domain:lesswrong.com
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17hr ago
I'm on your side. The whole thing feels like a tempest in a teapot. I understand why the NFL fined him, because you can't have that kind of thing happening, but I don't think he's like a bad person or something.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17hr ago
Adjust around it. Build a routine of exercises that don't irritate it, and focus on those for several months.
marinuso
17hr ago
It makes at least a bit of sense to stop supporting a commercial business if they do things you don't like.
Pynewacket
17hr ago
you know, it doesn't make you less admitting when you fucked up and didn't think things through. Torturing logic like you are doing does.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
17hr ago
It also highlights why some of Scott Alexander's takedowns of people are so damn effective and brutal. He will spend a lot of writing space saying many nice things about people that seem objectively bad. And then he will end by saying something slightly not nice about one person, and you come away thinking "damn that person must be the worst piece of shit ever".
Honestly, this also describes most of Singal's work, which is I suspect part of why he's so hated for, as far as I can tell, things like questioning small-n studies that have been embraced broadly with shockingly few published followups now that drastically more data should be available.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
17hr ago
(also @sarker and @JarJarJedi)
Here's a post from Catholic Answers that is already more fleshed out than what I could scribble into a comment: LINK
@Hoffmeister25, specifically:
I think there are benefits to trying to check my own animal instincts by weighing them against the example of Christ-like charity and temperance
We'll probably just hard disagree here, but there is no "weigh against." It isn't okay to be just the right amount of selfish. In the Imitation of Christ, we continually make hard attempts towards sanctification. We can make progress but will always fall short of his perfect example. That's the inevitability of sin. The good news (Good News?) is that through grace we can be forgiven our inevitable sins. But they remain sins nonetheless. I get worried when I see things like your phrasing "weighing against" -- because this can easily become an obstinate habit towards sin paired with a self-forgiveness.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
17hr ago
The duties remain, but the actual structure that supported and encouraged performance of those duties have atrophied.
Agreed, and I'd totally support fixing them back up (reactionary Monarchist, here).
That promise has been eroded and replaced with nothing, the duties have no real attachment to any underlying purpose whatsoever, and the previously stableish equilibrium has been wrecked by unpunished defectors.
How can you not expect rebellion at that point?
Because material comfort, electronic distractions, ersatz simulacra of success, etc. dull the rebellious spirits of the youth. Obesity, falling testosterone levels, and psychiatric drugs all suppress it further. Plus, peasant revolts have always failed outside of East Asia, and modern states have (or are gaining) various institutional and technological advantages that make them increasingly rebellion-proof.
Basically, all the same reasons Tyler Cowen gave in Average is Over for why we won't expect rebellion when 80% of the population, rendered economically superfluous by automation, are immiserated and packed into overcrowded favelas to subsist on beans.
They ain't going to fight for a civilization that doesn't at least pretend to work in their favor.
Oh yes. This is indeed a recipe for the collapse of liberal civilization, with basically two possible outcomes depending on how well memetic transmission of modern Western views can be maintained.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
17hr ago
Hilariously seems like Bluesky has the inverse of the Witches Problem.
Like "reverse racism" is just racism, "inverse Witch Problem" just means the left did, in fact, have a Witch Problem. It's not a different thing.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
17hr ago
Where the Traditionalist view fails now is answering what equally-unchosen duties and obligations apply to women, what mechanism is attempting to enforce their application to women, and what society's duties and obligations towards men are. The answers to those three questions seem to be a hat trick of "nothing," which makes the Traditionalist view less than compelling.
For the Fox News normie-con values of "Traditionalist," or the kinds of (now shrinking) church congregations Dalrock used to write about, sure.
But, yes, some real traditionalists, who have managed to resist the GOP-flavored version of feminism, do at least have answers for the first and third questions, even if, due to their small size, their enforcement mechanisms are limited (at least for now).
Hilariously seems like Bluesky has the inverse of the Witches Problem.
The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
They witch-hunted all the witches off Twitter, pushed them to Gab, Twitter, Parler, Truth, etc., then a new monarch came to power and let (most of) the witches return.
So the witch-hunters all filed off to form a new community that was in theory was against witch-hunts but also promised to prevent the witches from doing their witchy stuff too much.
Witch-Hunters started making some really questionable accusations and some of the accused just shrugged and returned to twitter, and a few leaned into it and antagonized the witch-hunters enough to garner the current reaction.
Like its crazy, Bluesky might have managed to gain real traction as a Twitter alternative if the users were allowed to have fun and the primary userbase wasn't exactly as censorious and bigoted (using the proper broad definition, look it up!) as their stereotype. Now its arguably a more petulant echo chamber/breeding ground for radicalism than ANY of the RW twitter alternatives.
