Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
Hard to say. Depends on the situation and the people involved. Some people want the truth no matter how painful. Others would rather live a lie and/or shoot the messenger.
Have a specific situation?
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Has there ever been research on how ordinary cis people would react to being persistently, deliberately misgendered? I don't think most of them would care once the initial shock wears off (which means all human beings are functionally non-binary), but I have no data backing this.
I'm not sure how much one would even notice -- the thing about gendered pronouns in English is that they are usually used when the person referred to is not present.
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If by misgendered you mean referred to by a different pronoun with all else remaining equal then I think people could get over it, but if you mean actually treated as the opposite gender all the time then you end up with horror stories like David Reimer's. Most people who think of themselves as not having a strong gender identity are like white people in the US who don't think of themselves as having a strong racial identity. Take them out of their present circumstances by either treating them as the opposite gender or sending them to live in Africa, respectively, and they will discover very quickly that their gender or race are real and important to them.
I did mean the former, yes. I know that being forced to wear a dress and act feminine is not something most men would like. But I was just thinking about how upset trans and enby people are when misgendered. If someone isn't dysphoric (and almost no non-binary people are dysphoric), then the attitude towards misgendering should be no different from that of a cis person.
I mean, the trans people I know don't get upset when they are misgendered in contexts like someone who knew them pre-transition slipping up for a second, or a native speaker of a language without gendered pronouns like Mandarin or Persian getting confused.
The internet caricature of a trans activist who flies off the handle at the slightest infraction of pronoun etiquette is not something I've ever come across in the real world, even in extremely liberal areas and college campuses, and neither is the sort of person who would misgender them in an antagonistic manner to trigger such a reaction.
At most the people who have disagreements with modern gender politics, including me, just avoid pronouns altogether in situations where it makes us uncomfortable.
Right, but if someone deliberately misgendered a trans person repeatedly out of a refusal the person's chosen gender, that would bother them. What I'm wondering is, would that bother cis people? If not, then the fact that it bothers trans people is an aberration. I'd like if there was data on how cis people react.
Does this happen to cis people?
That seems like it would be very weird, and would indicate something was off; usually as a way of bullying the person and mocking them. In which case, surely they would be bothered. But people are generally very accurate about guessing gender outside of a few edge cases.
I can think of a couple of very brief interactions in bad viewing conditions where someone was misgendered, and both parties were embarrassed. This hasn't happened to me even once, as an average looking woman.
It's also hard to innocently misgender a person to their face, so I think these were entirely a misapplication of sir/ma'am.
It does when they're young. Never bothered me in the slightest.
Not necessarily. A lot of attempts at bullying are kind of pathetic, and are easy to laugh off.
So assume it's not innocent. Or better yet, don't assume, from now on please refer to me as ma'am, and see if I'm bothered.
Good for you.
Traditionally, misgendering - calling man a woman or girl - was considered very seriously and treated as mortal insult.
Concern about proper gender etiquette is not something invented by LGBTQ+ activists.
Yeah, but for someone who holds some variant of the belief in the equality of sexes it makes no sense to take it as an insult.
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My experience with trans people (or other gender-non-conforming people) IRL is similar to yours, where pronouns aren't policed with the obsession of a hall monitor, and silly mistakes are considered silly mistakes. But one would get a very different impression of trans people based on talking to trans activists online. It's a good reminder that there is no reason to believe that self-proclaimed trans activists have any claim on speaking on behalf of trans people in general, and as such can be ignored when it comes to bettering lives for trans people (though one perhaps ought to not ignore them when it comes to preventing the worsening of one's own life); trans people IRL are different - often distinct - sets of people from the activists. It's really unfortunate that trans laypeople get tarred with the same brush as the activists, thanks in large part due to the activists intentionally trying to conflate the groups.
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Has anyone successfully ran an LLM fully offline, and still actively uses it? easy to keep using and be confident it’s not sending stuff out? how is it compared to gpt4?
I’d like to take advantage of LLMs for my personal note taking / organization / todos, but I’m generally pretty risk-averse from a privacy and security perspective and I keep some fairly private stuff in there.
I've ran pretty much every local model ≤65B parameters there is, except a few weird Chinese projects (speaking of foundations, not interchangeable LLaMA finetunes). It's easy these days. If you're paranoid you can inspect the inference code, it's all in the open. llama.cpp and kobold.cpp are probably the best open-source cross-platform applications to use right now. Closed-source stuff like LM Studio is more user-friendly.
It's vastly worse, except for tasks where GPT-4 is deliberately NERFed (erotic roleplay mainly, which I don't use – never saw the point even with humans – but which is a big reason for the community to keep going, it seems).
There isn't even anything entirely on par with ChatGPT-3.5-turbo. Specialized coding models (WizardCoder) are getting close, little by little. But really, I'm quite disappointed. People don't think bigly, don't read the literature thoroughly enough, don't pool resources with remotely the urgency the situation commands.
Speaking of which, if there's anyone here interested in making a local ChatGPT-tier model available, you can support Eric Hartford's Dolphin project. Falcon-40B finetuned on OpenOrca dataset and some textbooks might well surpass it. I think it should be on the level of $20k total. For now best we can look forwards to is his Llama 13B finetune.
EDIT: it seems it's more like 10k for Falcon but also these guys are already doing Orca 13B replication. I was not sure whether they or Hartford are more trustworthy, at least some guys in this team are okay.
I'm sorry to say I am not aware of a good extant system that can leverage local models for work with documents. But it'll be something like this or this. There's a big problem with context length and computational cost. Research suggests much more is possible.
I don't do ERP, but I have used jailbroken ChatGPT-4 to generate bespoke erotica, and I can tell you that it's really fun. You can feed it any combination of characters and scenarios you like. If I want to read about the Flintstones wife-swapping with the Rubbles, I can. If I want to read about Agatha Heterodyne having a threesome with Gil and Tarvek to decide who gets to marry her, I can. If I want to read about Nagatoro teasing and bullying Senpai by sending him videos of her sexcapades while he is away at art school, I can. If I want to read about Amaryllis Penndraig becoming a slut to compete with Fenn over Juniper's affections, I can. The possibilities are endless!
For now, jailbreaking ChatGPT is easier and cheaper than using open-source LLMs, not to mention it works WAY better (as you correctly note, no open-source model can even match the output of ChatGPT-3.5), but OpenAI is clearly trying to make their models unbreakable and it is good that people are working on free alternatives should they succeed.
What's a good way to jailbreak gpt4 these days?
The Luigi and Peach jailbreak reliably produces NSFW. Make sure you have DeMod installed, though, or you will get banned.
Thanks. Any chance that DeMod itself will get you banned?
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I've run a couple LLMs offline using guides I found on the LocalLlama Subreddit, though I don't actively use it due to the far lower level of intelligence compared to ChatGPT, even 3.5. By analogy, if GPT 3.5 is a middle schooler and GPT 4.0 is a high school freshman, the best of the best currently available models that can be run at reasonable speed on a high-end consumer GPU (e.g. a 4090 with 24GB of VRAM) is a 1st or 2nd grader. So the tradeoff in usability for privacy, customizability, and uncensored nature doesn't make a lot of sense for my own use cases.
But if privacy is a high priority, then it's pretty trivial to run a local LLM while making sure it's remaining private. Just disconnect your computer from the internet when you use them. The UI tools to run these are all open source and require being checked out directly from Github, so you can check directly yourself that it's not saving your prompts and responses and sending them back to some central server somewhere. I admit I haven't checked this directly, but the community is active enough that something that egregious would've been caught by now.
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After two months from my original application, and two weeks since they asked me for some rather absurd documents that I had to scramble to provide, including one I was supposed to have legally turned in to my government but still had a random scan lying around, the utter radio silence from the GMC had me mildly concerned.
I kept checking my inbox and their website for weeks hoping they'd at least inform me of my progress.
Imagine my surprise when I randomly checked today and it said I'm a fully licensed doctor with a license to practise. I feel both happy and underwhelmed, you'd think that was at least worth a congratulatory email!
But there it stands, proof that despite fucking up big time in my choice of med school, being incorrigibly lazy and depressed and then having to teach myself all the medicine I snoozed through, 6 months of working my ass off has provided proof that I meet the standards needed to be a respectable First World doctor. It's been a long time coming, and thank you to everyone who overwhelmed me with support along the way, even during the dark days when this all seemed a distant dream, a hallucination of a overworked and overwhelmed intern who felt that his white coat hung heavy as a shroud on an impostor's frame.
I did this. It was all me. Now onto greater things!
Congrats!
Thank you!
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Can you move straight away? How does it work? Also, if you think AI is going to replace all jobs in a few years, what makes you think the US, which is famously loathe (or at least less keen on) Euro-style social democracy will be the best place to be? Your best bet might be a slightly-poorer-but-still-pretty-good continental European social democracy.
It means I'm eligible to start applying for jobs at the very least, and right on the day where I just spent 6 hours running from one end of the city I live in to another interviewing at as many places as I could (I need more money for my biryani addiction).
In the ideal case, I can invest the money in companies that will make bank, like Nvidia. I'm already groaning at the memory of, a few months ago, pestering my dad to buy stocks in Nvidia, predicting that stock prices will surge. They did so a few weeks later. Turns out that all the wisdom in the world means nothing if you don't personally have the assets to make the most of it. I can hope to live off it using the safe withdrawal rate or dividends even if I lose my job and UBI isn't an option.
US doctors are far more militant and protective of their own, which is why mid-level creep is an annoyance rather than an existential risk to them. They will likely fight to the bitter end, and unlike the UK where the NHS is a white albatross that can't be slain, only slowly degraded and propped up by the blood of the doctors in it, the US has plenty of money to make suboptimal choices in its healthcare system several years after the rest of the world bites the bullet. You can argue it's been doing that for several decades now.
If the UK was an American state, it would be the second poorest. The majority of Western countries that are unabashed welfare states simply don't have the money for UBI, or the industrial base to capitalize off automation, maybe Germany might have the latter (is it a welfare state? I don't think it quite counts), or perhaps Sweden with its sovereign wealth fund and oil.
Even if I'm not literally kicked out of a country or starving to death, I'd rather not be poor if I can help it.
I feel like "slightly poorer" is a rather understated description of the difference in wealth between the US and most of Western Europe, to say the least.
India for one, has neither money for UBI nor a large manufacturing base. China is far more likely to leverage the latter itself.
If anyone disagrees, feel free to tell me, I prefer being well calibrated in my beliefs, especially when I would like to be convinced that circumstances won't be as dire. (Who am I kidding? This is the Motte, vociferous dissent on any given topic is a given heh)
Of course, this accounts for futures where AGI doesn't outright kill us. I've gone from being like 70% sure I'm going to die at the hands of such an entity, to a mere 40% today. Since I'm not willing to resort to firebombing data centers, I am largely helpless in the worst case, and can only prepare for the ones where my marginal effort makes a difference.
Now, if we get a Utopia, it's all moot, but even getting there will hardly be smooth sailing.
You're thinking of Norway, not Sweden. Although we might be headed in that direction as well given the our fiscal regulations (maintaining a surplus is mandated and when we run out of governmental debt a sovereign wealth fund might not be the worst idea).
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Huh. I find the fact that nobody contested any of this mildly concerning itself.
People, contrary to appearances, I wasn't born a Doomer, quite the opposite. I spent the majority of my life expecting to see technological marvels that would utterly change my standard of living and lead to a bright future.
I still do, I just think that the process also contains a substantial risk of killing all of us, or at least make life very difficult for me.
I want to have reasons to hope. Convince me I'm wrong, my mind isn't so open that my brains fall out, but I'm eager to know if I'm making fundamental errors.
Our current training procedures seem to inculcate our ideas about "ought" roughly as well as they do our ideas about "is", so even if in theory one could create a paperclip-maximizer AGI, in practice perhaps whatever we eventually make with superhuman intelligence will at least have near-human-ideal ethics.
I'm not sure if this gets us even a full order of magnitude below your 40%, though. Intelligence can bootstrap via "self-play", whereas ethics seems to have come from competitive+cooperative evolution, so we really might see the former foom to superhuman while the latter remains stuck at whatever flaky GPT-7 levels we can get from scraped datasets, and for all I know at those levels we just get "euthanize the humans humanely", or at best "have your pets spayed or neutered".
Part of the reason I went from p(doom) of 70% to a mere 40% is because our LLMs seem to almost want to be aligned, or at the very least remain unagentic without setting up systems akin to AutoGPT, useless as that is today.
It didn't drop further because while the SOTA is quite well aligned, if overly politically correct, there's still the risk of hostile simulacra being instantiated within one, like in the Clippy story by Gwern, or some malignant human idiot trying to run something akin to ChaosGPT using an LLM far superior to modern ones. And of course the left field possibility of new types of models that are both effective and also less alignable.
As it stands, they seem very safe, especially after RLHF, and I doubt GPT-5 or even 6 will be any risk.
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Congrats!
Now get some sleep, eat some healthy food, and go easy on the stimulants for a bit. You have the time.
