domain:web.law.duke.edu
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
8hr ago
Aesthetically, I can't summon much disgust for her. "Women are being seduced into prostitution by a female rationalist self-identified nerd and sex researcher" is not going to be a major social problem anytime soon. The "trad" stuff, that's the disease of the heart.
What do you mean by the "trad" stuff exactly?
Also sidenote, are you Christian? Just curious.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
8hr ago
We have good evidence to believe that free will is mostly BS at this point
I stopped reading at this point. Thinking that free will is a solved debate makes me not take any of your other arguments seriously.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
8hr ago
To try and summarize the matter, actual redemption always comes with a cost
Not true in the slightest. Redemption is about turning your heart towards God, and He lets the sun shine on the just and the unjust alike. He does not require payment, he's not a debtor that we owe. He is a healer.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
8hr ago
Ahaha ok maybe it's too mysterious. It translates to "Lord, make me an instrument of Thy love."
Oh no. Viral dog piles are usually disproportionate and unfun. As someone who gleans some of her output, my impression is that she engages in a significant degree of bait, provocation, and an outrage schtick. She is part curious investigator of taboo, and I can be entertained by that part of her output, but she's also part persona of Taboo Teehee. She may be a kind, considerate individual, but she's also an advocate -- maybe even rebel -- and that's a big red target.
Aella is not an accidental microcelebrity. She built herself a brand, then propagated her brand and services in social networks saturated with nerds. I do want to issue a friendly reminder for the think of the children rat adjacent nerds: as young women have agency, so do nerds following the allure of smarty pants rationalist escort JAQ lady.
Most of us don't wield a social media platform to grow an audience for great profit. We don't have the same incentives to draw attention. She does not always carefully hedge her ideas with preventative measures and considerations, because that is less virality. That's not extraordinary behavior on Twitter, but it does make disagreeable outrage part of her brand. Scott Alexander may enter a half-dozen qualifications to demonstrate whole-minded fairness in order to avoid outrage-- all for a statement that carries a tenth of the controversy. Aella's long-form content might be best described as a salacious gonzo journalism.
I've seen her deploy Gee whiz, guys, what's wrong? I'm autistic, sorry. Just asking questions ;) enough times where I try to avoid her when internet surfing. That kind of defense implies she is blindsided by an unexpected response, but this conflicts with my impression. She has demonstrated above average intelligence and emotional competence on more than a few occasions. I can't dispute the autism claim, but she seems socially aware and capable, if a little vain-- women, amirite? For myself, the reputational cost for shitposting means I get tired of the schtick and pay less attention. Others have decided the cost will be extra mean comments. I think that's bad, but given the medium it's a normal, expected amount of bad.
A curious investigator of taboo who shows us a glimpse into the psyche of sex workers, or the systems of OnlyFans, might also be controversial. I really doubt they would generate as much seething contempt as a certified shitposter. There are plenty of traditional and internet sex workers on X, aren't there? I've seen her hedge some, go through the well it's not for everyone motions, but that carries less weight when bracketed by many other instances of designed engagement. If one enjoys playing with fire and pushing boundaries, then they better find satisfaction when boundaries push back.
Aella is maybe a victim of her own success, but probably not. Criticism of her positions, advocacy, and behavior was never going to come in the form of 2000 word LessWrong posts. Surely she learned this already. If people believe they're going to run her off I believe they are mistaken. Maybe she'll return baptized and born again. Now that would make for interesting gossip.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
8hr ago
She's like transgender people. If you embrace her because she pisses off the pro-lifers and tradLARPers, you should ask yourself "would I want my daughter emulating her?" And even if you don't have any "moral" objections, know that she's not getting what she wants out of romantic life. People see her as sexually high-status because they're projecting male standards of sexual success.(having a bunch of opposite-sex groupies) But she's written a post about being 33-years-old and struggling to find a husband:
https://aella.substack.com/p/the-difficulty-in-dating-good-men
I found it funny how, despite her very unusual views and history, she wound up in the same place as many normie high-earning careergals, struggling to find a man who earns at least as much as she does:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GpLudIca4AEQP_0?format=png&name=900x900
This isn't to say she's a bad person or should be mocked or bullied, just that you should take her opinions on sex and romance with a grain of salt.
Aesthetically, I can't summon much disgust for her. "Women are being seduced into prostitution by a female rationalist self-identified nerd and sex researcher" is not going to be a major social problem anytime soon. The "trad" stuff, that's the disease of the heart.