Now they can't even easily return to twitter because the witches are pretty well entrenched. Also they've declared the owner of the site to be a particularly dangerous witch.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
17hr ago
It's interesting, my earliest Santa memories were that St Nicholas was a real person, that we give gifts at Christmas because of his generous example, and that many people (including my Grandparents) liked to pretend to give gifts from St Nicholas (aka Santa Claus). But I don't remember ever spilling the beans to any other kids even accidentally.
Today my only regret is not learning about the Santa legend that he punched out a heretic (often Arius himself) at the Council of Nicaea earlier.
JarJarJedi
17hr ago
The whole point is to "hate the world" and constantly seek to prepare for the afterlife.
I don't think this is what Christian faith is about (obligatory note: I am not a Christian and have no authority to speak for them). There are some people in it that do that, but it's in no way an universal requirement, at least to my extent of observing many Christians.
ThisIsSin
PC is for progressive-conservative
17hr ago
My conversion therapy was done with a priest
Yeah, they're very powerful. Once you hear their message- powerful enough to be condensed into a single word- all of a sudden your clothes (and banners, and even your cars on occasion) change color and you're instantly batting for the other team.
In all seriousness, I have no idea how you'd teach a man more interested in beards and shoulders to love tits and ass instead. I get that that maybe isn't the primary driver, but then again, if it was comprehensible the mechanism of action would be more well-known to the point you'd have more people casually attempting it. Then again, I wouldn't expect people to shout such a conversion from the rooftops, so...
it stands to reason someone, somewhere, can turn them straight
But that would require a bunch of tomboys and/or cougars willing to debase themselves (for the most unattractive men available, given a traditional female standpoint) in a professional capacity, and those are in short enough supply already.
but also not something that has a justification
Do anti-blasphemy laws help keep people in the faith?
JarJarJedi
17hr ago
I'm increasingly skeptical about this whole "lying to yourself" business. The reason is, we lie to ourselves in so many ways. Sometimes because we are ignorant (and the reality being so vast, most people are ignorant in a real lot of subjects), sometimes because we are lazy, sometimes because it's too hard to face the unadorned truth, sometimes because the truth would be detrimental to what we want to achieve, or maybe because it's more profitable to believe something other than the truth. Is it really that huge a deal doing it one more or less time, or this is just an inflated ego speaking - "they may have fooled those idiots, but they are never fooling ME!". And then he goes and buys stuff and drinks stuff and eats stuff because the TV told him so (one of the ways, not a personal observation).
Really, if you think about it for a while, there's a lot of self-fooling involved, and probably necessary, for normal life. True, self-fooling about "is there a God and what does he want from me?" may be a bit bigger deal than self-fooling about "is eating this fast food meal really good for me?" but is the difference in kind or merely in degree?
I do not say it's necessarily always good to be fooled. I'm just saying maybe sometimes it's not that bad, if the beneficial outcome is worth it. And also maybe when people say "I just can't let myself be fooled" it's something else than the insatiable lust for truth is speaking. Because they must know they are letting themselves be fooled already in so many ways - at least if they give themselves a time to think about it. I can imagine a person that goes radical "no fooling ever, for any reason, I'll always get to the ultimate absolute truth in every matter" and lives a life like that - but that would not be what one calls a normal life, and would likely be very unpleasant to be both in and around it.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
17hr ago
Will it harm you to believe in an ancient Levantine civilization that spread across the Americas without leaving behind any archeological or anthropological traces? No, not in itself. Nor would believing that the Archangel Gabriel dictated the Quran to an illiterate 7th century Arab goatherd. Nor would believing that the sun revolves around the Earth.
For me, anyway, epistemic hygiene is pretty close to my terminal value. Truth is the highest virtue. Without truth, no other principles are meaningful. Yes, I know, no one can ever know the truth, we're all fumbling towards the closest approximation of the truth we can perceive, but you should be striving towards it, not averting your eyes from it. You and @2rafa are basically saying "Truth is less important than other things, like living in a nice community with people who make life pleasant even if they believe silly things."
I cannot adequately express how strongly I disagree with that.
I could live in that community. I could agree to follow their rules. I could tolerate their silly beliefs. I could not lie about what I believe. (I mean, if my life depended on it, I guess I would pretend. I'd feel dirty about it, and murderously resentful.)
I understand why some people choose to believe things that are beneficial to them, or at least go through the motions of believing and studiously avoid looking behind the curtain. But I can't do it and I kind of look down on people who do, to be honest.
