domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
Some types of people are so used to deriving their self worth from their (real or imagined) intellect that they can no longer admit to being influenced by their base human drives. They are Prometheus unbound! ‘Twas their mind that was seduced, not their PP! Aellla provides just enough of a fig leaf to allow her fans to maintain this ruse. It’s a bit hilarious and sad to anyone outside of the bit, its obviously no more intellectual or advanced than a Midwestern boomer AWWOOOOOOOGAA-ing over the local Hooters waitress.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1d ago
I think "pathos" is a better and more neutral term for this concept.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia.
Just wanted to drop a quick correction here: “qualia” does not mean “non-physical”. Qualia just means “conscious experience”. The word is entirely neutral regarding the question of what conscious experience actually is or what causes it. It could be physical, or it could be non-physical. But it’s still a qualia all the same.
I say this because the word “qualia” has gotten a reputation in some circles as being a “woo word” which causes people of a more materialist bent to nope out of the conversation whenever it comes up, and I really don’t think that has to be the case. It’s just a convenient word for describing the, well, actual conscious-experience part of conscious experience, as opposed to say its objectively observable behavioral or neurophysiological correlates. It’s just a handy word for talking about a phenomenon we’re all intimately familiar with. That’s all.
It's a measure of your capacity for destruction
The fact that we only control the capacity for destruction/abuse in men, but not in women, is closer to the root of the problem. Men are normally attracted to women with a high capacity for destruction: social popularity is a direct measure/expression of that capacity (and conversely, creates "nice girls finish last" problems if they can't secure a boyfriend powerful enough to resist hers when she sends him through that social pressure to take your resources).
Punishing women for doing that is harder, which is why it's normally (and traditionally) imposed by men-as-collective at a group level by default. Which makes things harder for the women who are responsible with that power, and something the ones who aren't interested in using it that way will (rightly) complain about being assumed guilty of wanting to abuse it by default.
The woke are once again more correct than the mainstream- gendered violence is a sex crime- it's just that most of the problems in society arise because the female gender isn't punished for its violence (and because feminists are all about encouraging its use...).
phailyoor
1d ago
Maybe not a central example, but the union deleted the rock island railroad by striking even though the company was on the verge of bankruptcy
TIRM
1d ago
Ad hominem? You severely misread my comment and are angrily arguing against claims I never made and don't hold.
aldomilyar
1d ago
Yeah. Simultaneously it can be hard to exactly explain gravity due to nested complexity in the real world, regardless of improved sensory equipment and yet still practical to assume that we're not gonna wake up tomorrow morning and fall into the sky.
Zephyr
1d ago
Sex used to create the expectation of romantic exclusivity, but we kind of bulldozed those expectations. If you want that, make it a condition of having sex with the guy (and if he doesn’t want that, move on).
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
1d ago
They did not marry young because they were successful young.
Sure they did/were. A man in the '50s was wildly successful compared to the older cohort of men, and that success was bestowed just for showing up.
So they started their lives very early: a huge luxury. As the old get disproportionately more successful compared to the young, the average age young men get married increases. (This is part of a feedback mechanism that naturally depresses TFR when a society is overpopulated, though naturally that lags reality a bit.)
Rov_Scam
1d ago
This was the same argument that Virginia made in Loving and the court rejected it then. Black people are free to marry other black people and white people are free to marry other white people so what's the problem?
But marriage, at least from a legal perspective, is a privilege the state recognizes for people to incentivize the formation of healthy and stable families, which gay people do not do.
Well, at least that's the conservative fantasy. If you look at the way the laws surrounding marriage actually operate, and have historically operated, it's pretty clear that the legal purpose is to regulate property transfers among family members. The only historical precedent which has to do with natural children is the legal presumption that a woman's husband is the father of her children, absent other evidence. While this may be a useful feature these days, it's no longer a necessary one, as states have been keeping records of these things for over a century, and technology has allowed paternity disputes to be resolve fairly easily. Beyond that, historical laws relating to marriage were based on the presumption that women couldn't own property in their own name, that wealth was basically synonymous with real property, and that widows were likely to be an undue burden on society. Today, of course, we live in a property where women are more economically equal than men, where the family farm isn't the primary source of income (or, realisitically, doesn't exist), cash is more important than real property, birth control exists, Social Security exists, etc. As a consequence, the laws surrounding marriage have changed since the turn of the last century to keep up with the times.
An along the way, we've created a whole host of new rights relating to marriage, notably ones concerning medical matters like the right to make certain decisions and the right of visitation. In other words, as the circumstances surrounding marriage have changed historically, the laws have changed along with it, and if you want to figure out the legal purpose of marriage, you have to look at those laws. If you want to believe in an idealized version where the laws that matter are the ones that have "stable families" or whatever as their obvious goal, you're going to be left with very little.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
1d ago
Maybe AGPs would be less resistant to the diagnosis if it was framed not as "I have autogynephilia", but rather "I have an 'imagining myself as a woman' kink".
