domain:houseofstrauss.com
aiislove
12m ago
I think that "hard status" is a terrible name for that axis. "physical status" and "body-inferred status" might be better.
I had a really hard time naming the two axes. First I had "male power" and "female power" but it became so conflated when I began to imagine two different charts. Then I thought of calling "hard status" "power" and "soft status" "status" but it wasn't exactly right either. I kept changing it, ended up with "hard status" and "soft status" and thought it worked well enough to illustrate the point and just went with it.
And social status is obviously contingent on the society you are considering. Plenty of cultures value Mohammed a lot more than Buddha.
I said as much in another comment here, I wasn't really claiming and omniscient point of view in my ranking, things are highly subjective in general even as I try to disentangle something universal
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
14m ago
Why are LLMs so bad at wordplay? I asked them "What is the favorite sex toy of Linda Load and Diana Doll?", explicitly stating that it's a wordplay riddle, and none of them got it right.
TowardsPanna
19m ago
The western shitlibs are the only group in the world who don't favor their own group. Their favorite victim group, American blacks, have more ingroup/anti outgroup bias than anyone tested, if I remember correctly.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
32m ago
They are first conditioned not to notice ANY physical advantages of black people over whites
The progressive is trained to have a phobia reaction to intellectual or moral differences only. He is perfectly fine saying white people can’t dance or white people have no rhythm, but if you ask if this is genetic he will say no. And while it’s easy to train someone into believing that everyone has the same baseline genetic intelligence / morality, it’s next to impossible to persuade a human that athletic power doesn’t matter, because that’s a primal indicator of power that goes back millions of years to pre-human ancestors. And we live in a world that valorizes the athletic from the middle school level on. The big adolescence coming of age ritual for Americans revolves around sportsball homecoming. I’m not saying this on top of your theory, but just from an evpsych understanding: men are biased to respect men who are physically stronger and better at performing an athletic activity. Especially if they represent your school tribe. This is one of the reasons that we have an ingrained bias toward height. Culture can find ways to reduce this inclination, but in the West we don’t have that kind of culture, as even our Christians worship sports (they used to be banned). In China, where grades are so much more important and where academic success is honored in society-wide festivals, like doing well on the Gaonkao exam (definitely misspelling but won’t be googling), this bias is probably reduced.
this only strengthens their conviction that the poor blacks are ONLY victims in ANY circumstance because they do worse in every single category of soft status that they (the progressives) value- test scores, iq tests, academic achievement, wage payments, career advancement, you name it
The average progressive isn’t doing a 200iq/eq Magnus Carlson-think on the chess board of sociopolitics. They have been taught that everyone is genetically the same, and have been taught that Blacks are oppressed, and this works to induce the closely-guarded assumption that Blacks cannot be blamed for their intellectual or moral failings. A random teenager from the whitest town of Maine will think this just as much as a hyper-educated Ivy graduate who lives in gentrified Harlem. They are doing the same amount of thinking / unthinking.
If you believe in blank slate you believe that whites are exactly the same as blacks
Progressives retain a belief in free will. Everyone starts with the same genetic resources, but some people are good and some are bad. White people only have themselves to blame for their failure to do well in sports and rap. Especially when they have all the riches that they willingly and evilly stole from the rest of the world. This is approximately their belief.
I think white progressives only hold their beliefs out of a deep sense of arrogance and certainty in their own superiority
There are some studies showing that white progressives have a negative in-group preference, whereas white conservatives and blacks do not. They genuinely don’t like themselves and instead like minorities.
anon_
37m ago
I should have trusted my gut on that one. I didn't realize until after the fact that the QR Code reader I'd been using extremely sporadically over a decade had become enshittified with predatory ads.
Well yes. You didn't pay for a QR code reader or buy a phone where someone is paid to write it as a native/bundled app. So the only incentive structure remaining is for someone to write a free one with the hopes of monetizing it later.
You'd go to download a no-cd crack off GameCopyWorld.com, which still exists, and you were presented with 3-6 buttons that all said "Download" on them. All but one were predatory ads which caused you to install a virus. Only one was the actual download link to the no-cd crack.
Or you could have just paid $50 for the game. Steam doesn't distribute malware and their website is pristine.
Now it feels like that's how everything works. Everything is an app, and every app has dark patterns trying to steal from you.
No, everything is an app and every app needs a business model. Sometimes the business model is clear (you pay us $90/yr, we give you app). Sometimes it's less clear but still approximately benign (you use Reddit, they sell the ability to mass-train on their content to AI company). Sometimes it's clear it's ad supported (Facebook, Chrome) with varying degrees of scrupulosity on their origins. Some are indeed funded philanthropically like Brave or Signal. Some are fundamentally scammy.
