inhabits. We’ll know once we have recursive self-improvement and can attempt initial training with extremely primitive datasets.
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Seems like all the people still saying that LLMs can never do anything truly intelligent because they're mere next token predictors didn't get the memo. (Hm, should that be "didn't get the preprint"?)
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That shit already free, nigga.
People who cannot get a living wage in 2026 America are mostly people who are deeply unsympathetic, or have very high expectations. We have clunky expensive universal healthcare that people who can't afford it just don't pay for, and the system works fine.
Not quite. Soccer in America has a left-coded fanbase, yes, because 'soccer fan' in America is implied to be a premiere league fan, and liking English stuff as better than American is a weird blue tribe tick, MLS or Liga mx fandom isn't nearly so political. Internationally soccer is not a left coded sport, at all, and FIFA is real cuddly with Trump, Qatar, etc, and clearly making a play to get the American red tribe into soccer.
I lol'ed.
And I agree, which brings up kind of a bigger, spookier question;
What does the DSA actually want if the shit already free?
And this is where I take them at face value. I think they truly do want heavy handed gov't redistribution. Does your brokerage account have more than $1mm in it? Great, every dollar over $1mm goes into someone else's account directly until we all "balance" out.
Well first, we need to ask who the DSA are.
The core of the DSA, which solidly outvotes basically everyone else in their membership, is basically people in first tier cities, with graduate degrees, earning under about $65k/yr. For non Americans, the sort of person who is capable of earning a masters degree normally obtains $65k/yr in compensation through normal advancement in conventional employment by the time they would have earned a masters degree, even for non-college workers, in first or second tier cities- and college degree holders tend to make more. So we’re basically talking about people who are paid significantly less than the market rate for their qualifications. There’s a stereotype of them working in the educational system, but that would be a raise for most of them(teachers make more for having masters)- they’re mostly underemployed. Add to that that they’re living in first tier cities, which are more expensive, and often have substantial student debt(yes, lots of grad school is funded, but many of these people either get the unfunded version or exceed the limits of their funding). So we’re talking about people who are embarrassed by their class position- their purchasing power is very low, and the expectations in their social circles are very high.
Fundamentally, what they want is for the government to come in and fix that. They want welfare to expand to cover people like them(the American welfare state is substantial but mostly need based, and ‘I don’t want a real job’ isn’t a need- if they were parents earning that amount they would have free healthcare, be eligible for subsidized apartments, get food stamps, etc. But underemployed single adults are not covered). They want their student loans forgiven to put hundreds of extra dollars in their pocket every month. They want, as a stretch goal, status markers distributed based on their idea of virtue, not on ability to pay(or virtue as perceived by private clubs). They want to apply to live in cool apartments in hip neighborhoods and receive heavily discounted rent because they’re awesome. They want to be able to go on international vacations every year because they deserve it, not because they can afford it. They somewhat notoriously want to be able to DoorDash without thinking about it, because their class peers mostly can, and dammit they’re entitled to the normal petty luxuries of their cadre.
Now here’s the kicker- entitlement of a certain class of people to a comfortable lifestyle at societal expense- without them needing to personally do anything useful- isn’t exactly new. Historically we called them nobles and defined them by birth. But the DSA doesn’t want to conceptualize themselves that way. They want to restructure the economy around making them, personally, more comfortable, without really needing to think about what that actually means. They have fellow travelers who are simply misinformed about the state of America- they believe that there are millions of children without healthcare because their parents can’t afford it, for example- in reality, most children in the USA already have their health insurance paid for by the government, and the reminder come from parents wealthy enough to pay the premiums. But upper class people often don’t have the specific knowledge to realize these DSA narratives are propaganda to justify their entitlement campaign.
The two necessary elements of a new, hip neighorhood are 1. Fake laptop job young women 2. Just slightly older men (with or without fake job, but with job) that can afford to take them out on dates to the hip new spots in the hip new neighborhood.
Gentrification is a market based collective action method of filtering for mate fitness. Trendy NYC/LA/Chicago/Dallas is the Serengeti.
San Francisco is disqualified. Because of the gayness.
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Soccer is left-coded because it's Euro, and Europhilia is a left-coded thing. There have been many attempts to make US men's soccer happen, and none of them have really gotten anywhere, so soccer remains Euro.
FIFA is cuddly with Trump and Qatar because FIFA is utterly corrupt and therefore speaks Trump and Qatar's language.
Soccer is left-coded because it's third world coded. US Europhiles are absolutely not "philic" of the sort of European who loves soccer.
Who needs sport that can be played by any ragged urchin in Latino, Arabic or African favela? Real sport for real Americans needs heaps of expensive gear to just begin.
The era when European association football was tied to working-class masculinity (which was also the heyday of organised hooliganism for obvious reasons) is now in the past, and never existed in the first place in large parts of Continental Europe - including Spain.
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This was really fun to read. It reminds me of a recent evolution I've had, or devolution.
When I was young and edgy, I used to say that I couldn't stand talking to most people because they were boring and weren't passionate or nerdy enough about anything, and all they wanted to talk about was the weather and logistics and other stuff I didn't care about. Then I got older and I forced myself to grow up, which meant that I chastised myself for being elitist and edgy, and I did my best to appreciate everyone and be fully engaged with conversations with anyone and anywhere. And then I recently realized that my teenage edgy self was naive and angsty but fundamentally right that most people are just boring for nerdy semi-autists like myself, and it's really annoying to have boring conversations with them.
I think your emote-judge-moralize feedback loop really is the dominant form of cognition for the vast majority of humanity.
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