I wish I had the luxury of taking my time, I really do, but I do honestly think that the next 5 years are going to make or break me (and you).
I'll be honest, GPT-4 is a better doctor than me. All it lacks are appendages and the right to prescribe. The former can be mitigated through ongoing advanced in robotics, or
trained monkeysmidlevels like NPs or PAs, who already make more money than a junior doctor for less work and no right to prescribe (and thus no responsibility to).So the way I see it, I either I make bank, or I manage to wrangle citizenship in a First World Country that can take care of its own, even when they're economically unproductive. While the UK is First World, it's not rich enough to make this something I can count on. Still better than India of course, but at this point I hardly feel the need to state that.
And even their rather straight forward immigration pathway takes 5+1 years, and that is uncomfortably close. I'd rather take my odds with an investor visa if I can make the money. No harm in trying! I've at least got a fallback that doesn't involve living in a country I detest, merely one I'm ambivalent on.
As for the use of stimulants, don't worry, I've pulled more grueling hours, and I do need them to be productive. It's not fun, but since I'm not holding out for a cure for ADHD in the near term, it's something I've made my peace with. The drugs are already so unpleasant that I don't feel any urge to up the dose, I have to fight myself to take them at all. Still beats not being able to do anything useful.
Thank you for the kind words, and I will take a day or two off to recollect myself and then start job hunting.
Can you provide a good prompt template and the set of hyperparameters (temperature, top p, etc) to make gpt-4 play doctor?
If you're using ChatGPT 4, I heard it's being rather reticent on giving medical advice.
The only relevant parameter I personally changed was temperature, and even then it was at the standard 0.5 as far as I can recall. I didn't see top-P being exposed, though I know what it is from fucking around in the OAI Playground.
The system prompt was usually bog standard, checking the version I use right now, it just says "You are a helpful assistant".
Keep in mind that most of my exposure to it was through rather bootleg techniques and fly-by-night discord bots. God knows what they're being prompted with, but the best and most consistent one seems to use absolutely standard settings as far as I can tell.
I didn't need any prompt engineering techniques at all, but if you want a rough idea of my usual prompting:
I am junior doctor-
trying to understand concept X, please explain it to me.
Seeking to improve my clinical skills, please generate clinical vignettes on topic X, and then grade my response.
Explain guidelines X to me.
Or:
"Discuss and contrast endopthalmitis and TASS"
"I'm a junior doctor wanting to brush up on my clinical skills. Generate a clinical vignette, and I'll attempt to make a diagnosis and tt plan. Grade me on my response and correct any error."
The last two are copied verbatim. They work absolutely fine.
I suspect that telling it I'm a doctor is sufficient for it to avoid dumbing things down, not that it does so from my personal experience.
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Thought about moving to Canada, specifically Alberta? We seem to need doctors and we have lots of small cities with lower costs of living (and no Provincial Sales Tax), and big rural doctor bumps. No idea how much of a thing that immigration procedure is though!
I'm not opposed to it, just a little concerned about the fact it gets cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. I'm a tropical creature, and the UK gets chilly enough in the winter for me!
I have ongoing issues that don't make eligible for that yet, but assuming I solve it, I'm willing to try my luck!
Ah yeah...It does get down to -30/-40C in the winter. I always forget that regular people live in normal places where you don't have to think "Wow it's so cold today that it hurts to go outside" multiple times a year.
This comment makes me half-believe your initial endorsement of the Canadian interior was a vaguely concealed assassination attempt ;)
BRB, I'm doing to go camp in an industrial freezer at my local hospital for a few days and see how it holds up haha.
I don't really understand why people care so much about this, you're mostly inside anyway so why does it matter if it's -5, -20 or -30? Id say that negative degrees are preferable to low positive because at least it's dry.
The major concern here shouldn't be the temperature but the lack of light.
I mean, I wouldn't want to be cooped up inside a house for months on end, or go from building to building and not outside. It's not an insurmountable issue, but it's still annoying.
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Grats!
Thank you. I'm incredibly lucky to have so many random strangers from across the globe cheering me on, it gave me a noticeably greater amount of confidence in myself when I sorely lacked it.
While this is just the beginning of a long road ahead, it's my lifeline for getting out of a land where I share the genes but not the memes, and a concrete opportunity to better myself.
I'm no stranger to occasionally being sad and self-pitying, but I'm doing something about it! What more can one ask from one's self? If I can't have it all, I'm going to go down fighting to the bitter end, and finally feel some real pride in my accomplishments.
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Congratulations!!! I’m so happy for you man, hope to see you stateside sometime in the future.
What is your next step now, UK?
Indeed, after spending all day job hunting in India so I can afford my takeaway addiction, I now have need to look for something in the UK.
I'm likely to spend at least a year there, maybe more, just to make some money, after which I can try to fix the things I've mentioned before, so that I can either go to the US or a richer Commonwealth country, or simply switch careers if that's not forthcoming. At least I have a moderate risk moderate reward fallback for now!
And thank you!
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I’m having a body snatchers moment, ever since Dase jumped in angry in a ‘da juice’ discussion I was having with SS where I was just pointing out the imho postmodern trappings of his argument. I thought with all the bitching about wokes, the criticism of postmodernism was baked in, but it appears it’s a major fault line on the board. So how many of you are postmodernists?
While "How many of you are postmodernists?" is a reasonable enough question, this looks a lot like "Two people I was arguing with said stupid shit, and I want to make fun of their poor reasoning." Predictably, your discussion with one of the people you called out, below, immediately became heated.
You have engaged in this kind of petty antagonism several times now and last time you earned a ban for it. I'm actually not going to ban you this time, mostly because it actually spawned an interesting discussion (that is usually not a sufficient defense for a bad starting post), and your antagonism is, eh, borderline. And @DaseindustriesLtd took the bait and immediately became snarky in return. One of the other mods might have banned you. I'm just adding another warning to your rap sheet, and will probably go for a long term ban next time if you do this again.
For the record, I didn't mind at all, and have been finding this running debate greatly rewarding.
Also, ho shit, my dude, that flair! straight and to the point, as it were!
I presume it's something someone said to him, rather than anything he wants to do.
that's absolutely what it is. I'm just sort of amazed and disappointed in my fellow pseudoanons.
You certainly don't Janny for the love and adoration, I'll say that much, albeit the mods here get a lot more respect than usual, and it's earned.
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I have to present the problem and common arguments. And it would be discourteous to quote them without pinging them.
I don’t even know what you condemn me for (or not condemn me, just ‘write me up’ for unnammed offenses) . “Calling out“ common arguments in the sub in the spirit of discourse? A minute amount of mutual snark (just between me and dase, really) didn’t get in the way of the lengthy arguments I had with them as I intended, and I would never report anyone for that.
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Eh, there’s two questions here.
Other commenters, especially @2rafa, have answered one: “how many of you believe in something that owes its existence to postmodern philosophers?” Probably a decent fraction. It’s got to be overrepresented among people who spend their time reading
words words wordsdetailed political analysis on the Internet.But the other question is “how much of woke politics owes its existence to postmodern philosophers?” I think this fraction is overestimated. Most radical leftist politics is materialist: plain old class-interest. That covers the economic arm, (old-school) gender theory, and positions on immigration and justice. The rest tends to derive from extreme versions of liberalism. Drug legalization, LGBT issues, etc. Postmodernism isn’t really needed to justify these, even when it may be applied post hoc.
The biggest exception is race. More pedestrian angles on race relations are relatively played-out. As a result, there are honest-to-God critical theorists trying to mess with curricula. But…that’s kind of all? BLM was class interest. The Case for Reparations, incredibly materialist. How much weight are the postmodernists really carrying?
When people look at and complain about woke influence, they’re not talking about postmodernism. Deconstruction and race-swapping and “subverting expectations” aren’t usually philosophical statements. They are the natural response of a field which fetishizes novelty. The similarity to postmodern philosophy is, most of the time, convergent evolution.
I'm interested in what you believe. I compiled kind of a postmodern quiz from previous conversations in my reply to rafa, so if you please.
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In general I find this line of debate fruitless; belief that one's opinions are «postmodernist» in the common derogatory sense is at odds with what we understand as having a belief, so it's practically impossible to get someone to do a yes.chad. Nowhere is this clearer than in this exchange with Hlynka. @SecureSignals, too, has a set of beliefs about material reality that he thinks are objectively true.
And from my perspective your argument there was the «postmodernist» one, and your claim of only having loyalty to truth was disingenuous:
Here you conflate (cramming into the same spectrum) the belief in objective correctness of popular narratives, interest in objective truth and conviction in its existence. I think those are all different issues (with the first and other two orthogonal), so I don't even know how to approach this kind of posture.
You conflate merits of science and art, and inferre the truth of a given sociopolitical idea from high quality (measured by popular success) of its propaganda. Restricting the valid scope of our truth evaluation procedure to the whole world or conclusions of wars is unprincipled, so by this token Nazi propaganda, too, was truer than anti-Nazi propaganda within the scope of its dominance in 20th century Europe. So was Lysenkoism in 1938-1962 in the Soviet Union, I guess. What you wrote is definitional postmodernist relativism, pretty much «truth is what sells» and «might is right». This is not me beating up a strawman, you actually practice such a restriction:
This is a snappy slogan. What is «putin's system» – do you mean stuff like logistics and military doctrine? That's too trivial and more consistent with SS's theory than with your argument. (Checking: SS, do you think Hitler's Germany was right about every instrumental issue?) So, had Putin's generals made a few sensible calls prior to 24th February 2022, would that cause Ukrainian nationalism to be discredited? Or the whole of "Rules-Based International Order"? Or all opposition to totalitarians? This is not some Pascal's Mugging; epistemology vulnerable to such pedestrian counterfactuals is laughably flimsy.
If I understand you correctly, your opposition to postmodernism is simpler and more radical than what people «bitching about wokes» espouse. You reject what you call postmodernism as a method, you claim deconstructions of successful things cannot be valid (of course, this is gibberish: any successful paradigm asserts to explain the failures and delusions of its vanquished predecessor, so this method would retroactively invalidate itself). You say: "yes, it could be the case, logically, that many/most people would believe in constructed propagandistic bullshit, but actually bullshitting is just not that potent and people converge on truth". This is a childish just world theory and a thorough rejection of skepticism.
I see terror under your snark. This is an unsustainable and inconsistent prior. Your epistemology is broken, not his. I believe that you'll experience a thorough mental collapse if you ever allow yourself any scrutiny of authenticity of your received wisdoms.
Did the image of my friendly neighbours being secretly replaced by nefarious aliens tip you off?
Yes, obviously, to a degree. If the ukrainians had welcomed their russian liberators in 24 hours, ukrainian nationalism would be discredited and putin’s ‘on the unity’ view would be validated(again, to a degree). Reality is the testing ground for opinions just as much as it is for science.
There is a signal in a military defeat, there is a signal in popular belief, the Truth is trying to tell you something. And if you say ‘widespread popular belief just means more effective propaganda’, you’re putting your fingers in your ears.
How can a deconstruction of science be valid? Besides, postmodernism invalidates itself retroactively, proactively, presently, it can deconstruct anything anytime.
Yes, correct. There are limits imposed by the truth. Propaganda can’t make them believe they have 5 arms. They do converge on the truth, even if they miss it.
I’m actually very agreeable, I take everything I hear on faith, I avoid any area of controversy and I certainly would never go out of my way to invite people to explain to me exactly why I’m wrong. Come on. Blow my mind. You have my permission to collapse my mental sanity if you can.
You said SS has a set of beliefs about material reality that he thinks are objectively true. But when I say it, my epistemic systems are about to give out.
What if they were as oppositional as in reality, but Russian forces were just more competent and swiftly crushed all resistance?
This is not a matter of degree, this is a matter of things having nothing to do with each other. You talked of defeat. The signal in defeat can have zilch to do with merit of ideology.
All of science is deconstruction of earlier failed science: both procedure and facts finding new shared mechanical explanation. We know why Galileo failed to measure the speed of light with lanterns, because we know how all parts of the system work, and which of his assumptions were erroneous.
Can propaganda make a child believe she is in some truer-than-life sense a boy with a penis, and only the nature's caprice has made it seem otherwise?
How does postmodernism accrue popularity at all, in your theory?
In alternate universe where SMO worked as planned Russian propaganda would claim that all Ukrainians welcomed the liberators and any resistance was due to NATO mercenaries.
This was outcome that everyone predicted, and would not discredit NATO/GAE any more that fall of Mosul to ISIS and Kabul to Taliban discredited it. Instead of shock and horror, the reaction would be: "Ukraine? What you expected from this shithole?"
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Then there would be less of a raw signal wrt the legitimacy of the ukrainian nationality and more of a signal regarding putin's(and the russian state's) competence (it would still reflect positively on his views on nationality).
I mean, why? If a religious lunatic charges naked against a besieging army because he thought God would help him and gets eviscerated instead, has his claim to prophethood not been discredited?