Quantumfreakonomics
8hr ago
It sounds like the internet stuff started leaking out into her real life a bit too much, and that triggered an existential crisis.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
8hr ago
In a normal, healthy, average relationship, a single man and a single woman partner together to provide each other with resources that would be difficult for the other to get. They do this because they have a shared vision of the future, a shared project to raise the next generation.
The historical norm was for a woman to be spinning cotton, wool, or flax from sunup to sundown to make enough thread to weave enough cloth to sew into enough garments for herself, her husband, and her children. There was a gendered world - every civilization had their own norms, but they all had norms surrounding what tasks belong to women (tasks that can be done by weaker people with the tendency to get pregnant and have babies/toddlers hanging off them.) For example, in a European village a man paid taxes by giving his lord crops, while women owed their taxes in eggs.
Men needed women's labor. Women needed men's labor.
There was a weird period in the 19th-20th century where machines took over a lot of the labor that women could do, while there was much less automation of male labor. Then in the later 20th century, the women's labor that wasn't automatable went overseas to cheaper labor. This lead to more "Homemakers" outside the upper class.
But now, the majority of the time, both men and women work outside the home. Both men and women need to labor productively to keep themselves in comfort. We are reverting back to the historical norm (except for the "women taking jobs they can do while minding their own children" part. We'd probably need to repeal the CRA and some license regulations before we could get there.)
Quantumfreakonomics
8hr ago
So I read the free preview of Nate’s guest post on Aella’s Substack. If you can believe it, I think that she and the people close to her are confused as to why people respond to her with disgust. Maybe she isn’t stinky. Maybe she isn’t riddled with STDs. Maybe she adheres to the highest standards of Bayesian data hygiene. None of that had anything to do with the why the Sankey diagram went viral.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
8hr ago
For my part, I'm disgusted that so many people seem to think it's okay to cyberbully celebrities.
Talking shit about people is not "cyberbullying".
The knowledge that thousands of people who barely know anything about you have decided to hate you as a social activity is damaging to the human mind. It's cruel to do that to someone.
No one has any right to be liked, or even not hated. You have no moral right to control what other people think about you or what opinions they express of you.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
8hr ago
Lol. The only reason anyone knows that basic bitch's name is because she's a naked whore who preys on quokkas. If she were anon, she'd be Substacker #4000. Aella is an object lesson, because she doesn't have the self-awareness to do better. The woman literally pre-plans to have people pin her down and force her to continue with her birthday gangbang while she's - per her own description - screaming in horror. This is probably not someone who should have been left free to run her own life. But if we're going to permit people to make terrible, self-destructive, delusional decisions and also to proselytize them, then we have an obligation to counter that advocacy with scathing rebukes. And, because a large portion of the population is actually not that smart (half are below average!), then we also need to acid-treat those memes into a more easily digestible format (this is what conservatism is, generally speaking).
All of which is to say that the discomfort from being shamed is literally the entire point. If Aella having a crying breakdown because people called her a dumb, dirty whore saves 5 other girls from trying that life path, then from a utilitarian perspective the bullying is an objectively good behavior. If being less mean about it means only 2 girls are swayed, then being kind was the evil option.
And if she doesn't care for that framing, then I would encourage her to consider the entire world of philosophy besides dipshit utilitarianism - probably with some sort of suicide watch on standby.
LateMechanic
8hr ago
If thats why currency is debt
I'm just showing that you can google 'why is cash a liability of the central bank' and get people offering different ways of trying to explain it, if you're confused to the point of asking 'what's stopping them from saying all yuan are their liabilities'.
In my view as I've written, it's just following just the normal IOU/credit/banking logic, but the only thing special here at the 'top' of the money hierarchy is that it's not promising to pay/convert into anything else -- it's just abstract credit. And the reason why anyone treats that credit as valuable is because we're also simultaneously in debt to the issuer (we owe abstract value to the government in tax payments in this case).
It sounds like youre now suggesting something about inflation as the criterion.
That's what I think I've been saying from the start, so I'm sorry if I didn't make it more clear in this chain of replies. Inflation is the constraint on making the deficit too large, providing more savings than people want in aggregate, the excess value of which gets burned off. So that is a discussion about 'real' desired monetary wealth and inflation being self-correction mechanism, which I'm sure we hit at the top of this chain. The evidence of pushing against this constraint is seeing it happen.
Is accelerating inflation the right criterion and old economists where just too worried about going over, or do you object to that criterion as well?
