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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38232 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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All real experiences are being replaced with more optimized simulations. Real experiences have limitations to how much you can optimize them. Pets can literally be bred for cuteness, docility, smallness etc, not so with human children. Streamers can optimize friendship, sex workers/OF egirls for sexuality, retirement homes for elderly care, recorded music for friends/family singing. Real experiences limited by blood relationships, geographic proximity, reciprocity and non-specialized providers just won’t be able to compete in the future (present) and it seriously troubles me

Cats are very well adapted to mimicking human infants but they aren't really in the same league.

Isn't it about desensitization/addiction in general? When people haven't learned normal coping mechanisms, they would always find a way to wirehead themselves, virtual or not (drugs, alcohol, food). Low prices would drive substitution, sure, but the deeper problem is why people do -- or do not substitute in the first place. Why some people would binge read blogs and books, and other - binge quarrel at forums with no definite goal.

I don't think this is true at all. No one is happy to pick streamers over real friends or onlyfans girls over actual sexual partners. Everyone knows they are a poor substitute at best.

That's definitely not true. There are in fact people who would rather watch streamers than have real friends, or jerk off to an onlyfans girl instead of having a girlfriend. I think those people are profoundly unhealthy and wrong, but they exist.

Ok maybe they exist but they're rare. I don't think we have an issue of these "hyperoptimized" alternatives being seen as generally preferable. The real appeal is that they are so low effort not that they are super optimized.

Nobody thinks being obese is better than being fit, but pizza is still outcompeting healthy foods for an increasing portion of the population

Basically: single-purpose specialized experience providers often leveraging technology will outcompete everything real eventually

We just.... All kinda forgot to have kids for a couple generations and then we were all too old. Out with a wimper indeed.

This feels accurate.

Personally, I've always (until somewhere around the mid 2010s) waffled on the question of whether or not I want to / should have children. In hindsight, I think it can be summed up as "Yes, but the more I think about it, the scarier it gets."

The problem is that there are some prerequisits I'm just ... not super interested in. In middle school, I had this tendency to fantasize about having children, but would handwave away where they came from. I think the book I published in high school could be interpreted as a self-insert parenting fantasy, that I suddenly realized was that halfway through and so the SI got uncomfortable about it in awkward infodummps because that's what was happening in my head. (In said book, the protags somehow wound up looking after not one, but two adorable space-orphans, withddout a shred of romance or sexuality to be found.)

This feels like the opposite of the rest of The West, where people have prioritized sex and romance over children, yet somehow it still feels like "we just kinda forgot for a couple generations" applies to me, too. Really deprioritized, in favor of the all-important Education.

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