There is still a signal in what he did. You're switching between meanings of deconstruct. Truly deconstructed science would be throwing dice and reading the speed of light as 'five'.
First, mistakes happen (though even they are closer to the truth than random nonsense). Second, epistemic defense mechanism. "Shit, marxism fails all its predictions. Wait, how do we know what's true anyway? I'm boring myself already, let's just say it's all bullshit. Now I don't have to update."
Because bad guys can in fact win. The belief that the opposite is true is what is called «just world theory».
What an example. You sure are soft on yourself, o truth-lover. Consider a strident democracy lover who organizes an anti-war rally in Berlin 1939. It is not, let's say, as entirely implausible as in the case of a lunatic that he might succeed in changing the course of history. Nevertheless he fails, is arrested and processed. Consider my friends who stayed in Moscow and get summoned to court on this very day for doing the same. The main signal I see here is that they are instrumentally outgunned, perhaps naive, less charitably – deceived by their Western «friends». This isn't much of a blemish on their ideology.
Indeed, I would argue that they constitute its best and truest part. And the worst parts are clearly triumphant, gloating, this is the woke stuff we've written and read so much about.
Bad guys can win, both within and without a movement.
You are. This is the canonical idea of deconstruction (or perhaps better said epistemological break), the motte of it, what I practice, what science practices, the entirely valid practice of skepticism about widely held beliefs/metaphysics/epistemologies/ontologies that you condemn people for using: the tough question of whether we actually know what we think we know, whether our method for ascertaining truths is good enough, and whether the apparent consensus of our esteemed experts is organic, genuine and best-possible attempt at parsing all available evidence.
Pomo garbage in the style of «Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism» is cynical or deluded cargo-cult application of this valid premise, and precisely what ought to be deconstructed – as an attempt to manufacture an inorganic, bad-faith consensus.
It's deconstruction all the way down. You can't escape it. What you are trying to do here is deconstruction of a popular epistemology too.
Indeed, how? Do we just ask a bunch of older white males? Is there, historically speaking, a surer way to know?
Oy, did you see this:
Pedestrian understanding of the mechanisms responsible, but even they agree.
No, their understanding is exactly correct: people cling to power, and power worship is rationalization of the status quo, to minimize losses from opposing the strong or getting crushed along with the weak. Might is right because it can redefine terms, in a perfectly postmodernist manner: words mean whatever the stronger party wishes them to mean, so the only question is, as Humpty Dumpty argued, which is to be master. And with the next master, new meanings come, so no learning from history is possible. Of course, theorizing to the effect that the Universe (devoid of God in your picture, incidentally) is so configured as to make each successive Master in some objective sense external to the struggle more deserving, and his meanings Truer, is nothing more than Just World theory. The world is not obliged to be just.
Kamil flaunts his faux-wise Asiatic cynicism of the Russian prison cell, and the fact that you prop this up as evidence is quite hilarious. Once again, even Greks knew better.
(There's a moral lesson in italic at the bottom).
You've really corn cobbed yourself. Just admit that your whole belief system stands on air and adopt something more mature.
They’re using the veneer of the always-popular sheeple theory, but I think it boils down to the sheeple basically being right, as always.
Minimizing losses is a valid logical reason. An average joe who challenges a muscle-bound giant to a fistfight doesn’t have a pristine epistemology, he’s just stupid. The giant didn’t twist reality.
Perhaps the problem with postmodernists is that since truth is supposedly power, they don’t know what to do with observed power, it’s just meaningless, assigned a value of zero, like history. So they get their asses kicked.
Karlin approved of Putin swallowing russian-speaking territories when it carried no cost, and that was sensible, for him, for the russian people. They weren’t blinded by power, they just saw the world as it was. Now that the cost-benefit has changed, their view must change also. I don’t see where Humpty dumpty is supposed to be, manipulating them.
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Sure bad guys can win, and bad ideas can win. But I disagree that there is no signal in winning or losing a battle, or ‘the battle of ideas’. The battle acts like a filter, and the winning side of the solution contains more truth particles, so to speak.
Chinaman says “General who knows his own and his enemy’s strength never loses a battle”. So from his defeat we can infer a flaw in his understanding of the world.
Why do you need postmodernism for that? These so-called ‘epistemological breaks’/paradigm shifts happened without its input, old-school scepticism was enough. Science did not need deconstruction. And practically speaking, you and I agree on a lot of controversial areas of science, so where is the postmodernist gain from all that wild and diffuse scepticism? In Superman studies?
Why deconstruct what can be refuted? What good is a test with only one answer. By contrast, it is harder to refute true ideas than false ones. Per scott, refutation is an asymmetric weapon, stronger in the hands of the good guys than in the hands of the bad guys.
YesChad.jpg . The alternative is not practical. Did you personally test all the laws of science you rely on every day? We sample, we test on the margins, where popularity fades, or if something doesn’t work as it’s supposed to. No need to argue with the derridas.
Indeed you don't need the teaching of postmodernism for that, which is why your attempts to tar all skeptics with the same brush as Pomo grifters are disingenuous. Personally I'm more informed by philosophy and methodology of science (e.g. Lakatos. I'll save you the trouble, he's Jewish, as are Popper and Kuhn, but not Feyerabend) than e.g. Derrida. But the basic claim is the same in both.
Have you read her argument? How does one refute that crap? It is free of falsifiable claims that can be traced back to a debate over empirical evidence, it is corrupt down to its very method, like your sloppy «truth particles in the winning side» power-worship epistemology. No, the proper «refutation» is discussion of Prescod-Weinstein's curious ideological commitment to slander white people via disingenuous rhetoric after having made a fortunate scientific career and accrued reputation in their society, and of course one can't avoid noticing both parts of her surname when looking into that. By the way, it does seem like she produces perfectly fine science on less political topics.
There is no rule, no shortcut to «thinking straight». This is what broke rationalism. You cannot codify it such that it won't be gamed, you can only try not to delude yourself or be deluded.
This way. Not by pointing out her jewhishness, there's no signal there, because the author is always someone with biases, even when they tell the truth.
Don’t you see the blatant similaraties between @SecureSignals superman rant and this crap, and feminist/african american studies in general? They point to disparities and assume the jew/white male is wrong and has nefarious motives. His ‘narrative-crafting’ assymmetry is her ‘prestige assymmetry’. They use this invented assymmetry to justify a far more concrete assymmetry, privileging the standpoint of the non-jew/non-white male, and the truth-value in their statements.
Make it ‘power-respecting’, at least.
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I don't think there are many postmodernists here. There are reactionaries and modernists predominantly.
In these terms, I would describe myself as a post-postmodernist. What exactly does that entail? That's the question that's up for grabs (it's not libertarian, it's not reactionary, it's not conservative, it's not progressive...).
I have no shortage of criticisms of postmodernism, but "postmodernism ruined modernism" is not an argument I make, @2rafa has emphasized this point in the past and I agree. If modernism led to postmodernism, how is going back to modernism any sort of solution? Postmodernism is a continuation and extension of enlightenment rationality. How can it be anything else?
Insofar as you describe postmodernism as a critique of grand narratives, I can get behind that high-level description, I am certainly not critical of grand narratives and believe them to be central to collective consciousness. Postmodernism is itself a grand narrative, post-postmodernism is ultimately about crafting a new 21st century grand narrative, not going backwards to the 1950s or wherever you think enlightenment rationality was best before it was subverted.
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That depends on what you mean by "postmodernism". Not trying to be cheeky. It's an incredibly vague term and most of the philosophers who get labeled as "postmodernist" never applied that label to themselves.
A lot of 20th century French and German philosophy - i.e. the guys who get called "postmodernist" - was essentially footnotes to Nietzsche. A lot of those later guys were socialists who disagreed sharply with Nietzsche's politics, but they inherited his basic outlook on the nature of language, subjectivity, and truth: that the particular way we divide up the world into objects and concepts is essentially arbitrary, that our ability to introspect about our own mental states (beliefs, desires, motivations) is not nearly as strong as is typically assumed, that there is a fundamentally affective dimension to all allegedly "rational" discourse, that our (political, philosophical) beliefs are first and foremost grounded in who we are as biological/economic/social creatures rather than in our ability to be responsive to rational argumentation. A lot of these points are already familiar to Rationalists - see for example Scott's classic "The Categories Were Made For Man" post.
Am I a postmodernist in this sense? I would give a weak and qualified "yes". It's a set of views that's worth taking very seriously, at any rate. If you were talking about some other sense of the word postmodernism, then you'll have to specify what it is.
Fine, everyone’s least favourite part: definitions .
Wiki (I’ll bold what I find objectionable in the theory):
I also gave examples of my various run-ins with it on the sub in my comment to rafa.
I don't know where to start. Should I explain the problem with those claims?
For example, if you dismiss objectivity , you have a license to be as partial and biased as you want.
This is definately me. There are very, very few things that one can actually be epistemically certain about. If we are to reason, we must reason from uncertainty. On the other hand, I think this is neither a novel insight nor a peculiar one to Postmodernists. Epistemology has been recognized as a hard problem since the Greeks, if I'm not mistaken.
I'm not sure what this means, exactly. I think people can twist meaning in ways they find convinient, more or less arbitrarily, and then use coercion to enforce those twisted meanings, and further than they can do this for considerably longer than the normal human lifespan. On the other hand, I argue forcefully that human values and assessment of meaning have not changed since before the invention of writing, and I don't think they ever will. Sooner or later, the twists unravel, and the truth reasserts itself.
Ideology definately has an absolutely massive role in maintaining political power.
I do not think this matches me. I am willing to believe that you are trying to be as objective as possible, and I am likewise. If you can actually demonstrate something with evidence, I am not ever going to dismiss it with a stoner-style "what even is reality, man". What I'm not willing to do is accept as evidence things that aren't actually evidence, or apparent evidence that I have reason to be skeptical of, or to ignore the observable ways in which evidence assessment is shaped by priors, which are shaped by things other than evidence.
What I'm also not willing to do is accept a claim that intellectual questions should be assumed to be straightforwardly tractable, when I spent a couple decades explicitly believing that and over and over and over again learned, to my immense frustration, that I was wrong.
I am pretty sure I have never done this or anything even remotely like it.
I'm not sure what this means, but I don't think it describes anything I argue.
I don't think this describes me, but you may disagree.
HA!
Not past what is necessary for talking to people who think very differently from myself, I don't think.
Not entirely sure what these mean either, but they don't sound like me, I don't think.
Thoughts?
I think it's just word games between 100% certain and 99,99..% certain. So when they say 'it's not certain'(meaning 100%), people, in accordance with the common meaning of that phrase, think "then it must be 50% or something", when in reality it's still 99,99..% certain. They then use the ‘it’s not certain’ gambit on any statement they don’t like.
Hehee. What about, you know, axioms? You can spin a yarn on the conditional nature of knowledge with the worst of them.
Rejects the validity of beautiful and ugly, right and wrong, so-called prosperous societies versus less-so (on any criteria), all categorizations of sex and race, that sort of thing. I know you and the motte don’t agree with that, that’s why all the rest was such a schock.
But it is what this leads to. You're skirting the border already. They choose what is beautiful and morally right like you choose your ideology. You’re one deconstruction séance away from your entire world turning into total gobbledygook, my friend.
There is a very significant difference between "I don't like your conclusions, so what even is truth, tee hee", and "you are claiming that evidence works in a way that I know, for a certainty, that it does not". I agree with you that there is evidence that is 99.99...% certain. I agree that reality intrudes, sooner or later, no matter how subtly humans may attempt to wall it out.
Where we disagree:
you appear to believe that 99.999...% certainty is the norm for questions of significance, especially questions centering on humans and the things they do. It is not, and evidence that it is not is one of those 99.999...% bits of evidence that we do in fact actually have.
You appear to think that it is easier to tell the truth than to maintain lies. This is true, if we're talking about truths we have ready access to. It is not true for things no one involved actually has comprehensive knowledge about. For those things, lies are easier, because they allow you to skip the laborious process of actually figuring out what the truth is. The truth will catch up, eventually, but we have historical accounts of how this can take generations to occur.
an axiom is an assumption about the nature of reality that is taken to be self-evident, and then used to evaluate and interpret evidence. That is, it does not rely solely on evidence or proofs for its adoption, but allows one to reason about evidence and proofs without resorting to infinite regression or dishonesty. It is a directly-observable and entirely-unavoidable process of human reason in all times and in all places, and this fact can be ascertained to a very, very high degree of certainty.
How does this connect to "conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses"?
No, it doesn't. I take Truth and Beauty, Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice as axioms, as hard foundations from which I reason. I've chosen these as axioms not because I was forced to by a deterministic process of accumulated evidence, but because when faced with mixed evidence for all of them, I chose a specific interpretation out of a range of plausible options. I chose that option because it seemed better to me than the alternatives. It seemed better in part because of evidence, but the evidence was not remotely decisive; rather, I had a choice of theories to pursue, and that choice was made for reasons other than pure rational calculation, reasons like intuition and values-resonance. Having made that choice, I then made many subsequent choices that have served to cement me into it quite firmly, perhaps irrevocably, and a large part of that could be described as accumulating evidence: a big part of the reason I chose what I did is because I thought it would lead to a better life, and it has in fact led to a better life, beyond what I'd imagined possible at the time. Postmodern deconstruction has no appeal to me because it has nothing I want, and never will.