To take this slightly out of the religious context: I live in a very blue bubble and most of my friends and family are very woke. Despite being pretty liberal compared to the average Mottizen, I'm basically a dissident now. I have never lied about what I believe, but I do frequently stay silent when certain topics come up, because it's not worth the fight. Recently, even my silence has occasionally been noted and my inability to make convincing sounds of affirmation is probably going to lose me some friends.
I resent this, and I don't see it as being a lot different than pretending to believe in the Angel Moroni and Joseph Smith's golden tablets, if my social relationships depended on pretending to take them seriously.
On the subject of "Believing things that are convenient, or at least pretending to believe them because they are pro-social," I'm going to bring up a more pertinent example for you. I have made the point before that if HBD is true, it's going to be a very hard sell to, for example, black people, that they should just accept their lot in life (specifically, the lot that white supremacists would like to assign to them). I got downvoted and scolded for that on the mistaken assumption that I was advocating the Noble Lie, that we should pretend HBD isn't true even if it is. But that is never what I said. What I did say is that I can sympathize with people who are unwilling to believe something that might be true but which has brutal implications for them and their loved ones, and that whatever social contract we negotiate based on that is going to have to take that into account. But other people would absolutely embrace the Noble Lie. Indeed, I personally think a lot of liberals have–on HBD issues, on trans issues, on immigration–in other words, they know the truth but pretend not to, and will actively attack those who speak it. This is, from their perspective, pro-social. You, I am pretty sure, would disagree. But in the realm of religious beliefs, the Noble Lie is what you are advocating. "Even if Joseph Smith never discovered any golden tablets and the Lammanites didn't exist, pretending to believe it gives me access to a great community." Well, okay then. I understand why you would make that decision. But I don't respect it.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
17hr ago
Being an atheist doesn't make you infertile, so that's a questionable question in the first place. I really doubt that that's the tradeoff he's facing, if it is, I'd recommend getting a mail order bride or becoming a sperm donor.
Quantumfreakonomics
17hr ago
my observation is that bluesky is resisting its best of becoming an "ideological monoculture", failing at that though.
I guess my question is, why are they resisting this? The hardest part of making a successful social media site is building the userbase. The current Bluesky userbase consists almost entirely of people who left Twitter because it wasn’t an ideological monoculture. Owning a site with an annoying userbase is better than owning a site with no userbase.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
17hr ago
I'm happy for your dog :)
At risk of circle jerking also fully agree LOL
I have a strong preference towards intelligent dogs but I couldn't own a Collie, Blue Heeler, or the other mega energy smart ones. It does just feel like you're committing it to a life of under-stimulation and frustration.
By contrast, looking at the happy, stable, prosperous, fecund, clean, healthy and attractive Mormon community and concluding that it would be a smart move to join them is precisely the opposite philosophical choice, the equivalent of taking up the hard work of, say, going to the gym or forcing yourself onto 20 first dates in a year because you know the outcome of a healthier body or an eventual happy marriage and family are things that will fulfil you more than your present existence.
That is a poor analogy. As far as I'm aware, while hitting the gym or going on first dates are difficult and uncomfortable, they do not necessarily include lying to yourself. Sure, maybe it might be instrumentally helpful to overestimate the gains, or project self-confidence you lack. If you're getting 20 first dates at all, you likely don't need that.
Friends, family and community do not necessarily require lies either. Though it might be occasionally helpful to claim you believe your team will win or that the casserole was delicious.
Even wireheading doesn't necessitate lying either. It well might in practice, but I'm sure there are people who would enter of their own volition and without delusion regarding the implications or consequences of their actions.
That is not to disagree completely. I won’t speak for @Hoffmeister25, but I think it would be hard for me, or most of us here, to truly convincingly become Mormons in the religious sense. There are some very smart born Mormons here who have indeed, despite being part of this largely (post-)rationalist and atheist community, resisted the urge to look behind the curtain, and I respect them for that, but I have looked behind the curtain and read the catastrophically persuasive takedown of the entire structural basis for the faith written by that one guy and widely shared online and I think I would find it hard to overcome that.
As much as I would like to claim otherwise, being smart, thoughtful and a fan of the tenets of rationality isn't a guarantee that you'll succeed at the process. It doesn't even guarantee you'll be happier. Even from a values perspective, many people just don't care about truth and internal-coherence as much as I do. There is no panacea for delusion and bad decisions, just actions and traits that make succumbing to them less likely.
But does it matter? Hundreds of generations of extremely intelligent people lived and died as true believers of the absolute sort, could not even conceive of an atheism in the way we do today. Hoff’s children will be believers, will (or had least may) resist looking behind the curtain they have known their whole lives, and so at ‘worst’ he is making a sacrifice for their happy and prosocial future.
