domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
veqq
21hr ago
How do you get women (e.g. an aunt) to address structural issues like TikTok dependency?
CrispyFriedBarnacles
21hr ago
In my experience, anti-wokes are more likely to entertain the possibility of race and sex differences being biologically intrinsic, but they shy away from applying biological explanations to LGBT, preferring instead to endorse social constructivist theories
Is this an accurate description? I mean, obviously there are a lot of strands of anti-woke. But it seems to me that a slightly more nuanced read on this might be more like this, and I'm going to dip into analogies here...
Teenage girls being prone to anorexia in the 90s, or teenage girls being prone to cutting, were not biologically determined in the sense that there was a specific "I want to cut" gene that was being triggered, exactly, and cutting was those girls "true self". BUT it was almost certainly the case that many of the girls prone to cutting, or to anorexia, did have some other, background biological traits that made them more likely like to be susceptible to those manifestations of whatever else was going on with them on a deeper level. They had their own hardware, but the social ways it manifest were absolutely a kind of social software, and broader culture played a deeply important role in making those behaviors manifest the way they did... and different broader cultures could absolutely dampen or accentuate harmful behaviors.
Likewise, it is very likely that most school shooters have some biological things going on internally that worked against them. But it was obviously the massive coverage of Columbine that put a giant spotlight on "school shooting" as the cultural pattern that that kind of biology got channeled through subsequently.
I am no expert on HBD and black people, so I'm going to just sort of shrug on this topic. But I will say, because it's quite an interesting detail, that violent, destructive riots by black people in the 20th century has been a largely northern phenomenon in the U.S. Southern law-and-order has been much less coddling of such things, in general, but also, at least historically, Southern blacks were much less successfully targeted by radical activists with immigrant backgrounds from continental Europe that spread a radical culture of violent rioting as a way to force social change and try to spark revolution. Whatever is organically, biologically wrong black people (I will be rhetorically agnostic here, as it's not my point), clearly certain cultural strands can serve to make it far, far worse.
I could do this all day, of course. I don't think most anti-woke types would disagree with me too sharply, or maybe that's just a guess. This is a way of saying "it's nature AND nurture!", I suppose, but I don't think that quite gets at the deeper orientation, which is more something like, "nature is real, a lot of nature is pretty bad, healthy cultures cut with the grain of nature and try to steer it towards better, more pro-civilizational ends, there are absolutely limits about how far this can be taken because of the reality of nature, and certain ideologies work as arsonists in the face of these facts and are anti-civilizational to the core". And even accepting these tenants in broad strokes, different people could come down on different sides about how much culture can actually achieve, versus how much nature cannot be evaded.
So, putting these analogies down, I have to imagine that there a lot of people who put a lot of LGBT pretty firmly in something like the above framework - it's no more real than cutting or being a Quaker (which is to say, it exists culturally, it's very important to some people, but it doesn't exist the way that helium does), it probably is a manifestation of something deeper biologically (like whatever it is that gets manifested in cutting or rioting), the fact that it has even those natural roots doesn't mean it's in any sense good (which is just the naturalism fallacy anyway), and the rise of Queer identification (or even the rise of "identity" as a conceptual orienting principle in the first place) is obviously cultural, political, and activist driven. And just like you can accept that some people choose to live as Orthodox Jews and can accept giving them space to do so (and giving them space to believe things about you that you wouldn't appreciate) while balking at having their belief system aggressively pushed by the state, media, and shared educational bodies, so likewise with the LGBTQ+ movement. In this view, the science and liberal tolerance might've supported something like decriminalization on normal liberal grounds (liberal society tolerates all sorts of things that aren't clearly good or bad that subgroups care about), but active promotion?
It seems to me, anyway, that the current pop progressive stance goes, much, much further than all of this. It's something like, Science shows that gayness is exactly like having brown eyes or being left handed, and it's totally natural, and Science also somehow proves the normative claims that it's entirely morally neutral or even good, and it has existed in exactly the form we now recognize throughout all of human history, but we've finally become enlightened enough, and made enough progress, to recognize this and encourage people be who they truly are, and all of this applies to all humans who have ever lived universally, past, present, and future - and all traditions or religions that have ever been wary about this were always emphatically both incorrect and immoral. And there are no possibilities, now that we have it all figured out, that there will ever be any negative consequences at all to our new progress. And anyone who dissents from this framing is a bigot and should be hounded out of polite society as an example. I'm being a hyperbolic, but to be honest, this does capture roughly how it often seems to me (although I suspect some people might admit a bit more nuance if really pressed on an individual level).
