domain:putanumonit.com
SSCReader
3d ago
A society where people use 'cisheteronormativity' in conversation is simply not the same as one where people don't. The creation of the word cisheteronormative innately destroys cisheteronormativity.
I can't see that it does really. A word for water doesn't destroy the society of fish or Atlanteans. It describes their reality. You could create the word and then say, this is the word for what is normal and correct and good so lets not change anything. Or you could create the word and say this is the word for the status quo and that is not good and needs to be changed. But the word itself isn't doing the changing. How it is used (or how the concept is used really, because the word could be blargle for all that it matters).
In fact, I'd suggest the evidence shows the opposite, people were working to tear down what was "normal" BEFORE the word in question was created. Gay rights movements were campaigning to normalize gay people and spread well before cisgender and heteronormativity were coined (the 90's from what I can see). Showing the words are not necessary for people to try and change the status quo. The words come second. The awareness comes first. For what we observe in reality that must be the case. The existence of the word does not destroy "normality". The existence of people who challenge the concept might but that predates the creation of the word.
It might be true that creating the words make it easier to describe and campaign for perhaps, but they clearly aren't necessary.
Ioper
3d ago
What's any large company (say, over 10,000 people), in any other field than tech, that you positively like? If you're like me, you'd struggle to name one.
They're mostly large manufacturers and some resource extraction companies. If we look at smaller companies there are a lot more.
What makes big tech vile is the same bad impulses that exist in other industries dialled up to eleven due to scalability, network effect driven lack of competition, cultish customer behaviour and finance driven lies. For example, everyone hates rent seekers and tech are just currently the best and most visible ones at it.
NunoSempere
3d ago
There is a philosophical problem regarding whether pure altruism is conceptually possible; if you help someone, and you receive in exchange nothing but the satisfaction of having helped someone, then haven't you received something of value, thereby rendering the altruistic act "impure"? What if you don't even feel good about it, could it be pure then? But then, how were you motivated to help in the first place if you didn't even feel good about it? Regardless of how we answer these questions, I believe we can put the idea of absolute pure altruism to the side, because if it exists at all, it surely encompasses a minority of human interactions--source
I have a different perspective here, where a) I think it's conceptually possible, b) the interesting question is whether people who say they are are really only doing the pure altruism. I first encountered the term pure altruism in two papers by James Andreoni, from 1989 and 1990. In them, Andreoni lays out a model of altruistic giving, where agents contribute to a public good both because they value it in itself, but also because they get a private benefit, a "warm glow". He has some nice academic results, like a quick mechanism for indexing one's own altruism (if one was taxed one dollar less, or a thousand, how much more would one donate?), and other observations (taxation may not produce warm glow, and as a result increasing taxation by some amount doesn't reduce donations by that amount; when parents get a warm glow from giving to their children, children are incentivized to be more "spoilt" in a technical sense).
Are people who are saying they are doing pure forms of altruism actually doing so? Often not so. There are aspects of the EA community that just don't make sense by considering its participants as pure white cherubs of innocence and selflessness, although each particular case will be uncertain and ambiguous, and although pointing the discrepancy is tricky.
One of the biggest bets Open Philanthropy—a large philanthropic foundation I'm acquainted with—is making is in its own people. 161 people, earning say 150K to 250K salaries, with overhead of 20% to 40% (?) is 30M to 52M/year—probably higher than any one of their grants in 2024 and 2025. This does not include the cost of their office, another cool 16.5M. This leads them to have a class interest: they are invested in that form of doing philanthropy—rather than anonymous part-time rotating grantmakers whose funds under management grow or shring depending on their evaluated success (like the Survival and Flourishing Fund).
Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed outlines how this happened with the apparatchik in Russia. The apparatchik are in charge of the wellbeing of the Soviet Union and ended up reallocating ressources to themselves. Some of my experience is that the grantmakers just want to be sucked up to, their ideas confirmed, their egos upheld, their strategies validated, their personalities admired. But at the same time they are selected for not rocking the boat in a deep way. More mundanely, people get grants from projects that don't work out, and don't pivot, because they think that would involve losing their jobs. EA seems like a failed Schelling point to me, because it advertises itself as doing pure altruism, but the actors end up fighting for their own self-interest, sometimes in quite obvious ways.
Is pure altruism selected out? If you do something for someone such that you don't get something out of it, can you continue doing that into the future? What is the mechanism? I think this is a key question that leads to rederiving some form of non-naïve form of altruism. Or alternatively, it leads to exploiting the pure altruism until its ressources are exhausted. One of the first guys to think about this ended up killing himself.
On the other side, pure altruism can be understood essentially as a mating display because it's a costly signal of strength, and it. The underlying purpose of ideology X isn't ideology X, it's displaying that you can still be a well-adjusted person even with its iron around your neck. Some version of this is fine by me, but the problem becomes when people really believe their ideologies and do cripple themselves for real, as happened with Germany's industrial economy as a result of their terrible energy policy. This matters to me, I made a heavily real, non-fake investment in learning German. I passed the C1 exam but probably at some point did have a C2 level in German. Now I just do business with Americans instead. I also do find it aesthetically distasteful when people do something which is nominally about, e.g., helping the homeless in a way that makes the problem worse, partly because nobody taught me how to do the Straussian reading.
