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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30987 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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So ive been trying to get involved in the local political seen. I live in jacksonville, Fl. I decided to vote straight D in hopes to get control over the housing crisis. Donna Deagan won against our republican Daniel Davis. Which is a happy victory that im thankful for. Many people dont live here in jax, but the top 3 issues for my city personally were housing, our shit-excuse for a downtown, and public transportation, all of which are currently abysmal. From what can tell, Deagan is mentioned zoning reform on her website (the only known way to decrease housing cost, losing the zoning laws to build more). She also mentioned making things more walkable, which im also in favor of. Along with bringing more small businesses to jax (if you dont live here, its kinda boring, its football, beer, shopping malls. Thats it. The most exciting place is the beaches)

Ive kinda been questioning how much this will mean. A lot of other cities have blue politics, and are still notorious for having the above problems, (well minus shitty down towns). But im still giving it a try. What i find frustrating however is how little people actually care for local politics, and how people blame things on the president or governor, without understanding anything. Housing is a good example, ive had a lot of passengers in my car (i drive for uber) blame his for the price of it, without actually understanding that the reason for housing cost is down to city politics, and not the state. (Same thing with people blaming the president for gas prices). Ive always felt as though a lot of political problems in the US would be solved if people engaged on the local level of politics more.

A lot of other cities have blue politics, and are still notorious for having the above problems, (well minus shitty down towns).

Including shitty (literally) down towns in at least one case (SF). But go ahead, keep voting D to solve problems which the Ds don't solve; it's traditional.

Including shitty (literally) down towns in at least one case (SF). But go ahead, keep voting D to solve problems which the Ds don't solve; it's traditional.

This comment is paradigmatically partisan, but not paradigmatically evidence-laden. Please be more careful about that.

I agree with the sentiment, but what cities might those be?

Looks mixed to me, more Republican than most cities but they don't have San Francisco Democrats level of dominance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mayors_of_Jacksonville,_Florida

I can understand how someone living in Jacksonville might yearn for the more vibrant, walkable cities of the Blue states. But you might want to examine how these cities became what they are in the first place. Was it through the policies of the current Democratic party? No. It was generally due to these cities being settled before cars were in widespread use.

On the other hand, for those of us (probably the majority here) who do live in urban areas in blue states, we can see the real effects that the current Democratic party has had on our cities in the last 10 years. These include higher violent crime, much higher rates of homelessness and overdoses, higher taxation, and failing public schools. For example, King County (Seattle) has seen more overdoses in 2023 already than in all of 2020, which was already something like 1000% above rates from the 1990s. Furthermore, our transit systems have become unsafe to use and the cost of living is insane.

Are there any cities like Jacksonville which have actually achieved what you are looking for? Who did they vote for during that transition period? How do those policies look compared to the current Democratic and Republican parties.

You shouldn't vote based on "these people are saying some nice things, let's give that a try". You don't build walkable neighborhoods and lower housing costs out of thin air. And I've seen the slippery slope that leads from nice-sounding statements to women being pushed in front of a subway train by a drug-addicted lunatic.

No. It was generally due to these cities being settled before cars were in widespread use.

I don't think this is a good explanation. This is Jacksonville in 1914. This is the same location today. It had transit and density, and like most US cities, probably removed it after cars started becoming common.

Huh?

Jacksonville's 1910 population was 57,699 vs 954,614 today.

Contrast that to Boston which had a population of 670,585 in 1910 vs 654,283 today.

That's why Boston has density and transit and Jacksonville doesn't. Cities like Jacksonville (and Los Angeles) removed their streetcar lines because people weren't using them and they were losing money. Cities like Boston and NYC couldn't do that because there was too much existing density for car-only infrastructure.

Your after image shows less streetside parking and the streetcar delete in favor of a bike lane and enlarged tree lined sidewalks (one is near triple width of the before, other is only double width).

The sidewalks are largely irrelevant, since at the time walking in the street was much more common and generally not illegal. Removing the streetcar is a substantial loss. The buildings on the left have been replaced with a parking garage, so the loss of street parking isn't very relevant either. This example is not as bad as many cities in the US, but it's certainly no improvement for pedestrians.

Removing the streetcar is a substantial loss.

Google Maps shows a bus stop at the location you linked, with several routes passing through it. What advantage does the streetcar have over a bus?

I'm also confused by this comparison, surely if you are going to pick a comparison this can't be the most dis-favorable to modern Jacksonville. The density is arguably higher, at least the buildings are taller.

It does show something I did think to myself last time I was in downtown Jacksonville though, the area has an absurd number of parking garages. I assume it's because I-95 is the most convenient way to get there.

I don't think "more" transit is the solution though. There's already several stations within close walking distance along downtown. But look at the top review for Central Station:

Not safe even if security is around they are useless, trams don't come on time. Doors closed on me twice which is dangerous at the same time consuming for commuters since tram time isn't accurate at all.

I picked it because it was the first picture I found of the time period I was looking for, so I wasn't cherry picking. It's not terrible. But I think it does show that Jackonsville was definitely "settled" before cars became common.

the only known way to decrease housing cost

You're not intellectually mature enough to be permitted on the internet without supervision. Decreasing demand (by, for instance) decreasing the population would also decrease housing cost.

  • -35

Mark two

deportation is not fatal, hlynka. cute attempt tho

You didn't say anything about deportation only decreasing the population.

You're not intellectually mature enough to be permitted on the internet without supervision

Where the fuck do you think you are?

I suspect you are not new here, but if you are: this kind of posting is not permitted here.

Banned for a week.

Don't forget decreasing demand by triggering massive unemployment or otherwise reducing income.

Or incentivising multiple occupancy.

That's unreasonable. In context of 'I actually live here', it's clear that Roman-style decimation or introducing Japanese knotweed or distributing asbestos isn't what he means.

Japanese knotweed

Am I missing something here? How does an invasive weed push down on demand?

Well why would people want to live somewhere infested by an extremely difficult-to-eradicate pest?

No, it lowers property values.

I'm not familiar with local politics in Jacksonville past hearing from multiple people that the Florida State Democratic Party is incompetent, if not actively working against their stated ideals, including actively pushing away people wanting to help. Maybe the local party in Jacksonville is better or you can find some local politician you can connect with, but the other approach might be looking into local citizen lobbying groups that care about the issues you care about like a local branch of Strong Towns, a local transit organization, or something else. One way to find such organizations is looking for lists of endorsements of candidates with views you agree with, but other than that I don't have any ideas.

I don't think "blue politics" is a meaningful term if you're talking about policy on housing and public transportation. Most large cities in the US are dominated by the Democratic Party and there are major intra-party arguments over the appropriate policies, and to some extent they are issues that cross party lines (e.g. YIMBY free market arguments may appeal to some Republicans). Looking at Donna Deagan's campaign website, "zoning" is mentioned quietly in one section and transit isn't mentioned at all. My interpretation is that she's unlikely to make big changes on either, but maybe I'm missing some local details.

A few states have been making zoning law changes at the state level recently because the local levels haven't been willing to do anything. But some of that is that no one municipality wants to make a change while their neighbors don't, so zoning at the state level fixes some coordination problems. Jacksonville's weirdly large size (compared to other urban areas where the metro area is legally organized into many more municipalities) might make it easier for zoning changes to happen at the municipality level.

Local politics are indeed quite impactful in the US. In fact back in the day that was the explicit goal - the founders wanted us to care more about our mayor than the president.

Unfortunately the massive rise in federal power and the hero worship of federal politicians with radio and tv has killed local politics. Even if the power is still nominally there, it’s just too boring to entertain the average person compared to the massive waves of attention grabbing content available everywhere.

If you think of electoral politics as team sports, with voting as the equivalent of cheering on your team from the sidelines (a fun activity even if it doesn't impact the result) this explains both the paradox of why people vote even though their votes almost certainly won't make a difference, and why people are drawn towards entertaining politics, even when their vote is more diluted, or even when they don't have a vote: see the numbers of non-Americans who religiously follow Trump-related news or US politics in general, but know little about e.g. their local representatives.

I love etymology too but thinking that because trans activists use the term "deadnaming" it means that they actually think that transition is like death is kind of like thinking that when a guy says "what's up, motherfuckers!" to his friends, he is implying that they fuck mothers.

The psychology of how and why people use words is often very little connected to those words' etymology.

There is a danger in getting so deep into etymology that one turns it almost into a form of numerology or astrology, believing that it explains more than it actually does because one can always come up with a plausible theory for any given supposed connection. Same with evolutionary psychology, I guess.

And yet a pro-transition perspective

A transgender person may decide to no longer use their birth or legal name. Instead, they’ll choose a name that better aligns with their identity. When someone uses their old name after being asked not to, that is what we call ‘deadnaming.’ The person who they once were is dead, but the new person is alive, so their current name should be used.

Emphasis mine.

It's like the scene you get in movies when tarot readings are involved. The Death card comes up. The reader says something like "It also means change". Invariably turns out it means death.

Not very different from rhetoric around being born again, or simply accepting Christ: "God's solution to the problem of my sinful self is to get rid of my old self and make me a new person in Christ." But if anyone posted here equating that with physical death, they would quite properly laughed off the stage.

Arguably trans activists play fast and loose with the figurative/literal meaning of death for political footing. It's one thing for your opponents to disagree with you, but for them to genocide you (sic) gets a bit more attention. I do not doubt many using these terms imagine they are being very sincere and good-faith.

Edit： After reading further here I see that nothing I have written here adds anything new.

I realize this is an extremely minor and tangential point, but...

Take another example - "evolution is just a theory." A Bible basher may take this expression to mean that "evolution is just a guess," whereas a scientist may understand this phrase to mean, "evolution is a falsifiable hypothesis that has been verified through empirical study and evidence." The Bible basher simply does not understand the academic definition of the term "theory;"

... every "Bible basher" I've met to date knew quite well what "theory" means in a scientific context; "evolution is just a theory" are not, in my experience, the words of scientists expressing a properly humble understanding of the physical world, but of precisely the people who need the scientific definition of "theory" explained to them.

EDIT: I'm open to seeing counterexamples, of course.

https://twitter.com/JakeHerrington/status/1443286841533374469

This link seems broken

From this exchange it became clear to me that no one bothers to investigate the etymology of words, where they came from, how they are defined, and what they actually mean.

Why do you believe that etymology helps you to know what a word actually means?

Etymology is interesting, but it’s almost totally unrelated to meaning. Even Websters dictionary doesn’t try to do that — they’re explicitly descriptive, not prescriptive.

Words are defined by how they’re used. That’s it.

Yes, it’s frustrating when people intentionally use the wrong word trying to sway public opinion, and it’s frustrating when you can’t pin down people on what they mean because of shifting definitions. But none of that is new nor unique to the left.

For this reason I think it is unsurprising that so many leftist forms of social media - I will call out Reddit and Twitter in particular - are geared towards short-form content: 280 character posts; TikTok shorts less than a minute in length; soundbytes, quips, and "gotchas" that carelessly use words without bothering to expand out their definitions and make it clear in what sense they are using a particular term.

That's the exact opposite of the "leftist memes" discourse, which posits that the right wing is able to condense its memes to few poignants words and images and leftist memes are far too wordy to actually read.

Memes and mottos have to be witty. Short rants can simply be babbling and cathartic, they are different mediums.

1 word is still fewer than 25.