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
Referencing the shortest AAQC I’ve ever gotten, that is because a same sex marriage is not real under historical understandings of marriage.
What the Supreme Court actually did was impose a new definition of marriage on the states.
Samizdata
21hr ago
Got an interesting article to share, with a goofy-ass twist.
https://farhakhalidi.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-male-centered-women?triedRedirect=true
So, my first thought is that it is rare to see a writer lay out so explicitly their hang-ups with sex positivity. She makes the case that heterosexual men exploit the “unwritten rules” of the dating game to string along women for sex, and in doing so, traumatize them through sheer carelessness.
I don’t completely disagree with her assessment of the situation, although I’m confused as to what her policy prescriptions are, and I think she’s in a “Be Careful What You Wish For” scenario.
If you’ll indulge me as I put on my over-analysis hat, the heterosexual dating marketplace can be viewed through an economic lens, with men and women modeled as agents within the marketplace.
The author is making the case that the current status quo privileges men’s interests at the expense of women’s. Even if women would prefer a longer “runway” towards consummating a relationship, it’s the men who get to set the timetable, with their implicit threat of walking away otherwise.
The optimal behavior for women, operating collectively as a self-interested guild within the heterosexual marketplace is to coordinate to demand maximal investment from men in exchange for romantic/sexual relationships. In other words, to collude, act as a monopolistic cartel and engage in price-fixing schemes.
Like every cartel ever, this is hard to enforce because every individual member’s incentive is to undercut the group-set price. It becomes especially hard to enforce in cases of romantic relationships, where people are not fungible economic actors with identical goals of maximizing profits, but flesh-and-blood human beings with radically different goals, desires, and libidos.
The solution that allows women to set a “price floor” for relationships, in spite of both those factors, is to use social technology to align their interests. In this case, that technology would be “slut-shaming”. Any woman who engages in behavior that undermines the interests of Women as a Collective (like being willing to be Chad’s booty call) is declared persona non grata at Mimosa Mondays and banished from the bookclub.
None of this will be new to the average Mottizen, although God knows we never get tired of re-hashing the gender wars. What I find especially interesting in this salvo is the delivery source. In another essay, the author explicitly rejects the patriarchal norms of the conservative community that she grew up in. Despite that, she still converges on advocating for basically traditional conservative sexual morality in women’s dating life.
My concern is that I’ve never really heard of a secular society with those kinds of restrictions on sexuality; the only places that successfully curtail premarital sex do so explicitly through a religious point of view. The Taliban has successfully prevented Afghan women from traumatizing themselves from Hookup Culture, but whether this is better for Women As A Class is left as an exercise for the reader.
The punch line to all this? The author, Farha Khalidi, is an Onlyfans star! She is the bête noire of conservative patriarchs across the globe, and every social system (that I’ve ever heard of) that frowns on premarital sex would consider what she does to be much worse.
So it begs the question: what, exactly, is she advocating for? Quite frankly, I’m not sure. If I had to guess, I think she wants a secular, sexually conservative sororiarchy, where women watch out for their gender’s collective interests and stop each other from undercutting their bids. Either way, an interesting point of view.
JarJarJedi
21hr ago
Thank you! I haven't remembered all the details from 20 years ago (the anniversary this month!). Re-reading it, the especially evil part is that the weed in question was absolutely undoubtedly for personal consumption, to treat a severe debilitating condition, with medical approval and supervision, allowed by state law - and yet Feds were absolutely adamant torturing a couple of women to death is what is right and proper to do.
I think that this "estrogen cures autism" analysis is false, for the simple reason that this reads like confirmation bias and (ironically) an attempt to systematize the effects of estrogen in a way directly counter to any notion of the author becoming less autistic. That being said, I'd assign something like a 1-5% chance that they're onto something, and that something would be really interesting if it was true, so for a bit I'm going to be arguing from that perspective.
