domain:imgur.com
aldomilyar
2d ago
often feels the way a Malaysian must feel going to Singapore or something - there is a clear upgrade in the quality of life in a general sense, things are just cleaner, better, more efficient, more advanced, more premium
To a certain degree this is the case though the gap's closed a lot between the absolute nicest parts of Malaysia and Singapore. Also Singaporeans radiate a certain energy of chipper productivity which is Flanders-like and annoying.
The whole time the subreddit was up, it is categorically true that places like /r/politicalcompassmemes, /r/4chan and /r/redscarepod had much more objectionable (to the admins) content than we had.
You could say the same thing about /r/GenderCritical, they still got nuked.
There were times when there were more pro-trans voices here, sure, but most people are clearly of the same opinion now as they were then (“it’s not real but it’s reasonable to be individually nice to trans people in your life”).
It has nothing to do with the amount of pro-trans voices, and everything to do with the arguments themselves.
Originally pro-trans people where running around saying how The Science Is Settled, how there's a robust diagnostic process, and how younger people are only put on reversible treatments, and trotting out paper after paper. It took several years for people to catch on that the papers were flawed, raise questioned that the trans activists had no good answer for (exponential increase in dysphoria diagnoses, sex-ratio flip, age-ratio flip). It took several more years still for things to start to come out like detrans people testifying how much of an utter joke the "diagnostic process" was, whistleblowers coming out, the Cass Review, senior Biden admin officials putting political pressure to abolish age limits in the latest Standards Of Care, or WPATH commissioning systematic reviews from John Hopkins, shitcanning them when they didn't like the results, and demanding that any further reviews be approved by a trans person, while also demanding that they be published with a statement that WPATH had no influence over the process.
If all you got from all these years was “it’s not real but it’s reasonable to be individually nice to trans people in your life”, then you simply weren't paying attention. Which is ok, if you aren't interested in the issue, but why are you acting like you know anything about it, and like the conversation hasn't shifted at all over time?
Corvos
2d ago
I second @Lewyn's welcome. I would like to learn to read Chinese someday but I'm very interested about what goes on. The Chinese internet is basically dark matter for most of us - you know it's there and you know it's huge, but you have no idea what's in it. The Great Firewall notwithstanding, I believe that the reverse is not quite true, though that may be parochialism on my part.
People on the Republican judge track don't get involved with small legal troubles of senate nominations or congressional campaigns. The disputes are too small and they don't want to make enemies in the party.
Getting on the bad side of a Republican patronage network (https://scholars-stage.org/patronage-vs-constituent-parties-or-why-republican-party-leaders-matter-more-than-democratic-ones/) can tank any future nomination.
edit:
Also I have the sense that it's more acceptable for a lawyer at a prestigious largely Jewish firm to do pro bono work for a pro Israel Republican than it would be for a lawyer at a prestigious non Jewish firm to help a pro life republican.
Lewyn
I am at the center of everything that happens to me
2d ago
How are gender relations in China, in your experience? We have a lot of issues and stories like this in the West, though South Korea always seemed the most insane to me in terms of complete gender relation breakdown.
Also, welcome to the Motte. I would love to read about more Chinese culture war skirmishes like this, and I'm sure I am not alone in that. These stories tend to not make their way to the English side of the web often.
faceh
2d ago
One possible solution I've been considering recently is forcibly marrying and then if that doesn't working, castrating these men. Of course I would like women to shape up too, but that seems like a tall ask.
I'll do you one better and suggest summary execution.
The logic being that screwing with a relatively fresh, innocent, 'happy' young woman and leaving her worse off is irretrievably depleting a scarce, somewhat fixed supply of a critically valuable resource.
There's legitimately no way to repair the 'damage' through monetary compensation alone, and in a sense, the extent of the damage is probably 'incalculable.'
So hey, just remove your ability to do further damage via permanent incapacitation, rather than risk your continued despoiling of the dating pool.
