domain:aporiamagazine.com
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3m ago
This makes me appreciate, even more tangibly, how sane the countries I've lived in are. I mean sure, Indian politics involves a fair share of riots, gunfire and vote-rigging, but it's almost never this personal. UK politics just puts me to sleep.
I've never had the displeasure of cutting ties, or having them cut, because of politics. It's borderline unthinkable. There might be some bickering, then everyone goes out for tea and forgets it. I even had two uncles stand for (and win) elections for diametrically opposing parties, and they lived together.
Honestly, it's a testament to the stability of US institutions that there's this much rage and disdain circulating in the water, and yet the amount of political violence is, in objective terms, nigh non-existent.
2rafa
3m ago
Sure, but then this cuts both ways. In that sense MGTOw man who regularly goes to pub with his colleagues or who plays D&D with his friends or who organizes grill party for his nieces and nephews or who volunteers for summer camps for children is not lonely either.
Sure, I don’t think this guy is necessarily lonely, unless he does really want a romantic relationship in which case he might be. But there are plenty of widowed older men who have similar large social circles, even if it’s less common than for widowed women.
2rafa
4m ago
Male friendship can be as close, but my impression has always been that male friendship is abandoned for a romantic relationship in a way that female friendship isn’t always.
thejdizzler
5m ago
I think dating is a big part of it. There is no motivation for me to grind or hustle or finish my PhD fast because I don't see girlfriend/wife opportunities coming very easily.
2rafa
6m ago
That is sad, I think it’s a great tragedy for a child to grow up without their biological mother but I’m sure your current wife is able to help as best she can. I do think it’s best for the children to know, the alternative is that they seek her out, meet her as impressionable teenagers and young adults and then are possibly ideologically indoctrinated; if they think she’s a loser from the beginning that is much less likely, and any lies she might tell about you are less likely to be believed. All the best.
Owlify
6m ago
What kind of state kills people due to accusations like this? And no, I don't think it counts as violence. I wouldn't say it is emotional abuse either, because that's a specific kind of harm to me, but it is definitely as severe. She was trying to get herself removed and either genuinely didn't understand the full consequences of her actions on her family or she just didn't care (probably this).
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10m ago
Sure, and way more people in today's America genuinely, deeply believe in mental illness than believe in demonic possession. We'll see more explanations from the dominant religion of Scientism than we will from other religions. Even pious Catholics acknowledge the dominion of Science and Psychology, even most self-identified Catholics don't really believe in demonic possession as something that might happen to them today.
Though, you're right in that even within their respective paradigms, mental illness is much more common than demonic possession, and a "mental illness" like mild ADHD isn't much compared to possession. So maybe a better analogy would be if we had a survey asking people if they "are a sinner?" Far more right wingers would say they are sinners than left wingers, this would not reflect any underlying reality about sin.
I just don't really accept that "mental illness" is much of an explanation for anything, divorced from generalized statistics about outcomes, which are much more mixed and inconclusive and mostly gets into a series of No-True-Scotsman and Motte-and-Bailey games around what is actually meant by Red Tribe and Blue Tribe. There's something "the enemy is both strong and weak" about saying leftism is the cause and effect of mental illness, while also saying the left controls all the levels of power and all the commanding heights of industry and academia and culture.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
15m ago
Yes, the face is one of the body parts that loses weight the quickest, so when you have a massive caloric deficit on semaglutide, your face grows gaunt faster than the rest of the body. That, and people are attuned to small facial differences, so going from a typical plump American face to a one that is actually able to contract and show facial lines is striking.
faceh
15m ago
I find myself drawn to emotional intensity and struggle with finding women who don't have that to be...boring (The trick is to find someone who has an intense affect, but is otherwise relatively sane.)
It's me.
And yeah, they also have to be smart and, to some degree, self aware.
Unfortunately them merely being aware that they're being unreasonable isn't enough to convince them to STOP being unreasonable.
The smart ones tend to be able to create unique coping mechanisms that work until they have a particularly bad episode and then all collapse at once.
At which point they usually shut down all connections in life, job, friends, living situation, move somewhere new and start over to try again "fresh."
Corvos
20m ago
One think to look into is prefills - writing the first part of the AI's answer for them and then letting them 'continue' it. It's quite good for overcoming the more mind-killing varieties of fine-tuning that the big players use. Generally used for overcoming censorship but I think probably also good for directing approaches to problems, etc. For example, "Hmm, I should think about this very carefully, it's important I don't get it wrong" or "Oh, that's easy. Just...".
DelendaEst
22m ago
I'd take "no MAGA" as a challenge
I wouldn't. I live in an area where a disproportionate number of the pretty young women on dating apps were liberal (at least a decade ago when I was single, probably even more true now) and I have liberal friends so I never thought it was anything worth filtering out. Two things have changed my mind.