Soteriologian
1hr ago
Yeah, the Dark Souls game mechanics are very counterintuitive. In fact, arguably much of the games' difficulty is rooted in the fact that players don't know how the games work. In Elden Ring, you can one-shot (up to phase transitions, which are often hardcoded) every boss in the game by doing the correct buff incantations, which basically renders the entire game trivial. And it's not like this is some glitch or exploit -- it just falls out of basic understanding how buffs stack and doing the obvious thing.
Then again, this is hardly unique to Dark Souls. Basically every single-player game is like this, in the sense that actually knowing how the mechanics work is a game-breaking superpower, rather than the baseline expectation.
aiislove
1hr ago
Oooooooh this comment is so far away from my personal suspicions and understanding of things that I'm fascinated to see it written out like this. Apparently you are anti blank slatism and I am very anti blank slate as well but we seem to have completely opposite assumptions and terminal end goals in this.
the blank slate progressive is influenced to believe in the superiority of African Americans.
I don't see this at all. In my views, blank slate progressives are the ones who absolutely prioritize the "Soft Status" of my original theory over any kind of hard status. They are first conditioned not to notice ANY physical advantages of black people over whites, and this only strengthens their conviction that the poor blacks are ONLY victims in ANY circumstance because they do worse in every single category of soft status that they (the progressives) value- test scores, iq tests, academic achievement, wage payments, career advancement, you name it. This is what gives the progressive stack its power- to paint the minorities as the eternal victim. Instead what I propose is that black people have their own strengths, which are not the strengths of the PMC class, and that this is actually completely dignified on its own terms, and to try to prop up the academic achievements of a people not predisposed to these strengths is firstly humiliating toward black people, secondarily dehumanizing toward them, thirdly a waste of time, and fourthly demeaning to the rest of humanity as well. Indeed the arrogance of the white progressive that it takes to even imagine doing this makes me queazy and begin to imagine them all as Icarus circling ever closer toward the sun without an ounce of suspicion that their wings are about to melt.
An internalized ideology of genetic blank-slatism will always lead to an intuitively-held belief in the inferiority of Whites, who are historically evil
This doesn't make sense at all to me... If you believe in blank slate you believe that whites are exactly the same as blacks. On the other hand I believe white people, and indeed Asian people, intuitively hold the belief in their inferiority when they find themselves as victims of black crime or feel anxiety when black people are around, because they are bigger scarier and more aggressive etc than smaller weaker people. My family has lived in the midwest for generations and the ones who kept living in increasingly black areas were buying more and more guns and becoming increasingly paranoid of black crime because they lived with its effects every day, meanwhile my family members who have moved out of those areas simply don't live with that fear and paranoia to the same degree.
So, that variety of white progressive who loves hip hop and considers Blacks oppressed is all but forced to consider his own group inherently inferior
I can imagine becoming this person only if I was absolutely positive that my group (whites) was superior to black people. If there was a 1000000% superior race out there and I was running around telling people how much I loved them, that would be so crazy. If there was a group that I saw as inferior and I ran around telling people how much I loved them, I would be getting so many brownie points from everybody. Which describes progressivism more accurately? I think white progressives only hold their beliefs out of a deep sense of arrogance and certainty in their own superiority, and of the inferiority of blacks. Anything that would truly point to an axis of power that holds blacks as more powerful (say in sports achievement) can only shake the foundations of the progressive worldview. They need to have a perpetual victim.
This worldview can only be corrected with the science of genetics and the belief in the superiority of civilization.
That worldview can only be corrected with more real world experience, acceptance of nature, respect for humanity and differences, and less ridiculous hubris, rather than a thin veneer of science and shallow morals that teach us something outside the realm of physical experience and history.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1hr ago
The best thing about Fusion is the prescient Onion article.
