domain:imgur.com
phailyoor
1d ago
Kind of shocking how hands off Reddit was given how much of an SJW the founder is right now. I guess he was willing to shut up when he had to, but once he got the network effects, he was ready to push the agenda.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1d ago
even the mystic needs to “crucify his flesh” and “make no provision for the flesh”
I guess it must be acknowledged that there is strong (and historically violent) disagreement on this question, I align more with Orthodox teachings and the concept of theosis, whose associated ascetic practice is not a rejection of the flesh but specifically a transformation and integration of the body as a temple.
humans are not as innately reasonable as they are innately animal
Again I do not see these as opposites as you do. Reason is but the conscious manifestation and structuration of our wants.
Humans aren’t designed to plot out in their mind how they will feel in five years if they continue to smoke and then imagine it saliently with excellent theory of mind and then decide to ignore the urge to have the sugar because they remember this mental image they developed.
I wholly disagree. Humans are designed specifically to do that, imperfectly. And my evidence is that they do in fact do this and have done so for as long as we can tell.
I do not believe as you do that culture is an innovation. Only that it's technological manifestations have evolved over time.
We always told stories and always made society.
phailyoor
1d ago
How to overcome Reddit’s massive network effect?
Convince Elon to buy Reddit and merge it with X. Other than that Reddit-like sites have past their peak and if you wanted to compete with them it would be a viscous fight for a shrinking pie.
phailyoor
1d ago
Instead, I'm probably going to have to give in and start joining discord voicechats.
I'm quite surprised. Discord voicechat is just something so different from Reddit that I can't imagine it as the first replacement.
aldomilyar
1d ago
I feel like optimization culture has pushed into hobbies, though. There's way more concern around 'performing' at even casual activities
aldomilyar
1d ago
Also the impulse to add professional/monetary incentives to everything mean that the second you stop heading upwards in the rankings it's kind of depressing.
I was a pretty good Rugby player growing up, got into the professional academy system and ultimately washed out at 20. I then stopped playing Rugby since just kinda hanging around being an amateur felt depressing as hell. This trend's happened a lot with the guys who went through the process, compared to previous generations where really the entire 'pinnacle' of the sport for the vast majority of people was just playing for the suburb's best team and a career would be ping-ponging between grades for 10-15 years until injury or life got in the way.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1d ago
And that makes me a little sad. Discord is fine, but I can't help but notice that I'm going dow the same path that so many repressed 3rd worlders do and resorting to discussion on unsearcheable, ungovernable silos. For all the sins of social media, it really does-- or at least did serve as a modern public square. And I'll miss the idea (if not necessarily the reality) that the debates I participated in could be found, and heard, by a truly public audience.
I want to feel sympathy for you, because I know how demoralising it is to lose a source like that - but that's because I went through it a decade ago. Social media has not represented the public since, it has been a variety of attempts to control the public. I guess I can appreciate that you finally see the problem.
roche
1d ago
I think this allows the kinds of actual work that used to happen, especially when you also remove the constant commentary of social media either encouraging or blasting everything and creating performance anxiety and creating inertia.
IMO it's not even really fair or appropriate to say, "Yeah you could scroll Tiktok, but you could also choose to learn origami! Or write a story!"
Because Tiktok (and recreational drugs, high stimulus TV, and porn) exist on a sort of "alternate mental plane" where 99% of reality is irrelevant. Like, the other day I was working on mindfulness and it was storming, and I crouched down at my kitchen window then to look up at the sky. I was shocked to realize I hadn't done this since childhood, where I'd actually tangle myself up in the living room curtain, get comfy, and just watch it rain for a while. And the thing is, even if I somehow had the idea to do this while I'm overstimulated, I know it wouldn't hit very hard. Kids aren't fascinated by their environments because they pay attention, but rather because their nervous systems are relaxed enough to pick up on things we can't.