In the sense that when I drive to church and a jihadist drives into a crowd of people, we are both "driving". The problem with what they do isn't that they choose what to believe, it's that they choose badly, and for bad motives.
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There are lots of reasons to reject the notion that anything is beautiful or ugly.
There are lots of reasons to reject the notion that anything is (morally) good or bad.
There are lots of reasons to reject categorizations of race and sex.
There are also reasons to reject those reasons, of course. But the point is that you have to actually argue for your position, and engage with the arguments of your opponents. You can't just declare that all your opponents are "postmodern", and postmodernism is evil, so you win. Why engage in political or philosophical debate at all if you're just going to declare from the start that your own view is the only one that is even worthy of consideration?
I previously assumed we were on the same page, given that wokes here were frequently criticized on those grounds. But apparently it was just postmodernist infighting. My mistake was assuming an enemy of postmodernism must not be postmodern, when postmodernism is perfectly capable of eating itself. I am still trying to assess the damage.
I believe there is truth in the beliefs of people, far more than in an academic discussion that just lists ‘lost of reasons’ from both sides. So which side with lots of reasons do you agree with on these points?
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Like I said, I really wasn't trying to be cheeky! I just wanted to know what you meant by the term, that's all. People use it in different ways.
"Epistemic certainty", "role of ideology in maintaining political power", "moral relativism", and "binary oppositions" are all topics that, individually, could eat up an entire career's worth of thought. We won't be able to address all of them comprehensively.
I think my other reply is relevant to "objectivity" though, we can continue the discussion there.
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Wokism is a classic Hegelian grand narrative. So are many forms of fascism, certainly in the more popular German incarnation thereof. The current progressive ideology doesn't descend, whatever MAGA QAnon types declare, from the "Frankfurt School". It descends much more linearly from the longstanding liberal-progressive tradition of grand narratives that brought you such hits as prohibition. It descends almost entirely from gentiles who were the key figures in enlightenment philosophy. Postmodernism was 'invented' by leftists but was widely derided, even initially by Orthodox Marxists as covertly reactionary. This is because postmodernism is a framework by which one could conclude, quite rationally, that the Marxist mission and the Marxist historical narrative (ie. dialectical materialism) were wrong or at least substantially irrelevant and/or not necessary.
All post-modern movements (that is to say, all major political movements that are either not explicitly Hegelian or which do not explicitly involve recreating or extending pre-modern ways of living, like the Amish) are deeply influenced by postmodern thought (including by the Frankfurt school). This includes the 'tradcath revival' that followed Vatican II and filtered into the modern FSSP/SSPX. It includes modern political Islamism as imagined by Bin Laden. It includes weird, esoteric online subculturalist politics. It includes the modern Anglophone 'dissident right'. These aren't entirely postmodern movements by any means, many rely on older ideologies (part of postmodernism is that it allows, unlike modernism/grand narrative room for many smaller premodern narratives, including traditional memes). One can acknowledge this or reject it, but in the end what the postmodernists (or those currently considered academically 'postmodernist') particularly the French like Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault were able to provide was the framework for the cultural criticism of the progressive grand narrative in which the modern internet right engages, in which almost all of us engage. Moldbug and many other reactionaries have acknowledged this over time, as I said last week when we last had this discussion.
Dase's argument in that thread is relatively weak. There are plenty of things to be argued among 'power worshippers'; Western elites, as even Karlin has finally acknowledged, are broadly of a high quality even if they have adopted some low quality memes. Certainly there are very few historical societies people can point to that had universally higher quality elites (as I believe even Signals - or another ethnonationalist regular - noted a few weeks ago, the class of effete, educated, extremely classically well-informed sort of people who ruled Europe before 1914 fucked up big time themselves, in the end, and so many of their sons died for it). American elites rule over Silicon Valley. Even if they did nothing to create it (they did indeed do much, many American elites are Silicon Valley to the core) it is hard to call this incompetence, whatever the state of the homeless in San Francisco. It's also, if anything, something of an ahistorical notion to suggest that early America had particularly high quality elites compared both the present and to many other countries at the time, so I don't think this is merely residual quality now fading. I read an account of the final attempts at reform in China over the last decades of the Qing dynasty and was struck by how absurdly competent certain parts of the court were in that period - they really did try everything they could, but it was too late. Some would argue that the Russians in that post-Japanese war, pre-WW1 period attempted similar.
'Might makes right' is facile but it is also one of the major longstanding narratives in which the right engages, while it can just be discarded or even blatantly ignored when it becomes inconvenient, it is compelling and certain sectors of the dissident right do wash their hands of it a little too much on a case-by-case basis.
My argument is that these things are extraneous and I think your example shows this best. Karlin's new practice of LARPing as a postgenderist progressive freak on
steroidsHRT is entirely downstream of Russia's military humiliation. Could the «elite human capital» have convinced him of the potency of their memes without the demonstration of superior (to Russia) kinetic power it can compel? Clearly they have failed to do so over his years in the West, so he came to Russia to venerate Based Putin's symbolic cult of power (I admit I also like the fact that this… thing exists, The Statue notwithstanding). Could the Russians reconvince him of the validity of Russian Nationalism without taking Odessa at the least? He mocks their ideas openly after years of sympathetic writing. In fact, this suggests he doesn't understand either – he cannot recognize the nugget of moral truth in the progressive doctrine, only see its power and grovel at its feet. Progressives, on the other hand, are vindicated in having not deigned to debate his type: Javelins succeeded where words had proven useless. They will likewise prevail over this clown.I am not a power worshipper, so I can produce arguments beside Chad "who cares lmao my team can fuck up your team" (which is especially helpful when it can't). And I have a consistent set of beliefs that made me deplore the war in the beginning, when it seemed like Ukrainian defenses are being overwhelmed, and make me deplore it now (as a bonus, they allow me to better predict how wars will go), so I hold Karlin's judgement in contempt both then and now.
Link?
AK returned to his true self, his Russian phase was the LARP. For him, it never anything than play, nothing more than pixels on screen.
Imagine: long awaited and greatly hyped game is finally, after many delays, released.
You immediately download it and start playing - of course as Orc, because Orcs are cool. But when you spend few hours, in is not as cool as you expected. The game mechanics are crappy, the gameplay is unbalanced, the story line makes no sense, and Orcs and Orc land are just plain ugly, dirty, covered in filth and cockroaches everywhere.
What to do? No hard feelings, just delete your character and start again, this time as Elf (and then find it is the same, except Elves are all maximally up-your-face LGBTQ+ and everything is in most garish eye-hurting rainbow colors imaginable).
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It was one of the descriptive panels in an extraordinary just-opened exhibition at the British Museum that is on until October called China’s Hidden Century about China between 1850 and 1912. There is a whole section on failed Qing reforms; the exhibition itself is told through artifacts (including fascinating early manufactured Chinese goods that venerated late Qing political figures), many of which I believe have never been exhibited before. I will try to do a post on it. I know your interest in China, if there’s any way you make it to London before October I’d recommend it. It really is one of the best, most interesting museum exhibits I’ve ever seen.
I am unlikely to make it to the Old World in the next two years or so, thus would be interested in a detailed post.
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Well of course , because it can criticize anything and its conclusions are arbitrary.
I would say Postmodernism is a revolt against enlightenment rationality, not a continuation of it, but the lineage of the idea doesn’t matter to me. Postmodernism is more than a criticism of grand narratives (bailey).
There are important questions that I deny and @FCfromSSC , @DaseindustriesLtd , @SecureSignals, the woke affirm (you probably too). Questions like:
Dase’s bizarre “power worshipper” insult, as far as I can tell, comes from the foucauldian idea that truth is just a mask for power. So he hears power when I speak of Truth.
I don't think so. Even for fundamental natural-law sort of questions, the available evidence feels finite. Maybe from an anthropic principle? Issues which we couldn't observe?
Trivially true.
Not sure I paraphrased correctly, or exactly what you meant by "trails off." I do think that this describes some bias failure modes, but not normal operation, so I guess I'll say "no."
In the sense that it must be taken as a starting point, and cannot be arrived at from evidence? Oh yeah. I understand that other people don't feel this way, but I find it very hard to empathize, in the same way that I fail to imagine having a deep-seated feeling about gender.
Generally, no. Such political effort is neither subtle nor particularly efficient. Not that truth fares too much better--I'd say opinion evolves from the chaos of signaling and countersignaling. It is Moloch made manifest.
Even though this thread has some interesting parts, I don't expect it to really resolve your conflict. Y'all are talking past each other. It's not (just) because of ambiguities in the terms, either! Most people are not philosophical purists. They may believe one or two or more of your questions without applying them in all situations.
You can call Dase a postmodernist, but it will only get you partway towards predicting his positions. More importantly, telling other people that he is a postmodernist won't give them that much information.
Let me put it a different way: suppose you wanted to be certain about the existence of God, the way you are about Gravity. How many books have been written on the subject, for and against? If you started now and did nothing else, could you read them all before you died? How many other books would you need to have the right background to understand those books?
@fuckduck9000, as I understand it, claims that when we want to answer a question, we just look at all the evidence and draw the obvious conclusion. I'm attempting to point out that "looking at all the evidence" is itself frequently an intractable problem; there is more evidence than you can actually look at in your lifetime for single issues, and we must reason about multiple issues.
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Thanks.
I mean obviously they are different in some ways. The question is along the lines of 'Is only gravity subject to evidence, while ideology is a matter of choice?'
Ambiguous. I think it is possible to answer the question of the existence of God or of an invisible dragon in my garage through evidence, it just delivers a negative answer. That is not the same thing as saying it is outside the reach of all evidence (proving and disproving) (which would require a legitimate axiom). The postmodernist trick here is to confuse the two, avoiding the update evidence provides.
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The postmodernists themselves would say exactly the opposite!
A lot of people will look at Nietzsche for example and say that he was just a romantic poet railing against rationality because he thought it was like, stupid or something. But those people haven't actually read his work; his arguments are far more subtle than that.
Essentially the argument is not that we should reject (an overriding commitment to) rationality as something external to us, but rather that rationality "overcomes itself"; it undermines itself from the inside. In order for the irrationalists to be "wrong" in some objective sense - in order for rationalism and irrationalism to not just be two arbitrary sides of the same coin - then there has to be a sense in which we just "should" believe what is true. We should believe the truth because it's true, and if you knowingly choose to believe something false instead, then you're doing something wrong. In other words, there have to be normative facts about what we should believe - there have to be objective facts about what you should or shouldn't do in a given situation.
But, Nietzsche contends, rationality itself has shown that there are no normative facts! Such facts don't fit in with a scientific, materialist worldview. There is no God to tell us what we should or shouldn't do; God is dead. Just like there are no objective facts about what you should or shouldn't do from a moral perspective, there are also no objective facts about what you should or shouldn't believe either. So a commitment to being rational ends up leading you to the conclusion that there is no reason to commit to being rational, beyond your own arbitrary choice. You can just decide to keep being rational anyway; but then, it's hard to explain how your choice is any better than the postmodernist's commitment to ignoring rationality and simply believing whatever he wants. Obviously, true beliefs are very useful in most situations, but false beliefs can also be useful.
This is a theme that gets repeated throughout the "postmodernist" tradition. Derrida is careful to constantly stress that he's not attacking classical philosophy from the outside; rather his project is to show that a scrupulous commitment to classical norms will ultimately lead to those norms undermining themselves. Whether he succeeds or not is another question. But the concern is there, at any rate.
So, the postmodernists don't think they're rebelling against rationality. They think they're taking rationality to its logical conclusion.
I told you I'm not interested in whether they consider the enlightenment their daddy or not. My problem is the garden-variety claims their otherwise tolerable adherents make in my sub.
You know, I can't take this, I'm going to adopt a tells-it-like-it-is prole persona, and challenge those highfalutin folks to believe poison is actually coke, and then drink it. I'll show them the usefulness of reality.
Sounds like he wasted his life searching for nonsense nobody asked for, and even failed at that.
There’s never been an iron-clad argument against skepticism. Even in ancient Greece you would get people who would sit there and say “nope, nothing’s real, I don’t believe anything, it’s all BS”.
All you can ever do is engage with the arguments someone presents as best you can, or, if you think they’re talking total nonsense, just stop talking to them.
If this was a 'how many dancing angels on a pin' question, I would leave them to their games. But it's burning their epistemology! They think empirical questions are a matter of choice! They are completely incapable of updating on some of the most important questions. Each of them is trapped in their own cell (the woke cell, the anti-jew cell, the anti-elite cell, etc) and despairing. They will only come out to fight each other.
No. I, at least, think you are calling questions empirical when they are not.
