domain:pedestrianobservations.com
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1d ago
GPT-5 Thinking one shot this. The free Claude Sonnet didn't.
https://chatgpt.com/share/689f7c89-c6c0-800b-89c5-ba2988419f6c
hydroacetylene
1d ago
It's interesting to note that Argentina is notable for it's anomalously high fertility rate into very recent times; this was plausibly due to its policy of targeting pro-natal gibs at lower class teenagers(which they had a lot of).
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
This sounds perfectly natural to me.
I think the complaint is that he actually hefted his mace before swinging (not while swinging, which is impossible), so it should be "He hefted his mace and swung at her".
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Yeah, a lot of these people think doctors are for 1) childrens and maternal care 2) emergency medicine and 3) really serious illnesses like cancer. Normal adults go to chiropractors, nutritionists, etc.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
And yet.
(in this metaphor, what's Xianxai? Gas station sushi?)
Lazuli
1d ago
LitRPG is the literary equivalent to a three-day-old, half-eaten Arby's sandwich.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
1d ago
"Hefting his mace, he swung at her as hard as he could."
This sounds perfectly natural to me.
Agreed on all the political points though.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
1d ago
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ERNAqqNSId0?feature=shared
This matches my experience (growing up in a rural deep red area) of medicine. You go to the doctor for broken bones, bleeding you can't stop, or when you're in enough pain your wife makes you go.
theincompetencetheorist
1d ago
Yeah but my hypothesis has nothing to do with Trump. It is just suggestion to ask: "Cui Bono?". I make claims with little elaboration and very little proof but gives my view that it is an useful avenue of thought if it is simply matter of corruption regardless who occupies the White House.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
I'm in the process of writing a retrospective of my AT thru-hike, so keep your eye out for that.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
Because humans are not motivated to fundamentally change their life for a trivial amount of extra money. In fact, insofar as this is an extrinsic reward, it will decrease the intrinsic desire to be a parent, as it signals to the would-be parent that the reason to do things is to spend money, reinforcing the salience of being an independent capitalist-consumer slopenjoyer. The very offer of the extrinsic reward is demotivating to its intrinsic pursuit. (In the same way, it is terrible to give students candy for doing math correctly, as it teaches them not to intrinsically value learning and success, but only candy). If humans fundamentally changed their life for a small increase in funds, all retail workers would be flocking to the oil rig, and everyone in Appalachia would have left. Becoming a parent is the oil rig of human activity. It needs to be promoted through social influence.
Totalitarian societies are fantastic at increasing pronatality when they understand how to do it, which Romanians and Hungarians do not. The best to do this through essentially non-theistic measures were the Nazis (as you mention). They increased the birth rate by 40% in 7 years, even though their understanding was also pretty mediocre.
Child-bearing is considered holy and a pregnant woman is shown the utmost consideration as one unselfishly doing her part for the good of the state. Children are extolled as worth far more than material comforts. In the schools the youth are being inculcated with these beliefs.
Nazis say that under the individualistic point of view a pregnant woman was treated with a certain amount of derision and scorn; she was foolish to undergo pregnancy; she and her husband would be more sensible to buy an auto or spend money on themselves in other ways
[Integral was the] “reviving of self-respect among the German people, and of their faith in the future of Germany. They claim that both feelings were dying out under the previous régime, and people were increasingly unwilling to raise children in such an atmosphere”
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/217103
(Unlocked link) https://sci.bban.top/pdf/10.1086/217103.pdf?download=true
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1d ago
Nazism did value motherhood, and does seem to have increased the birthrate, but unfortunately also massively increased the death rate.
This prompted me to look at other fascist/military dictator states around then. It looks like Italy crashed hard, Portugal stayed about flat, and Spain was flat with a small increase. I haven't found a good chart for Peronist Argentina specifically. I had seen the Franco chart before, but interesting to see that Italy was so different.
- Fight Club
- Snatch
- Way of the Gun
- The Usual Suspects
- While You Were Sleeping
- Cyrano De Bergerac
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
It’s hard in a non-totalitarian, non-centralized social ecosystem. Otherwise it’s as easy as top-down educational reform and media promulgation.