Before anything else, let me establish that the "problem" with autism is difficulty communicating .That predictably leads to social deficits and-- guess what-- trans people report high levels of social isolation and loneliness (This figure includes FTM trans people too, which aren't what I'm talking about with autism, but I'll get to that later). Meanwhile, estrogen increases oxytocin and oxytocin reducing autism symptoms and oxytocin decreases the felt impact of social isolation. So immediately, there's a pretty compelling link between autism->feeling lonely->taking estrogen->feeling better that explains the "success" of the trans phenomenon, including the high rates of treatment satisfaction. This blog post goes one level deeper, and proposes an autism-schizoid axis that underlies the taking estrogen-feeling better link... and additionally, explains why trans people feel better even without taking hormones. Namely, if their problem is an excess of autistic traits, even just adopting the cultural behavior of a more schizoid culture is enough to make up for part of their social deficits-- and joining a dedicated community focused on doing the same thing reinforces that effect even further.
FTM trans people don't really make sense if you assume that autism compensation is the mechanism of action for transsexualism, but with the autism-schizoid axis they start to make more sense... being schizoid causes it's own form of social deficits that presumably testosterene helps compensate for. We know that testosterone encourages altruistic behavior under certain circumstances... I'm not sure how that would help it counter schizoid personalities, but it's certainly suggestive of something going on.
Put all that together with the fact that transexualism has increased pretty much in tandem with the simultaneous rise of autism/ADHD diagnoses and hormone disruptors like phthalates, microplastics, high fructose corn syrup, etc. and you can put together a comprehensive, self-consistent explanation for why this entire social movement in happening.
Again, I don't actually believe the article. Even if the author is right, I think their methodology is so wrong as to be useless. But it is interesting, and for that I have to respect it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
21hr ago
Less than $3,000 over ten years on a $30,000-50,000 purchase is fairly unimportant. If you can't afford the maintenance on your Tacoma, it's unlikely that the extra $3k over ten years would save you.
Whether that is all worth it for the cargo capacity, towing, or extra performance, well, I dunno.
It all comes down to style. People buy a car primarily for what they want to look like, not for what they need or want to do. You can tell, because minivans are a tiny segment of the market these days.
I think if I had my choice, I'd own both a smaller electric car for local commutes and have a mid-size pickup for long haul drives or moving cargo around.
I've always been in a weird place with cars, I've always had multiple vehicles available to me. Having a truck available is the best, driving one everywhere all the time less so.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
Young people in the fifties married poor and then became successful. They did not marry young because they were successful young.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
Young men have never been, by the standards of the society in which they live, ‘rich and successful’ those fifties families just married poor.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
Who is stealing detergent?
Lots of people, actually.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
21hr ago
Crime rates aren't based on conviction rates, though I broadly agree with your post as at certain point no one even reports some of this stuff.
HighResolutionSleep
21hr ago
That's good advice for individual men, but it's also a poor response to criticism of systemic issues associated with a promoted lifestyle. If Republicans want men to buy the house, they need to be willing to come up solutions to poor inspection results.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
21hr ago
Sure. Give me a working definition of in good graces and a stake.
Grant_us_eyes
21hr ago
You can't blame them that much, as the South, politically, was weird. You had cases in the South where the governorship and local politics as a whole were deep Blue, as you said, well into the 90s, but the presidency would go Red.
It certainly made me raise an eyebrow or two when I stumbled across that knowledge.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
22hr ago
Who is stealing detergent?
A while (a decade or more, now) back, there were a series of articles about Tide being used as street currency for drug sales. I'm uncertain if that is still true, or even was ever particularly common, but it probably is at least known to store managers.
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/01/14/why-would-drug-dealers-use-tide-as-a-currency
TIRM
22hr ago
I don't know how to reconcile those insistences with the stark change in my daily life.
Lack of prosecution artificially reduce crime stats. "Crime rates are down, actually" -> our local progressive prosecutor has declined to do their job, so unprosecuted crimes are now much more common.
TIRM
22hr ago
I'll bet the crime rates in my local major city are really quite low. Open drug selling and use is not prosecuted. Homeless shantytowns are allowed. Car break ins and retail theft are common but cops don't care. It's not even the cops' fault. Prosecutors won't prosecute so there would be no point in pursuing such criminals.
Indeed, if they decline to arrest and prosecute such criminals, then (convicted) crime rates must be low. My perception of property crime rates is rather higher since I see broken car glass on the sidewalk and many locked up items in stores. I bought a jacket and they were all locked together on cable locks. The employee explained that an organized theft gang rushed in and stole large numbers of coats, so now everything is cable locked. Grocery stores now have locked sections for not very expensive product. Who is stealing detergent? Anyways, I bet a review of local conviction rates would not reveal any of this.