For this reason I think it is unsurprising that so many leftist forms of social media - I will call out Reddit and Twitter in particular - are geared towards short-form content: 280 character posts;

Leftist in this case just "co-opted by the establishment" and if that establishment milieu would have been to the right at the time of co-option would have been on the right. Both of these sites have had owners (until recently with Twitter) that has accepted losses on them. They have never been profitable, yet the establishment through investment have been pouring money into them. We need to stop ourselves and ask why? Is it because these are the factories where our consent is manufactured? Is it the battlefields where culture war is waged? Is it the place where they can put their thumbs on the algorithmic scales to nudge us to consume certain content? Are these the places where our internet culture is formed? Simply put 'Cui Bono?' because the sites themselves aren't profitable but yet investments are poured in!

it is hyperbolic to compare transition with death."

Oh hey, that's me.

I have to agree with the gist of your post. In retrospect, I don't even know whether the other posters were pointing at the final death. The words aren't automatically hyperbolic, it is hyperbolic to say that it is equally bad for a kid to transition as it is for them to actually die for real.

I find it interesting that you say: "it becomes possible to simultaneously say things and not say them at all"

This is exactly what was happening in my situation. The people I was responding to were just as complicit in using metaphors carelessly for impact. It's not exclusively the left's fault that language is a mess. Every culture war meme on the right, "groomer," "murder" (in the case of abortion) etc, are chosen dynamically for impact in the culture war. Not because they immediately create a deep understanding of the exact concept, but because they create an understanding of the concept that is predisposed to create favorable implications for their side of the culture war regardless of root level truth value.

I think your arguments that this is a disease are excellent. We should endeavor to communicate more clearly. I think your etiology is flawed. It's the culture war itself that breeds the weaponized language.

The people I was responding to were just as complicit in using metaphors carelessly for impact. It's not exclusively the left's fault that language is a mess. Every culture war meme on the right, "groomer," "murder" (in the case of abortion) etc, are chosen dynamically for impact in the culture war.

In the case of "murder" I think conservatives are using the ordinary definition of the word ("the crime of unlawfully and unjustifiably killing a person") and the disagreement is not over definitions but rather an object level debate about whether abortion is, in fact, murder.

In the case of "groomer" this is clearly a redefinition of the term, and I believe Rufo has admitted this. He popularized the term with the explicit understanding that the term is being redefined in an attempted mimicry or parody of the left's propensity to redefine words.

But I can't think of an example of the right doing what the left frequently does, which is to redefine a term while denying that the term has been redefined. I'm curious if you can think of any examples.

Sure, "Fake News" being applied to biased news, the term "Cancel Culture" being applied to people calling you a jerk on twitter, "Patriot"... which is it again? Nationalism? Libertarianism? The status quo? Just slaps onto any right wing cause for ingroup points. "Socialism" meaning any form of social safety net, "Freedom" and "Liberty" being extended to Laissez-faire economics.

The list just goes on and on because this is a very common and effective strategy that people use to argue for their cause. They staple a metaphor with their preferred affect to their cause or the enemy cause and run with it. The connotation of the word shifts and becomes ingrained, and its history is forgotten as generations are onboarded into the linguistic tech.

Usually the culprit doesn't think they're redefining anything when they do it, because to them the metaphor is apt. They honestly think their cause is good for the same reasons that the thing they stapled to it are good, or vice versa, and that they have found a new valid use case. Meanwhile another person looking at the metaphor, might not see the same implications or values implicit in its components, and disagree that it is apt, seeing it as a redefinition.

I think "socialism" is a good example, thanks. I could quibble with the other examples but I think this one hits the nail on the head.

A bunch of interesting points, but what's going on with the headline?

The Far Left's White Supremacist, Violent Rape of Language

Are you just fishing for clicks there?

It's what TVTropers of yore called a self-demonstrating example, I believe.

When you take your own 'culture' for granted it might seem like others are 'distorting' the meaning of words. When in reality you were always a fish swimming in water.

The dialectic of 'white' left-right politics is over. The battle lines drawn around slight ingroup neurodivergence or the slightly different financial incentives of two neighboring municipalities that expresses itself as mild disagreement over questions like taxation and where to place the bridge are outdated. We are in the throes of a total redefinition of 'western' politics.

It's no longer a few teams fighting in the same sports league. We are now fighting between leagues over who gets funding. It's no use complaining that the basketball players are using their hands, those guys simply don't see European 'football' rules as applying to them. In fact, they see them as restrictive. And why shouldn't they? Why on earth should a basketball player accept a ruleset that takes away all their advantages? You can argue that your 'feet only' sport is the best or whatever, but that's obviously self serving even if you very dearly believe it to be true or even if it is by some objective metric true.

A real lie example of this where I live is trans people. If you belong to this group, in my very 'western' country, you can argue for special privileges for your group. These don't apply to anyone else. You are not seen as a political party or anything of the sort, that would otherwise exist in the 'normal' western political dialectic, no. Instead you are seen through the lens of 'victimary discourse'. And because you have a lot of marketing behind your victimary narrative, people cave in to your demands of receiving preferential treatment at the doctors.

The same is true for immigrants or any non-white. They exist as themselves. They advocate for themselves. They form group coalitions, they weave an animating myth of victimhood and grievance against white people and then they try their darndest to funnel everyone behind their cause. This dialectic isn't born out of circumstance or the natural curve of history. This is a pathological mode of group bias.

There is no onus on one group to adopt the language tradition of another. If it doesn't suit your group, don't use the language. Find something else. The outgroup is always evil, no need to call them good.

Disclaimer: this is a serious test for shady thinking. My apologies. Consider this a strawman, and please try to confront a steelman.

Note: see disclaimer above. This is shady thinking in note format.

EDIT: This is mostly in response to https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-is-the-academic-job-market-so particularly thinking about Scott analyzing how the academic job market actually works. I bet Scott's analysis is super annoying to many of those in the market, and likewise super satisfying to others. My thesis is that the others are rationalists and the many are not.

idea

  • rationalists explain foreign things from "first principles"

  • they liken themselves to newton and hooke, exploring new frontiers

  • for better or worse

  • to the experts in the field, they are cringe and dilettante, sneer worthy

the problem

  • within every field, there are certain "touchy areas"

  • everyone understands the truth but pretends not to

a bigger problem

  • rationalists home in on touchy areas

  • rationalists can't "understand the truth but pretend not to"

  • rationalists "say the quiet part out loud"

the solution

  • demonize the rationalists

  • sneer at the rationalists

  • how cringe, what baby

One thing that people hate, of course, is the name "rationalism". It's conceited. Doesn't everyone think they are rational? What makes rationalists so special?

Relevant Hanania has a good answer to this question, defining rationalism thusly:

"Rationalism: The belief that fewer topics and ideas in the areas of politics, morality, ethics, and science should be considered taboo or sacred and not subject to cost-benefit analysis.

I think this gets at what you are saying. "Rationalism" is primarily about the ability or desire to examine things that others consider taboo.

This is also how a rationalist lay person can make insights and connections that a scientist with decades of training cannot. The taboos in academia are so strong that there are low-hanging fruit everyone. Infamously, HBD has great explanatory power which is completely tabooed inside the academia.

Now, in academia, does everyone really "understand the truth but pretend not to"? I don't think so. People's ability to self-deceive is very strong. For every person in the social sciences who secretly believes in HBD, there are 10 blank-slaters. Social conformity bias shapes beliefs. It's just less powerful in rationalists, whose lack of conformity also makes them irritating.

Which article is that Hanania quote from? I’d love to read it.

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-ea-will-be-anti-woke-or-die

Hanania is up there with Scott as a must-read blogger, IMO.

One thing that people hate, of course, is the name "rationalism". It's conceited. Doesn't everyone think they are rational? What makes rationalists so special?

There was a time when I would have agreed with you here, but I have been shocked by how many times I've seen and heard things that basically amount to, "look at these morons who think being correct is the most important thing in the universe." I think "rationalism" is a pretty good description of the ideology that hears that and goes "yes".

"Rationalism: The belief that fewer topics and ideas in the areas of politics, morality, ethics, and science should be considered taboo or sacred and not subject to cost-benefit analysis.

I somewhat disagree with this. If we consider lesswrong to be the hub/mecca of rationalism, there is little in there that is particularly taboo. I would feel comfortable sharing most links there with general audience. I think rationalism has more to do with systematic thinking, heuristics, long-form social commentary, etc. Dropping red pills about IQ and other aspects of HBD is a small part of rationalism. There are plenty of rationalists who don't think IQ is that important or are indifferent about it or don't subscribe to the purely deterministic view of IQ vs. individual achievement.

As Yudkowski himself pointed out, tell one lie and the truth will be your enemy. Without the uncomfortable truths, rationalism just gets eaten by rationalization.

I think both are aspects of rationalism. You start with the whole "thinking better" aspect, but from there it's an easy hop to recognizing "thought-terminating clichés", "arguments as soldiers", "political thinking" as things that impede rational thinking. So an honest rationalist sees someone's sacred cow and immediately goes full matador before his superego manages to stop him from saying stuff like, "yes, I agree this is the right policy to promote equity as you defined it, but why do you consider equity as you defined it the most desirable societal outcome?"

I would be curious if rationalists are even less "social conformity" biased. I'd guess the average rationalist grew up an outcast who became (often irrationally) suspicious of the ingroup, and gravitated to outgroups to fulfill their social needs and went on to justify their continual social exclusion via their own intelligence whether they were or not.

They are just as influenced by social conformity, but through an inverted/rejection/wound/resentment model that leaves them able to see through the blind spots of the normies, but just as biased when it comes to the particular outgroups they identify with. Which is still valuable to have, but the self congratulations are probably unwarranted.

This reminds me of how, it seems to me, a disproportionate number of people who make an identity out of being atheists (as opposed to just being atheists) are people who grew up in oppressive religious households and rebelled against it*. Similarly, there is a difference between people who just take some good ideas from rationalism, on the one hand, and people who make an identity out of being rationalists, on the other.

It does not help matters that rationalism was started by a guy who has what could fairly be called very extreme and dogmatic feelings about a certain topic (artificial intelligence) and that so many prominent rationalists are from the same Bay Area milieu, both of which things give the movement a sort of cloistered vibe that to some observers contrasts oddly (although not necessarily fairly) with its professed goal of pure reason.

*This is even more, and more obviously, the case for people who are into stuff like black metal and/or Satanism. Not that I think there is anything wrong with the vast majority of Satanism - which, from what I can tell, is mostly a fun hobby rather than some serious desire to do evil.

This sounds like something a rationalist would say. I don't think we should ask rationalists about what makes rationalists special.

One big problem with human movements is they're founded on ideas, but select for traits, as the matching – if imperfectly – phenotype for their objective function is discovered. Martial arts turn out to be mostly about finding the guy with the most ape-like skeleton, social studies reward cutthroat political sloganeering, and rationalists become a particular breed of neurotic high-IQ systemizers – plus people who want to bask in their light. They can do well in analyzing bullshit in some domain just because they're smart enough; their interest in discussing it publicly is explained by incentives in their community (or lack thereof; as we can see, prestige rats have excised HBD bros from their ranks). This isn't the special part of what makes them a cohesive set.

