domain:slatestarcodex.com
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
1d ago
I didn’t take it as an insult lol, just thought it might be a fun factoid for people who didn’t know how much overlap we had (I know of a couple high-profile mottizens who have confirmed they post there)
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
Depends on the date. The SA was the Nazi militia before Hitler took power, and engaged in a lot of non-state political violence. After Hitler consolidated power it had become an embarrassment (it was also a hotbed of Nazis who took the "Socialist" part of "National Socialist" more seriously than Hitler's new industrialist buddies were comfortable with) so it was dealt with in the Night of the Long Knives.
cjet79
1d ago
The Waffles article is a reminder of how much I hate interacting with other parts of the internet.
Its a writing style that consists almost entirely of assigning the worst possible terms you can get away with to people you don't like. "Fascist", "race scientist", "shit-head", "racist", "white supremacist", etc. No regard for truth value, just pure culture warring and mud slinging.
I barely learned anything reading the article. There was about one paragraph of content explaining something that happened and then like 30 paragraphs of name-calling. That half paragraph that is most useful is here so no one else has to visit that link:
A little while back, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber approvingly tweeted a post by Jerry Chen about a person bursting into a Waffle House and shouting "oh, so you hate pancakes?". In the replies, someone asked her why she'd not yet banned notorious transphobe, fascist and serial instigator of harassment campaigns Jesse Singal from the platform, to which she replied with only "Waffles!".
Even in those two sentences she couldn't help but throw out some names.
I have to wonder if part of this writing style is a leftover problem of "micro" blogging platforms like twitter. In isolation you might believe those things about Jesse Singal, and it would be very useful to learn that thing. So a tweet saying that would get boosted up and retweeted.
But when its paragraph after paragraph of everyone being called a fascist, or some other thing that is the worst thing a progressive liberal can think about someone. You can't help but notice that this writer thinks everyone is a terrible awful no good human piece of garbage. And suddenly the information content collapses from "this person she is speaking about is really really bad" to just "she doesn't like this person, and everything she says about anyone is suspect".
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".
If your default is to be nice, kind, and charitable to everyone, then if you ever need to stray from that default and say bad things about someone we know you really mean it. If your default is to insult everyone you just look like a misanthrope.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1d ago
And the HBDers here will be very aware of the demographic breakdowns between those two positions (and it's not usually a switch these days but more likely an electrical cord).
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1d ago
Still in complete agreement!
For the sake of completeness though, I think I have undersold just how obsessive our girl is about fetching. This behavior:
Whereas every collie I see playing fetch seems to have it optimized down to a science of how to get and return the ball as quickly as possible, and then to grind out as many repetitions as possible as fast as possible.
Maybe they're actually having a ton of fun doing it, but it just feels very serious in a way other dogs playing fetch doesn't.
That's her when fetching, just completely obsessed with the activity to the extent that she completely ignores other dogs, doesn't want to take even the smallest break, and sprints the ball back as quickly as possible until she's fatigued enough to decide she's had enough. She's an ex-breeder that I think developed some neurotic habits from the confined lifestyle prior to her moving to our home setting, and is also epileptic - there are some neurologic oddities that I think keep her from being entirely normal, so we just kind of roll with that. The finding games at home are a more relaxed, playful activity, but fetching is very serious business.
But yeah, more generally, I know exactly what you mean. I don't understand why people insist on getting these working breeds as city dogs where they're just wildly out of place and obviously have strong drives to do other things. For an old lab, even one that's neurotic about fetching, spending the vast majority of the day laying around is pretty optimal for her, but collies and Aussies and other herding dogs are clearly just losing their minds. I really don't get how their owners look at behavior that is just short of literally chewing on themselves and think it's fine.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1d ago
you have to look around you and determine that actually maybe I’m the one who believes something that makes for a worse, less fulfilled society,
See the semi-recent post by @WhiningCoil about realizing he was raised incorrectly, or even that substack post by Bismarck where he realizes he, in fact, is the rootless cosmopolitan.
2rafa
1d ago
Congratulations on finding a faith, it makes me happy to know I played some (very) small part in it, and I wish you all the best on that journey.
Choosing to get baptized into a transcendental faith, especially (a nominally) Christian one, after or because of creating a list of temporal pros and cons is wildly contrary to the faith itself.
I didn’t say that this list is why I got baptized. But if I’m trying to justify/explain the decision to people who are totally uninterested in any non-secular reasons, it makes sense to actually take stock of what is happening on a secular level.
That being said, I will openly admit that I have no interest in “hating the world”, nor in spending my every waking hour preparing for the afterlife. I don’t actually believe that this is what Jesus demands of me, and if it is, then I’m going to fail to live up to his demands. I do think the things of the world, including the works of man in the material world, are beautiful and important and meaningful and worth preserving. I’m not especially concerned with the prospect of a rapture that will sweep away the civilizations of men and totally remake the world; I will leave that for future people who will be around for it to consider more closely. 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, but I certainly do not plan to sell all of my possessions and forsake all material desire, as seemingly demanded by the Jesus of the Gospels.