name
2hr ago
potentially yes if she can take solace in having very attractive children even though perhaps set back a bit by the age impaired sperm? I would like to be forcibly married to an old toothless rich woman, go ahead and do it to me if we need to run the experiment.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2hr ago
I don’t find your schema of status too useful, but an adjacent point here is that the blank slate progressive is influenced to believe in the superiority of African Americans. If everyone is totally equal in terms of cognition and moral nature, but one group is more athletic, then that group is superior, and you will intuit and internalize this even if you nominally claim that no group is better than another, because athleticism is a very primal value that humans consider in other humans. So, that variety of white progressive who loves hip hop and considers Blacks oppressed is all but forced to consider his own group inherently inferior: Blacks are the unjustly harmed member of the perceived community (thus demanding extra empathetic concern and love and resources, even primates do this), harmed by someone like himself (thus demanding shame and punishment and ostracization on himself), all while being more musically and athletically dominant. This is a very poisonous worldview. I’ve never bought into the idea that “white progressives are so racist that they actually dehumanize Blacks and that’s why they treat them with lower standards”. I think it’s the exact opposite. An internalized ideology of genetic blank-slatism will always lead to an intuitively-held belief in the inferiority of Whites, who are historically evil (thus likely predisposed to evil according to progressive anachronistic history), can’t rap, and can’t play sportsball. This worldview can only be corrected with the science of genetics and the belief in the superiority of civilization. And perhaps better taste in music.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4hr ago
be me, Dark Souls 2 fan (though I haven't played it in several years)
enjoy using Heide Spear, which has innate lightning damage, on a character whose dump stats are attunement, intelligence, and faith (which are useful only for magic)
notice that a new wiki has been created for the game
idly check out the page on scaling
mfw lightning damage scales with faith
mfw the meta tryhards say that there are "low returns on melee weapon scaling", so you're supposed to go for weapon upgrades and temporary buffs instead
Maybe I'll start a new playthrough with a character for whom faith is not a dump stat.
Lonely_Varelse
4hr ago
I regret pumping up the ticket numbers. I’m planning on waiting till it’s on streaming for that reason (obv that still counts, but it’s diffuse enough that I can lie to myself).
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
5hr ago
Vidya thread.
49.4% of players have the "Defeat the Paintress" achievement. 49.0% of players have the "Go back to Lumiere" achievement.
0.4% of players have quit the game mid-cutscene and never launched it again.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
5hr ago
Have you at least joined the Ostbayerischer Bart- un Schnauzerclub?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5hr ago
[Citation needed]
Blue culture has been winning for centuries.
I know you just look at raw birth rates and assume inevitable victory, but that's… well, I'll be charitable, and say "naïve." Because you ignore retention rates. It doesn't matter if some YEC Fundamentalist "quiverfull" family has a dozen kids, if only one stays with the church while the other eleven all apostatize and become Blue Tribe liberals. Then they're still shrinking — and birthing the future Blue Tribers the current Blue Tribers aren't as they go.
And the data I've seen all shows such poor retention rates pretty much across the board. All the "high fertility" Protestant denominations? Shrinking rapidly due to such effects. Even the Mormons are shrinking once you factor that in, with their above-replacement birthrates going toward producing more Tyler Robinsons.
Even the Amish, who do have high enough retention rates to still be growing, have been moderating. They're running out of available farmland for their farming methods, and are having to economically diversify, which is driving both greater contact with the "English" world and relaxing of tech restrictions — computer and cellphone use are both going up. And those high youth retention rates? Last I saw, they were going down.
And this is all without Blues taking even more active measures to suppress Red birthrates and increase Red-to-Blue assimilation. Expect the latter to go up when homeschooling is banned and Wisconsin v Yoder is overturned. Let alone doing like one of my therapists once argued for, and declaring raising children with "far-right beliefs" to be child abuse (remember the SSC comments comparing the Amish taking their kids out of school early to literally chopping their legs off?), and deploying CFS accordingly. It doesn't matter how many kids you have, once the government just takes them all from you and sends them off to be adopted by a polyamorous gay "throuple". (And then there's what they can do with mass migration from high-fertility parts of Africa.)
Master's tools, master's house. Set a thief to catch a thief. The Blues weaponized demography as a tool long before Reds ever could. They're more experienced at it, and better at it. Which also means they're better at preparing against it. (Is there any better cybersecurity expert than a former "black-hat" hacker? Who knows better how to secure his valuables than the world's greatest thief?)
We agree on a lot of things, but this is one of our biggest differences: you think outbreeding them will work. I don't.
P-Necromancer
6hr ago
Credit cards do not fail us; it is we who fail credit cards.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
It's been a while since I read the books; Captain Samuel Vimes does not, I presume, live in a world that extends easy credit to the working class. Because if he did, he'd just buy the $50 dollar boots with his (terrible) 30% APR credit card, keep his debt payments to the recommended 10% of his income ($3.80 a month) and have them paid off in 1 year and 5 months at a total cost of $61.39.
As a rule, money now is worth more than money later. It's not generally worth 30% more now than it will be in a year -- most of that is to cover the risk of nonpayment, a little overhead, plus some profit for the bank -- but if you're in a situation where it is -- not at all uncommon, especially for people who are struggling financially -- having the option of borrowing at that rate can be extremely helpful.