Well - if I understand "we're not always capable of evaluating deep connections" correctly, the Christian answer is not even "I don't have time for your stupid questions", it's "I don't know how all of this works myself, but I trust the textbook and you should too".
...With the attendant evidence that trusting the textbook has a long history of delivering net-positive results, sure. Compare that to novel theories with no track record at best, emerging from "science" that is in fact negative-sum social status tournaments with minimal connection to concrete reality.
The ability to admit uncertainty is greatly preferable to false certainty. It's what you know that just ain't so.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
22hr ago
I'll take that bet.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
22hr ago
Recently on LessWrong: Estrogen: A trip report
(Yes, he's treating estrogen HRT as the type of psychedelic drug that might necessitate a "trip report".)
There's a lot to sift through here, but the most interesting part of the post to me was being introduced to the concept of the schizotypy spectrum, a related-but-distinct counterpart to the autism spectrum. Autistic traits and schizotypal traits both have similar outward manifestations (e.g. introversion and difficulties with social interaction), but they have different root causes and different internal subjective manifestations (principally, autistic types are higher in detail-orientation, and schizotypes are more prone to disorganized and delusional thinking):
A couple of years ago Ely recommended that I read the paper, Autistic-Like Traits and Positive Schizotypy as Diametric Specializations of the Predictive Mind (Andersen, 2022). It turned out to be the most interesting paper I read while writing this post. The author proposes that the archetypal behavioural traits observed in autism and schizotypy – like variation in attentional modulation, theory of mind, and exploratory behaviour – are downstream from a fundamental oversensitivity or undersensitivity to sensory prediction errors, respectively:
It has previously been argued that autism-spectrum conditions can be understood as resulting from a predictive-processing mechanism in which an inflexibly high weight is given to sensory-prediction errors that results in overfitting their predictive models to the world. Deficits in executive functioning, theory of mind, and central coherence are all argued to flow naturally from this core underlying mechanism.
The diametric model of autism and psychosis suggests a simple extension of this hypothesis. If people on the autism spectrum give an inflexibly high weight to sensory input, could it be that people with a predisposition to psychosis (i.e., people high in positive schizotypy) give an inflexibly low weight to sensory input?
[...]According to these models, everyone falls somewhere on the autism–schizotypy continuum, and neither autistic-like traits nor positive schizotypy represent dysfunction. Instead, each side of the continuum is accompanied by its own set of cognitive-perceptual strengths and weaknesses. People high in autistic-like traits are detail-oriented, have a focused attentional style that allows them to ignore distractors, have some advantages in sensory-discrimination abilities, and have highly developed systemizing skills, allowing them to learn and use complicated rules-based systems.
People high in positive schizotypy tend to be imaginative and creative and have a more diffuse attentional style (compared with the average person) that allows them to switch their attention more easily. There is also some evidence that people high in positive schizotypy tend to direct their attention toward highly abstract, "big-picture" concerns rather than focusing on details.
[...]Although the autistic type may rely more on culturally inherited high-level belief systems, the schizotype's proclivity for tinkering with high-level priors may lead to the construction of relatively idiosyncratic high-level belief systems. In our own culture, this could manifest as having odd or (seemingly) unlikely beliefs about high-level causes. This may include beliefs in the paranormal, idiosyncratic religious beliefs (e.g., being "spiritual but not religious"), or believing conspiracy theories, all of which are associated with positive schizotypy.
The author of the post then goes on to claim that, subjectively, estrogen caused him to experience a shift away from autistic traits and towards schizotypal traits:
I'll outline some of the psychological changes I've noticed in myself since starting estrogen. The term "schizo" is used very informally in today's internet vernacular, making it difficult to discuss these concepts in a sensible manner – but if the reader is comfortable playing armchair psychologist, perhaps they can judge for themselves whether the following makes me more "schizo":
- Increased predisposition towards associative thinking. Activities like tarot are more appealing.
- Increased predisposition towards magical thinking, leading to some idiosyncratic worldviews. This can probably be gauged by the nonsense I post on Twitter.
- Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life. This felt really good.
- Increased mentalising of other people's internal states, resulting in a mixture of higher empathy and higher social anxiety. I'm somewhat more neurotic about potential threats.
- Decreased sensory sensitivity.
- Decreased attentional diffusion, contrary to what the paper predicts.
- Decreased systematising and attention to detail, for instance with tedious matters like finances.