But yeah, castration seems a reasonable compromise position there. I don't know how many it'd take to successfully deter, but its probably fewer than you think.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2d ago
Most people’s opposition to the trans thing is solely aesthetic
Not if you have kids.. The consequences go far beyond "solely aesthetic".
One possible solution I've been considering recently is forcibly marrying and then if that doesn't work, castrating these men. Of course I would like women to shape up too, but that seems like a tall ask.
The thing is, the top 20% of these men that don't get married are frankly throwing a lot of their life and use to society out the window by continuing to live the lifestyle of a Lothario. Not only does stringing 2-4 women a long at a time embitter those women and make it more difficult for them to stably pair bond, the sheer amount of time that it takes to juggle these relationships impacts your ability to do work, have friends, take care of yourself, and generally contribute to society. These men are also ruining their own ability to pair bond by engaging in this lifestyle. Consider two examples. One of my current roommates, let's call him James, has lived like a Lothario almost the entire time I've known him. Long term "girlfriend" back in California who he constantly cheats on with a rotation of 2-3 women here in Baltimore. Some of my resentment towards him is certainly jealousy (he has recently been fucking a girl I went on a date with and mildly liked), but it's hard not to see how this behavior is ruining his life. When I first met this guy he was deeply interested in history and biology and in pretty good shape. Now he doesn't do anything except scroll on instagram, watch retarded kids TV shows, and have sex with these women. He also recently got his PhD, but with ZERO publications, despite being in a computational biology lab where the expectation is 3-4 papers by graduation. This guy is smart and should be contributing to society, but instead is mooching off the NIH tit and ruining women. The other example is my friend Saul, who used to live this kind of lifestyle, until he started dating this girl Deborah. They got married last year, and since then his efforts around the house, at work, with friends, and with his art projects have skyrocketed because all that time he was spending at bars and on tinder is now going into his actual life.
2rafa
2d ago
Most people’s opposition to the trans thing is solely aesthetic, in that it is about pretending that a physical state of being is something other than that it is. It is biologically impossible to go from being a man to a woman or vice versa. Suicide has no such mythos, in fact legalized euthanasia is to some extent about the end of a particular mythology surrounding suicide in which the body belongs not to the man, but to God. It is about cold, hard, material reality.
2rafa
2d ago
Abortion advocates advocate for widespread education about and research on alternative contraceptive methods like the iud / coil, condoms, the pill and so on, which with regular and responsible use significantly lower the likelihood of someone needing an abortion.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
2d ago
I'm reasonably sure I did see him say that, once or twice, but others were simply using reaction images of him to make the same point.
I don't think 4o is that harmful, really, but it's a bad look for Altman to make a fuss about reducing the sycophancy in GPT-5 and then immediately cave. At least he also caved on the ridiculously low rate limits.
2rafa
2d ago
Switzerland is less homogenous than much of Western Europe and has relatively large amounts of non-European immigration. In any case, given that legal euthanasia is nonexistent in the Islamic world (for largely the same religious reasons Christians oppose it) I find it hard to believe mass immigration from there will lead to greater permissiveness.
The dynamic where willing to deceive about long term prospects gets men more sex is probably responsible for a lot of hate women have for men generally.
Its probably fair to say that the bottom 50% of men, in terms of attractiveness, are functionally invisible to the average woman. And you ever heard the saying "the opposite of love isn't hate, its indifference?" Yeah.
Which is to say, they don't actually count those men in their own personal calculation of what "men" are like. If you tell these women that a huge portion of men are actually not able to get matches on tinder, or can't successfully approach women, and thus are unable to find a relationship despite honest best efforts, these women will simply disbelieve you. Availability Heuristic and all that.
So from their perspective, the men that they notice and pursue, i.e. the ones that actually 'exist' for them, are doing just fine. In fact they're doing TOO well, its not fair that he can just pump and dump her because she's one of 5 or 6 others he has on tap!