If you're treading water and your car breaks down and needs a $700 repair, going $700 in debt certainly isn't good, but it's a lot better than losing your job because you can't get to work. If your new job got things mixed up and sends your check to the wrong address, you're much better off if you can cover rent and groceries for the week or two that might take to get figured out -- if the timing's right, you might not pay any interest at all.
Much is made of how long and how much money it takes to pay off a credit card if you only pay the minimum. The bank could very easily solve this problem by raising the minimum payment such that the payoff time is at most two years (so, at most 170% of the principal)... but of course they'd rather you pay less each month for far, far longer. ... But you can counter this devious ploy by just deciding yourself to pay that much!
And if you're not in that situation? Well, you can just not borrow money! It's not impossible for you to be worse off for having another option available to you, but there's a reason that result is unintuitive: it's hardly ever the case in real life. And it certainly isn't here. All you have to do is not be an impulsive idiot!
... Which, of course, is the whole problem. Lots and lots of people are impulsive idiots. I haven't watched these audits, but I've got no doubt you're characterizing them accurately.
I hate the idea of denying responsible, thoughtful people every opportunity to better their circumstances in order to protect irresponsible fools, but I'm very doubtful that works from a Utilitarian perspective. I suppose limiting total credit to a more reasonable percentage of income might be a bearable compromise?
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
6hr ago
The social justice decentralised meme labs work shockingly fast - when they went all-out during COVID, three days was slow. This is a fool's errand; you cannot switch terminology fast enough to outflank them, and you'll look like you've something to hide by trying.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
6hr ago
In my view what Scott Alexander calls "conflict theorists" is basically woke ideology.
It was written to refer to Marxists, actually.
SJ is almost definitionally conflict theorist, but white supremacists are generally conflict theorists as well. Your mistake is that you assumed "conflict theory vs. mistake theory" was isomorphic to the two sides of the culture war; it's not.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
7hr ago
I don't. Have completely given up just about when the "pandemic" came and the world ended. Told myself I'd start shaving again when things get back to normal, but they never did. Not to that normal anyways. Thus caveman.
rae
8hr ago
I’ll keep this short because I’ve rambled about this enough on themotte in the past. As a younger gay man, I didn’t understand why the soft status game was so ungratifying. I could be Liberace with little to no effort on my part. But Liberace- and gay men like him- have little to no actual status among gay men. Even entirely destitute gay men aren’t charmed by the money of a rich man. Likewise, when you are the rich man, it is not gratifying to charm a man with your money. The average gay man may pay for sex once or twice in his twenties, or when he comes into money, but he’ll find that it doesn’t gratify the ego in any way that matters. It feels cheap, fake, and dishonest to wield power in this way. Only through hard power- and earning respect, love and status through hard power- can you feel good about yourself and your place among men.
I’m not a gay man but this seems utterly backwards to me. Liberace was the highest paid musician in the entire world, an immensely talented entertainer and genuinely skilled pianist. To achieve that level of status requires a massive amount of talent and effort and you’re saying it’s more gratifying and somehow harder to just be a generic handsome guy because… other gay men find you more fuckable?
For me, what you describe as “hard power” is the definition of cheap and ungratifying. You’re talking about the kind of “status” that a chimpanzee would understand. There is nothing deep about it, it doesn’t add any value to the world, and it’s not something you can build a foundation for a relationship on - whether that is a friendship, a professional connection, or a romantic relationship. I’d rather have a partner who’s a bit plain looking but smart, loving, ambitious and successful - once you’re 6 months into a relationship a chiseled jawline won’t compensate for the lack of deep meaningful conversations. When you’re old and grey, will your proudest achievement really be that you were hot in your twenties and thirties?
I am sure that, as a man, winning at hard status is gratifying, while winning at soft status feels dorky.
I am not sure of that at all.
But I want to know if women feel the same way or if the opposite is true. Do women feel more gratified being Ellen Degeneres or more gratified being Marilyn Monroe?
Marilyn Monroe had a tragic life, suffered from depression, alcoholism and probably committed suicide via drug overdose, while Ellen Degeneres is still alive at 67 with hundreds of millions of dollars and seemingly no real regret over having being a toxic bully of a boss.
I don’t know if the medication of MTF women can tone down this desire inside- perhaps it can, and perhaps that’s fine if you’re living it, but as an outsider to me it is sad.
I’m MTF and if anything I find it a relief to not have that testosterone driven competitive mentality. Explicit hierarchies always made me uncomfortable and the very concept of “ranking” people in status/attractiveness is something I find kinda icky.