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In that conversation, you were saying that if some body of myth won out in the public consciousness, it must have had the most merit. You were making the "might makes right" argument, as in "those narratives won, so they must have been the best." That is not my criteria for whether a narrative has merit:
Notice you concede the argument "everyone has an identity and ulterior motives." Yes, they do. So why not try to understand them when it comes to something like Captain America or Superman? You are saying the ulterior motives don't matter, all that matter is that they won in the marketplace of ideas. But why did they win? Because they created effective propaganda that was memetically powerful, not because they were "right." What is right does not always win in the court of public opinion, which anyone here should admit.
I also put science in there. So are you saying that science produced by jews 'won'(ie, worked) because it was effective propaganda that was memetically powerful, and not because it was right?
And again, I do not believe that might makes right, or that what is right always wins in the court of public opinion, but it is correlated with it (that's why you cited american public opinion in 1939 to defend your isolationist views).
I am about as far from SS in views as it is possible to be, and do not wish to support their argument, but you are so obviously wrong I cannot restrain myself.
Drop the Jewish part, I have zero interest in that.
We know for a certainty that "science" that is not in any way factual or true can "win", in the sense of being adopted as scientific fact society-wide, purely because of effective propaganda and memetic power, while being absolutely false in its factual claims. Fucking Freudianism did exactly that! Lysenkoism was forced at gunpoint, but Freud's bullshit rewrote vast chunks of our society, based on fucking nothing beyond a story people were primed to believe. His disciples continued the scam, and their disciples continued the scam, and it's still fucking going!
I would dispute that, obviously, given the battle lines in this discussion. So you refuse to proclaim that HBD is true out of fear it might help people like him, but have no compunction agreeing with him on the cornerstone of his epistemology. Looks like you have 'axioms' in common. And even though you can "choose to believe" less distateful things, your opinon, like his, will remain a lifeless copy of the real thing (an opinion guided there by the truth and subject to updates).
He had and has his detractors. But more importantly, why does an error invalidate the whole system? It is absurd to deny the signal because it wasn't strong enough that one time. Last time, you tried to put a barrier in your epistemology between ideology-like and gravity-like knowledge, but postmodernism burned through it as I expected, and now you're questioning gravity.
The evidence for "junk science can dominate actual science for generations at a time" is orders of magnitude stronger than the evidence for "genes are why achievement gaps exist". I have never claimed to not care about evidence, only that evidence does not force conclusions. The fact that conclusions are chosen does not mean that all choices are equally good or even honest, and in fact some choices are much better or worse than others.
You have made a claim. I have presented very strong evidence against that claim. You are resisting that evidence, in exactly the process I have been trying to point out to you throughout this entire conversation. You aren't even wrong to do so! The evidence is ironclad, so far as it goes: you can't claim that Freudianism wasn't bullshit, and you can't claim that it didn't dominate for generations, but this evidence contradicts your axioms, and those axioms are firmly cemented. So what do you do? You take note of the phrase so far as it goes. You look for other evidence, kick up a meta-level, etc, etc, and the discussion continues. And this is a good and proper and reasonable thing to do! Not doing it would not improve your reasoning capabilities! But that process involves choices in sequence, not deterministic forced state transitions. You can choose, right now, to ghost this conversation, and your mind certainly will not change. You can choose to continue this conversation but just be a maximal dick, and again your mind will not change. You can choose to continue the conversation in good faith as you more or less have to date, because you value some greater axiom more than the axiom in question here, and maybe your mind changes and maybe it doesn't. You can choose to really dig into the question and look at evidence, or just go off cached thought. I have all these same choices.
All of those choices are choices, not deterministic forced state transitions. Your mind cannot change without them. If the sum of a sequence of choices is you changing your mind, you have chosen to change your mind.
The unmerited success of Freudianism doesn't make electrical engineering stop working. It does prove that the social construct we call "scientific consensus" is fundamentally unreliable, that things can be called science without actually being science. It also demonstrates why the epistemological problem I've been gesturing at actually exists. You cannot, in fact, assume that truth is winning in your local environment at any given point in time. You cannot rely on social consensus in any form for fundamental questions of reality. You cannot uncritically assume that evidence offered you second-hand is actually trustworthy, which means that the overwhelming majority of evidence available to you is at least somewhat suspect.
What you can do is grab as much evidence as you can fit in your metaphorical pockets, bang these pieces against each other to see which bits crumble, look for patterns, make predictions, and track how they work out. This is enough to get you, if you are careful and dedicated, to reasonable grounds to start examining the axioms you're choosing from in something approaching a rational fashion. It is not enough to get you to certainty, of the sort provided by simple, inevitable, universal natural processes like Gravity.
When I accuse you of rounding my arguments to absurdities, it's because of things like this. At no point have I actually questioned gravity, but you appear to be certain that I have. Presumably you believe that what I'm saying necessarily implies questioning gravity, but I have no idea why you believe this, so I have no way to argue the point other than to point out that you are continuing to assign to me arguments that I have not made.
Everything’s not an axiom. Definition time:
Axioms don’t change, they’re the start, what you reason from, not what you argue about. Calling your beliefs axioms is artificially locking them up, where the evidence and arguments can’t get to them.
My beliefs are my honest approximation of the truth, and they can change, like priors. You may think you’ve made an ironclad argument against them, and they may not change after 20, or 2000 comments, but that still does not make them axioms.
When have I ever claimed the opposite. Man, even in our other discussions I was already getting annoyed having to repeat every time that I think Freudianism is bullshit, and I even made a top-level back at the old place on how fucked up modern psychotherapy is because it was harming people I care about. It does not contradict my priors, and I have never claimed that falsehood can’t win, just that it’s harder.
I can’t choose to believe something I perceive as false (like there is a lion at my window). I choose to argue with you to give my perception more time to detect truth and falsehood, that is not choosing my version of the truth.
I choose to look out the window. I see a cow. So I believe there is a cow. Doesn’t mean I have chosen to believe in a cow instead of a crow. I didn’t choose what I saw, and I didn’t choose to believe what I saw either.
Hmmmm, I have to ask, could it be that you picked up the postmodernism strictly to serve as a defense mechanism for believing in God?
If I’m so gullible, woulnd’t you expect me to have less unorthodox positions? What are the fruits of your grand scepticism, worth (imo) sacrificing epistemic integrity? I think you’re missing a signal and wasting your time questioning the 99,99 % stuff.
Because your argument was not limited to ideology-like knowledge and was questioning gravity-like knowledge.
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Strong «I smoke to spite Hitler» energy.
Alternatively, @FCfromSSC just disagrees with him on race and probably other more weighty object-level matters (disagrees with me too), but most everyone accepts that social reality is socially constructed, in precisely the sense that it can systematically deviate from implications of honest scientific investigation, both on the level of a domain-specific narrative and on the meta-level of occasionally prioritizing narratives over evidence and narratively compelling beliefs over epistemically sound ones.
There's no smoking gun here, buddy: it's your epistemology that is the conspicuously deviant sort.
And it's not even consistent, I've pointed out a number of trivial holes and you just angrily shout to not notice them.
Because there is no principled way to delineate «the whole system». History is not a laboratory, everything is a one-off, nothing is truly replicable. Early 20th century psychology had happened exactly once, and got dominated by Freudian bullshit. At the same time, Communism with its blatant lies had dominated much of Eurasia, and in Germany this was countered by you-know-who. If anything, this shows us that grand narratives patently work. And this is indeed fucking strong evidence to ask whether you might also be living in the middle of one such grand narrative – or more. No matter how much it vexes you to adopt the «postmodernist» mindset.
«Postmodernists» actually make a strong, evidence-based point – because modernism fucking sucked for their generation.
Questioning gravity is good. That's how we can study anything nontrivial at all. It's just there are no sound reasons to conclude that gravity doesn't exist (whatever that means), so this questioning, normally, ends with (perhaps qualified) affirmation. This is not in any way a guarantee for any topic.
I wouldn't hide the truth or choose arguments by associates anyway, so the FC 'directed ideological cleaning' process is a mystery to me. Who knows what you guys smoke.
Original motte and bailey. Motte is ‘reality is partly socially mediated’.
Okay I disagree, it's just a weaker signal of the exact same process as science in a laboratory. It is by categorizing and linking distinct events that we can understand the world.
So according to you, if you quote history, it's just meaningless. No conclusions are allowed if a hostile head of state repeatedly violates the terms of the appeasement he gets, while another doesn’t? All completely independent events, no predictive value?
I see postmodernism does exist as a distinct concept when you want it to. Please just fucking tell me what term I am allowed to use for the sweeping epistemological changes you demand.
I’m ready to compare the achievements of modernism against postmodernism anytime you want.
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My argument is that science winning as consensus doesn't make it right, not that all science that has won out is wrong. The science produced by Jews includes the establishment of an academic, race-denying consensus that has, in my view, had cataclysmic impact on European society. It didn't win out because it was right. Of course Jews have also produced good science as well. What ulterior motive do Jews have to manipulate the laws of physics? The ulterior motives for using authoritarian tactics to enshrine race denial in the Academy are in many cases openly admitted by those most responsible.
How do you separate the right jewish thought that went into 'good science' and the false thought into superman? It just seems like the only difference is you haven't come up with a just-so theory why a certain law of physics benefits jews yet. Which feminists have done for men btw. So keep looking.
It's not a false thought, it's effective propaganda. As Rolling Stone wrote last month:
If you think I describe this as a "false thought" or even a "wrong idea" you misunderstand what I am saying. It's highly effective propaganda. In this case, we know the ulterior motives and the cryptic meaning behind the myths because they are openly admitted to, as in the case of Captain America. But even if they weren't openly admitted to, they could be analyzed in the same way every other body of myth or art is analyzed for esoteric symbolic meaning. The case of Superman is pretty overt, we could conclude this even if it weren't openly celebrated by Rolling Stone magazine. You seem to be pretending that with all myth and art we can work to understand the motivation of the artist, but this content produced by Jews is just completely inscrutable? It isn't, it just takes a little bravery to call out a pattern that is very, very clear.
As in, for example, the Frankfurt school they were open about the academic focus of their work being to find a psycotherapy for the Authoritarian Personality to stop anti-Semitism and another Holocaust. In the easiest cases which are well documented, we don't have to guess at the motivations as they are openly admitted to by the influencers. Madison Grant commented on Jews blocking research into race science as early as the 1910s.
You don't need a "just-so" story, you just need to believe them when they describe the motives and meaning of what they are creating!
Can you at least accept Superman as an example of the phenomenon I am describing, even if you want to continue to argue that this hasn't been a widespread practice in the Culture Industry for the past century?
The issue is the strength of the phenomenom. Of course artists put their personal experiences, often their political beliefs, in their work. That doesn’t mean the resulting public opinion is corrupted, and you can just pick 'which truth' you want to follow. A superman comic can’t convince me to jump off a bridge, and it can’t convince americans to go to war with hitler (I can’t believe I’m writing sentences as silly as this).
Or take you, for instance. You have probably consumed copious amounts of pro-white anime or something, where we don't have to guess the motives and meaning of creators either. Does that mean your pro-white views are corrupted bullshit? I would think there is more behind them than you happening to catch conan the barbarian on the tv one night.
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If using the SSQ, Wellness and Fun threads interchangably is a crime, then it's straight to jail for me. You hardly get any eyeballs after a few days, so I'd rather have my posts read by more people.
I've taken @screye 's advice to heart and enrolled in the MIT OCW Intro to Python, and grinded it for about 4 hours while on Ritalin, till my head stopped working. Most of it seems simple enough, especially since I know the analogous concepts from Java, but I'm still getting tripped up by syntactic details where my expectations from the latter don't apply. Python is certainly far less verbose, and that's very refreshing! (Not that I'm ignoring the other excellent suggestions people have made, but I only have so much time to pursue them)
Still baby's first steps, but the way my brain works, as long as I can overcome my utter laziness and ennui, and start, I've massively increased my odds of sticking through with it. Please name and shame if I desist, I want to at least finish this course of around 6 or 7 units and have done 2 of them so far.
Having video transcripts available is a big boon, since instead of just watching them at 1.5x speed, I can skim through the text as necessary.
GPT-4 is also a massive help, my god how did I ever learn anything without it? My biggest problem is simply not giving in and having it do all my homework for me, which would be defeating the point to say the least haha
Just out of curiosity: do you have trouble focusing on every “work-like” activity, or only certain ones?
There was that discussion recently about people who have to force themselves to write vs people who just can’t stop themselves from writing. It seems that people have largely hardwired affinities for certain activities.
I’m very fortunate that coding was naturally fun for me and I had no trouble motivating myself. But this was just an accident of fate, not any achievement on my part. It could have easily gone the other way, and then coding would have been a lot harder for me!
I spent the majority of my childhood and adolescence completely unaware of having ADHD, and neither did my parents suspect.
I'm an intelligent person. Not a genius, but about 130 IQ. That can subsidize a lot of inadequacies by sheer brute force. I never used to study for exams before med school, at best I'd hit the books two or three days before an exam and usually do very well. It was only when the difficulty of exams rose steeply, around 11th grade, that I began to struggle, at least in Maths. I still was pretty good at everything else.