Anyway, what's clear is these two ways of perceiving the world are incompatible. The "Gen Z stare" happens because the mental pace of the zeitgeist right now is breakneck, so teenagers have to get stoned before work and keep their air pods in just to make it bearable.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
1d ago
I did pass them via cramming stuff instead of developing any real mastery which was stupid of me.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
1d ago
I missed that part. Commercial insurance coverage should be enough by a single party to cover this so I don't know why the judge went out of their way to punish the yellow light driver.
I caught my first Ryanair flight, heading down from Edinburgh to London, and holy shit.
I didn't have very high expectations (and I think I got scammed by paying for extra baggage), but the experience was abysmal.
The initial point of failure was informational. Upon checking in online, the website presented me with a series of warnings, escalating in their shade of digital red, that as a non-EU citizen (despite possessing a UK residency permit, a distinction the system seemed unable to parse), a printed, physical boarding pass was a non-negotiable requirement. Failure to produce one at the airport, it was implied, would result in some combination of fines, exile, or possibly being sacrificed to the god of baggage fees.
This sent me on a quest through the Edinburgh airport for a Ryanair helpdesk, a quest which revealed that the designated helpdesk was less a "desk with helpful people" and more a "suggestion of a desk, currently unburdened by the presence of staff." (This is presuming someone's half eaten lunch doesn't count). The system, it seemed, had a single point of failure, and had failed.
An airport assistance employee who, taking pity, escorted me through a staff channel to a hidden check-in line. Here, the ground-truth epistemology contradicted the website's stated doctrine: no, of course I didn't need a physical pass. The dire warnings were, apparently, just a sort of generalized, non-binding advisory. This was my first lesson: the Ryanair informational layer operates on a different plane of reality from its physical one.
It only got worse. After getting to the terminal, I found myself boarding a perfectly normal airport bus. Tad bit crowded, when I got there, but no biggie.
And then people kept coming. And then more showed up. The bus showed no signs of readying for departure. Yet more people kept being shoved in, and you can tell that even the legendary British tolerance for minor inconveniences was taxed beyond its limit. We were semi-apologetically informed that there was only one bus operational today, which didn't really make things better.
People were loudly asking if they couldn't just walk to the plane, others made comparisons to being sardines in a can, and I added my own take by simply questioning why they didn't just do two trips if they had one bus?
Why didn’t they? One might hypothesize that the marginal cost of a second five-minute bus journey (fuel, driver time) was calculated to be greater than the cumulative disutility experienced by 180 passengers compressed into a human brick for thirty minutes. Or perhaps it's a form of signaling: you wanted the cheapest flight, and this is what The Cheapest Flight feels like. You are not a customer to be courted; you are a parcel to be shipped, and parcels do not have preferences about packing density.
Eventually, the boarding staff ceased their efforts, which had begun to resemble viral videos of shinkansen "pushers" in Tokyo, though with less efficiency and more audible sighing. Whether this was due to hitting a hard physical limit or a soft limit on potential passenger revolt remains an open question. The ten-minute journey to the plane was a miasma of condensation and shared misery, followed by another ten minutes of waiting in the poorly ventilated bus at the foot of the stairs before we were permitted to ascend.
The aircraft itself was a masterclass in apophatic design. An angry wasp, and just about as comfortable to ride. It was defined not by what it had, but by what it had aggressively stripped away. The cabin was a symphony in hostile shades of yellow and blue, a color palette that seems optimized to discourage any sense of calm or well-being. The seats, clad in a thin, sweat-inducing pleather, were clearly selected for ease of cleaning over any consideration for human comfort. The legroom was a theoretical concept, not that the seats could recline and take any more of it away.
I had paid a non-trivial fee to place my modest backpack in an overhead bin, a transaction that now felt like a failure of game theory on my part. Observing the general chaos and the apparent lack of rigorous enforcement, I suspect the Nash equilibrium for a frequent Ryanair traveler is to simply ignore the ancillary charges and bank on the operational entropy being on your side. The airline is running a tax on the risk-averse. They won't pull the same trick on me again, I promise you that much.
This flight can't leave soon enough, but now I half expect them to charge me if I use the toilets in-flight.*
(I promise you that even the most budget airlines in India don't cut as many corners. It's frankly quite impressive.)