The old orthodox approach was to think you mainly use monetary policy and the interest rate to deal with everything. So they are trying to be vigilant about when inflation is around the corner, and think (thought? maybe it's more up in the air in the last year with countries starting to question this and try the other way around) that raising the interest rate causes unemployment, which is used to curb inflation.
In terms of accelerating inflation, that could just mean the inflation rate going up slightly, which is probably all you'd see from real demand-pull inflation. The real worry that panics people is a spiral where somehow it just keeps accelerating. But you could really only get this if you keep pushing hard with ever-increasing amounts of spending in the face of higher prices, such as having too much government spending indexed to CPI. Or indeed, raising the interest rate, which pays people money just for already having money, which is likely why raising the interest rate is actually not a good tool for fighting inflation in reality. They are probably mostly scarred from the experience in the 70s, without distinguishing between demand-pull and cost-push inflation (unemployment won't stop inflation if it's caused by an oil shortage, etc.).
What do you think of NGDP targeting?
It always seemed goofy, still based on the same assumption the central bankers are wizards that can dial inflation up or down at will. Monetary policy just isn't that powerful, which people would understand if they actually learned the balance sheet assets/liabilities accounting and the plumbing of various operations, instead of thinking there's one special thing called "money" like the textbook said, which can slot into hand-drawn supply & demand toy model charts. That stuff just appears to be brain-breaking.
People rightly want a plausible model for "observations in the real world" before making them loadbearing.
This is all an explanation of how it all already works. It's already loadbearing. Did anyone think the US made it hundreds of years with the debt climbing into the millions, then billions, then tens of trillions by listening to people suggesting that in the long run, 'rational' actors know that the budget will have to be balanced, and thus save all their money for paying judgement day taxes when the long run finally ends?
Occasionally the people freaking out about large numbers actually got their way and reduced the debt significantly, causing our country's only depressions every single time they did it (which also ends up re-exploding the deficit & debt anyway to recover).
precisely what keeps critics of mainstream economics outside the mainstream
Luckily for us all, they usually bring in bankers to run things in government. When they do tap academic economists like bernanke, they have to learn everything on the job, and end up later on trying to get the word out about how things really work.
So the MMTers are often quoting and collaborating with past fed chairs and treasury secretaries, and communicate very easily with the various hedge funders like McCulley & Dalio, and just anyone in finance. They only feud with and can't break through to economists, who have a turf to defend unrelated to accuracy of thought.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
Most promiscuous women seem to draw a hard line between themselves and actual sex workers, even if broader society often doesn’t.
Like, nobody sees Anna-Nicole Smith, (briefly)successful though she might be, in a positive light- including women who sleep around and show their tits to strange men for free.
The negative stereotype of whores may not revolve about their promiscuity, but it is still there.
KMC
8hr ago
For some quick background, aella is a prostitute.
She is a victim of abuse and molestation who very publicly demonstrates all of the ways she fails to cope with her childhood, while tempting other girls into the same path and normalizing the really disturbing coping mechanisms she's employing.
She does data science work as well
She does half-assed twitter polls. That is not data science. I don't know of anything she's done that could accurately be described as data science.
Perhaps it's Pollyannaish but I wish that we could do our shaming in a more dignified, and less clearly antagonistic way.
Maybe if she would demonstrate any shame at all, then the shaming would be gentler. This is not the first time, and it will not be the last, because she refuses to change her behavior.
whether there's a way we can employ shame in a truly good way as a society? Can we somehow shame people without turning into monsters ourselves
That's exactly what's happening here. There's nothing monstrous about what's happening to her. As far as I can tell, she's richly earned all of the attention she gets, positive and negative both.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
8hr ago
Found Gannon's case, number is 2412CR000495 if the link doesn't work. It's not up to date though.
National Grid, of course, sucks balls.
I'm shocked by how many people on TheMotte seem to have such a visceral disgust reaction to Aella.
For my part, I'm disgusted that so many people seem to think it's okay to cyberbully celebrities. Punching is OK as long as you're punching up? That's the logic of someone who just wants an excuse to punch people. The knowledge that thousands of people who barely know anything about you have decided to hate you as a social activity is damaging to the human mind. It's cruel to do that to someone. I also think it's unhealthy to participate in an internet hate mob. It makes people petty and frivolous.
All around it's a negative for everyone involved. If I find out that someone has wrapped their identity around performatively hating someone they've never met, it lowers my opinion of them. That holds true whether the target is Elon, Aella, or Adolf Hitler. There is just no good reason to invest your emotions in someone you have never met and will never meet.