One is that my wife is more liberal than me and this causes friction, both from her being annoyed that I am not more anti-Trump (I am not MAGA and do not like Trump but I remain a conservative and push back against TDS type stuff) and us not always being on the same page for child rearing.
The second comes from a young woman I met on OKCupid. We had a first date that went well, and then at the end of the second date after I kissed her she explained that she had seen I was a conservative and she was a liberal and she was looked for a long term relationship and didn't think it would work out. In hindsight I'd say this was very mature and correct of her (though waiting until AFTER I'd wasted my money and time on the date instead of canceling beforehand was pretty shitty), but at the time it was soul crushing. She was not the prettiest girl I'd met on the apps (due to shyness, confidence issues, and not liking to drink I had better luck on the apps than IRL though if I had it to do over again I'd work to change that) but she was up there and she was definitely the one I had the most in common with. And what is very clear to me is that after our first date she liked me a lot and happily accepted the second date and then went to look at my profile again and found the dreaded right wing thought. It is one thing to be filtered out up front by by blue haired harpies with problem glasses, having something with manifest promise cut off at the knees was a gut punch.
Corvos
24m ago
@self_made_human, how are you getting on with the new PC?
I actually copied your specs, on the basis that you seemed like someone who knew what he was talking about, and I'm liking it very much but I need a proper monitor. You were going to get an OLED TV rather than a conventional monitor - did you? And if so, what do you think of it?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
28m ago
It’s not just a problem of brain rot though. We’ve had a narcissistic culture for decades before brain rot hit the accelerator. Americans prize autonomy, their own needs and wants, and tend to see anyone or anything that requires them to give up their freedom and autonomy to care about others, do things they don’t want to do, or takes the focus off themselves as negative. It’s not that other people don’t want this, but Americans have long taken this to extreme levels. Brain rot simply weaponized this cultural trait and uses it to push political and social ends. Marinate an American raised in the culture of autonomy and narcissistic tendencies in content that tells them they are oppressed and abused by anyone who wants them to do something they don’t want to do. Then celebrate those who “throw off the shackles of oppression” by blowing up all their relationships, quitting their jobs (claims of burnout), dying their hair odd colors (rejection of the norms of society). People who read that stuff end up destroying themselves.
Thanks for sharing your experience (and welcome to the Motte!). There were always similar concerns in my household (my children are all adults now)--I would like to have had more children (like you, I come from a large family) but then I talk to people who were lucky to have one kid, or who struggled with infertility for years and never had any, and it makes me feel like an ungrateful whiner.
My main reaction to your post is "you don't owe a baby to the world!" You aren't overstating the magnitude of the risks--even today, though the risks of pregnancy and childbirth are much less than they were even a hundred years ago, they remain real. At the extremes, women still die in the process. Even the temporary stuff, like sciatica and morning sickness, is still genuine suffering.
But pro-natalism has arisen almost exclusively as a reaction to the rise of philosophical anti-natalism. And one of the central arguments in anti-natalism is an incongruency in ethics: there often seem to be morally compelling reasons to not have children (e.g. you know you are unable to care for a child, and know that no one else will), but (outside extreme cases of authoritarianism) essentially no one thinks anyone should be compelled to bear children (even pro-life people who think it is wrong to terminate a pregnancy don't believe it would be right to force a pregnancy on an unwilling woman). Anti-natalists inflate the arguments against childbearing toward an all-encompassing edict: humanity should voluntarily work toward its own orderly extinction.
Because I am not a utilitarian, I do not find such arguments compelling. When I say you don't owe a baby to the world, what I mean is this: it is morally permissible for you to have another child, if that is what you decide to do, despite the risks. Whether the risks are worthy to be undertaken is open to you to decide, but you are not under any utilitarian obligation to have another child even if that child would be of tremendous benefit to the world. Something that I think most ethical systems really miss is the range of permissibility; utiltiarians and deontologists frequently run into the assertion that there is always and only one truly right thing to do (the "best" thing) in any situation. It's very constraining! As a contractualist, I think that there is actually a wide range of things it is morally permissible to do, and that having children is often one of those things.
But if you do, you should do it because you want to, and because the risks are acceptable to you; or, you should not do it, because you don't want to, or on reflection you find the risks too great. Whatever you choose, it's not on you to make the world a better place. It's only on you to do what is reasonable. That's all it means, to live a life of choice and value. It's wonderful that you already have three children, and I wish you luck with that endeavor. Whether or not you continue to grow your family, I thank you for your existing contributions to the rest of the world, which we did not earn, were never owed, and can receive from you only as a welcome gift--never, ever as the fulfillment of a moral obligation.