They'd still be highly resistant, because the rest of society can say "kinks/fetishes are optional, so we have the right to tell you to keep it at home and otherwise judge you for it".
It has to be an orientation, because orientations are considered sacrosanct (that was the whole "born this way" fight being hammered out in the '00s). If they fall out of that social protection scheme they predict, correctly, that their social power to do their thing will go away.
aaa
1d ago
Are you suggesting that this proves souls exist and they are also subject to evolutionary processes?
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
1d ago
Gay people don't call themselves 'homophiliacs'.
They were going to back in the '70s, but this didn't catch on.
thejdizzler
1d ago
I'm an apple chud unfortunately. I have cold turkey on my computer which works great, but phone is another issue. I seem to always be able to get around the controls.
A first impression: If we take a lot of leftist dogma as being true and discard obvious analogs to reality and claim they might be inaccurate, then we might just be able to explain why our ideology is seemingly not mapping on to the world around us.
Now queue the arguments through analogy, 'what if's' about reality, and a mountain of research motivated entirely by a need to collapse all genetic gravity into a neat environmentalist fold.
Scott Alexander seems to have a good eye for strategy. The article is effectively just an advertisement for a few plucky anti-hereditarian rebels who want to expose the fatal flaw of the hereditarian Death Star. Scott speaks highly of the effort, but obviously signals that he is going to wait until the rebels actually fire a torpedo into the thing. And there in lies the problem for the rebels.
For every alleged fatal flaw exhaust shaft that the hereditarian Death Star has, environmentalism has less than nothing. Every proposed theory has failed to explain the big problems. So... What's the point? What exactly are we doing here?
Crowstep
1d ago
I'm your man!
So I've turned my phone into a pseudo-dumb phone. I've replaced the stock launcher with a minimalist black and white one, deleted any fun or distracting apps and installed an app which blocks the browser (but which allows me to access it for 30 seconds every five minutes for logins etc).
If you want to lock down your phone even more (assuming it's an Android), the Universal Android Debloater lets you uninstall anything, even stock apps like the browser or the app store. ChatGPT helped me set this up despite my lack of technical ability.
All my browsers on my personal and work PCs have site-blockers, blocking mostly news sites. The best ones let you set a password which you can make as a string of numbers which you save somewhere else. Typically you can also add sites without entering the password, but you need the password to remove sites.
My tablet has a whitelist of sites I'm allowed on, with the parental control PIN set to the aforementioned password. Previously I let my wife set the PIN number which also worked.
Finally, if I want a complete digital break (say, to read a book), I'll activate SelfControl which completely disables the browser on my laptop.
Now of course, all of these things can be reversed if I want to (except SelfControl while a block is active). What seems to work for me is that the pain of setting everything up makes me less willing to e.g. simply uninstall the browser extension.
I still slack off at work more than I should, but this makes it much easier to get back to what I should be doing. Also having books easily accessible for when I want to proactively rest is helpful.
kky
1d ago
There are at least three pieces at play here: first, the question of deterministic heritability of mental characteristics; second, the question of how genes as we currently understand them map to mental characteristics; and third, the question of what, precisely, IQ is measuring in relation to mental characteristics.
As far as mental characteristics go, I think it’s fair to say that some are pretty clearly innate and inherited and others are not. There are a lot of children out there who pretty obviously derive their mental abilities from whatever their parents have. However, that’s not the whole story. There are habits of thought that can dramatically improve or sabotage a person’s performance. A simple example is just whether someone cares or not. When I play chess, my level of play whiplashes severely based on how focused I am, on the order of a few hundred Elo. When I’m not focused and don’t really care, I just play moves. I believe this replicates across most fields of activity, and that caring has a very strong cultural component. Of course, a few hundred Elo is not multiple standard deviations of performance, but I think it could explain half an SD pretty easily, which is actually quite a lot.
Genes are a stickier question. My rough viewpoint is that our current understanding of genetics is far too coarse to pick up on anything but the simplest behaviors, where a gene encodes a pretty straightforward protein with one real use case. But in real life, all of the body’s systems are expected to interact quite intricately, and we should expect some novel properties to emerge at the intersection of genes. I’m far from an expert here, so this is all I’ll say. I’m not surprised that efforts to reverse engineer the hack job that is evolution are hitting difficulties, but all it proves is the lingering inadequacy of our science.
IQ is the fun part. On the one level, it’s quite simple: IQ is just a measurement of how you do on a specific batch of tests. But those tests claim to be an imperfect measurement of intelligence, and that intelligence is a singular value. This I am not remotely convinced of.