It’s not religion qua religion that’s essential here, it’s how women are reared and judged. Gypsies aren’t very theistic. China can implement these changes without touching religion. I think the few pronatal factors which are intrinsically theistic are just: (1) increased sense of social safety and abundance from a God, (2) increased use of exaggerated paternal / filial language (when one speaks of God being a Father and Provider, they don’t realize it but this is implicitly pronatal, inspiring a desire to be a parent as God parents). The other pronatal factors in religion can be divorced from the religious package. You can induce obedience to many behavioral prescriptions without God.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Centralized communist parties don't have a good track record in increasing TFR. Ceaucescu tried and only managed a blip. Even taking the rest of your thesis as true, it doesn't work because Communism is essentially modern in the ways you're objecting to. Communism (theoretically) values work, not motherhood.
Nazism did value motherhood, and does seem to have increased the birthrate, but unfortunately also massively increased the death rate.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Right, the coordination problem to actually do this is a tough nut to crack, even in a totalitarian society.
TradCaths do this by having enough babies/toddlers that there are generally more of them wanting to be held than there are adults wanting to hold them; thus teenaged girls get lots of baby holding time and decide they like it(because most do). This is likely not an option for a country with a TFR of 1.0. The party might bring this up at meetings, but they probably bring up lots of stuff no one believes. China also strikes me as an… unlikely candidate for the kind of religious revival which boosted fertility in the stans.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
I think the argument is basically feudal. The employer is basically considered a liege lord to its employees, owing them some minimum standard in living. If the king (government) has to step in and provide additional largesse directly, that's a failure on the lord's part.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
It is trivial to change TFR and eventually China will realize it, and they will be able to solve it via totalitarianism while we are unable to follow suit. You (1) judge the social value of girls and women exclusively by their aptitude and progress in motherhood; (2) inculcate pro-fertile values in adolescent girls (eg media, stories, idols), (3) train girls in the skills for motherhood.
The reason the Haredi female TFR is so high regardless of country or income is because they do this. The reason that you have some fundamentalist Christian families with high TFR is because they do this. The reason the Gypsy TFR is 1.5 to 2x the national average of whichever country they live in, despite being urban-dwelling, is that they do this. The reason I have cousins on one side of family who are going to average 4 kids each is that I know their parents so this. There was a longitudinal study where girls were given a fake baby that they had to mother throughout school; the longterm effect was 1.5x higher TFR. (I think I found this on themotte but forgot the poster).
carrot on the stick
Women care so much about their social valuation that they will starve themselves to gain more more of it; they will spend two hours a day decorating their face and hair and wardrobe; they will even go through a miserable period of hard work and stress with little monetary reward only because it secures status (we call this “academia”). In more fertile eras, these pressures were toward motherhood; a woman who wanted to be an academic would be laughed at and derided.
Anyway, China will realize this, they will totalitarianly implement changes and likely in such a way that it targets high IQ Chinawomen, and we will be fucked (impotently) because we are ruled by entertainment and corporations, not a centralized communist party.
(also paging Mr @hydroacetylene)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
That's cope and you know it.
It's very much not cope. The capture of the institutions means those who have captured them can, at will, produce "authoritative" studies supporting or opposing any proposition they care to support or oppose, regardless of the truth value of those propositions. That, in turn, means the probative value of studies from such institutions is zero or close to it, and such studies are correctly dismissed out of hand.
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
A few things which irritate me about the LitRPG genre and web fiction in general. You may picture me as comic book guy for purposes of this rant.
- Switching tense within sentences. This is rampant and incredibly-obnoxious once one notices. "Hefting his mace, he swung at her as hard as he could." I don't know how this got to be such an entrenched institution but to me it occurs as about on par with having "Like" at the start of every sentence. Is the book still readable? Yes. Does my eye twitch a little every single time? Also yes.
- "Whelp I don't immediately understand what's going on so let's just not talk about it at all; let's not even try to figure it out until later in the plot." No use thinking about it now!
- Reflexive denigration of 'religion' even in contexts where this is obviously and absurdly inappropriate. "Oh are there literal gods walking the world, enacting their wills and communicating with humans? Well I want nothing to do with that because religion is dumb and stupid and icky and only for low-status people."
- "No don't bow to me or call me 'sir'; I don't go in for things like that." This one is everywhere and I find it especially puerile. Hierarchy is crucial in human organizations and we developed the systems we did for a reason. Particularly outside the modern context, public displays of respect and deference are both necessary and for the good of all. People need structure and boundaries to function. Refusing to take on the mantle and respect of authority, if that is your calling, does not serve anyone. It just confuses and scares them.