Obviously this all has to be taken with a grain of salt, because the risk of confounding factors and psychosomatic/placebo effects in this case is high. Nonetheless, I'm curious whether pre-existing schizotypal traits in an individual (contrary to the author's experience in which HRT induced these traits) might play a causal role in explaining the abnormally high incidence rate of MTF transsexuality among so-called "terminally online" young men. By "terminally online" I mean the prototypical image of this demographic: likely to be in a STEM field, likely to have had little romantic success with women, likely to have obsessive "nerdy" interests like anime and video games, etc. This demographic is often stereotyped as "autistic", although that label may potentially conflict with the fact that MTF transsexuals are disproportionately drawn from this demographic as well, since it's not clear a priori why a disorder that allegedly gives you a "hyper male brain" would also make you more likely to want to be a woman. But if some of these "autistic" men actually belong to other personality clusters that have a tendency to masquerade as autism, it could help us build a higher resolution mapping of this region of cognitive space and provide more accurate explanations of the trajectories of different individuals (especially because one of the schizotypal traits is, as mentioned previously, a predisposition towards delusional thinking).
Regardless of which theory ultimately turns out to be correct, I think the biological basis of LGBT traits (or at least, which intrinsic traits increase one's predisposition towards being LGBT) is a subject that deserves further study. In my experience, anti-wokes are more likely to entertain the possibility of race and sex differences being biologically intrinsic, but they shy away from applying biological explanations to LGBT, preferring instead to endorse social constructivist theories (and in particular, the "social contagion" theory for transsexuality). Wokes are the opposite, heavily opposing biological explanations for race and sex differences but somewhat warmer towards biological explanations for LGBT (although they may not allow themselves to present it in exactly those terms). I prefer the simple, consistent position: it's all (at least partially) biological! Social contagion is undoubtedly a part of why the incidence rate of transsexuality has skyrocketed in the last several decades, although I think it's clear that only some people are susceptible to "catching" the contagion in the first place, and one's individual susceptibility is biologically mediated.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
22hr ago
It seems to me that feminists and red-pillers agree on most ground facts
More generally, it seems to me that progressives and traditionalists agree on most ground facts, and the fighting is mostly just the narcissism of small differences/whose brand gets to be on top.
(Some red-pillers are not traditionalists, of course, but they're not a major influence compared to those that are.)
HighResolutionSleep
22hr ago
When I feel my radicalism softening, someone always comes in to remind me that winning World War III is more achievable than giving men a birthright buy-in to their own societies.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
22hr ago
It seems to me that feminists and red-pillers agree on most ground facts, e.g., men work longer hours and make more money. They simply disagree as to whether the facts are a bad or a good thing.
So no surprise that they should be in agreement about the facts on this topic.
sun_the_second
22hr ago
"I don't have time for your stupid questions, go look up the answer in the textbook" is two lies for the price of one: first, the person does in fact generally have time to answer questions, they just don't want to, and second, the textbook doesn't have the answers either. The equivalence you are drawing is non-existent.
Well - if I understand "we're not always capable of evaluating deep connections" correctly, the Christian answer is not even "I don't have time for your stupid questions", it's "I don't know how all of this works myself, but I trust the textbook and you should too".
If I were obscenely Bezos-Musk-Gates tier rich, I would organize a season of the reality TV dating show The Bachelorette with every contestant having the option to challenge every other contestant to a formal sport-rules fight at any time. The fight would have no non-social impact on the competition: the loser doesn't have to go home, the winner can be sent home by the lead; and the challenged competitor doesn't have to say yes, it can be turned down without being sent home automatically. So the season would be a real-time experiment in how women (both the lead and audience reactions) feel about men engaging in violent duels. Is challenging someone attractive or unattractive? Is it deadly to refuse a challenge? Is it sexy to fight even if you lose, or are you better off refusing if you think you might lose? How much sexier is it to win? Is there a point at which winning too hard is actually less sexy, because you look like a jerk?
I don't know the answers to these questions, though I can guess. But I want to know! I think we'd watch two dozen former college football players invent the code duello from scratch as they went along!
I'm also of the opinion that paparazzi, and anyone else filming anyone in public, should be subject to physical violence by those they are filming.
Normalizing personal violence is agency-producing: men who get into fights learn that they can fight, men who never do fear that they can't. It allows people like landlords and shop owners and teachers to engage in self-help when dealing with jerks. It will improve society in numerous ways!
And I'd still hope to never get into a fight.
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