I like this thread, very illuminating:

when i came across lesswrong as a senior in college i was in some sense an empty husk waiting to be filled by something. i had not thought, ever, about who i was, what i wanted, what was important to me, what my values were, what was worth doing. just basic basic stuff

the Sequences were the single most interesting thing i'd ever read. eliezer yudkowsky was saying things that made more sense and captivated me more than i'd ever experienced. this is, iirc, where i was first exposed to the concept of a cognitive bias

i remember being horrified by the idea that my brain could be systematically wrong about something. i needed my brain a lot! i depended on it for everything! so whatever "cognitive biases" were, they were obviously the most important possible thing to understand

"but wait, isn't yud the AI guy? what's all this stuff about cognitive biases?"

the reason this whole fucking thing exists is that yud tried to talk to people about AI and they disagreed with him and he concluded they were insane and needed to learn how to think better

so he wrote a ton of blog posts and organized them and put them on a website and started a whole little subculture whose goal was - as coy as everyone wanted to be about this - thinking better because we were all insane and our insanity was going to kill us

…yud's writing was screaming to the rooftops in a very specific way: whatever you're doing by default, it's bad and wrong and you need to stop doing it and do something better hurry hurry you idiots we don't have time we don't have TIME we need to THINK

i had no defenses against something like this. i'd never encountered such a coherent memeplex laid out in so much excruciating detail, and - in retrospect - tailored so perfectly to invade my soul in particular. (he knew math! he explained quantum mechanics in the Sequences!)

an egg was laid inside of me and when it hatched the first song from its lips was a song of utter destruction, of the entire universe consumed in flames, because some careless humans hadn't thought hard enough before they summoned gods from the platonic deeps to do their bidding

(To be honest, sometimes I have nightmares about this. Like, yesterday).

This is an almost perfect description of someone like @Quantumfreakonomics, I think.

The intersection of people who identify strongly with their intelligence and have an OCD-like anxiety about doing wrong is the natural substrate for rationalism, the tradition of cultivating correct thought processes. It's as pecuilar as some Gnostic sect, and while there's a central doctrine about questioning priors (including, of course, political taboos), all these trappings do not define the memeplex. There's an entire ecosystem of elements to it, like the very notion of a meme, the meme about infohazards, the assumption that thought ought to be recursively interpretable, the contempt for normie beliefs and the hope/fear that More Is Possible. Underneath it all, together with socialization, identity and morality, are some very general intuitions, probably following from neurological kinks that work like inductive biases in machine learning. For example, one key part is the uncomfortable but giddy conviction, informed by pure math I guess, that spaces – any spaces, really, or perhaps any manifolds, such as all mind designs, or all thoughts, or all physics – have… higher dimensionality than they seem to have. Are rougher, weirder, full of navigable hairline cracks. And accordingly, processes in such spaces are non-convex in the Talebian sense. So if you know just the input, if you're smart enough to derive the exact fitting passkey with correct values in every register, you'll be able to chart a trajectory that's shorter than what normies believe is the direct one – or longer than they'd say you can go. You'd be able to do magic. This is what Yud has in mind when writing:

here's a concrete list of stuff I expect superintelligence can or can't do:

… Train an AI system with capability at least equivalent to GPT-4, from the same dataset GPT-4 used, starting from at most 50K of Python code, using 1000x less compute than was used to train GPT-4: YES

Starting from current human tech, bootstrap to nanotechnology in an hour: GOSH WOW IDK, I DON'T ACTUALLY KNOW HOW, BUT DON'T WANT TO CLAIM I CAN SEE ALL PATHWAYS, THIS ONE IS REALLY HARD FOR ME TO CALL

– Hack a human [in the sense of getting the human to carry out any desired course of action] given a week of video footage of the human in its natural environment; plus an hour of A/V exposure with the human, unsupervised and unimpeded: YES

– I'd currently consider the scenario my 20(?)yo self mentioned - trigger off a difference between known physics and actual physics from inside a computer - a "NO" but not quite "DEFINITE NO". You'd really really think it'd take greater physical extremes, but hey, I'm just a human.

(To be clear, the scenario was: «One of the things you can't rule out - and I mean this seriously - is "magic". Magic plain and simple. Running a particular sequence of instructions through the CPU so that a certain transistor turns on and off in a certain sequence and modulates the quantum cheat codes of the Universe.»)

When you feel this way, then fucking sure, you want to know how to think right. And surprisingly many people do.

I don't know where I'm going with that, but I feel that a proper account of «rationalism» has to include analysis of this axis.

What do you mean by "the assumption that thought ought to be recursively interpretable"?

If you're smart enough [...] you'd be able to do magic

From an empirical perspective, this has mostly turned out to be true. Telephones, horseless carriages, haber-bosch fertilizer, insert here the same feelgood rant you've heard a thousand times. Maybe rationalists would be very different if technological progress were slowed 10x or 100x.

It's hard to predict exactly what form the magic will take, but very predictable that something about the future will feel like magic to us moderns. Probably most spaces don't have a hairline crack shortcut through the manifold -- but it only takes one.

How do you secure your position as the world makes an important technological transition? If you're politically savvy, you'll be as fine as anyone else. For the rest of us, the best bet is to be one of the builders, and that's best accomplished by neurotic high-IQ systematization. Unless you have a better suggestion?

I do feel uncertain, seeing that QC has been through all this and decided to do something else instead. He's smart, maybe he knows something I don't? My current best bet is that he's a tragic case of someone who wandered off the true path, lured by the siren song of postrat woo. But I do sometimes wonder if he's made some Kegan step that I've failed to comprehend.

I found the that thread very interesting. Reading between the lines and over thinking until I can see what isn't really there, I see two big issues.

First, QC sees the issues of cognitive bias and running on untrusted hardware as specificially human issues. Yudkowsky is a space alien, of a superior species, so he is unaffected by these issues. His takes on AI risk are gospel truth.

Second, I'm reminded of testimony before Congress about unconscious racial bias. The witness claims that every-one harbours unconscious racial bias. The Congress man asks: which races are you unconsciously biased against? This leads to a deer-in-headlights moment rather than an answer. I want to ask QC whether his own judgement is subject to cognitive biases and whether his mind runs on untrusted hardware. Specifically, is his judgement that Yudkowsky is telling the gospel truth from a position of superiority, also the gospel truth? QC seems to think that he too is a space alien, free from human failure modes.

The thread seems like a living-out of the Zen parable about the Dharma being a finger pointing at the moon. QC has studied hard and knows all about the finger, its joints, and its nail.

What I have written comes across as unsympathetic to QC. Or does it? The impression of a lack of sympathy comes from inferring that I see myself as a space alien, of a superior species, unlike Yudkowsky and QC, who are merely human. Actually, I think that I suffer from cognitive biases and am running on untrusted hardware. I'm writing from a position of despair. How do we know anything? Epistemology is difficult. Epistemology is harder than that, we read the sequences and still don't get it. We encounter arguments about AI risk and never stop to think: Well, that has been crafted by Moloch to suck me in, maybe I should stay away and leave it to less vulnerable people to wrestle with the issue.

My antidote to epistemological despair is reading the history of science. There are ways round biases. The double blind, randomized controlled trial is one route, available to a well funded team. There are other instructive stories. I particularly like Blaise Pascal's 1647 pamphlet on barometers. One of the experiments involved a six foot tall mercury barometer. Why six feet, when three feet tall is tall enough? So that he could fit a three foot tall mercury barometer inside it, and watch the mercury run out when the inner one was in the vacuum. The mad lad actually went the extra mile to check what was really going on.

I don't see a clever hack that lets me cross-check AI alarmism to see if it is for real. I'll wait. For me, the core of "rationality" is studying clever cross-checks. Get a feel for what we can know despite cognitive biases if we are willing and able to do the extra work. Get a feel for what we cannot know, and learn patience.

That might have been a good description had I discovered rationalism ~10 years ago. By the time I came across a Slatestarcodex article on /r/drama I was already a jaded veteran of internet culture wars who had learned the hard lesson that you can’t outsource epistemology.

Damn browser ate my reply, and I have no desire to retype it, in brief:

IPEDS Completions Survey shows more than 23 000 Americans obtain a bachelor's degree in history every year. That's just too damn many. Becoming a university researcher is the best career choice that utilizes their degree for most of them. There's no industry outside the academia that can consume that many graduates like it does in STEM and law and theology. Of course the universities exploit these rubes by dangling the carrot of tenure in front of them and letting anyone who wants major in history.

The best advice an adjunct teacher of history (or of English lit) can give to his or her students is: if you can dream of not being a historian and aren't independently wealthy, go major in something else. 2300 history majors is a much more sustainable number. 230 history majors is an even better one: everyone will be able to get a job as a historian.

I think honestly it’s a self-solving problem as long as the politicians can stop messing with the loans. The high cost of college is starting to make students more aware of major-related job prospects which should drastically cut down on vanity degrees. If you’re unqualified for a good paying job, yet spent (over a lifetime) over $100K on a degree you’re shutting yourself out of a lot of normal life experiences. That negative consequence, when seen by others, will lower the demand for those degrees.

I suspect that’s why the sudden push to simply wipe away the debt. It’s not for the students, it’s because the school’s’ economic model depends on fleecing humanities students to pay for the labs of students seeking actually useful degrees. Every student in the history department is paying just as much to read books and know things useful in case they’re ever invited on Jeopardy as the kid in a STEM class learning to build useful technology. Unless the debts get picked up by the government, this model will eventually fail when kids are no longer willing to pay big money to read books in the library.

And honestly, I think most humanizes should be autodidact pursuits. There are tons of resources, including online courses, books (and if they’re only enough, for free on Project Gutenberg), videos, museums, and so on. These resources are cheap if not free, and widely available. There’s not much added value to going through a history program at a university— you can ask the TA questions, you’ll be assigned things which I think would help in directing your study, but even this can be emulated with other methods if you are motivated enough.

A 30-year-old pregnant nurse attempted to steal a GPS-tracked rental bike from a young black man right outside her workplace, and when a group of onlookers surrounded her and started filming she had the audacity to start acting strangely, call for help, and briefly cry. Don't worry, justice has been served: she has been identified and suspended, and she will never be okay again.

  • -29

Stop feeding the obvious troll people.

let_them_fight.gif

The actions of US nurses in recent years have updated my priors against them, for they have gassed themselves up as “essential workers” while posting tikthot dances on social media.

Which is darkly hilarious: Imagine being a bed-ridden patient with a request pending to your nurse while she’s out in the hallway attention-whoring for social media, where you can hear the shitty music being replayed over and over again and thumping through your room again and again (like you’re getting tortured like a prisoner of war), the recurring cacophony of giggles, squeals, shrieks, bumps, and crashes while she repeats takes with her coworkers until they get a sufficiently cUuUuUte take for social media… before she deigns to return to you when she has a spare moment. She’ll roll her eyes, "Ugh, stupid patient, so needy and thirsty. Can't he see I’m a BUSY essential worker."

US white women should know by now that race generally trumps sex when it comes to idpol considerations. If they didn’t know from undergraduate admissions affirmative action statistics, they should at least know from anecdotes such as Central Park Karen.

  • -27

Nurses benefit from the women are wonderful effect.

For me the dancing videos are propaganda to distract normies from pulling back the curtains and being horrified at the nature of reality.

Here are two of my favorites

Dancing Coup

War in The Ukraine

The actions of US nurses in recent years have updated my priors against them

This is childish and stupid. You've "updated your priors" far too far, in a way you obviously know better than if you're capable of walking down the street without having a sperglord meltdown at every passing mote of dust.

Okay, this bit of personal antagonism, combined with openly admitting that this is a troll account, means I'm just going to retire this one for you. Have a nice day.

So I'd like to discuss this. I haven't yet, but I absolutely agree that regurlarly changing your account is just good data hygiene and provides some protection against doxxing. Especially on a contrarian forum, this should be valued. I recognise that this makes your job somewhat harder and has negative effects on community-building.

The problem of making this argument is usually that all the prominent and prestigious users come out against it. And of course they would. If they had good secop, they wouldn't be prominent users.

So why are you still deleting your stuff? You’re making the last glorious bits of human internet unreadable. Destroying priceless artefacts, cave paintings of the new age.

Nonsense. Your writing is first rate, and deletion allows Hlynka to make stuff up. Then I have to remember and look for my replies to your comments, and play reverse battleship on your positions to correct him.