Tacherus
32m ago
Just this past week my wife and I have been discussing replacing a ten year old ICE car with an EV. The main motivations are simpler maintenance and charging from our solar panels.
aldomilyar
36m ago
I've never dealt with online dating, but I always imagined that the "no MAGA" is a blessing in disguise. It outs people as shallow thinkers or deranged partisans and makes it easier to sift them out of the pool. It would be much worse to go on several dates before finding out the truth.
I haven't been on the dating apps in a few years, but you don't get how hard it shuts down potential matches to put conservative on your profile and also how many of those potential matches are actually open to conservative beliefs they just have this strange conception that anybody identifying as conservative on a dating app is literally a Jan 6 attendee.
Though probably the metagame has contributed to a case where since most rational people stopped ticking that box, the boxtickers left are the MAGAest MAGAs who have no tact.
On your second point I'd generally say it's other way. I know plenty of 'good conservative women' who are absent of red flags, but a combination of a fairly conservative (Massive age skews, lack of fresh blood coming into their churches etc) social circle, workplace flirtation not being what it once was and frequently a lack of meaningful experience in courting means they just kinda get stuck in a loop when waiting for prince righteous to sally into their mortal life.
FtttG
37m ago
Last Sunday, a 22-year-old man walked into a small shopping centre in Fairgreen, Co. Carlow and began discharging a shotgun into the air. The police and bomb squad were quickly called, but the man in question turned the gun on himself. To the best of my knowledge, the only other person injured at the scene was a young girl who tripped while fleeing from the scene and skinned her knee.
That's not the interesting part of the story - the interesting part is how it was reported upon. The Irish police (Garda Siochána) were extremely quick to clarify that the perpetrator was a white Irishman:
The Garda Press Office issued four press releases over the next 24 hours which provided a full picture of what happened, including a precise timeline of events, the extent of injuries (including to a young girl), and – most notably – a description of the perpetrator as a “white adult Irish male” on Sunday night.
It was unusually direct by the standards of the Garda press office, which tends only to offer the most basic details around crimes, in part out of sensitivity towards victims and their families.
The decision followed a similar move by police in Merseyside less than a week previously, after a man drove into a crowd of football fans celebrating Liverpool’s Premier League title win in the city.
The incident in Liverpool saw the same kind of misinformation spread as in Carlow, with false claims that the ramming was a terrorist attack and that the suspect was a person of colour being shared on social media.
So why are the Garda announcing the perpetrator's ethnicity, you ask? To combat "misinformation" and "uninformed speculation":
The Dublin riots in November 2023 were fuelled by a deluge of speculation about the identity and motive of the man who carried out a knife attack at a school near Parnell Square.
The Southport riots last year in England followed the same grim pattern, when far-right groups seized on speculation about the identity and motive of the man who fatally stabbed three children.
Both instances were preceded by hours of silence from police and officialdom, which created an information vacuum in which speculation and conspiracy theories were able to take hold.
On each occasion, speculation dampened much more quickly after both police forces provided additional information about the background of the perpetrators.
...
The strategy denied bad actors the ability to hijack the narrative and acknowledged a basic truth about modern social media: in the absence of facts, fiction will flourish.
I know this word has been abused to death over the past decade or more, but I really cannot think of any word which better captures the feeling I am feeling right now. I feel like I am being gaslit. A full year and a half after the stabbing in Parnell Square which sparked the Dublin riots, in an article specifically about the Garda's sensible decision to get ahead of conspiracy theories by disclosing demographic information about the people who perpetrate crimes - and The Journal still cannot bring themselves to mention that the stabbing in Parnell Square was committed by an Algerian Arab. They still cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that the Southport stabbings were committed by a black Rwandan. They'll wax lyrical about the "deluge of speculation" which followed these horrific crimes, without once mentioning that much of this "uninformed speculation" turned out to be entirely accurate.
But some people aren't happy about this strategy:
But although it worked this time around, it’s a tricky strategy that’s not without its downsides.
Several far-right accounts online accused Gardaí and Merseyside Police of being ‘too quick’ to say that the suspects in Carlow and Liverpool were white locals, with the implication that this was an act of political messaging rather than public clarity.
What is so confusing about people objecting to a blatant double standard in how crimes are reported upon? What is so objectionable about a standard in which all crimes are reported upon in the same way regardless of the perpetrator's ethnicity or national background?
The next time a similar major incident occurs and Gardaí or British police don’t — or can’t — release identifying information about the suspect(s), it’s easy to see how the decision not to do so will be seized upon.
The public may take the lack of information as confirmation that the suspect is foreign or non-white, and may end up believing bad actors or others who are speculating about what has happened.