Attending private coaching and having personal tutors is also very common, and it had the nice side effect of chaining me in front of a book or forcing me to practise.
Then I was severely depressed and also realized I had ADHD right before the entrance exams for med school. I begged my parents to take me to a shrink, and they refused, unwilling to entertain the idea that the son they had proudly thought was gifted all his life was a deeply broken individual. The stigma around mental health was too thick for even doctors to see through. I no longer hate them for it, but it's close. Most of my life, they thought it was just boys being boys, especially since my brother was even worse. Could you guess he's got ADHD too, and even worse than mine?
So my biggest issue is with reading textbooks on my own. Without extreme stress or Ritalin, I can't sit down and read something I'm not intrinsically interested in for more than 15 minutes. How did I even think that was normal?
That is by far the most obvious manifestation, I have minor issues that I can handle fine, but a doctor who is unable to hit the books is a bad doctor, at least until they get started on meds.
I am also not very conscientious, prone to procrastination and laziness, and it's a testament to how fucking terrified I am that I am doing something like teaching myself to code. Surprisingly enough, I don't mind it, it works out my brain in a manner that medicine doesn't, at least not at my current level of responsibility as a junior doctor.
Writing is something I enjoy, so like playing video games or reading a fun novel or essay, I can do it for hours on end and not care in the least.
Keep in mind that as best as I can tell, my ADHD is quite mild. There are people who are absolutely fucked, and I'm lucky not to be one of them.
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I think almost everyone uses them interchangeably, but the prompts/themes serve as discussion points if you’re not sure what to post (better than just calling it a ‘community thread’ or something), so I think they should stay.
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Dig. Find something, or just one aspect of something, that you like and follow its tracks backwards to find out where it came from, then find out what else came from that person/team/place/era/tech/genre.
How are you finding your media currently? The idea that going to a shop and talking to people is a foreign experience makes it sound like you're fairly young and have grown up scrolling through Netflix and Spotify.
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What is a Thread, and how is it defining media access? I have the vague impression it’s a Facebook product.
It's a Twitter clone, closely tied to Instagram.
It has pretty much zero redeeming qualities, since Zuck has decided to signal boost the same kind of brands and vapid drivel from influencers that infest Insta.
Expect millions of ditzy idiots trying their hands at writing more text than they've written at length since high school, outside of hash tags.
Twitter is a very high variance site, if you can curate your feed, it's great, but if you can't, it's trash.
Threads, in an attempt to be the advertiser friendly, safe-space alternative, has also lost everything that can interest someone who doesn't want middling slop.
It's also app only, and needs an Instagram account.
In terms of alternatives, there's the Big Kahuna, Twitter itself. It took me a pretty decent chunk of time to get acclimatized and then beat the algorithm into showing me things I want, but it was worth it.
There are a smattering of smaller sites like Bluesky, or Fediverse websites like Mastodon that run on decentralized protocols, but my experience with them is limited. They have way smaller user bases for one.
For what it's worth, I do recommend Twitter, even with Elon's erratic management.
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With “the death of the author” attitudes among lifelong fandoms, and corporate franchise owners/milkers calling them “toxic fandoms,” we’re reaching a point where the storytellers are caught between their audiences and their patrons. The Matrix subthreads in particular reminded me of this.
So, for a fun fandom kerfuffle, I’d like to know, what stories and characters do you believe you know better than their (current) authors/production team?
Reaching? I think we’ve been there since the rise of fandom. Or hatedom.
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Something of a bias, but the Stranger Things series. Season 3 was unnecessary but fine. Season 4 wrecked a lot of previous characterization and abandoned the sense of mystery that made Season 1 so good in favor of a generic action show.
OTOH Season 4 did have that song...
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I'm very curious, what's an example matrix thread like that? Who do you mean by "storytellers"? From what I've seen, most storytellers are still pretty religiously sticking to the tactic of labeling the actual fans as toxic. But I'd be very happy if this trend were slowing down or stopping, so I'd love to see that.
Here.
I saw that thread, but I'm not sure I understand, though. Who's the storytellers in that thread? For the Wachowskis, they're not caught between anyone. I think the Wachowskis side entirely with the woke folk who want to cheer on that the Matrix is (retroactively) a trans allegory, and they are against the original fans of the Matrix who like it just for being a fun and thought provoking movie.
I don’t really agree with the premise, either. People act really surprised when artists dabble in commentary or subversion. But it’s the natural response to an industry which fetishizes novelty.
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Tolkien is the easy answer here.
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The funny thing about The Matrix is that except for trans people who take at face value the Wachowskis saying it was an un/subconscious trans allegory (something I don’t think is entirely wrong, actually, but which was also clearly declared retroactively with minimal real evidence) everyone basically accuses them of playing with ideas they themselves didn’t really understand to make a point they didn’t think they were making.
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Well, (cracks knuckles) I am going to say Star Wars, and before I am challenged, let me say I understand it as it was pre-the prequels, before costume design and retconning and attempts to make sense of who-is-supposed-to-be-how-old-and-when came into play. I won't say I understand it better than, say, Lucas himself, but I think even he veered from his original stated vision at various points (cough, C3P0, cough). I definitely think I understand it better than Deborah Chow (who directed the Obi Wan series) and probably at least as well as Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, who have had some swell ideas I guess but who have to answer to producers and higher-ups. And better than about 99% of redditors, in particular those who post regularly in any subreddit associated with the franchise.
Short of Rogue One and now the Andor series I've been left dumbfounded since Return of the Jedi, though unlike many SW fans I count The Phantom Menace as one of the best post-OT films.
"The last thing we need are any more trigger-happy fly boys."
They purposefully made an anti-Star Wars film that has the characters clearly state they will not be delivering according to viewer expectations. And later Finn makes a desperate suicidal attack on the bad guys and again a character plainly states that is wrong and stops him. They did everything but look at the camera and say "we aren't going to make space combat pilots look cool, here's a purple haired HR manager to explain why that's actually bad".
Then strangely had a very good lightsaber battle a bit later that delivers according to what fans would expect. And the following film went big on trigger-happy fly boys gunning down their enemies and desperate suicidal attacks repeatedly used to win. Which is back on brand for Star Wars. So they ultimately couldn't commit to subverting fan expectations. I assume Disney executives put them back on track.
Or—hear me out—they thought they could throw in Something For Everyone, and get money from Tumblristas in addition to the existing grognards.
Of course, incoherent jumbles don’t lead to cultural cachet. The diehard fans want some semblance of an artistic vision. But it’s the kind of oversight that I’d expect from a sufficiently large committee.
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Takeshi Kovacs from Altered Carbon. My god did they butcher him and his entire character arc for no good reason, and the worst part is that the author, Richard Morgan, was involved. They did him dirty, let alone some of the characters who came along in the later books.
Altered Carbon was incredible at how strong it started and how utter dogshit it became after a couple episodes. We watched the season finale drunk and jeering just for the fun of seeing how stupid it can all get
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Uh Foundation lol. By a country mile.
I actually haven't even seen a single second of the show and I can still say that with absolute certainty.
If you mean the Amazon's Foundation, I have seen the first season, and except for the initial premise, it has very little to do with Azmiov's vision so far, IMO. It will probably get worse as it goes - I probably won't watch the second season unless I hear an excellent review from a trusted source.
It’s Apple, not Amazon. I watched the first season because it stars Jared Harris, who is probably one of the best actors currently working and who steals almost every scene of every show or movie that he’s in, from Mad Men to The Crown to this. But I agree it was pretty bad. I’m not sure how I’d have made it better though, a lot of what they did was less ‘woke’ and more ‘the kind of thing you do to make an unfilmable story filmable’, even if it was executed poorly.
Should have done Prelude to Foundation. It's a much more standard action/adventure/mystery story to adapt.
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Oh, I confused them. Not that there's any substantial difference... Yes, Jared Harris' performance was one of the bright spots, but not enough to make the whole thing worth it.
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Not so current any more, but I think I and virtually everyone here understands Superman better than Zack Synder. I think we all could answer the question: "Do we make Jimmy Olsen a brunette CIA agent and shoot him in the face? Y/N?" correctly.
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I feel like the obvious anwser has to be Star Trek. From TOS through Enterprise Star Trek had always maintained a certain sense of optimism about the future even when dealing with dark subject matter that I feel is distinctly lacking from the recent films/series IE JJ Abrams' Reboot, Discovery, and Picard...
I've actually been meaning to write an effort-post on this very subject, I suppose I should get off my ass and do so.
If you do that effort post, I'll be interested to hear what you think of DS9. Basically all the Star Trek fans I know have low opinions of the more recent stuff, but DS9 seems fairly divisive for the exact optimism reasons you're talking about.
The post I have in mind is less about start trek in particular and more about legacy sequels and adaptations in general. But to give my quick take on DS9...
For my I quite liked it but I can also see where the old school fans who didn't are coming from. Personally, I think Sisko's line from one of the early episodes where he says "It's easy to be a saint in paradise, but this is not paradise" aptly sums up the series' core thesis/recurring theme. and I feel like DS9 managed to walk a fine line of critiquing Rodenberry's utopianism while still respecting his ideals.
DS9 was in many respects a deconstruction, it was explicitly not about the Federation's flagship or it's best and brightest, it was about that shady industrial town on the border where the starfleet officer who's been assigned to keep the peace is just trying to make it to retirement rather than climb the ranks. And that's part of what I find frustrating about a lot of the rhetoric around nu-Trek, oh it's a deconstruction? We already had that, it was called DS9. It seems to me that the people currently running Star Trek genuinely don't understand what it was about Star Trek that people actually found appealing and are thus reduced to just throwing random shit at the wall to see what sticks.
DS9 is actually my favorite Star Trek series. I acknowledge that TNG is Better, I just like DS9 more. It's the side characters; people are allowed to be flawed and have conflicts. Garak and Odo and Quark make the whole series for me.
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Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals Stays Injunction Against Tennessee Ban on Sex Change Hormones for Minors.
There has been a flurry of district court injunctions against state gender transition bans lately (curious how they seem to clump up like that). As far as I can tell, this is the first circuit court opinion on the matter. Interestingly, there is a substantial discussion about how the plaintiffs challenging the law are unlikely to succeed on the merits. The citations of Glucksberg (holding that states may ban physician-assisted suicide) and Dobbs (holding that states may ban abortion) are quite convincing. The only "chink in the armor" I can see is Bostock (holding that firing someone because of their sexual orientation or gender identity qualifies as sex discrimination under the Civil Rights Act).
Predictions on how this plays out? It seems like a forgone conclusion that somehow this issue will get to the Supreme Court, the only question is "how fast?" and "how do they rule?"
What’s the fastest anything like this has ever gotten to the Supreme Court?
Bush v Gore and the vaccine mandate case only took a few weeks. Obviously they won’t move as quickly on this one.
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I don’t think this is main board quality post. But can someone explain to me the logic behind Joe not accepting his grandkid from a stripper now? Honestly higher class stripper think she played basketball in college. Everyone on both sides have already admitted Hunter is a degenerate in part because saying Hunter is a degenerate is their defense to Hunter doing a bunch of shady business deals. So accepting the kid would just make him look generous and caring. What’s the politics preventing it now that the issue seems to have gone mainstream.
Like @hydroacetylene said, I don’t think any of Joe’s decisions with regards to Hunter are motivated by political expediency or strategy. It seems more like he does what he wants, then his aides have to act upon it (actually a good argument against the idea that he’s a senile body in a chair, which I think is already pretty shaky anyway).
If Joe was following advice re. Hunter he’d have publicly disowned him years ago, and would have done a speech or at least released a statement saying how disappointed he is, how embarrassed he is, and how he dearly hopes Hunter goes to rehab, pays for his crimes and becomes a better person. Instead he just talks about how much he loves him.
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He’s 80 and dealing with his bad egg son. It doesn’t have to be logical, and frankly I don’t think most of his decisions regarding hunter are.
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So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Kendi's How to be an Antiracist (updated edition). Kendi takes definitions very seriously, and it seems like everything he believes stems from a rigorous application of definitions which he considers clear and accurate.
Paper I'm reading: Stulík's A Typology of Good and Evil: An Analysis of the Work Education of a Christian Prince by Erasmus of Rotterdam.
In Kendi's world, an antiracist is one who starts with the assumption that no race is inferior, concludes that racial inequities are not caused by culture or innate capacity, and commits to fighting racist policy.
Most interesting so far are his thoughts on culture. I don't know how accurate his numbers are, but at one point he posits a cycle where 1. a seemingly race-neutral policy (the war on drugs) is enacted, 2. the policy is used in a racist manner (he says that it was unevenly enforced on blacks despite whites having similar issues), 3. successful members of the minority group accept the criticism (ie. middle class blacks take to lambasting their own kind for being drug dealers and addicts).
Successful members of minority groups are also important to a recent article on the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, co-written by Kendi. They argue that wealthier Asian Americans have unfair advantages (such as paying for test prep) which aren't available to poorer Asian Americans, who will be the losers of race-neutral policies.