If he regularly changes his accounts, nothing is lost by banning this one.

That which is picked up without regard can be discarded just as readily.

Changing accounts isn't against the rules. We would prefer people stick with one, because this place basically runs on reputation economy, and if you keep changing your accounts, you start from scratch every time (unless you're deliberately trying to obscure your alts and ban-evading, which is frankly why most people do it).

The OP wasn't banned for using an alt account. He was banned for already throwing many red flags as a troll and likely being a previously banned poster, and then admitting that yes, he's just cycling through accounts. If you tell me you're cycling accounts for "data hygiene," okay, whatever. If you're being trollish and cycling accounts, I see no reason to make that easier for you.

That's why we have the clarity rule, aka "write as if everyone reading you is a high-functioning autist".

This piece of flash fiction is pretty low-effort booing. Maybe somewhere there is a nurse neglecting her patients while she does a TikTok dance in the hallway, and it's fine for you to say you hate nurses for reasons, but this is not contributing anything but a snarl in badly written prose form.

This has always been a weak argument. People who do stressful work want and need to unwind sometimes. It's why soldiers get rotated out of the front lines rather than being there continuously. The TikTok dances say little to nothing about how busy and essential the nurses were.

On the other hand if you’re really overwhelmed with deathly ill patients, it would seem like you wouldn’t have time to elaborately choreograph and perform dances. And the dances I saw were not the kinds of things you might film in two minutes of spare time between patients. They were highly produced, filmed well, and the costumes were coordinated. No one was out of rhythm or forgot the dance. It had all the hallmarks of something people had put significant time and energy into, had clearly practiced, and had coordinated outfits.

That’s not something that you could reasonably do in between dying patients.

Covid hit NYC. All non-essential surgeries in the country were then cancelled.

Many hospitals in other parts of the country found themselves no major covid outbreak and no elective surgeries.

The nurses had fuck all to do. So they made TikTok dances.

Nurses have fuck all to do most of the time...like lots of classes of workers.

Firefighters have fuck all to do most of the time. Cops (outside of a select few neighborhoods in a select few cities) have fuck all to do, whence their ability to respond to midday noise complaints and ability to camp bars waiting for a guy to slightly stumble or blow a .06. Lots of lawyers do fuck all most of the time, they just cram everything around trials. There are lots of "congestion professions" where the flow of work is very much irregular, but not having enough personnel at critical times is extremely negative, so the average period of time is a person doing nothing.

I pretty strongly disagree with this statement, at least when it comes to nurses. I cannot speak to the other professions, but all the nurses I know are fairly overwhelmed and overworked, and when they ask management to hire more nurses, this request is almost uniformly denied. Perhaps the one unifying theme among these nurses is that they all work in large hospitals, and as a result there is probably a much more steady stream of patients coming in, and therefore management is better able to select the appropriate number of nurses without needing to hedge for irregular patient flow. Perhaps in other settings, such as at a small-time pediatrician's office or in hospice care, the work is more variable and thus there exists more downtime.

Lots of people say their job is overwhelming and hard. IDK. I recently spent 5 days in the hospital and anytime I'd go get water from the water station there'd be a half dozen nurses just chilling. Also whenever you press your little button they typically come in less than a minute even for the trivial "this machine is beeping" reason.

I think the reasons for nurses feeling this way are pretty obvious: 1) 12 hour shifts are standard, and horrible; 2) The average shift probably will have at least one "surge" period where all the patients a nurse is assigned press their little buttons at almost the same time; and 3) Nearly all-female workforce creates a strange dynamic where that kind of victim mentality enters a feedback loop, as also seems true of schoolteachers.

I've heard so many Americans, including my dad, repeatedly claim that America is the best place to live. And here we have a nurse, a woman who job is no less than saving lives, who is also doing her part to address the birthrate crisis, and on top of that is doing the environmentally conscious thing by riding a bike. And this is how she is treated.

I used to think that I got treated badly in the US because I was a nerdy, low-status white male. But maybe America is just an absolutely horrible place to live? So please tell me, freedom-loving patriot who waves the flag. Why should anyone live in America?

And this is how she is treated. I used to think that I got treated badly in the US because I was a nerdy, low-status white male. But maybe America is just an absolutely horrible place to live?

Viral social media shaming leading to getting fired is like being struck by lightning. It shouldn't much effect your evaluation of quality of life in the USA, any more than mass school shootings should.

To be honest, I've felt like that poor nurse most of my life, and not just around black men. (And obviously without the viral social media component, thank god.) What I'm trying to say is, life in America is constant charade of being accosted by one group or another, people I call moralists, people who try to use the latest morality to scam you or manipulate you.

I'm an American. I've never seen something like this in person. In a nation of hundreds of millions of people you can find endless, but actually quite rare, examples of anything.

This is just the macro version of something all Americans have to deal with on a daily basis.

I'm am American. I don't deal with even the mildest version of this almost ever, much less daily. My unfortunate interactions with racial politics are rare and have no negative impact on me. Occasional HR BS, very rare mentions of white privilege. No attacks or "canceling" or anything.

As a white guy I'm actually pretty well treated.

Daily? Nah. I live in a city of 250K people and have literally never been harassed here. Again, this is purely about where someone elects to live.

Because everywhere else is vastly worse for the vast majority of people.

The United States is a big place. I've been around the world a decent bit, including to places that I think are absolutely lovely on their own terms, but there's nowhere I'd rather be than a moderate-sized Midwestern American city. Take your pick - Lincoln, Grand Rapids, Madison, Duluth, whatever, these are all nice. The combination of extremely high earnings potential, freewheeling American culture, tremendous food and drink options, relatively low taxes, and so on are just too much to beat for me. I don't think it's necessarily great for everyone, but as an unironic freedom-loving patriot, I always feel happy to come home to the good ol' US of A. Japan is great to visit, but it's stultifying. Much of Europe is nice, but it's so goddamned poor. Australia and Ireland are legitimately pretty close, I think I just like the States better because it's home, but I can see the case.

Is New York City the best place to live? No, it's a filthy shithole run by corrupt scum. You should expect to be accosted by Jordan Neely, taxed aggressively to support parasites, and treated like you're the asshole for thinking that bodegas don't make it all worthwhile. But you don't actually have to live in New York City unless you insist on working a specific sort of finance or law.

I don't think it's necessarily great for everyone, but as an unironic freedom-loving patriot, I always feel happy to come home to the good ol' US of A. Japan is great to visit, but it's stultifying. Much of Europe is nice, but it's so goddamned poor. Australia and Ireland are legitimately pretty close, I think I just like the States better because it's home, but I can see the case.

Seconded. Perhaps I've become too accustomed to vice in America, but in Japan the rampant alcoholism among professionals getting hammered on a Monday night was especially offputting, combined with the gambling dens and maid cafes/strippers on every corner of Tokyo. I'd consider Canada, but there's nowhere to live outside Toronto and Vancouver unless your quebecois is impeccable and for our profession it's boring as hell.

Is New York City the best place to live? No, it's a filthy shithole run by corrupt scum. You should expect to be accosted by Jordan Neely, taxed aggressively to support parasites, and treated like you're the asshole for thinking that bodegas don't make it all worthwhile.

You guys all seem to take this as a given, but again - I've lived in large American cities for over a decade now and I've had literally zero problems. I'll spare you the gory details, but I used to get obnoxiously drunk and walk 4-5 miles across downtown to get home at 2-3am on a fairly regular basis. I've been taking public transit both ways for my daily commute for the last two years without ever witnessing anything close to the Jordan Neely incident, and at least for one of those years, wasn't living in the greatest neighborhood. Ditto for my wife.

The only thing I, and I guess most other posters from outside the US, know about Duluth doesn't make it sound a good city to live in while male.

Can you elaborate? Are you confusing it with Minneapolis by chance? If actually really enjoy Minneapolis as a city to visit, but I can't recommend moving there due to the recent changes. Duluth, on the other hand, is pretty much delightful and I'm not sure what commonly known thing would make it seem not great for white men.

For any men: Duluth Model. Crap, now that I think about it, I'm not even sure it's called that because it originated in the city. That was low effort and generally un-Motte of me, I apologize.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duluth_model

The name does come from the city.

Hell, I'd go to the US if there was an obvious and reasonably fast route with my current credentials. I settled for the UK in the interim. America's still where it's at, and a lot of the people decrying it's downfall need to step outside and see what the rest of us live with for a bit.

I'd rather have bad roads and bad wifi than bad people.

Yeah, I was forced to work in a different industry hub, the one with all the electrons. It was, as you say, a filthy shithole. Then I tried other parts of the USA, and they were better, but not actually livable I'd say. It's hard to live under this constant umbrella of what I call moralism. Since leaving the US bubble I feel free for the first time in my life, free from people policing my life, my sexuality or my opinions on some racial nonsense. I can actually have a life, go to the amusement park with my girlfriend, that kind of thing. And yeah, this country is a "filthy shithole" in a more literal sense (dirt poor), but I guess I just tolerate a somewhat lower standard of living. It's not the stone ages or anything, just the streets are fucked up, the shower sucks, the wifi sucks. But I'm not being treated like shit by everyone, like this poor nurse! That more than makes up for it!

I’ve also had the distinct pleasure of working in the city you referenced.

The homeless there are awful, but to me they weren’t the worst of it.

I spent a lot of time around rich and powerful people there, and I’d be amazed if they didn’t have the highest number of psychopaths per capita. The whole place seethed with demonic energy, and I routinely saw extremely depraved behavior from supposedly high class people.

Who knew a collective obsession with acquiring and wielding power and secrecy whilst leveraging it to enrich yourself would produce a whole class of devilspawn?

It was a relief to leave that place behind.

I routinely saw extremely depraved behavior from supposedly high class people.

What are you talking about here, if you can share?

A lot of this stuff might not seem that bad in isolation just written down, but keep in mind many of these were all compounded together and the specific way these actions have more menace when someone very powerful is committing them, often strung together.

Keep in mind this was all in public or semi-public settings

Public sex

Galavanting around in public with clearly underage prostitutes

Extreme levels of drunkenness, like drinking until you piss yourself and pass out in a pool of vomit

Extreme levels of illegal drug use out in the open

Credible threats of physical violence, including threatening to have people killed

Continuous severe verbal harassment for 20+ minutes, screaming at the top of their lungs

Sexual blackmail

Extreme acts of conspicuous consumption

Pretty blatant acts of corruption

That about sums it up. Like I said, written down doesn’t seem like much but when the powerful and rich indulge in depravity they tend to go hard, and it’s different when a bum does it in the street because a bum (probably) couldn’t ruin your life if they were dead set on it.

If you’ve ever seen the second season of White Lotus, they pretty much captured a milder version of the dynamic I’m talking about.

I spent a lot of time around rich and powerful people there, and I’d be amazed if they didn’t have the highest number of psychopaths per capita.

Have you spent much time around DC?

Hyup. Way, way too much. Absolutely soul destroying city.

Very physically beautiful in parts, for sure.

She did not come off particularly sympathetically in the video.

That really depends. She might've been scared, like you might be (as a man) if five or six huge gay dudes were doing the same kind of shit with you and your bike. How would you feel if five gay Mountain-sized guys, 6'8" 400lb strongmen or NFL linebackers, were doing this to a smallish straight dude?

2rafa is a woman. The dudes being gay wouldn't make much of a difference.

Yeah. I assumed that 2rafa was a dude. This being said... how would YOU feel in that situation, assuming you're a man? Like. At best these guys aren't handling this situation well, at worst it's strongarm robbery.

This being said... how would YOU feel in that situation, assuming you're a man? Like. At best these guys aren't handling this situation well, at worst it's strongarm robbery.