Gosh, how might they arrive at that idea, I wonder? It's not like the article in which this sentence appears mentions four distinct crimes, and only provides any identifying information about the two perpretators who were white natives while conspicuously avoiding mentioning anything about the perpretrators of the other two crimes.
At this point, all I can say is that, at least in Ireland and the UK (and probably in a great deal of the rest of Europe as well), Coulter's Law is no longer just a journalistic convention, but actually an official public policy.
quiet_NaN
46m ago
My unpopular opinion on anything ai safety or alignment aligns with a top level comment a few weeks ago and the general skepticism some have worded out very well here.
Well, I am rather sure that there is a great rebuttal to these arguments somewhere on Less Wrong, so I remain unconvinced.
The religious fervor around this seems pretty irrational with Scott getting people over at slatestarcodex calling him names for this.
Well, the version of Pascal's wager offered by the AI safety people is that (1) the current AI boom might lead to AGI which is much smarter than humans are, and (2) that aligning such AI systems will be hard. You assign a probability to both of these, then multiply this by the QALY cost of killing all humans (or an even higher cost if you care about humanity's far future, which many do), and you get a number how seriously you should take AI x-risk.
Of course, you can simply pick your AGI probability to be 1e-50, but then I might claim that you are overconfident, and ask what other past correct predictions you have made which might make me rely on your predictions instead of everyone else's.
If you pick 1% for both numbers, then a one-in-10k chance to wipe out humanity still seems like a big fucking deal.
In Scott's last 24 non-OT posts on ACX, I have counted four AI stories (2x geoguesser, which is more "AI as a curiosity" and 2x AI 2027, which is more doom and gloom). While I am sure that some of the ACX grants go to AI safety, he is also funding plenty of other projects, which would be totally irresponsible if his p(doom) was 0.9. If this is him showing religious fervor, it is not very convincing.
I never read Yudkowsky till a few days ago, a lot of what he's said and his arc in the past two decades makes me not take him seriously.
I will concede that AI alignment is his pet thing much more than it is Scott's, and as of late he has been very bullish on p(doom). Still, I have found him to be a smart, engaging writer. Most of the ideas from the sequences could also be picked up elsewhere, but he did do a great job of communicating all these ideas and putting them in one place. For some light reading of his, see if you like HPMoR.
By and large, the ratsphere does not share his high confidence on p(doom), I think, because they were trained by their prophet to update based on the strength of arguments, not to blindly follow their prophet.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
1hr ago
I'll give it a go, thankyou.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1hr ago
Not in any detail. I just googled him and he's still got a profile page at the same law firm he was at 20 years ago.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1hr ago
You are no one's outgroup and everyone's far-group.
I don't think I've ever specifically had this thought! I usually say something like "the lefts think I'm too far right, the rights think I'm too far left, and the centrists think I'm way too political" but "I'm just in everyone's far-group" has a ring of truth to it... most of the time, anyway. Every once in a while I get picked to be someone's nemesis; fortunately, it rarely seems to last.
Corvos
1hr ago
Partly I think female friendship is closer, more emotional and less contingent than male friendship. Partly of course grandchildren are family and that makes a big difference compared to tfwngf incelish guys.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I think interpersonal exit is an evolved form of the teenage door slam. It’s almost always done publicly, either online or in person, and if done online and the program doesn’t generate a satisfying message that tells the audience that they’re blocking people who say or do X, don’t worry, they’ll announce it. As such Theres a certain level of narcissistic behavior involved — the person must be validated in some way for “having the courage of their convictions” to remove someone from their lives.
To me, I think that at least a partial answer among friend groups is to not give them the narcissistic supply. Don’t support them, don’t acknowledge it happened, make a point of including the shunned in group activities. After a while it stops being fun because nobody’s calling them “stunning and brave anti-racist.” They’re just throwing a teenage girl temper tantrum, and they’ll get over it once they realize that they’re not getting their way.
Sure, but then this cuts both ways. In that sense MGTOw man who regularly goes to pub with his colleagues or who plays D&D with his friends or who organizes grill party for his nieces and nephews or who volunteers for summer camps for children is not lonely either.
Of course this can explain only part of the problem, loneliness is something deeper no matter how women or man try to rationalize it. And maybe in current culture lionizing single powerful women it may be easier for women to do that. Incel has much more shame in it compared to femcel. A lonely childless widow may have more social status than lonely childless widower. Nevertheless in some fundamental way they are still lonely.
I think the biggest difference is male aggression toward women is usually physical while female aggression towards men is usually social, most notably attempted social ostracization. Women attack men's social bonds in ways that men don't attack women's, thus leading to this asymmetry.
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