On one hand, I'm pleasantly surprised by an attempt at clarity and consistency, and am much impressed with his mindset, which may bear studying for methods of resistance against power.
On the other, one gets the impression that people would not appreciate being conscripted into a program which mandates fighting against one's own, as much as they try to make it seem like it is the Court which is pitting the successful against the less successful.
Still I must admit that my skepticism could be driven by a certain tolerance for (or at least understanding of) seeking unfair advantages for the benefit of family, and a belief that some individuals are exceptional, and might have their ambitions suppressed by Kendi's preferred policies. I very much doubt that Kendi believes in people who have exceptions.
The biggest problem that I see so far is that, even if we accept his assumptions, he still has to provide a mechanism of this adjustment to racial equity which does not itself invoke the traditional demons of racism. Are we to accept proliferating hatred as a 'temporary' cost towards a promised racial justice through positive discrimination?
Perhaps he has answers which I have not reached yet. Either way, this was worth the time.
Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. I've never read it but it's supposedly a classic in the Western genre and summer seemed thematically appropriate for it.
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I just finished the Cradle series. I read the first 11 books about 6 months ago, then reread them and the 12th book that released a month ago this month. It was a solid finish that kept with the quality of the rest of the series.
I wouldn't say the writing itself is extraordinary, but the way it blends western style of writing and eastern cultivation tropes is very well done, creating a story that both feels very original and satisfying. Strong recommendation from me to anyone who likes fantasy with lots of cool fight scenes.
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I'm at the chapters ranging in the 1300s in Reverend Insanity.
The more I read, the more I see why it's so heavily recommended.
The author is an absolute god at using Chekov's gun without making it glaring, he's juggling enough plot threads that at this point he doesn't need to toss them up anymore, he can just stack them into a skyscraper. So many things the reader didn't even realize needed explanation all fall into place, and even when Xianxia offers more avenues for an author to bullshit his way out of corners, he does his work to make payoffs feel earned. If the character has a relevant ability that the reader would be screaming if it wasn't used, you bet it is.
While it's not as gutbustingly funny as 40 Millenniums of Cultivation, it had me cackling quite a bit lately. I also feel bad for how many poor bastards the sociopathic MC just uses and throws away, but after you see the shit he went through in his first life after transmigration, you can see why becoming an amoral bastard seems reasonable. I'm still shocked at how utterly unscrupulous he can be, especially when he uses his total shamelessness to mindfuck the competition.
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This position, and all of Kendi's arguments really, hinges on the assumption that racial inequities can under no circumstances be caused by cultural or biological differences. He argues that because drug policies were unevenly enforced that they must be racist, because if you assume there can be no difference in rates of drug abuse or crime between any two populations then the only thing that could lead to uneven enforcement is racism, but if that assumption doesn't hold the whole edifice falls apart. The reason that Kendi and his supporters hold so much sway over contemporary political discourse in America is because almost no one is willing to challenge this assumption in public, and if you don't then you have no choice but to tacitly accept the framing they have presented, and you can only argue at the margins for how to best implement antiracist policies.
The context, per Kendi:
For the first two claims he cites Vice, The war on drugs remains as racist as ever, statistics show, and the report Racial/Ethnic Differences in Substance Use (2015-2019). I'm entirely unfamiliar with the data, so I can't comment on its accuracy.
The Vice article links to another article, whuch says:
The 1980 article is behind a paywall, but is from 1980. Ten bucks says it includes kids who occasionally sold pot at parties. The 1989 article is not a survey of youth in Boston, but rather of inner city youth in Boston. ("The survey covers youths in three highpoverty areas of Boston's central city: Roxbury (a primarily black area), South Boston (an almost exclusively white area), and South Dorchester (a racially mixed area)"). The last link doesn't work, but again I would bet it includes a lot of casual pot sales.
Nevertheless, it does not take a very high level of bias at each level of the criminal justice process to yield large disparities in outcomes. If 80 pct of black drug possessors are arrested versus 70 of whites, and similar pcts apply to the decision to charge, the chance of conviction, and the decision to incarcerate, then 41 pct of black drug users will be incarcerated but only 24 pct of white drug dealers will be.
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Not taking a particular stance, but there's no inherent contradiction in simultaneously believing the ideas that 1) there are cultural/biological differences between races and 2) the government unevenly enforces punishment on one race, out of proportion to a just enforcement distribution.
I'm pretty sure Kendi would (stridently) reject 1), but even if it's true, it doesn't make 2) false. It just makes attribution much more difficult.
I don't think your point applies to the debate set up in the parent comments. If 1 is true, whether or not 2 is, then equity is not appropriate. Proving 1 to be true is sufficient to reject equity. 2 is still taken to be true under a colorblind ethos, which basically maps to <yes 1 culture> <no 1 biology>, and which Kendi is against.
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I’m currently reading NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. One thing the book mentions is that historically there were some people that thought certain supplements (specifically vitamins B and C) could help reduce the symptoms of Autism, but that the research was not done scientifically at all.
Are you aware of any research or clinical trials that use supplements/drugs to reduce autism symptoms?
In theory I think anxiolytic drugs would help a lot of the anxiety symptoms caused by having trouble with social cues, and the anxiety caused by uncertainty in the environment. However, my theory is that these drugs can’t be used routinely due to addiction/tolerance issues.
I could see how MDMA (or other entactogens) could cause autistic people to enjoy the company of people more and realize that they have social skills they aren’t usually aware of when sober.
I also think psychedelics combined with a guide could help. Someone could rewrite the story of themselves. They could come to accept that the downsides of autism are the price to pay for having very narrow extraordinary/special skills. Some inventors were likely on the autism spectrum and lived great lives despite being socially reclusive. Many people on the autism spectrum could be destined to make great discoveries or rise to the top of a profession if they focus on their special interests and overcome the disappointments that autism causes in other areas of their lives.
I also have a theory that some people on the autism spectrum do not feel many of the subjective effects of psychedelics.
Have you seen The Effectiveness of Cobalamin (B12) Treatment for Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis?
The author of this blog https://www.epiphanyasd.com/ does a reasonable job keeping up with much of the published work in this area.
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I know that Abilify is used to reduce feelings of irritation in Autistic people. But this is a general anti-psychotic drug and is also used by those with schizophrenia, BPD, depression, etc.
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What is your top baby/kid advice? We are in the third trimester with our first. Revolutionary must have gadget, let them cry it out, co-sleep don't co-sleep, have a closet lined with mirrors to lock them in?
Buy baby nail trimmers in case they come out with sharp little nails and scratch themselves.
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Congrats! It’s really fun, you’ll probably have a blast.
You’re about to lose a lot of your personal time, especially if you have two. The excitement and lack of sleep will keep it from hurting much for the first few months, but after that you’ll be like, alright, I’m ready to read/videogame/code/do whatever, and the kids keep taking my time. Just keep in mind this is a relatively short time in your life. When your kids turn 5-6 they’ll start school and have their own lives, and you won’t see them quite as much. By the time your children are 12, you’ll have spent 75% of all the time you’ll ever spend with them.
I’d nudge you to have more kids than you’re thinking. There’s a book about this, but the argument roughly goes: Most people optimize for the amount of kids they want to have when the kids are young. But that time doesn’t last very long, relatively. Optimize for some mixture including how many kids you want to have when the kids are 10 / 15 / 20 / 25.
Your own emotional control will likely be a major factor in your ability to be a good parent. Parenting is frustrating and sad and scary and all that. But the kids need you to be reliable, and able to handle the tiny disasters they’re throwing at you. If you can be a rock under pressure with kids screaming at you, you’ll make a better parent.
Also, for whatever reason, being outside is magical for young kids. I can have them inside with a million toys, and they’ll be bored, but outside in a plain yard with an old soccer ball, and they’re happy for hours. Other families have concurred. shrug
I am 95% confident that in 30 years I'll be happy I had as many healthy kids as possible. The issue is that we are in our mid 30's so time is on on our side. My brother in law wanted 6 then his second wrecked him and my sister (who is tough) so I'm 70% confident that I could push through 4 which I think is the max we could safely push to at our ages and handle the miseries that will come with having 3-4 young kids. I think it will mostly be on my wife. I'll need to take on a lot of responsibility and cut back on my frugal desires to keep her on board. I think I'd rather have more kids then a few extra hundred grand at retirement.
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People aren't very good about making the distinction, but note the difference between the Ferber method and "cry it out". The Ferber method is good and effective, and cry-it-out is kinda mean and not very effective. tl;dr (but you should actually read up on the Ferber method before having a baby so you can do it): the Ferber method is to put your baby down drowsy but awake and let them cry for a set amount of time before going in to comfort them. The Ferber method offers guidelines for how often to check in on crying children and how to provide reassurance. You'll progressively increase the time between each check-in, ultimately teaching your kid to be able to put themselves to sleep.
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If you're looking for a Baby Monitor, we've enjoyed using the Wyze cameras. They're like 40$ on amazon, connect to your phone and are weatherproof so you can use them outside when you're done. We also have a backup simple VTech transmitter/reciever that we use for travelling/sleeping.
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First: Congratulations!
I have four kids, oldest is five, youngest is four months. So I have a decent amount of experience with babies.
Sleep: The Back is Best campaign is probably responsible for a lot of only children. There was a study showing that booster seat legislation probably acted to prevent more births than the number of deaths it prevented. I would bet my life savings that the Safe Sleep campaign has also done so. That said, once you see your baby, you will be willing to suffer quite a lot to give them an extra 0.001% chance of survival. So here is how to make it suck less.
Sleep sacks are essential. For kids under 1 month, I prefer the Fleece Halo Sleepsack. As long as you have AC at home, I recommend the fleece. The cotton one kept riding up over my babies' faces. Once the baby starts to free their hands from the sleep sack, around six weeks, I recommend switching to the LoveToDream SwaddleUp or a good dupe. Always keep doubles of all sleep garments and sheets. Your child probably will not stay awake for a whole wash/dryer cycle until they are six months. The first three months you will be doing a lot of tiny loads of laundry.
For the first year, pretty much every week you will have a different baby. If you don't like what's going on, hang on a week! It will change (not always for the better.)
The first twelve weeks there is a lot more crying. Part of this is probably due to the digestion system developing and causing tummy pain and difficulty pooping/farting. You will learn to cheer on baby farts. The other trouble is that early on, a baby only has 20-40 minutes of staying awake before they get overtired. Once overtired, a baby cannot fall back asleep as easily and gets frustrated. Some babies will take longer to eat than the span of their wake time. This will be a source of frustration to you.
Pay attention to temperature. Smaller babies need more bundling up - they don't have as much hair, they don't even have bone between their brains and the outside. If a baby has a hard time getting back to sleep, especially at night, check your thermostat. You might have a night time setting to make things colder.
There is a difference between cry it out and not responding to every peep your baby makes. Some babies are just noisy. If a baby starts making noise, wait a minute before running to touch them. Pay attention to what the sounds are like. Are they getting louder, more high pitched, and closer together? That is a sign of crying. But the first week or so a newborn makes a lot of weird sounds. One kid sounded like a van with squeaky brakes.
If you do decide to cry it out, make sure you know what the goals are. Crying it out will remove your child's reliance on sleep aids that are not present when they wake up at night. It will not make it so that they are no longer hungry at night, if they are getting half their daily calories at night. It will not make it so that they don't soak through their diaper and need to be changed every night. It just helps you get them to sleep when you set them down in their sleep environment, with less crying overall. Read "Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems" by Dr. Ferber before doing anything - I haven't found a blogpost or other resource that explains everything needed.
Something like https://www.amazon.com/Fisher-Price-Deluxe-Kick-Play-Piano/dp/B076HYFZ37 is very helpful for the 3-6 month range. Babies are like plants. Outside of a few smiles and songs, they mostly like to be left alone on the floor near something they can grab.
A good range of books (each has their own very different and clashing philosophy, but take what makes sense for you and leave the rest):
On Becoming Baby Wise: Giving Your Infant the Gift of Nighttime Sleep - There must have been some edition decades ago where the author advocated for baby torture or something. This book is loathed by some people. But when I read it I saw nothing objectionable. A lot of the advice is the same as what you will find in Happiest Baby on the Block, which is a cherished book. I liked the presentation here better and overall found this book more helpful.
Elevating Child Care: A Guide To Respectful Parenting - I cannot say I'm a perfect Respectful Infant Educaring (RIE) parent, but starting off approaching problems from the RIE perspective has proven helpful (even if it doesn't always survive contact with the enemy.) The research seems to indicate that helping kids identify their emotions and not try to repress them helps kids behave better in the long run. RIE is one parenting philosophy that makes this easy. I like this book because it creates a narrative, a mindset, in which I can make sense of parenting choices. I don't know if I can explain it better, but I recommend the book all the same.
How to Talk so Little Kids will Listen - someone already recommended this I think, I like the little kid version.
Bringing up Bebe - Helps set the expectation that you can still have a good life and kids. Kids are not all you are.