I don't like this situation even if those dudes are straight. I absolutely agree this is close to strongarm robbery with the threat of violence replaced by the threat of cancellation (plus a weak version of the threat of violence). My priors for "pregnant woman with ID badge launches ploy to steal bike from group of urban youths" are so low that it's pretty clear to me that this is almost certainly the dudes trying to trick her into giving up the bike.

Steal? No, the best case scenario is an honest misunderstanding where the woman thought it was her bike, but it was one of the dudes' bikes.

That's never been independently confirmed or outright stated by them, to my knowledge. Better to leave it ambiguous to avoid the inevitable ad wominem and white knighting claims that would inevitably follow.

She's been very clear about it on numerous occasions.

They also said they occasionally switch from commenting as man or woman.

If my memory isn't playing tricks on me and it was indeed @2rafa who wrote it, then there was a post in /r/PurplePillDebate that has stuck in that memory for literally years, with such a genuine confusion about how habitually covering the check could possible be an issue that only somebody both upper class and female could have written it.

Could just be the upper class thing.

On the internet, claiming to be a woman both invites special treatment and accusations of wanting special treatment. Therefore strategic ambiguity is a way to avoid the “tits or gtfo” dilemma.

Given how male this place is, there is also at least a distinct probability that they are a man. Rafa’s views are so idiosyncratic that I doubt much can be gleaned from discussing their sex anyway (in the absence of an explicit claim).

If someone implicitly signals ‘whatever I am, treat me as everyone else’, I am happy to comply.

I find it extremely grating because, especially if you're another women, you have to accept it as a timeout since continuing with a (fair) argument or complaint if the other woman is streaming crocodile tears is considered rude and unacceptable.

Why 'especially if you're another woman'? At least you can cry back as a woman. Women’s childish behaviour is socially sanctioned, they are empowered to switch at will between being considered a child or an adult. And if you point this out or talk like you did, as a man, then it’s sexism. For carrying the burden of being the only sane adult in the room, men are called 'emotional cripples' .

At least you can cry back as a woman

No more than you or I could, no. Crying on command isn't something healthy-minded people get to do very easily.

You have a more naive view of social relationships than I do (or rafa : see ‘crocodile tears’) . It’s all about incentives. Boys are not rewarded for crying, so they learn not to cry. We’d be bawling our eyes out right now if there was status in it. It’s funny, even on the internet, in communities unlike this one, people will signal that they are upset to "win an argument".

You are spilling a lot of words on what should be a particularly simple set of questions: can any given woman cry back sincerely? Should they? And if they choose not to, should we applaud or condemn them for it?

They can but shouldn’t. We need to stop rewarding (or punish) this behaviour in women, like it is punished in men.

Two parts. First, correct the inequity in allowing this behaviour in women versus men. Then determine which rules we want to universally apply. My rules applied fairly> your rules applied fairly > your rules applied unfairly. I am partial to the male way of doing things here : cry = you lose the argument.

They can

I disagree. There are some people, at the margins, here, there, who can lie, delude themselves, or go with the flow enough to cry in situations like these. Anyone else can't and won't. Talking shit about them because 'they won't even cry when they could, the idiots' is moral poison and no outlook anyone should have.

but shouldn't

On this, at least, we agree.

People can do any number of morally reprehensible things, like stealing, murdering, raping and pillaging. Being concerned that current incentives might push them in that direction is not 'moral poison'. Your willful blindness is not morally superior.

More comments

Has anyone done a blinded study of this? I can't help but think of that old steroid placebo study.

It's not 100% biological or environmental, and I'm not that conservative, more MRA than redpill.

A man can simply say "I'm sorry you feel that way" and walk away

That’s not going to go over well, plus you cede the field and adopt her frame (just like “I’m so sorry you feel that way, there, there”). She should be the one apologizing "I’m sorry I’m upset. I’ll be in my room.”

I think it can go over quite well, but you have to own it completely. I've told crying women "I'm sorry you're upset, should we continue this conversation later?" to which they responded by turning off the waterworks or by doubling down and lashing out ("How can you be so insensitive about X!?"). The key in the latter case is to maintain frame and not be provoked, but instead simply make a mildly concerned, sympathetic expression as you allow her rage to pass over and through you. If she tries to drag you in by demanding a response, just calmly repeat the question.

I've never suffered any lasting social damage from this approach, but you really have to be rock solid in your frame.

A man can simply say "I'm sorry you feel that way" and walk away (doing this as a woman is socially impossible)

This would incur pretty serious social sanction in my *own social environment.

but the reality is that the women I'm talking about deploy tears much less frequently on men than women

This I can believe, for a multitude of reasons, though I myself don’t have a good gauge of how much women cry towards each sex.

Edit:a word

me, this is the source of the Karen complaint. I'm not saying that The Biggest Victims of Karens Are Other Women, but they kind of are.

Long before Hanania was talking about Women's Tears in the Marketplace of Ideas disadvantaging men, I recall black feminists complaining about "white women's tears" and how it shut down a lot of progressive talk.

I don't know that that means that they were the "biggest" victims as opposed to the ones the progressive stack tells us we have to take seriously though (like black men facing "Karens" where the usual assumptions about who's probably at fault and whose fear is justified go out the window)

She did not come off particularly sympathetically in the video.

It comes off quite a bit differently knowing that she's six months pregnant, just got off her 12-hour shift, and that the theft was on the part of the guy harassing her. What's she supposed to feel like? She would probably be better served by stating the claim plainly rather than becoming emotional, but if I had just worked a long shift, had some scumbag trying to steal a bike from me, and some other guy recording the incident for fun and profit, I might lose my capacity for calm indifference to the situation.

the endless shoving of emmett till in our faces means that a white woman crying or attempting to get help when being accosted by black men is equivalent to attempted murder.

Yeah, there's a particularly nasty tendency recently for these videos that kick off rage mobs to involve people who are literally just trying to live their lives and suddenly they find themselves in a forced dilemma with a camera shoved in their face with no warning or prep.

For instance, some guy on the NY subway who is just trying to get to a destination unscathed.

At least in the situations with, e.g. Kyle Rittenhouse or George Zimmerman (remember him? over ten years ago!) they were arguably inserting themselves into situations where a conflict and confrontation were likely, so there's a certain amount of risk assumption there.

But this trend of depicting ordinary people, probably dealing with various other stressors, just trying to go about their normal days and not intentionally interfering with others, forced into a standoff where they either back down and allow themselves to be trod upon, or they stand their ground and get mobbed by an uncaring internet posse for their 'racism'... it is antisocial in the extreme, if you ask me.

And there's no obvious way to restrict it other than, perhaps make it broadly illegal to publish videos taken of other people in public places, which is surely going to be impossible to enforce at the end of the day.

For instance, some guy on the NY subway who is just trying to get to a destination unscathed.

If you mean Penny, I don't think the camera was his problem.

But this trend of depicting ordinary people, probably dealing with various other stressors, just trying to go about their normal days and not intentionally interfering with others, forced into a standoff where they either back down and allow themselves to be trod upon, or they stand their ground and get mobbed by an uncaring internet mob for their 'racism'... it is antisocial in the extreme, if you ask me.

No, it's pro-social. It's teaching them (and others similarly situated) their place.

No, it's pro-social. It's teaching them (and others similarly situated) their place.

I simply do not believe that the overall utility of society is increased by these actions, nor the individual utilities of the people involved.

If I wanted to pick apart 'social fabric' to make it impossible for people to trust each other and make it harder to peacefully resolve conflicts and de-escalate violence, this is exactly the sort of behavior I would want to encourage. All-or-nothing zero sum games, mediated by completely anonymous groups of strangers with no skin in the game and selected specifically for their preferences for malicious retribution.

Not sure what you're getting at in your post at all.

Know your place and doff your cap at your betters and do what you are told by social class superiors, OR ELSE. It looks like a class/caste system developing as an emergent behaviour, with adherence enforced by the internet mob. It's not picking apart the social fabric, it is weaving it.

At least that's my best guess as to what the hot needle means.

Know you place and doff your cap at your better and do what you are told by social class superiors, OR ELSE.

Crump's Tweet is helpfully clarifying on that point:

A white woman was caught on camera attempting to STEAL a Citi Bike from a young Black man in NYC. She grossly tried to weaponize her tears to paint this man as a threat. This is EXACTLY the type of behavior that has endangered so many Black men in the past!

As we all know, capitalized-Americans simply aren't a threat to lower-case-American women and the only reason that she would become upset is as a weapon to cause the capitalized-American undue trouble. If you see a dispute between a capitalized-American and a lower-case-American, it should be obvious whose side one should choose. If it's not obvious yet, you don't know your place.

I thank god every day for leading me out of that hellhole country.

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I simply do not believe that the overall utility of society is increased by these actions, nor the individual utilities of the people involved.

That's not what "pro-social" means, though. Pro-social simply meaning that it's reinforcing the social structure. No different than literal hen-pecking. It's a horrible social structure, of course.

I'd say that's the non-standard definition, where the definition I'm using is "Promoting social good and the welfare of the members of a given society."

Not sure why this implies enforcement or reinforcement of a particular social structures, since in my definition social structures can, in fact, be anti-social.

Social structures cannot be anti-social; you're just trying to equate "pro-social" and "good", which doesn't work because society often sucks.

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Pro-social simply meaning that it's reinforcing the social structure.

What structure is there to reinforce? It is an anarchic free-for-all where any event can - based on the derangements of the day* - serve as punishment or a chance for anyone who wants to hurt people to indulge themselves.

That's all.

* See the Latino man fired for the "white supremacist 'OK' hand-sign at the height of derangement over Floyd.

The structure is people at the top hold out a few jobs that pay well enough to live above all this as a reward to those who create the most value for them.

Then they turn their shock troops (those with nothing to lose) out upon the masses as the stick incentivize them to compete for one of those coveted positions in the highest levels of the low to avoid them) and if anyone with something to lose fights back against these shock troops they get their life and reputation ruined with at best a long, expensive trial and aquittal that leaves them hated and presumed guilty and thus effectively unemployable by half the nation.

When my wife was pregnant she was pretty weepy. She'd cry over sad news stories, etc. She'd never do that normally.

Maybe this woman is a "Karen" performatively crying as a means of social control. Or maybe in that forceful confrontation after a work shift and far into pregnancy, she honestly cried.

Reads like some amalgamation of AI and MK-Ultra coming together to write the most incendiary CW paragraph possible.

'A Karen with a potential abortion attempted to appropriate indigenous peoples culture right in front of a PoC! When the seasoning police caught wind the Karen lashed out in a racist tirade! Don't worry, justice has been served: she has been identified and suspended, and she will never be okay again.'

On a more relevant note, the NYPost reports she rented the bike. (As has been pointed out.) Otherwise it might be 'man bites dog' story of the year.

Judging by the info at https://help.citibikenyc.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032366911-How-to-start-a-ride, it's practically impossible to take someone else's bike by mistake: even if you do it at a kiosk, you have to physically walk to a bike and enter an unlock code to be able to remove it.

The only remotely charitable explanation is that there's actually a bug in City Bike's code that allows two people to check out the same bike. But it's more likely that the black guy made a mistake when renting a bike (since the nurse has now shown she has a receipt) and neither party was willing to deescalate because both thought they were in the right. At least her coworker was smart enough to realize relocking this particular bike would allow both parties to restart the rental and avoid further confrontation.

No way it was a mistake, he even had all of his "friends" there to help surround her.

Do you live in NYC? One common scam are gangs that either:

switch stickers on bikes so that when someone unlocks a bike via the QR code sticker it unlocks another bike they’re conveniently sitting on

straight up strong arm people off the bikes

There’s no mistake - it’s simple robbery.