I'd say that most of the intersex animosity is because women see the top, call it 20% of men as "men" and the bottom 50% as nonentities that don't enter their thought processes at all. And then there's that awkward 30% of men who are in a superposition of 'man' and 'not man' unless and until a woman decides to pay them attention.
If they only compare themselves to the upper 20% of guys, and ignore the bottom 50%, then mentally yeah it feels like SHE is the disadvantaged one in this situation. They can ignore things like the male suicide rate, the fact that most of the crappiest jobs are male-dominated, and that men are generally disfavored by the law because they only see the top 20% of dudes, who ARE in fact doing really well, and assume that's representative. And boom, there's your patriarchy.
Meanwhile, the other 80% of men are painfully aware of their own status, and are finding that every woman they attempt to approach is in fact pursuing those top 20% of guys, and, as noted, is un-self-aware of this factor, and disregards the experience of the vast majority of men when judging them.
So women are mad at 'men' because the only men they care about are rejecting them in the end, refusing commitment but taking sex.
Men are mad at 'women' because when women get mad at those top men, they put ALL men on blast, and that catches a lot of guys in the crossfire who have not done a damn thing to deserve it. They're being treated like villains ON TOP of being rejected by women en masse because those top men are gleefully exploiting their position, and women are incapable of regulating their own marketplace so are getting increasingly distressed and lashing out.
And uh, it looks like said men are getting very, very fed up with this.
And no, this is NOT explained solely by manosphere influencers. Even men who are successfully dating seem to believe less in gender equality. Because those top 20% of guys probably have come to understand women from the other side.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2d ago
I really don't.
Jiro
2d ago
When the clinic reportedly promised to “always contact a person’s family”, it may have been making a well-intentioned but practically impossible promise. What does a clinic do when a patient insists their family not be contacted, or provides false information for them?
If it is not possible to do what they advertise, they shouldn't be advertising it. False advertising doesn't cease to be false because the thing you advertised was impossible, but you really wanted to do it.
And if truthfully advertising what they actually do leads to bad publicity, so be it.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2d ago
they were going to kill it entirely, but so many people have become addicted that Altman relented. Big mistake.
I've been skimming Elizer's twitter occasionally this weekend to see if he posted any "HAHAHAHAH FUCKERS I WARNED YOU/TOLD YOU SO" but I'm wondering if he's getting sick of saying it
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2d ago
There are things that work in a high trust society that don't in a low trust society. Switzerland, notably, almost singularly in Western Europe, is still super homogeneous, and hasn't thrown open it's welfare state to 3rd worlders. Good for them that they haven't manage to slide down some slippery slope when it comes to assisted suicide. But they've made profoundly different choices about the type of nation they want to be than just about all their peers. I doubt we can pick and choose how we wish to emulate them without there being significant unintended consequences.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2d ago
Is anyone watching the chatGPT 5 "bring back 4o" meltdown on /r/chatGPT and /r/OpenAI?
It's insane. People are losing their shit about 4o being taken away to the point it's back now (lmfao). There's also a huge push of "don't mock others for using 4o as a trusted friend you just don't understand". It's honestly equal parts hilarious and horrifying.
For additional fun, browse the comments, obviously there are idiots on the internet, but these people are cooked.
I had thought the internet collectively agreed that RLHF had resulted in glazing that was a huge issue. But it turns out a sizable amount of people actually loved it.
Also funny, gpt5 can glaze you if you ask it, but I guess the median Redditor complaining about this doesn't understand custom instructions. Similarly, people are clearly giving gpt5 custom instructions to be as robotic as possible and then posting screenshots of it... being robotic.
The whole thing makes me rather worried about the state of western society/mental health, in the same way that OnlyFans "chat to the creator" feature does. We need government enforced grass-touching or something.
Around 2018, someone linked me to a few SlateStarCodex essays (IIRC In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization and I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup). Pure bliss. I spent days binging Scott essays. I'd finally found someone who thought in the same idiom I did, after a whole life feeling like a space alien.