2rafa
1d ago
You can make a soup by frying, say, various raw ingredients and then pouring water over them in a big pot and bringing it to the boil and then eventually after some time consuming it. There are ways of making coffee that are mechanically extremely similar.
Honestly I think the price of ec2 in terms of server time is somewhat reasonable. Not reasonable-reasonable, but like within 4x the cost of actual hardware and electricity, and honestly it's close-to-cost if you sign a year long contract for provisioning.
Last I looked, the moment you ask for something with a bit more RAM, the prices start getting very goofy.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1d ago
noted race scientist Scott Siskind
Steve Sailer heartbroken.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1d ago
This topic is difficult to break down because people will use "spanking" to refer to both "fifty lashes with a switch to a 12 year old for sass" and "quick swat on the bottom to tell a toddler to stop being suicidal".
benmmurphy
1d ago
The post is interesting because they have titles like: 'We need to kill the "coding" concept' but are part of the blueksky zeitgeist that is anti-LLM. If you really hate these 'man-children' maybe you should be pushing the boundaries of LLMs in order to replace the need for people who type arcane runes into the machine.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1d ago
It's called code-switching, and it's actually very brat.
This is a known strategy, but coming after a discussion on the downsides of wireheading, it creates a certain cognitive dissonance.
As I recall, my objection to wireheading was largely that it seemed unaesthetic and depressing, that I don’t want to be the human version of a mouse in a dopamine button experiment, etc, and that I think it is probably inherently unfulfilling. I even included a personal example of what I think that kind of life leads to among the very rich, which you refuted by implying they probably just need to recalibrate their own measures of life satisfaction.
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 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.
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.
Good luck, I can't really find it in me to condemn you, but I wish you hadn't gone down this rabbit hole even if it has hot blondes and fun, family-friendly activities along the way.
At some point, and I think a few ‘sacred cows’ of liberalism are like this, you have to look around you and determine that actually maybe I’m the one who believes something that makes for a worse, less fulfilled society, no matter how “objectively true” it is (and often it isn’t, even, objectively true, although I think on religion it might be). Better that my children should be happy believers than unhappy philosophers.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
What actual bad effects would that have on my life?
Probably very little to none, as you've stated before.
The cost would be eternal damnation in the afterlife. Pascal will take your bet, and I'll offer him some default swaps on the side.
Choosing to get baptized into a transcendental faith, especially (a nominally) Christian one, after or because of creating a list of temporal pros and cons is wildly contrary to the faith itself. The whole point is to "hate the world" and constantly seek to prepare for the afterlife.
I don't know enough about Mormon theology to offer any specific guidance or raise any ideas for you here. Personally, I consider it to be basically a multilevel marketing cult.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
1d ago
Honestly I think the price of ec2 in terms of server time is somewhat reasonable. Not reasonable-reasonable, but like within 4x the cost of actual hardware and electricity, and honestly it's close-to-cost if you sign a year long contract for provisioning.
The way they try to fuck you on bandwidth though is just beyond the pale.
Based on a bit of research I'll probably just slop this out with Hetzner cloud. Their stuff lives in Germany, they charge $.0012/gb going both ways, and ultimately all I need is a dumb pipe that I can kill with little commitment.
Skulldrinker
1d ago
It never stops showing me queer leftists with BLM ACAB in their "Lets make sure we're on the same page about."
I fucking HATE Hinge prompts and the tone they enforce.
the_Culture_is_great
1d ago
For the most part yes, you shouldn't renege on agreements "you" made (I'm not fully aware of the history here, but the people who made the agreement, and the people who refused to enforce it aren't completely the same people).
But also it was slavery. In today's day and age the moral question is settled - it's abhorrent, and free societies should do everything practical to stop it. Breaking the agreement is much less morally reprehensible than actually keeping slaves.
07mk
1d ago
I'm no longer a 4channer, unfortunately, but 15+ years ago, I used to use it heavily. Spending time there and seeing how communities can develop when anonymity is enforced both through trivial inconveniences and norms, on top of not only tolerance for but celebration of the breaking of taboos and common decency is one of the main things that convinced me of the value of free speech. In my 30+ years of using the internet, 4chan remains the most loving, welcoming, dynamic, and fun community I've encountered. TheMotte comes a distant 2nd and is even better in some aspects, but falls far behind in others.
Skulldrinker
1d ago
It just mentioned him vaguely positively, but I feel like the implication is there.
I just despair that when given limited space to convey your personality to a potential romantic partner, someone talked about their favorite rich himbo clout-chasing socialist. As I said, it made me put my phone down for a while.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
Totally agree with this. And young men taking risks is, frankly, how society moves forwards with new discovery.
Right now, however, young men are being told to take zero risk, to artificially castrate themselves, and to enjoy doing it.
I’ve switched to Yerba Mate (which is fully permitted under current doctrine) and it has not been a major step down. Eventually I might try and find some sort of caffeine powder (I know there are caffeine pills, but the ones I’ve seen are like 200mg, which is a massive amount to consume all at once) to mix into water or something, to reduce my sugar consumption.
More options
Context Copy link