More on citibike scams:

https://old.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/13kv20l/hacked_citi_bikes/

No, I don't live there. Moscow bikesharing requires you to enter the PIN on the keypad that is on the bike itself, so strong-arming someone off the bike is the only way.

That is because in Moscow, the people coming up with the system were utterly cynical bastards who could think of of all the easy ways to cheat a proposed system in about 10 seconds flat, and within 3 minutes had probably gotten down to the ones you can't get around. Whereas in New York there were at least some environmentalist-type idealists involved. But also cynical bastards who decided scams didn't matter provided the legitimate customer rather than the company was on the hook.

Yep. Hard to extend charity to this situation when there's known scams for exploiting a given system.

Hanlon's razor works here but after a certain point it's fine to conclude malice is the more likely explanation.

This post is bad.

It's bad because you are framing it in a confusing and, I suspect, deliberately misleading way. You clearly think you're being clever with your ironic commentary. You are not speaking plainly. I had to actually go search this story to figure out what is actually going on and determine what point you are trying to make, or pretending to make.

This and several other posts, and the newness of your account, make me suspect you are not participating here in good faith.

Don't do this again. If you have a point to make with a news story, make it clearly and straightforwardly.

With only the information that's surfaced as of the time of this comment, I don't put much stock in the idea that either first-party was acting maliciously. The most likely single thing is that this is a straight up misunderstanding, by confused imperfect normal people, who suddenly woke up from their daze of a day in an extreme situation with cameras in their face.

Some others who have involved themselves, though, I've spent several unhealthy minutes I wish I hadn't daydreaming about in a red mist.

deleted

Posting the video to the internet is acting maliciously. No reason to do it except to socially attack the victim.

people on twitter gloating about posting her home address. for getting emotional (not even being racist or any actual american mortal sin) over a bike. you couldn't think of a better psyop to further annihilate race relations

When a user with no prior posting history and the hex code for the color white as his handle shows up posting racially inflamatory shit it's almost certainly a pysop.

Regular user, I just like to make new accounts once I start to get too attached to the previous one and want a clean psychic slate.

I'm very curious who and what exactly you think this psyop is. Tell me the whole story, I especially want to see the Dasepost in response.

Edit since banned: Hlykna (and to a lesser extent Amadan): you've perfectly misinterpreted both this (not posted to be racially inflamatory, more Moloch and classic general culture war; I made a mistake with a thin single layer of sarcasm I thought would be obvious enough to everyone here, I was clearly mistaken and I apologize) and that other comment (which is quite literally the exact opposite of "whining about da joos").

You're only dirty to the degree you dirty yourself. What you're telling me here is that on some level you recognize that your participation is a net negative, and that is why you habitually change your username.

As for the psyop, isn't it obvious? Like @yunyun333 the post seems explicitly designed to undermine race relations, and given the smugness that permeates your post and that the only other comment you've ever made on the motte was whining about "da joos" I think it's reasonable to assume that this is not a coincidence, it's enemy action.

the post seems explicitly designed to undermine race relations

More and more, it seems reality is explicitly designed to do that.

In as much as race-baiting people are part of reality, yes.

Race-baiting people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have been around for decades. WorldStarHipHop has done more for race realism then either of those two hucksters. So who is race-baiting here? The thugs trying to steal the nurse's bike under threat of getting cancelled/fired/beaten? The grifters posting the video claiming "white tears get innocent Scholars killed"?

Just in terms of raw numbers, which category of people do you think is larger?:

a) black people watching this thinking for the first time, "yet another Karen trying to kill black bodies"

or

b) non-black people watching this thinking for the first time, "why do we have to live with these animals?"

I don't think this video converted very many new people to the idea that white women overreacting gets black people killed. That's basically 99% of black people already and is the progressive dogma. I think vastly more people were converted to, or became more sympathetic to, the idea that black people are out of control in the West.

Given that this was posted by blacks, it looks like a massive self-own. The people most harming race relations are these people posting gleeful videos of their own misbehavior. How many of these kind of videos will people see before they decide having blacks around is a terrible idea?:

https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1660148662385922049

That's from the same account that shows him entering random people's homes and walking out of the library with books he didn't check out. He's posting that for social status. If this is "race-baiting" it's of the "I'm black and untouchable" kind.

Look at the replies. What percentage are black people saying, "knock this shit off you cretin!"?

So who is race-baiting here? The thugs trying to steal the nurse's bike under threat of getting cancelled/fired/beaten? The grifters posting the video claiming "white tears get innocent Scholars killed"?

Yes, both of those.

Just in terms of raw numbers, which category of people do you think is larger?:

a) black people watching this thinking for the first time, "yet another Karen trying to kill black bodies"

or

b) non-black people watching this thinking for the first time, "why do we have to live with these animals?"

Neither. The largest group by far is

c) non-black people "thinking" how horrible this woman is for picking on poor innocent black people, and what a terrible racist she is and how we have to "do better".

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I need to reassess the net contribution I bring to hair salons, as I never go to the same one twice in a row.

Yes you do, or rather you need to find a hair salon and stick with it

What you're telling me here is that on some level you recognize that your participation is a net negative, and that is why you habitually change your username.

And only a criminal has any reason to oppose a police state.

We have a rule against sarcasm. One advantage of adhering to the rule is that it imposes an intellectually interesting exercise.

Write a sarcastic comment. Remember the rule. Now what?

You can start over and write the comment directly. The story goes: err, actually I'm not touching that story, I'm all sarcasmed out

Giving up on the particulars, sarcasm generally works as a cognitive tax. Enough effort gets wasted on the inversion, writing as well as reading, that little is left over to notice dangling threads. One creates/latches-on-to the opposite meaning to become one of the in crowd that makes/gets the sarcasm, and one misses the telling details that are worth exploring.

I can't be bothered to get into another scuffle. But I second @Amadan in that it was a needlessly confusing way to frame the event. For a moment I actually thought that American progressives have found their Holy Grail, the man-bites-dog story with some mentally ill white woman stealing a damn bike from a black youth; this was substantially weird to make the topic a bit interesting. But reality is often disappointing.

Do you think that this didn't actually happen? It's all over twitter right now. And what is the psyop exactly? What are TPTB trying to convince us is true, that is not true?

When someone who already looks like a bad faith actor shows up with obvious culture war bait my default assumption is that they either lying or omitting vital context.

So to answer your question. No I don't. At the very least I do not believe that the scenario as it is being portrayed is what actually happened. See Kenosha, the Covington Catholic School fiasco and a whole mess of other examples from recent memory.

The fact that it will never occur to you to question what has been presented to you is why 0 HP Lovecraft compared guys like you to quokkas.

White is 0xFFFFFF. 0x7F7F7F is dark gray.

I use these sorts of bikes occasionally. They cost x¢/min, starting when you unlock and totaled up when you relock. If you don't re-lock the bike, the meter just keeps on ticking. I'm not sure what happens eventually, maybe the rider who's account checked it out gets billed for the "stolen" bike. But the way the QR system works, it isn't particularly possible to grab someone else's bike by mistake. It is possible to be grabbing the last bike (or the last "good" bike, all the rest having flat tires or rusty chains or the like) and someone else to take issue with that. I don't think that happened here. I think a group on young men wanted to grab a free bike, and were expecting to get it through some combination of the target's niceness reflex, confusion as to how the unlock system works (while the target is trying to figure out how the "misunderstanding" happened, the bike is already gone), and the implicit intimidation of a group of agressive youths. In this case, it didn't work, she froze up, got confused, knew something was wrong, and tried to attract bystanders. Then a helpful person re-locked the bike, completely ruining the young men's intent to get a free bike that someone else will be billed for.

Lots of people, (Midwestern Americans and Canadians, in particular) have a niceness reflex; when you, say, trip on someone else's foot, the kneejerk assumption is that you were being inattentive and just stepped on a person's toes; you say "sorry" and yield to them, it taking a moment or two to realize that you've been intentionally tripped. Other people do not have this reflex, either because of their cultural background or because they're dicks; either way, these people notice the niceness reflex of others and try to exploit it.

I also see these bikes left in yards in my (shitty) neighborhood. Now I know how they got there and why the rider doesn't care about being billed for them.

Lots of people, (Midwestern Americans and Canadians, in particular) have a niceness reflex; when you, say, trip on someone else's foot, the kneejerk assumption is that you were being inattentive and just stepped on a person's toes; you say "sorry" and yield to them, it taking a moment or two to realize that you've been intentionally tripped. Other people do not have this reflex, either because of their cultural background or because they're dicks; either way, these people notice the niceness reflex of others and try to exploit it.

Of note - this is highly adaptable. When I lived in the DC, the mental strategy that I developed for exploitation of niceness or just general belligerence was advice that I'd picked up from (oddly) Adam Carolla - always have a "go fuck yourself" chambered. I employed this a decent number of times and I don't think it was ever at an inappropriate target, but being inclined to respond to someone with a well-earned, "go fuck yourself" was something I had to actively cultivate. Then I moved to the upper Midwest and discovered that this skill was no longer useful, I just didn't need it for anything, and the mental tension of being ready to tell people to fuck off was a poor tradeoff here.

Once again, I encourage decent people to abandon the hellholes on the coasts unless you're personally dedicated to the political project of trying to reform them. There's three thousand miles of country that doesn't require you to assume the worst of everyone you encounter.

I'll make a few brief observations.

  1. These videos are mostly an American phenomenon. Attempts at blowing up a banal social interaction to a national scandal doesn't happen in Europe. I'm not talking about something going viral on social media because it's funny or whatever. I'm talking about a genuine witch-hunt, invariably on racial grounds. Sure, there's public shaming in Europe but it isn't extrapolated to the person's race like it is in America.

  2. The victims of these witch-hunts are almost always white. I don't think this is a coincidence. For the same reason, when mass shooters are non-white, media interest drops off. For this reason, I think it tells of a societal sickness in the US which is missing in Europe. It isn't just "obsession with race" but rather "obsession with white people", always in a negative way.

  3. Many white women went along with the anti-white bandwagon in the (naive) belief that the mob would spare them. Well, they sure did miscalculate on that one. In fact, I get the sense that white women are often treated worse than white men in the media when there's a pile-on like now. There's a particular resentful nastiness to the "Karen" insult - which again is only applied to white women and not women of other races - which has no real equivalent among white men.

Many white women went along with the anti-white bandwagon in the (naive) belief that the mob would spare them. Well, they sure did miscalculate on that one. In fact, I get the sense that white women are often treated worse than white men in the media when there's a pile-on like now. There's a particular resentful nastiness to the "Karen" insult - which again is only applied to white women and not women of other races - which has no real equivalent among white men.

Many people have observed that terms like "Karen" and "white women moment" let people get away with blatant sexism that would be otherwise considered unacceptable. While I think the woke movement has gone too far in general, I think it's a real thing that a vocal minority of people hold anger and bigotry towards women. And where for a little while that bigotry was unacceptable in public discourse, it's situationally acceptable again as long as it's against a white woman.

"Karen" works because it describes a real and common (and gendered, at least probabilisticly) phenomenon. Crying "sexism" isn't going to make it go away, nor should it. Even if a particular person was misidentified.

A phenomenon can be real but also lead to over generalization and excess cruelty because of bigotry. E.g if many HBD theorists are to be believed, black people have lower intelligence than white people on average, as southern racists in the 1800s believed. But southern racists used that to justify unjust cruelty. Similarly, the "Karen" is a real personality archetype among women, but some people use that to justify unjust (mostly online) cruelty towards women. Nowhere near the scale of chattel slavery, but the same principle holds imo.