Post a few years lurking /r/SSC and /r/TheMotte, here I am. This is despite me disagreeing with Rats on most things on the object level.
2rafa
2d ago
The whole time the subreddit was up, it is categorically true that places like /r/politicalcompassmemes, /r/4chan and /r/redscarepod had much more objectionable (to the admins) content than we had. The admins were most concerned about slurs and they have always been a bannable offense here when used against someone else.
The mods even confirmed directly that there was no ban coming immediately down the pipeline, it was purely theoretically pre-emptive in case things got worse, and in fact they didn’t, first because of the general anti-woke backlash and then because of Trump’s reelection.
Throughout my time on here the discussion went from me always feeling like I'm on the back foot, to feeling like I've some chinks in the pro-trans side armor, to the current state where I can kind of understand how one might call it "almost no opposition" (it's not true, but I can understand).
There were times when there were more pro-trans voices here, sure, but most people are clearly of the same opinion now as they were then (“it’s not real but it’s reasonable to be individually nice to trans people in your life”).
2rafa
2d ago
If we respect basic autonomy, why should an adult’s adult children have to sign off on whether they are allowed to end their life? As @self_made_human says, Switzerland has had legal euthanasia since the 1940s, and major clinics offering the service since the 1980s.
This is in possibly the most civilized country in the world, certainly in the top 3. People live better, longer, healthier lives in Switzerland than almost anywhere else. Things in Switzerland just work. Even from other wealthy countries like the US, going to Switzerland often feels the way a Malaysian must feel going to Singapore or something - there is a clear upgrade in the quality of life in a general sense, things are just cleaner, better, more efficient, more advanced, more premium. Along almost any scale it would be good for any other country to become more like Switzerland, and bad for Switzerland to become more like any other country.
The functional outcome of articles like this is for other Western countries to try to start banning their terminally ill citizens from going to Switzerland. This would be laughable, since you can just cross the border, but the effect would be to harass innocent people for no reason.
Pitt19802
2d ago
I found that it is very good at telling me which book I am trying to remember from a few hazy recollection of what the book was about.
I was trying to remember which book about basketball stats I read about 15 years ago which had a chapter comparing the relative merits of Tyson Chandler and Eddie Curry. Google gives you a sea of links to those guys wikipedia and basketball reference pages.
Chat GPT immediately knew it was 'The Wages of Wins' by David Berri, had a command of the basic thesis of the book in a way that jived with my memory of the book, was able to contrast and compare the arguments from the book with other books on sports statistics, talk about the various assumptions the arguments from those books relied on.
I was honestly pretty blown away at how useful it was in contrast to google searching.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2d ago
This is by far the best functioning Reddit clone I've seen
Calling it a clone is even wrong, as it's better than Reddit lol
Corvos
2d ago
I have no problem with his beliefs, though I don't also share them. The problem was that he was so totally certain of the rightness of his own beliefs and the wrongness of everyone else's that he had absolutely no interest in genuine discussion. He didn't bother trying to understand anybody else's objections to his arguments, and even asserted multiple times that he knew what his interlocutor thought better than they did. Any effort made trying to engage with him would never be returned and I stopped bothering. I think that attitude is more corrosive to the Motte than overt shitposting.
I don't see the need to complicate things. Assisted suicide is objectively bad, and restricting a persons freedom to commit suicide is objectively bad if and only if said person is having an episode (a temporary state of mind of lowered lucidity).
Making it into a business incentivizes death (by incentivizing profits, which is a trivial result of the death of unproductive members of society). Do I need more arguments? Did I even need this one? Assisted suicide is never needed. Suicide is trivial, and obvious. Obviously trivial. But in case there's some psychological defense mechanism which blind people to obvious, painless methods of suicide, I'm not going to write the method for now. If anyone reading this is suicidal, it's a good thing that they think they need to travel to an entire other country just to stop being alive. Being unable to think of a fast, easy and painless way out is great.
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