- Related to the above, modern progressive attitudes everywhere. Of course men and women are exactly the same. Of course everyone is having casual, consequence-free sex. Of course anyone who finds meaning in faith is secretly cynically corrupt or else a psycho child molester.
I could go on but I feel better getting at least this much off my chest.
Tree
1d ago
Walton family, whose business is only viable because the government enables them to pay below-livable wages with their welfare programs.
I don’t understand this common argument. Without welfare, wouldn’t the employees be more desperate, enabling walmart to pay them far less?
And to look at the problem from the other side: let's say Bernie decides that the state guarantees a minimum standard of living to everyone, regardless or work status, and raise that to equal or higher than whatever walmart pays : as a consequence, no one works at walmart anymore and the state pays everyone a walmart salary. It's a gigantic loss for the state. What I mean is, it's actually walmart who helps the state give money to people so they have an acceptable living standard (which is the responsibility of the state, according to leftists), not the other way around.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Actually, many rural republicans I know do self identify as people who don't need to or just don't go to a doctor. But that's more a matter of stupidity in those cases.
At no point am I arguing that rural healthcare won't be harmed, I'm arguing that they don't think it will be.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
I would love to read a regular "weird court cases" topic.
GBRK
1d ago
Replying here to both your comments.
Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh are inherently worse than India despite the only major difference being lack of Hinduism and castes.
This is a big claim when from my perspective the historical performance of pakistan and india have been pretty similar in terms of GDP per capita. The main reversal has come only recently, which seems like it would directly counter your complaints about indian society becoming more dysgenic. And saying that there's not a lot of differences between those countries-- and that those differences are shared with countries that perform both better and worse than india on an IQ and economic basis-- indicates that those differences are not decisive in increasing indian IQ.
India needed castes to create smarter outliers at the cost of dumber underclass which is a better deal than Bangladesh.
Elites are smarter than their underclass everywhere. You don't need castes to do it. Rather, the evidence is that creating caste-based elites makes your nation underperform relative to other nations with similar capacity for elite formation. Consider Mexico, which got mogged by brazil and the US in the 20th century at least in part due to political instability caused by the remanants of its caste system. Consider how recent european history is basically just relatively meritocratic states stunting on relatively aristocratic states. Picking smart people to form your elite just works better in every way that picking an elite and trying to make them smart.
This is simply untrue, these exams are the reason why French revolution happened
source? And what does that have to do with my argument about selecting for IQ? Even if you're right, it seems to fit pretty smoothly into my model of, "create intermarrying genetic castes -> castes put on bottom have a rational reason to revolt".
and also why you see Asians represented disproportionately in places as their society lives and dies by exam conferred status.
And this counters my argument how?
Did China or Korea produce anything resembling what Indo Europeans did until the 21st century?
Um, yes? From here:
For the Roman Empire ca. 165 CE we accept an estimate of a total population of 75 million and of an imperial income per capita of kg750 of wheat equivalent...$900
For the Han Empire ca. 2 CE we accept an estimate of a total population of 57.7 million and of an imperial income per capita of 1.88 times the subsistence minimum, or $750.
Also relevant,
1.72 subsistence minima ($690) recently estimated for the Aztec Empire ca. 149211. For the Byzantine Empire ca. 1000, an income level comparable to the Aztec has been proposed38.
It's not an exact match, but considering that rome then proceeded to collapse and never re-unite while china had long stretches of stability, it's fair to say that European and Chinese civilization were probably fairly comparable at various points in history.
The world has natural order which wants the blue blooded to be with the blue blooded, the son also rises as they say. Why are castes bad? Do you prefer a slightly higher median with a way fewer smart people. Castes are religious but I'll only defend the sociological factors here.
You foundational assumption-- that castes increase the total amount of very-smart people-- is wrong. India has the same normal distribution of IQs as everyone else. If you were right, India would have a right-skewed distribution. The caste system may or may not provide IQ benefits to the elite castes (I'd guess "not" looking at how the Indian elite underperform relative to the european and chinese elite), but it definitely fails to provide that benefit to society at large. At best, castes don't do anything except split India into a variety of fueding interest groups. At worst, they reduce global selection pressures for IQ without actually doing much to improve outcomes locally.
China's fertility rate is low enough, and has been for a long time, that it's pretty much stuck. Exposing teenagers to childcare causes higher fertility desires but China does not have enough children to do this; China is also aging rapidly and will be running out of impressionable young people sharpish. And orientals have low rates of coupling, too.
More options
Context Copy link