It matters to me. That is not the same as me saying it should matter to him, or you. For what it's worth, I have plenty of respect for all the atheists who came before, who lived in a time of much greater ignorance, who still figured out the truth without the same tools at hand.
But, as I've replied to Hoff:
Unfortunately, as your nod to your future status as paterfamilias suggests, you're not just selling your soul. You're selling those of your future children.
That? Beyond the pale for me. I think religion is bad enough as is, but it's even harder to shake off when it's drilled into you from birth, and just about all of your social status and community hinges on staying within its framework. My understanding is that while Mormons aren't as hard on apostates as, for example, Muslims beheading heathens, it's still social death to deconvert. If your children wanted to leave, they'd likely lose you. And then you'd face the choice of being with them, or keeping your own standing.
Every incentive, from the Young Single Adults ward to the social pressure against apostasy, is optimized to keep people within the fold. From a systems-design perspective, it's a very neat trick.
By raising children in this environment, you are choosing to place them in a system where leaving the faith often means losing their entire social world, and potentially their family. You are trading their future intellectual autonomy for their present (and likely future) social stability and happiness. This might even be a good trade. But it is a trade you are making on their behalf.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
17hr ago
By raising children in this environment, you are choosing to place them in a system where leaving the faith often means losing their entire social world, and potentially their family.
My concern is that the price is higher than it appears, and that the bill will be paid not just by you, but by the family you hope to build.
But it very likely means he's having a family and children. The LDS attorneys I know are out-reproducing the non-LDS ones by a ratio of 3:1 or 4:1 (actually more given all the ones I know with zero children, such as myself). At what cost epistemic hygiene if it means no children?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
17hr ago
I think what's most fascinating about Blusky, is it's the only case I know of where the lefties were exiled (well, self exiled) from a supposedly "neutral" platform. Every other time it ever happened, it was because the TOS or the Trust & Safety teams came down like a brick of shit on their right wing political opposition. This caused two things. When the people who got banned went to voat.co or gab or where ever, it concentrated things and made them look even crazier than they seemed before, making the right as a whole look kind of unhinged. The second thing it did was further entrench leftism as the "default". It's just being a good persontm.
Twitter going the opposite direction has been seismic in pushing back against both. The overton window has expanded to include more rightwing thoughts, and now the left is over on Blusky acting completely unhinged.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
17hr ago
I think it’s an artifact of social media and the attention economy. The only real way to stand out in the vast sea of ordinary people posting about your topic is to be as noisy and obnoxious and name-calling as you can get away with. If Trump is just wrong you get nothing— no likes, no shares, no comments, you are not going to be seen by many people. If Trump is an evil narcissistic authoritarian Christian nationalist, you get seen. Short form doesn’t help things, because it doesn’t allow for nuanced writing, but short content displayed chronologically wouldn’t push people to that degree because doing so would not make more people see the post. It’s like all the people posting are being manipulated into being shock jocks just to be noticed and so all of them eventually realize that being shocking and mean is the best way to win, and being deleted is actually a good thing because you are then the kind of poster not afraid to tell it like it is.
Rov_Scam
17hr ago
You're ignoring the fact that, according to Neilsen, about 20% of people in the US rely on OTA TV to receive local stations, myself included, and that number is in excess of 30% in some markets. This is up from 2008, when only 15% of households relied on antenna broadcasts. In 2008 on-demand and internet-based video services didn't really exist, and cable-television was bigger. Also in 2008, we were freeing up a part of the spectrum by making TV stations switch to digital transmission. This theoretically affected even fewer households, as nothing needed to be done unless your TV was several years old, but the changeover was delayed by six months, and the change was only accomplished by the government handing out coupons for free converter boxes. Telling 20% of the country that they have to pay for television or give it up is a nonstarter.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
17hr ago
But there's one simple phrase that makes me doubt that "causing mass death without inherently presenting yourself as a target of investigation" is simply as easy as "practicing even rudimentary opsec" — and that's "parallel construction."
There are parts of the Mangione story that I doubt for this reason.
I see parallel construction on a semi-regular basis in mundane drug stops. Boy, it's remarkably convenient that a local cop happened to stop this particular 18-wheeler for a traffic violation, had a drug dog ready and got a positive alert, and immediately measured the inside length of the trailer that revealed the hidden compartment in the front of the fully-loaded trailer. Incredible odds on that one.
So there is zero question in my mind it's happening on a much larger basis, and the only question is just how much of it is going on.
It also makes it quite remarkable that the person who planted the pipe bombs on Jan 5 has never been caught. So remarkable that it some might say it glows.
Seconding all of this as incredibly true to my experience. If it wasn't for the references to you job being coding, I'd wonder if this was an alt account of mine that I post on while sleep walking.
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