*I fucking knew it. Their CEO had actually floated the idea of coin-operated toilets a while back, but was stymied by airline regulations. I'm no longer a minarchist or libertarian.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
Maybe. But there's an increasing trend of social anxiety making people just not want to go to things at all -- and of course the internet rectangle makes it easy to develop parasocial relationships or social media addictions and spend time on those instead of actual people. The flakiest people I know are the least busy.
For instance, I have a friend who wanted to hang out and I haven't texted him back in 3 days (but to be fair, it took him 4 days to get back to me). And my girlfriend is in the other room and I'm typing this right now. I'm choosing you over snuggling, faceh-less internet person! Something has gone wrong there.
I saw a t-shirt at Target the other day that read, "Canceller of Plans." And I know the rush that comes from cancelling plans. But it's still pathological avoidance.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
It never stops making me laugh that anti-immigrant Americans fucking despise the immigrants but not the Americans who pay them illegally for their labor, which is why they're in America at all.
the_Culture_is_great
1d ago
Tonight when it came up that my fiance and I walked to the bar people were shocked.
It was a half hour! On a pleasant summer night!
Reddit is a completely curated experience for the most part, and so it’s never going to be a vanguard for new ideas. It probably stopped being that in the early 2000 before the normies showed up.
What? Reddit was founded in 2005, and didn't ban its first subreddit until 2011 (r/jailbait, rest in power).
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
"no you don't understand, my based right wing fantasy world is SO MUCH COOLER than the soy poet fantasy world"
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
This is so unbelievably wrong I don't even know where to begin
The sheer amount of surgical techniques, mechanical/robot assistance, and drug development alone. Not to mention computerization and millions of other improvements neither of us know about too.
How can you be so blatantly and confidently wrong?
It is end of life care
The stats on this are eye watering though
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
So they need to work 38% more hours to get a car that is like, 500% better?
I think we're in the rich society
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Interesting line of thought. On /r/4chan they often colour over the word 'nigger' even in image screencaps. There was at one time a bot that would bitch at you if you used the word 'retarded'. On tiktok rape is grape. People are unalived rather than killed. It's some variation of Orwellianism.
Often when I see ChatGPTisms in the wild, in media, from supposed experts, I get a sense of some vast engulfing monster slowly grappling with our civilization, wrapping around it to consume it. Like a white blood cell vs a bacterium. This may well be just another aspect of that.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
You think trailer trash is more judgemental about tattoos than thé PMC?
So many of my PMC friends have tattoos that I'm going to have to assume the answer is yes, although I don't really know anyone who is trailer trash so maybe they're super chill about it
The ship for "rahhhh tattoos bad" sailed probably a decade ago for downtown yuppies
FarmReadyElephants
1d ago
I think Reddit is more important than people realize. It’s long been one of the most valuable datasets on the internet, even before LLMs. I would google a question about health, products, or general interest with a “site:Reddit.com” at the end to get thoughtful commentary from real people. And now that it is LLM fuel, it’s influence will only grow
And it is entirely captured by the left fringe of the Overton window. It is one of the more progressive San Francisco companies. I’ve eaten more bans there than anywhere else on the internet. I’m not a particularly inflammatory poster! But their Overton window doesn’t extend very far to the right.
I’m troubled by this and I am a computer programmer. How to overcome Reddit’s massive network effect? I’ve thought that the Motte would be a good place to build from. We have a high quality audience. Could we start subforums dedicated to special interests and build slowly? It would give mottizens a place to have high quality conversations on issues other than the culture war without having to venture into reddit. But that probably deserves a top-level post of its own
America is a highly centralized modern managerial nation.
Try living your life after having been deemed a politically liability whom no bank will touch and come back to me.
But you don't even need society wide nets to ruin a person, just industry wide. Remember when James Damore got fired and people tried to prevent him even getting any job back? Because I remember.
People always do this dance of pointing to some Emmanuel Goldstein that survived cancellation because they can't actually name the ones that were successfully ruined, since they disappeared from the internet since.
I personally know half a dozen such people. The modern world and its secular Cathedral does have excommunication. I know so.
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