"Punishing" speech for the sake of punishing it is bad. There's an important distinction between actions of direct self interest (or in the interest of others, but direct), and actions meant to punish for ostensibly pro-social deterrence reasons.
If somebody attempts to harm me and I stop them, this is my direct interest. If I find a corpse in the woods and a series of notes with damning proof that their brother murdered them yesterday and I inform the police, this is for punishment. I have almost no self interest (I knew neither the victim nor perpetrator), but help promote the pro-social deterrence that murderers will get caught. It doesn't actually help the victim, who is dead. It doesn't help me (other than psychological satisfaction), but it potentially helps others by preventing the perpetrator from doing it again, and preventing others from following in their footsteps. This can extend to behaviors which are still legal but anti-social. If your kid smashes a vase because they're angry then you ground them. Not because grounding them fixes the vase or makes your life more pleasant, but because it discourages the behavior.
The key to free speech then is that punishing speech is fundamentally illegitimate. The punishment is anti-social, not the speech. Speech is not a thing that we want to deter, even if it's bad speech, because we don't trust anybody to wisely judge good and bad speech, and we expect good speech to win in the marketplace of ideas, which drastically limits any supposed harms of bad speech. (With exceptions, which is why most people make allowances for punishing things like direct calls to violence). So for any given speech act, your moral obligations are to leave punishment motives out of the calculation for your actions. If you act in your own direct self interest (avoiding a Nazi who you would expect to be unpleasant to be around), this is legitimate. If you act in your friend's interest (my friend hates Nazis so I expect him to have unpleasant experiences if he is friends with this person) this is legitimate. If you act out of punishment (I hate this guy I wish he had no friends) or deterrence (I want all the hidden Nazis to keep their icky evil thoughts to themselves) this is illegitimate and you should not do this.
In almost all issues of cancel culture, we can easily and obviously distinguish these motives because the majority of the cancelers live nowhere near the cancelee and have absolutely no way of possibly benefiting via any method other than punishment (and social status gained from being seen as a punisher). If you have never met Jordan Peterson and his words upset you, then by all means avoid buying his books so you don't have to be upset, but you have absolutely no legitimate reason to get involved in his life or speak to his workplace or his friends or family, so the only motive remaining is the desire to punish what is (incorrectly) perceived as bad behavior that needs to be punished.
Theoretically you can probably come up with some weird edge cases where this rule is slightly ambiguous. But 90% of free speech conflicts are obviously on one side or the other, 90% of the time the people opposing free speech are wrong and are making society worse, and if we fix that the majority of the issue will be gone and then we can focus on the pedantic edge cases and have reasonable disagreements about tradeoffs.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
9hr ago
I use a Norelco battery-powered shaver I found lying in my driveway one day when I was getting fed up with my older Norelco corded shaver. The battery ran for two weeks, long enough for the new charger to arrive from Amazon.
God provides.
SnapDragon
9hr ago
Their claim is that it is indeed a terminal goal. Here, for instance, is modern Eliezer still talking about corrigibility as a "hard problem" (and advertising his book, of course).
I agree that one of the important steps in their prophecy is that there will be a "weird random-looking utility function" - in other words, mindspace is huge and we might end up at a random point in it that is completely incomprehensible to us. (A claim that I think is looking very shaky with LLMs as the current meta.) But they ALSO claim that this utility function is guaranteed to, as you say, "place instrumental value on your continued existence". It's hard to have it both ways: that most AI minds will be crazily orthogonal to us, except for this one very-human-relatable "instrumental value" which Yudkowsky knows for sure will always be present. You're describing it in anthropomorphic terms, too.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9hr ago
I think "becomes the principle intellectual force developing AI" is a threshold that dissolves into fog when you look at it too closely, because the nature of the field is already that the tasks that take the most time are continuously being automated. Computers write almost all machine code, and yet we don't say that computers are rhe principle force driving programming progress, because humans are still the bottleneck where adding more humans is the most effective way to improve output. "AI inference scaling replaces humans as the bottleneck to progress", though, is pretty unlikely to cleanly coincide with "AI systems reach some particular level of intellectual capability", and may not even ever happen (e.g. if availability of compute for training becomes a tighter bottleneck than either human or AI intellectual labor - rumor in some corners is that this has already happened). But the amount that can be done per unit of human work will nevertheless expand enormously. I expect the world will spend quite a bit of calendar time (10+ years) in the ambiguous AI RSI regime, and arguably has already entered that regime early past year.
Knock it off with "shitlibs." This isn't that kind of place even if the majority sentiment agrees with you.
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