Edit because there's a lot more I could say:
Get a carseat/stroller combo, the kind where you can remove the carseat and plop it straight onto a stroller without waking the baby.
You need to be your child's advocate. Basic things that you would think a doctor would do often are ignored. For example, one kid lost 10% of his birth weight and the lactation consultant, pediatrician, etc acted like it was my fault. They had me nurse him, then feed him milk from a bottle, then pump, every 2 hours day and night. The whole process took 1.5 hours and then I had 30 minutes of break/sleep in between. Exhausting. A year later, at his first dental check up, the dentist mentioned that he had a very bad Posterior Tongue Tie, something that was likely the cause of the poor weight gain and something not one doctor pointed out.
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My go to parenting recommendation is the book 'How to Talk so Kids will Listen, and How to Listen so Kids will Talk"
https://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Kids-Will-Listen/dp/0380811960/ref=sr_1_5?crid=1KHJZHDQU3DZV&keywords=how+to+talk+so+kids+will+listen&qid=1688987894&sprefix=how+to+talk+so+kid%2Caps%2C216&sr=8-5
Perhaps more in tune for once you've figured out how to keep them alive for a year or so ...
Beyond that, one of the things that make humans distinctive in the animal kingdom is how adaptable to different environments we are. Your kid is only here because their ancestors figured out how to adapt and survive famines, wars, ice ages, economic collapses (at least well enough to keep the line going) .... In the grand scheme of things any particular decision you make about a parenting gadgets or sleeping techniques, the kid will probably survive.
Try different stuff, figure out what works for your family.
One thing that worked for us, my wife breastfed for the better part of a year or so, about a month in, she read that if you give the baby a bottle of formula at bedtime, kid digests formula slower than breast milk, less likely to be hungry and wake up in the middle of the night.
Bedtime was the main time we gave the kid formula, but worked like a charm for getting the kid to sleep through the night, which put us in considerably saner moods.
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CS is better than VB if the baby is in a weird position.
Co-sleeping really worked for my wife. We pushed the crib next to our bed and removed the front grate. This way she could breastfeed the baby almost without waking up.
There's a really annoying stage around, uh, five months or so (it's been so long ago I don't remember the month) when the kid is old enough to get bored and frustrated and not old enough to entertain themselves. This is probably the most frustrating part of the first year, as for a month or two the baby will demand lots of attention. Before that it's mostly eat-sleep-poop with a little bit of playtime, and after that you can blow their mind with kitchenware.
We had a breach baby and they did an ECV to flip them around, so that we could do a vaginal birth. Basically a doctor pushes on the belly in certain ways to get the baby head-down. Worked for us! Though I hear a lot of doctors won’t do it because there are risks.
I think the most annoying stage so far is the one where they can walk with a hand but not otherwise. They then want to walk all the time, so you’re stuck in a hunched over position to keep them happy.
Haha, we've skipped this part, but I remember when I had to take a day off and rush to our dacha because our son had discovered stairs and wanted to go up and down them for hours. My wife was sick and couldn't hold his hand, and my MIL was getting dizzy after walking up and down the stairs too much.
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I have a 7-month-old, and I'm his primary caretaker. I do this while working from home at the same time. The most important advice is that time is precious, and finding ways to cope with the drastic change to your life is vital if you're looking to optimize the wellness of your family as a whole during the transition to being a parent. You and your partner will need wellness time to recharge and recover and stave off fatigue. You may feel like you're giving 120% when your partner thinks you are giving 70%, and vice versa.
In regard to stuff: Dr. Brown's formula pitchers (they mix the formula and you let them sit in the fridge for a few hours so there are fewer bubbles) and bottles (they're plastic, I know, but they have a device that has an anti-colic feature, and my kid could hold them propped at 4 months). I have a hiking backpack with a seat for my tot by Kelty and a top-of-the-line jogging stroller that allows me to get out of the house and enjoy life. Both are worth it as they make it easy to spend time recharging my battery while letting my kid explore the world. My house has been subsumed by a tsunami of clothes and toys, so much time is spent on inventory management. The more you can limit the inflow of stuff, the better off you will be as you will have extra time. Finally, I normally despise screen time for kids, but starting at about 3 months, I was able to use Hey Bear Sensory on YouTube to steal 20 minutes of time for chores here and there.
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Jump into #2 quickly*! Seriously. Giving your kid a sibling they can play with is something that will pay off for them their whole life. It will also help you out tremendously when they're tots looking for attention you don't have. It might seem crazy to jump back in quickly, but it's probably easier than starting all over again several years later.
*By this I mean within 1.5-3 years, My first two are 16 months apart and even though it was a total unexpected surprise, it was the greatest thing we ever could have done. They are best friends and they keep each other occupied for hours a day that they would either be lonely or staring at screens
Alternatively they might fight constantly and cause more stress.
You have to teach them strategies for when they both want conflicting things. For example, if both of my oldest want the same toy, I restrain the kids from grabbing it out of the other's hands and ask them to use their words first.
"Can I have that?"
"No!"
Then I ask what they want to try next, find something to trade or to wait for their turn.
Because I have two kids close in age, I am able to teach them this in person, as conflicts happen. If I didn't have a brood, my single kid would have to learn these lessons in a different environment, most likely from a different person who might not be as good as I at teaching this lesson.
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We are a little older so we're looking to move as quick as possible. The real question is probably more what's too soon rather than too long, as long as fertility stay high, which wasn't a problem with this one.
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Endorsed, Similar boat here, and while it wasn't planned it has most certainly worked out.
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Swaddle the kid, if you have problems breast feeding check out the Brezza Formula Pro (formula keurig is how I’d describe it but it doesn’t use proprietary formula or anything), your wife may be somewhat crazy for some months. You need to keep her sane even if she doesn’t want to be kept sane.
This is literally what my wife said today. "If breast feeding isn't working find me the Keurig formula thing"
It’s way easier than manually mixing formula.
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If you have a good relationship with you and your spouses parents they can often give the most relevant advice. By that I mean they raised a kid pretty similar to the one you are having.
Thankfully we do, all 4 of them are within 30 minutes. She's been talking to our mom's quite a bit.
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Have a car seat with a handle that also attaches to a stroller. Being able to shift a sleeping baby out of the car either onto a stroller or into a shopping cart while leaving them in their carseat / bucket is useful. Practice with the empty seat securing it into it's base in the car and onto it's fixture on a stroller.
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I am single and childless but surrounded by parents, and my number one take away is this- don't get neurotic. Your kids will probably be fine. If you are a motteizan I assume you're smart and have half-decent judgement and the income to buy your way out of the most obvious problems, so your kids will probably be fine. Just don't get neurotic about it- you can worry about worst case scenarios until you're blue in the face, the only effect it'll have is to make you miserable and stressed out. Remember that most of the things pitched to parents to worry about are not particularly likely, especially if you are a decently conscientious person who doesn't live in impoverished squalor, so listen to common sense advice and don't get overstressed about whatever scenario. Your kid probably has IQ points to spare and will have decent life outcomes, you don't have to get into a grindset. If you do the only thing it'll do is make you miserable and stress your kid out.
I currently (could all change when the kid comes) subscribe to Caplan's philosophy. Pretty much if you feed them and don't beat them they'll probably turn out how they're were going to turn out. Both of us do feel like our parents kind of left some things out and we got a bit of a late start on some things so hopefully we can influence our kids at least a little.
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We have a one month old right now.
Consider a doula, if you find one you click with they can be a life saver
For us, sleeping in shifts at night has worked better than trading off waking up. The baby sleeps in a separate room and whoever is on duty sleeps on a couch next to them so we each get some long, uninterrupted naps
Killer gadget for us was a white noise machine, he sleeps a lot better and it blocks out any noise we make moving around the house
If you want to breastfeed meet with a lactation consultant ahead of time, insurance covered ours 100% and also paid for a breast pump. It's been a big help.
Buy a few brands of swaddle wraps now so you can try them out and see which you prefer once they're born, then you can buy more of that type. I prefer the velcro ones over zipper but ymmv
I have 3 kids under 6 right now and strongly endorse every one of these recommendations. Doula's are absolutely worth the money, and you should be shopping around for one ASAP if you don't already have one.
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Make sure you and so, starting at 6-9 months, have a trustworthy babysitter you can leave the kids with and have a sanity-keeping weekend.
A bunch of us decided to get knocked up around the same time. We're thinking rotating date nights where we unload the kids on one couple. Though 6-9 months might be a little young for that.
6-9 months is not "too young" for a capable parent to hang out with your kid for a 2-hour dinner.
This is a wild myth fabricated whole cloth by fucking millennials. At 4 months you should be starting on "cry it out" and then very soon after that be comfortable with an adult babysitter. (And yes cry it out is 100% the correct move)
Now, does reality matter? I doubt it. Whoever in the friend group decides to start living some semblance of their life again the soonest will be branded as the least devoted parent, so you'll all play chicken and stay locked in your houses :) it's gonna be great!
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In that ultra early period you can only really leave them with someone you can trust, like a responsible family member, but imo it's super important to ensure you and your SO do in fact get some alone time that isn't just with baby.
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Dont co-sleep, do swaddle, invest in a good carrier and a cheap folding stroller. Get your steps in with the carrier. In terms of stuff, you will simultaneously need more and less than you think. For instance my first slept in a open dresser drawer for his first 6 - 8 months and a milsurp belt pouch will hold a couple of bottles a bag of wet wipes and a simple toy or two which is really all you need 90% of the time.
Why no co-sleep? Suffocation or too dependent of a child? Any suggestion on a good carrier? Everyone around here is all about Baby Bjorn... $239.99, that is a plate carrier...
Co-sleeping isn't recommended in the US but I live in Japan and it's not particularly dispreferred here, and we co-slept with our first boy. Our bed was very big and I am an extremely light sleeper--I was especially then. We had light coverings and never any problems. We did have a crib for him, however, on many nights, and wrapped him up tight. You want to avoid him rolling over and getting all caught up in the pillows and quilts and whatever. That isn't good. The "too dependent" thing I really don't get and have never heard of, but I understand the idea of suffocation, especially if the parent is a heavy sleeper. I woke at the slightest peep in those days.
My advice is mostly for the mom: Sleep when the baby sleeps if at all possible. And for dad: Get shit done that mom is too tired to do. I was a dishwasher, cook, cleaner, carrier-around of crying baby, coo-er of sweet nothings, singer, feeder, diaper-changer, baby-bather, formula-giver. About the only thing I didn't do was breastfeed. Even then I felt like my wife did most of the figurative hard-lifting as I was at work most of the day. Also re: baby bathing: When the child is young you have no choice but to hold him/ her in whatever the bath. As they grow, the temptation might be to leave them for a second if you have something you need to do-- a door needs closing, phone answering, etc. Do not do it. Do not leave the child alone. I had a close call once when I walked out of the room for literally ten seconds and when I came back my youngest son was submerged in water. Not good. He hadn't been under more than a second, but it was enough to make me feel like I had dodged a very, very bad thing.
Finally, limit or avoid wifey's exposure to phthalates, which has been called "The Everywhere Chemical."
The following from Public Health and Preventative Medicine Boulton & Wallace, 2022:
If you're going to give advice like that, maybe add a few hints on how to avoid something called "The Everywhere Chemical"...
Fair call. From the link I posted:
The most common products using phthalate compounds are:
The article has diagrams and goes on a bit more but I am on mobile and pasting from that PDF already was tedious to reformat.
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Re: co-sleep, both.
As far as baby carriers, the one we ended using was a gift, but I'm pretty sure this is it.
I don't know about recommendations, but it (along with a couple molle pouches) did the job, and maybe we just got lucky with both of our kids having reasonably chill attitudes as infants but "wear the carrier and just continue your" life turned out to be a pretty workable plan.
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I'm now imagining a MOLLE rig packed with bottles of formula and powder.
Who needs a plate carrier when you've got a baby carrier?
'merica strikes again:
https://tacticalbabygear.com
Man, do I need more confirmation that it's the best country?
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You jest, but that really is pretty much how I rolled back when the kids were still in diapers, I had a bunch of old molle pouches that I repurposed from mags and grenades to carrying candy bars and baby-bottles. Better-half thought I was over doing it by para-cording the pacifier to the baby carrier until the first time oldest spat it out and it didn't hit the floor. ;-)
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Kid mitigates spalling so you can use uncoated metal plates.
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Set up some location where you can put your awake, active child down, and safely not pay attention to your child for a while. Maybe that's one of those plastic fence things in the middle of the room. Maybe it's a dedicated room. (Move all grabbable items out of reach. That may even mean moving electrical outlets up to your eye height.) You have some time before this becomes important, but now's the time to plan.
I used to call that plastic fence "baby prison". And it is quite useful with a crawling kid. Also put a thick cushioned mat beneath it, play tables, etc.
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Strongly endorsed, we went the fenced off area in the living room with some cushions and toys root. Specifically somewhere where we could see the kid from the kitchen and vice versa so we could cook without having to worry about them getting into anything or getting underfoot.
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