E.g if many HBD theorists are to be believed, black people have lower intelligence than white people on average, as southern racists in the 1800s believed. But southern racists used that to justify unjust cruelty.

I rather think you have it backwards. They weren't thinking "Hey, these people are dumb, so it's good to be cruel to them". They thinking "Hey, we like being cruel to these people, they must be dumb and deserve it".

And the phenomenon is classist, not racist (although America is sufficiently enstupidated by the culture war that most people struggle to tell the difference). The original Karen meme was the "can I speak to your manager haircut" - at heart a Karen is someone who demands that entry-level workers acknowledge her as a social superior, and demands punishment if they don't. I agree that calling a middle-class black woman who pulls rank on white service workers a "Karen" is non-standard usage, but if the shoe fits...

Oprah Winfrey is a total Karen. So was that Smith College chick who called in a cancel mob on the cleaner.

at heart a Karen is someone who demands that entry-level workers acknowledge her as a social superior

The issue is that Karens don't realize themselves as social superiors and see themselves as socially inferior to entry level workers. No one who truly feels themselves above someone else treats them poorly, that's absurd and insane. Karens emerged because the social roles have become so blurred in modern America that no one realizes they are above the minimum wage employee, hence the entire phenomenon of Karens acting ridiculously.

Oprah Winfrey is a total Karen.

I don't know what you are referring to specifically with her but if you perceive her as a Karen in some instance I presume it's because she lacked the grace or perspective to acknowledge her social superiority as well

I was mostly thinking of the race row she kicked off when the sales staff in a Swiss luxury-goods store were insufficiently respectful. It was back in 2013 when the Great Awokening was just getting started, so the Swiss laughed it off.

Oh, I remember hearing about that. I just read about it here. It's really too vague for me to comment on because one person said one thing and another person claimed another, and retail is a weird power dynamic to begin with in all sorts of ways (not to mention the store could just have that bag on hand not to really sell to anyone, combined with the sales person perhaps not knowing who Oprah was), and besides that the client-customer relationship is different in Europe compared with America- indeed, it may have been out of respect for the customer that the salesperson didn't want to show her such an overpriced item when most people shouldn't really be spending thousands on purses anyway

But yeah, I'd say that was Karen-like behavior from Oprah borne out of a lack of grace and perspective from her position as an American billionaire interacting with a salesperson, for her to weaponize her status in that way is weird and also self serving for her in that she tried to garner sympathy from it

You missed the update. She claims to have receipts proving she rented it first. Which didn't save her from being suspended from her job on the say-so of the Internet, of course.

I'm posting another comment because this is my favorite story in a long time. It just exposes so many things that are insane with American culture:

  • Why is she getting fired for this? Is there any evidence she did anything wrong, inappropriate, immoral or illegal?

  • Why isn't the behavior of the black man considered sexual harassment? He's deep in her personal space.

  • Why is a sixth month pregnant woman traveling on NYC streets on a rented bicycle? It's 2023 and we can't get reasonable transportation for pregnant women? We're on the verge of having home robots (and a massive unemployment crisis) and we can't even keep a pregnant woman at home where she is most safe?

  • Why on earth are people, in this thread, complaining about white women's tears? I'm a 100% hetero man and I'd break down crying if this happened to me. She was accosted by multiple huge men who were scamming her and humiliating her on the internet. Seriously, if you aren't on her side, I think you lack empathy or something.

Imagine showing this to someone in 1900. We have instant global film-making and we use it to ruin the lives of pregnant nurses, briefly following a massive global pandemic where nurses were on the front lines. And the powers that be decided to side with the teenagers and ruin this nurse's life! (And that's without the racial angle, obviously.) I'm going to be laughing about this story all day. It's just so absurd. I can't imagine anything more ridiculous, but the simulation is manifold I guess.

Because this woman is almost certainly part of the problem. Yes, yes, we don’t know, but do you really think she’s voting Republican? You think she has a Blue Lives Matter flag in her living room? I’d eat every hat I own if she did.

I really dislike this argument that's becoming increasingly frequent here and elsewhere, that is basically "Even if what happened to this person is unjust and morally wrong, they probably voted for Biden so fuck them." (Obviously the same argument is made everywhere else on the Internet about Trump voters.)

Yes, I get it, war to the knife and it's fun to munch popcorn while watching leopards eat faces, and @FCfromSSC will say this is just the sound of inevitability.

I know expecting people to show empathy for a (presumed) member of the enemy tribe is too much, but ffs we don't even actually know if she is in fact a woke liberal BLM-supporting enemy tribeswoman, we're just doing some sort of pseudo-Bayesian reasoning where she probably is so fuck her.

I know expecting people to show empathy for a (presumed) member of the enemy tribe is too much, but ffs we don't even actually know if she is in fact a woke liberal BLM-supporting enemy tribeswoman, we're just doing some sort of pseudo-Bayesian reasoning where she probably is so fuck her.

The argument that you should show empathy even to an enemy is noble, and I wish I had the generosity of spirit to really do it in this situation. I'm impressed by the people who still have to fortitude at this point in the culture war to do it.

That being said I don't think it's correct to say people cannot correct infer likely tribal affiliation in this case. In the canonical formulation blue tribe and red tribe do not necessarily perfectly align with political affiliation. Being a professional class, urban, person who cycles to work is already enough to fully establish blue tribe. Even if someone does occasionally vote Republican. In addition to that, her official gofundme, which admittedly is managed by her uncle, says:

...She holds racial justice and equity dear, and has dedicated her life to serving NYC's most challenged individuals.

That's enough to move from probably to almost certain in my book.

I'm not questioning the probability of such a guess being right (even without seeing her GoFundMe), and I don't think I'm noble.

I'm just watching the spread of accelerationism with equal parts anger and sadness.

If The Happening happens, I have little expectation that I will be one of the ones who makes it out the other side, but if I do, I will remember.

What is "the happening"?

The argument that you should show empathy even to an enemy is noble, and I wish I had the generosity of spirit to really do it in this situation.

I'm not sure "empathy" is the right word, but if you do not recognize that you owe something to your enemies, some level of consideration, some measure of restraint, you are missing something humans cannot, in the long run, do without. I get that it's hard, but good things generally are. Being hard doesn't make them less necessary.

The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. Learning to see everyone around you as an avatar of their tribe is a big part of this process. It's not even untrue. It's probably even strongly predictive! That doesn't make it any less destructive in the long term.

I'm not in any position to judge your mind. On a bad day, I sweat tribal hatred, can taste it in my spit. It's still bad for us and for everyone around us.

I don't think I disagree with any of this. I certainly recognize the importance, and do feel sympathy and sadness for the situation. I would say that I have "empathy" in the sense of an intellectual understanding of what the people in the scenario are experiencing, but not in the visceral sense. When I see the video I only see something I would absolutely never want to be involved in.

Just to be clear, I'm not the person @Amadan was responding to. My main objection was to the "don't even actually know." I thought it was clear that we do know, but that doesn't mean I endorse embracing tribal hatred.

I will say one of my guilty pleasures is novels like Sharpe's Revenge, where Sharpe teams up with with his long time battlefield enemy Calvet to defeat his nemesis the duplicitous Ducos. I realize its fiction, but I do think that kind of justice resonates with me strongly. That there is a right way and a wrong way to do battle with an enemy, and that in a just world those that do it in the wrong way would be the ones to suffer.

owe something to your enemies

Can you be more specific or provide successful examples from history?

Is not disingenuously piling on enough?

This looks to be an example of the left eating itself. Silence from those who might otherwise suggest this is the bed they made is all I'd expect an enemy to muster, at least until there was more penitence.

I really dislike this argument that's becoming increasingly frequent here and elsewhere, that is basically "Even if what happened to this person is unjust and morally wrong, they probably voted for Biden so fuck them." (Obviously the same argument is made everywhere else on the Internet about Trump voters.)

I'm of two minds. If what had happened to her was significantly worse and had a long lasting impact I would definitely feel bad for her. If it turns out she has never and would never participate in the kind of campaign that was levied against her I would definitely feel bad for her. But I think both of those are unlikely and watching these people eat their own in a mostly safe environment is what pure upside looks like in the culture war. It is the tiny burn a child gets which instills the life long lesson that fire is hot multiplied across likely tens of thousands of people who will see themselves in this unlucky ladies shoes. My only mitigating hope is that the update is not too extreme, that we only roll back that you shouldn't always mindlessly apply the progressive stack and not reverse stupidity.

Eh, I can split that baby.

Yes, the blue cities deserve what they've voted for, no that doesn't mean it isn't tragic for the individual people it happens to. No, it doesn't mean I need to defend or get excited when blue cities get what they voted for.

I'm not outraged by this, on either side. This is Covington all over again. Nothing fucking happened.

Aside from whatever the politics of some rando nurse in NY are, the right really needs to stop getting outraged when commies do what commies do to other commies. Y'all need to listen to Napoleon, and not interrupt your enemy when he's fucking up. Here I'm thinking more of Weinstein, Christakis, etc.

Think long and hard about who deserves your support, your defense, your outrage. Mostly it isn't going to be people in viral videos.

Did you think the hard times were going to create strong men by getting everyone to do more pushups?

My hope is that this shifts her beliefs to strongly support giving her the means to actually threaten a hostile crowd and she becomes a GoA life member and CCW holder in a better city.

the hard times were going to create strong men

I'm pretty sure that's been fairly strongly debunked.

cyclical history as an idea has been falsified

How?

That isn't what he said, and you very well know it.

Frankly I have no fucking idea what else it could mean. Enlighten me.

CCW in New York is impossible. You used to not be able to get a permit. Now after Bruen you can get a permit but it's not good in a huge list of places which make it impractical to use, including hopsitals I believe. Also I think it would be illegal to carry while riding a Citibike.

The difficulty of CCW varies by by body-type and wardrobe, not by state.

The only wardrobe which will allow CCW in New York City is a police uniform. Yes, I know what you mean, but the chance of you successfully concealing a weapon in NYC indefinitely while going about your business day after day and year after year is pretty much zero, unless you stick to bad neighborhoods.

Yes, that's what I meant by a better city. I'd like events like this to get her to move to a nice Midwestern city after learning about what qualities in a politician make their new home a good place and leave NYC to the Subway psychos and bike hasslers.

NYC has (and has had ever since the Giuliani era - the de Blasio murder spike was part of a nationwide phenomenon) unusually low crime for US medium-large cities. Non-NYC cities make it easier for a white middle-class hospital employee to personally avoid the crime by commuting by car from their home in one all-white suburb to their job in another all-white suburb, but the core city of the "nice Midwestern city" is going to be somewhere between St Louis and Detroit.

To check numbers, Indianapolis is the reddest big city in the midwest, and has 24 murders and 871 violent crimes (per the FBI definition) per 100,000 residents per year. The Bronx is the worst borough of NYC, and has about 6 murders and 650 violent crimes per 100,000 per year. Jacksonville FL, which recently voted out a Republican mayor for failure to control crime, was a red city in a mostly red state and also far more violent than the Bronx.

One of the problems with the crime discourse (and the problem predates the internet) is that there is tonnes of medium crime in a big city - even a low-crime one like Zurich. So anyone with a megaphone can create the impression that crime is out of control using summer-of-the-shark techniques. Very Online red tribers do this for NYC because performatively hating on NYC is part of red tribe identity politics. They are helped by NYC-based media doing the same thing because it sells newspapers. But that doesn't change the fact that "America can't police big cities the way Europe and 1st-world Asia can" is a nationwide problem, not a partisan one, and that NYC is in fact an island of minimally competent policing in a cesspool of dysfunction.