The typical argument is that because different mental functions correlate, there must be some underlying characteristic that powers all of them, and that they’re all secretly linked. But this doesn’t hold much muster with reality. If our various mental abilities were merely outward expressions of a single underlying scalar, we would expect to see people at the far reaches of intelligence be great at everything. In reality, we tend to see them be amazing at one thing, and somewhere between good and terrible at the rest. Another personal example: I am >3SD on the right for analytical intelligence (measured, in this case, by visual puzzle solving) and dead middle on “processing speed”, which means the rate of quickly mapping trivial inputs to trivial outputs, as measured by a professionally administered adult IQ test. This is irreconcilable with the notion that both are just expressions of an underlying “intelligence.” How could that intelligence be both perfectly average and massively out of the ordinary at the same time? It’s nonsensical. What actually makes sense is that these are different capabilities of the mind, and for whatever reason I am much stronger in one than the other. That leaves the question of why these disparate capabilities correlate in most cases, to which I’ll just leave two hypotheses: first, adverse circumstances that lower all abilities, like how being severely obese will undermine pretty much all athletic performance; second, that humans are sorted into classes in a social hierarchy and that these traits are then selected for in groups based on what the class does. Those are explanations that are plausible and do not require a general intelligence.
Anyway, interesting topic, and I do agree that too many of the opinions here come down to faith over examining what’s going on and flexibly adjusting based on new information.
Sloot
1d ago
I'm always looking for the hack supplement that will improve my athletic performance, the one blog post that will turn my opinion of the world on its head, the one connection on social media that will become my best friend or romantic partner, the one big experiment that I can do that will get me my PhD.
A hack some academics—such as a recently departed female Harvard professor—have stumbled upon is just making up the data, because p-… hacking… is too much work.
Broke: Carefully planning, preregistering, and performing meticulously designed experiments
Woke: p-hacking and garden-of-forking-pathsing
Bespoke: Just making up the data
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
1d ago
The broader points I'm making are:
- Modern sciency people tend to have axioms they don't quite realize.
- Biology is stuck in a mechanistic model of genetics and life, which holds it back.
FtttG
1d ago
I would resent being called a fuckboy (under the definition we're discussing here), as I don't like the implication that the only way I can get women into bed is by lying to them or deceiving them.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."
Twin studies are robust and reproducible. What can't be "proven" is the particular genes behind the heritability.
Sloot
1d ago
One could argue that, if anything, men perform more emotional labor than women, since putting up and dealing with women’s shit-tests and coffee moments is a price men pay for being in heterosexual relationships.
There could be epic_handshake.jpg potential here between boomers and zoomers—boomers with “does this dress make me look fat?” and zoomers with “would you still love me if I were a worm?”
Crowstep
1d ago
That said, a comment on the article from Scott:
I know of two secret results I'm not supposed to talk about, by people claiming they've found very large amounts of "missing heritability". Not yet peer-reviewed or confirmed by anything except rumor. I expect one to be out within six months, and the other maybe eventually.
I've seen it used to refer to both a hot Chad whose romantic interest in women extends no further than the tip of his dick and to a pretty boy that a woman keeps hooked on simping for her by using him for her sexual gratification (the female equivalent of a slampig - I haven't watched it but I think the toyboy fantasy film Babygirl with Nicole Kidman probably depicts something like this model), and also to any unappealing men who are more motivated to pursue sex than sitting at home watching porn and complaining online about Stacies.
Is he a boy and is fucking any significant part of the motivation for his actions? He's a fuckboy.
Reading that article though it reads like an attempt to build a stick for hitting men... but I don't see many men who would be particularly offended by the label. Low stakes defensive maybe, but not sincerely offended. What I can see being offensive is calling another woman's boyfriend a fuckboy. In that sense perhaps the fuckboy label is a tool for women to reassert the sort of social policing they're so adept at and that some here in this forum say could alleviate the ills of current day dating culture. Can you imagine if someone told a woman that the new guy she's excited to be dating is a fuckboy? It's a hit at her value - she's giving him her value and not getting compensated (she does it free!). Call a man a fuckboy and internally he'll probably shrug and think DM;HS. It's labelling him as someone who got what he wanted. Beats being an incel or a simp. Tell a woman her bf is a fuckboy and in short order he'll be put on notice that it's time to man up or he won't be getting what he wants any more. You don't need to tell her directly, posting it to the audience of young women reading a fashion blog will probably suffice to start the thought process.
This is not the first time you've gone off on this Mandate of Heaven schtick, and I can't help but feel it relies on creating monarchist fanfic only loosely connected to reality. That or it's a bit. You write like Trump is this massively popular figure instead of an incredibly divisive one. Like, in what world does Trump's popularity keep rising? People love rightful royal power?
Is there a reason we should prefer this narrative over the more boring theory that Trump won because of inflation, immigration, and short memories?
Or an exceptionally vain toddler. Trump is known to be comically susceptible to flattery, even as the same people shit-talk him behind his back. That is not an indicator of someone who commands respect. I would question the leadership qualities of anyone who wants to be treated in such a manner, and I would question the judgment of anyone who looks at such a figure and sees a worthy leader.
More options
Context Copy link