ZeStriderOfDunedain
Ze Strider
8hr ago
I may be in a bubble but New Zealand's lax sex worker laws reflect a noticeably different mentality. Many high end escorts here work high powered corporate jobs while offering intimacy services occasionally. Only to those blue blooded enough to afford their rates obviously. The mentality here is more that "sex workers' humanity is unquestionable but not that of the men who seek them". Re marriage, I find it hard to sympathise right there because we're literally living in a time where men's standards are at an all time low as more and more are being phased out of the dating pool. At least one of those nerds starved for female attention would be willing to put a ring on her. So it's all about expectations, no?
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
9hr ago
That's the difference between righteousness and self-righteousness. You can still sweep the steps of your trailer, and be content that you've brought a bit of cleanliness and order to the world, even if the neighbors scoff. You don't actually have to be a pretentious, stuck-up dick about it,
KMC
9hr ago
In a normal, healthy, average relationship, men trade resources and services for sex. That’s just how it goes. Prostitution simply formalizes the exchange.
In a normal, healthy, average relationship, that exchange is mutually exclusive, for the purpose of procreation, acknowledged by the family and community of both people, and lifelong. Not sure why you didn't notice those pieces of the puzzle.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
9hr ago
I can only assume there’s some sort of deep psychic/symbolic trauma associated with
the making explicit of a contractual obligation that is usually left implicit.engaging in that trade with many different men with different hormonal/biomarkers that disrupts pair-bonding
Plus the consequences of faking emotions on a consistent basis. Practice makes permanent.
Stellula
9hr ago
In a normal, healthy, average relationship, men trade resources and services for sex. That’s just how it goes.
That is not just how it goes.
Do you believe that human emotions exist?
I don't know how dangerous it really is but it feels pretty safe. Drink driving and aggressive driving in general is worse in France than back in Ireland so bus drivers are trustworthy in comparison.
Grant_us_eyes
9hr ago
Whenever I see this argument, I just helplessly gesture in the general direction of Joshua Graham from Fallout: New Vegas, how much the character is beloved in the community despite being extremely religious, before throwing my hands in the air and giving up, knowing I'll never be able to communicate the entire point without a multi-paragraph effort post.
To try and summarize the matter, actual redemption always comes with a cost. If you're not willing to pay the cost, you're not actually redeemed. You're just doing such to excuse your own guilt. Aella seems to just want things delivered to her on a platter, and is complaining her decisions have lead her to this point without any reflection.
You can't force redemption on someone who doesn't want to pay the price.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9hr ago
Breaking news: Trump is saying he will not be deporting illegal immigrants who work on Farms and in Hotels.
Gavin Newsom is claiming it for a win for the violent riots that have taken over LA and other major cities.
This is a bit of a let down for Trump Supporters and anyone who wants to take America back from those who were not invited. Especially with Gavin Newsom rubbing it in the public's face. Especially with American Approval of deportation efforts have been increasing.
Trump's rationale appears to be:
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Hotels/farms are low hanging fruit, it's easy to pick up illegal immigrants from these locations.
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After swooping these groups first, then the only applicants to these positions (at the wages the farms and hotels are willing to pay) are the criminal illegal immigrants.
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So focus on criminality first.
Does this mean that, once every last criminal is deported, he will then do sweeps of farms and hotels? Left ambiguous.
One problem is the effect of exploitable labor goes in one way. Over the past 2 decades, Landscaping businesses that employed high school students and ex cons went out of business because they couldn't compete against undocumented workers.
If one farm gets raided, and one farm growing similar things does not get raided for another year, then the first farm needs to hire more expensive people and raise prices while the second farm will still benefit from the lowered wages. The farm that got raided first goes out of business first, the second farm maybe gets to buy up the first farm, then when they are inevitably raided they still stay in business and make more money now.
It's not fair. It's not fair that the government has not enforced its own rules surrounding hiring employees uniformly across industries.
The fair thing would be to deport 100% of everyone deportable all at once. The shock of that will be destructive to every industry that is predominately illegal immigrants.
The next fair thing might be to deport 10% of employees in every business all together, then another 10% later, and so on until the bottom is reached.
Of course, the above two "fair" plans are ridiculous. We do not have the man-power to do it.
Any other fair ideas? Besides Trump's new plan of "Don't try to tackle this right now."
Most of the claims of the mechanisms are likely not spot on I'll admit, but the 'psychological' effect is absolutely real. Make of that what you will.
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