It's exactly the behavior in the Crump tweet linked above. Ditch the particulars, go straight to the tribal pattern. This shit will be the death of us.

I wasn't terribly impressed by her behavior in the brief section of the video I watched. I think it's certainly possible that the kid and their friends were actually trying to scam her. Maybe she's a progressive and this is just desserts. Whatever.

The rage mob is a vastly larger problem than any of that. The rage mob is a vastly clearer problem than any of that. These people are making a living off generating large-scale hatred, and no one has the slightest idea of how to make them stop. I am convinced that the hate they generate has serious, long-lasting consequences in the real world, and the harm they inflict is reliably rewarded, and on a vast scale. This is a career now, with significant growth potential.

...And people tell me we're peaked, and it's gonna get better from here. Yeah, sure.

A-fucking-men. Calling this woman an enemy based on how she looks and no other information is just identity politics. It might not be incorrect, but that doesn't mean it is correct. Hlynkawasright?

I wasn't terribly impressed by her behavior in the brief section of the video I watched.

I don't understand this attitude at all. Can't you just let a woman in an awful situation respond in the totally reasonable way which is to cry and try to get help? How do you want women to behave in these situations?

Can't you just let a woman in an awful situation respond in the totally reasonable way

No because it's not reasonable and you as a human (regardless of whether you are a man or a woman) are supposed to be better than this. The Gom Jabbar only kills animals.

In reality the Gom Jabbar would kill everyone; there is no one who cannot be tested to destruction.

I watched maybe fifteen seconds of the video, and the bit I saw wasn't her crying, but trying rather ineffectually to issue orders. I have no actual opinion on her behavior, other than a firm confidence that she did nothing wrong. At the absolute worst, she got in a silly argument over a misunderstanding, and that is absolutely not the sort of thing that people should be judged on. There's no need to valorize her. This incident does not appear to say anything useful about the nature of society. People are going to get into silly arguments, and we should be able to handle that fact without resorting to tribal warfare.

I think it says a lot about society that random people are victims of this kind of thing on a regular basis. She lost her job and had to delete her socials. Her husband had to delete his socials too. There is still an active mob of people who are seemingly trying to kill her over a bicycle rental. She won't get her job back. The hospital is not going to face any consequences. Nor are the young men, or the hate mob on Twitter. I think that says a lot about American society.

Having watched a number of these, I think it's entirely possible that she will get her job back, and that within a month this will mostly be behind her. I've seen no evidence anyone is actually trying to kill her. The hospital definately will not face consequences, as they've done nothing really wrong. It's not entirely clear that the young men did anything wrong either.

The hate mob is absolutely the problem, and its existence says woeful things about our society's future. Still, it could be at least a little worse.

More comments

Real freedom is being able to express your real feelings. Like crying for help when you're being accosted. Would any sane society set up a system where six-month pregnant nurses have to make snap decisions in the face of simultaneous physical and social threats, and then punish them for crying? This is just more evidence that America is not a free country (anymore?) and is also no longer a serious country. (This is a deeply satisfying revelation for me personally, because it demonstrates that all the people in my life who though I was a "threat to women" due to my slight awkwardness... well this is evidence that those people are literally insane.)

all the people in my life who though I was a "threat to women" due to my slight awkwardness... well this is evidence that those people are literally insane

That is an interesting one. There's the Poisoned Skittles idea...which is that predators that are new to being predators are going to be jittery. And then there's the idea that women are more vulnerable than men and so an awkward man (who might be totally harmless) is something to be afraid of. How would you feel if you were around, say, a guy like the Mountain, or prime Shaquille O'Neil, or some other huge, fast monster of a man that could trivially overpower you. And: he's gay. And awkward. Maybe guys like that need to work hard, signal that they're not going to be threats or pursue sex or relationships...in exchange for ordinary social inclusion.

On the other hand: we don't have enough information to make a determination on who was trying to get over on whom; however, the youths did not handle the situation well. He should not have been that close to her; if the bike really was his and he needed to get it returned he should have taken control of the bike, perhaps by pushing the rear wheel or seat. Then, he should have allowed her to use the bike, whether he got there first or not. He's a strong young man; she's a pregnant woman; it is not a good look for him to get in an argument over something like that.

Questions 1 and 2 have the same answer, which is that America's civic religion is the worship of black people. If he'd walked up to this woman and shot her in the head, the same people who are her detractors today would try to argue that she did something to deserve it, because the underlying premise of all negative interactions between black people and white people is that black people are always in the right, and can never do anything wrong, no matter how sociopathic the behavior in the latest rage video circulating on Twitter may be. As a nation, we've just brainwashed ourselves into accepting that there's always going to be this class of violent lumpenproles wandering the streets of our major cities, doing as they like, and that there's nothing that can or should be done about it.

I was confused as to why a 6-month pregnant woman is even still working as a nurse, since I imagine that involves a lot of standing and walking around for long hours, but maybe I'm wrong. As to question 4, sure, on some level I do feel sorry for her, but I'm absolutely sure that if this had happened to someone else she'd default to the mindset I described for questions 1 and 2, since she likely falls into that demographic of white liberals who are simply incapable of crafting a mental model for people who are just malevolent and antisocial by nature.

Questions 1 and 2 have the same answer, which is that America's civic religion is the worship of black people.

I get that you in particular really want this to be the case but repeating it doesn't make it so.

The friends I've had who were nurses usually worked up to about 8 months or birth. They know that time they are out is extra burden on their peers, miss the patients, and would rather take more time with the baby; if physically possible.

I'm posting another comment because this is my favorite story in a long time

I'd say that says a lot more about you than it does the alleged story.

  • -28

Are you going to keep shooting varmints from your porch like this until we have to ban you?

If the sole content of your post is to express how much contempt you feel for the poster, don't post it.

I intend to "keep shooting varmints from my porch" until someone provides a compelling argument as to why I should not. If doing so results in my getting banned, that is a consequence I am prepared to live with.

I intend to "keep shooting varmints from my porch" until someone provides a compelling argument as to why I should not.

The argument is in the rules you used to enforce. You're expected to be civil here and address the arguments, not the poster. You know this. Of course saying "You're stupid and you suck" will get you banned.

...and as I keep arguing, the rules are a means rather than an end.

One of the major differences between myself and most of the other users here is that I have always viewed "Consistency" and "Rationality" as overrated.

...and as I keep arguing, the rules are a means rather than an end.

Well, I can't make you do anything, but you don't decide how the rules are enforced.

One of the major differences between myself and most of the other users here is that I have always viewed "Consistency" and "Rationality" as overrated.

Actually, I don't think most of the users here are particularly consistent, and I have doubts about many genuine rationalists are left.

But you, I'm afraid, are just making the same argument our polemicists and shit-stirrers do when they decide the rules is a stupid.

Why on earth are people, in this thread, complaining about white women's tears? I'm a 100% hetero man and I'd break down crying if this happened to me. She was accosted by multiple huge men who were scamming her and humiliating her on the internet. Seriously, if you aren't on her side, I think you lack empathy or something.

White voters in NYC have an extremely high likelihood of voting for the politicians who enabled this situation. For many on the right, this situation is someone are getting what they voted for good and hard.

In SF I would agree with you, but NYC is a city which normally votes for the tougher-on-crime candidate. Looking at recent mayors, Koch, Giuliani, Bloomberg and Adams all ran as conventional law-and-order candidates. Dinkins ran on a platform of hiring more cops and getting the mafia out of City Hall, which is still a platform of being tough on crime. Bill de Blasio was the only soft mayor since crime became a major political issue.

You can say that Adams is fundamentally a corrupt machine politician and that his pro-cop positions are performative, but if so he is definitely putting on the performance - he is gratuitously pissing off the type of soft-on-crime white liberal you are calling out as "likely to vote for the politicians who enabled this situation." FWIW, I would give Adams, his team, and his supporters the benefit of the doubt on a "too early to tell" basis - it took years for Giuliani et al to get crime in NYC under control last time.

The Soros DA confounds your position.

Do you think Adams is tougher on crime than Curtis Sliwa?

He got into law enforcement in NYC at the tail end of it being a dangerous city. So yes?

Sliwa was a vigilante leader through long periods of NYC being a dangerous city.

Why is a sixth month pregnant woman traveling on NYC streets on a rented bicycle?

Biking is good, pregnant women are still capable of light exercise, and rental bikes are sensible in some situations.

If there's a report of a robbery between a 30+ year old, employed pregnant female and a teenaged male, everyone's priors should be that the male was robbing the female no matter what the report is. I'd guess that women in those categories have physically stolen things from teenaged males has to be out numbered many orders of magnitude the number of times the opposite has occured.

Using DOJ estimated national crime rates men aged 17 average 250-400 arrests for robbery per 100,000 persons per year, women over 30 average 12-14 robbery arrests per 100,000 persons per year. And that's all women, if you applied filters for employment status, pregnancy status, and victium demographics those rates would drop like a rock.

You don't even have to know the difference in racial crime rates to know this story shouldn't have passed the smell test.

If you left race entirely out of it, there is zero doubt that it is MORE plausible for a gang of teens to randomly confront a female nurse to pressure her into giving up a rental bike (which I gather don't cost much to rent) than the reverse.

Because the story that some random pregnant nurse decided to intentionally confront a gang of teenagers to steal one of their bikes is utterly absurd on it's face. Not impossible, but in the world we live in, 99/100 times you bet the other way.

Bringing race into it doesn't update one's priors that much, but it definitely updates them in the same direction.

Honestly, 99% is probably way too low of an estimate. I wouldn't be surprised if it was literally impossible to find an example of a pregnant white woman robbing a group of black teens. Even leaving out the pregnancy (it is pretty specific, although I would wager it predicts even more defensive behavior), it might be impossible to find an example of a white woman engaging in strongarm robbery of a group of black teens.

That people are willing to believe something that's so obviously stupid makes it clear why things like, "hands up, don't shoot" get treated as completely and obviously true - at least that's mechanically plausible, even if it pretty obviously didn't happen that way.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was literally impossible to find an example of a pregnant white woman robbing a group of black teens.

Something similar has probably happened somewhere and somewhen in a country as large as ours.

Probably wouldn't be caught on video.

But yes, your point stands, it's so ridiculous that anyone who defaults to believing it is not to be taken seriously.

The alternative view is not that was trying to steal the bike, but that she saw the one eBike on the rack and grabbed it even though it had already been reserved. This is at least plausible -- perhaps you'd bet against it a priori, but it's not crazy sauce. But it's not what happened.

she saw the one eBike on the rack and grabbed it even though it had already been reserved.

Let's give these guys the benefit of the doubt. As a man, I'd have put my hands up, told her that I'd cancel my reservation and the bike was hers. End of story, no confrontation. We'll talk, explain things, and if there's a chance for me to give ground (and not lose out on $1200 from an unreturned bike, I'm not that trusting) I'm taking it.

Let's give these guys the benefit of the doubt.

Not anymore, no. The benefit of the doubt has been weaponized and only ever runs in one direction. Reading about this case led me to discovering the new paradigm for purse snatching. The thief approaches the victim and says, "give me back my bag!" On the surface, this looks like it could plausibly be a legitimate case of someone picking up the wrong bag. That's what it's for, to induce in normal people just enough momentary confusion for the thief to take off with the bag. Four "teens" hanging around the bike rental deserve absolutely zero benefit of the doubt.

I'm saying that in the most charitable interpretation of the situation, these teenagers still handled the situation poorly. And it only gets worse from there.

That's an interesting point. I guess I'm arguing that the most charitable interpretation of the situation is so improbable that it's not even worth entertaining. But as a rhetorical device, I can see the value in your approach.


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