At the same time, how do you coordinate around public goods? One cool answer is dominant assurance contracts but in practice this hasn't been implemented much, perhaps because the people who could have jobs as grantmakers they would rather preserve, but also because part of the problem of setting up a new project is just distribution, and you have a chicken an egg problem here (you could do a dominant assurance funding model if only you had already built the distribution funnel for your thing, but that's a big part of the job).
Anyways one answer here is to try to get people in man vs. nature games because man v. man conflicts are just fucked up.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
3d ago
The creation of the word cisheteronormative innately destroys cisheteronormativity.
Or rather, the word is made specifically to attempt to contest it, and thus is meaningless outside that context.
The same thing goes when we asserting we currently live under conditions of transhomonormativity, or "globohomo" for short, since that word is intended to invoke the same.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
3d ago
It's honestly too bad that bad UX on Li-Ion powered electronics understandably soured people on electric cars.
It's a subtle thing, but when you're using your smartphone and the battery says 100% until it completely dies in the cold, or has enough energy to say "fuck you, powering down", that has consequences when companies want to put the same batteries in electric cars- people remember their devices were [either only in perception, or in actual fact] used to abuse them and think "oh, these cars have unreliable fuel gauges and their usable capacity runs into the ground after X time".
Honestly, though, I just want a Roadster. Best product Tesla ever made, mainly because the only parts they did make were the powertrain.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
3d ago
rural physicians
https://youtube.com/watch?v=haPcdobyINc?si=ncLFUNKgJeahFTyU&t=10
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
If we didn't then you would just abandon huge rural areas because the investment there simply gets a worse return on lives saved than adding another hospital in a dense city where the ED is packed every day.
We ALREADY choose to cause more deaths in certain places for certain reasons
You don't think we invest in urban hospitals until the point where diminishing returns make it so that it saves more lives to open a hospital in a more rural area, rather than another one in a city?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
AFAIK, Tesla’s battery and motor tech is very competitive
I thought they were buying their batteries from third parties?
SSCReader
3d ago
But the term isn't just about "allocating scarce resources and who should get them", it's "allocating them in such a way, that you are predictably causing more deaths than an alternative, traditional allocation".
Again this is NOT new. In Public Health policy we already take into account things other than just number of lives saved. If we didn't then you would just abandon huge rural areas because the investment there simply gets a worse return on lives saved than adding another hospital in a dense city where the ED is packed every day.
We ALREADY choose to cause more deaths in certain places for certain reasons. We trade off speed limits on safety vs efficiency and on and on. That doesn't mean any particular reason is a good one of course, it has to be examined in light of what you are trying to accomplish, but choosing to predictably cause more deaths is a valid trade-off. If you think poor or rural people should get healthcare resources that could save more urban people that is a valid option. If you think the economic benefits of faster commutes is worth 10 deaths a year, that's also a valid option. At the population level deaths are a trade off for other things.
In fact many people argued here that we should have allowed more deaths from Covid in order to not tank the economy as much and disrupt schooling and the like. It's already established that deaths are tradeable for other values. We're just quibbling over which ones and why. So the fact it predictably causes more deaths is not in and of itself a useful critique. Whose deaths? Why? You have to look at the object level not the meta level.
When leftists used violence on rightists during the fire-alarm pulling era, it was not an act of desperation, but a demonstration of pure power. The extensive infrastructure used to justify and protect them has been dismantled. Now they experience equality for the first time, and call it oppression.
Similarly, this is not desperation, but an admiral being killed as encouragement to the others.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
Early space suits were very hard to work in because constant-volume flexible pressure vessels are hard. This has gotten better, but isn't a fully solved problem. In much the same way that early aircraft required large forces on the controls (flying a B-17 I'm told is an arm workout on a good day, doubly so when the trim settings are damaged). It doesn't take a serious bodybuilder to fly an Airbus today, though.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
3d ago
the way you articulate it significantly affects how it goes on to be perceived and thought about.
Yeah, that's a good way to put what I was trying to get at elsewhere with a Ghostbusters reference. Choosing the form of the destroyer is a meaningful step!
MayorofOysterville
3d ago
And of course, the very idea that individuals may have innate differences that cannot be attributed to their environment is utter anathema to Marxist orthodoxy—
This is a common point I see repeated about Communism, but in practice it's more promoted by liberals and Western Marxists then actual Communist regimes. Both the Soviet and Chinese education system are hugely based around finding talented students and elevating them through intense educations. The actual implementation of blank slate equity type programs and elimination of gifted tracks is an oddity of Western capitalist countries neither the Soviets or Chinese ever attempted to put anything like that into practice. And the leaders of both were willing to make statements about people groups that would make most Western leaders faint.
Your absolutely right that the Chinese and especially Xi Jinping are true believers in Marxism but it's a syncretized and Sinicized, Marxism full of Han chauvinism. Very few Chinese ascribe to blank slate ideology and I don't think the government particularly cares about promoting it or even subscribes to it themselves. I feel like trying to predict the CCP based on "Orthodox Marxism" Is like trying to predict the behavior of Evangelicals based on the Catechism Catholic Church, you might get some hits but it's not a useful way to go about it. For example the CCP is comfortable not suppressing theories about Chinese being a separate race of humans descended from a different ancestor, while these theories are not mainstream they aren't taboo either. The PRC is a national project for Chinese and nationalism and pride in China are off the charts, it's not a self hating liberal western country but neither is it a post national experiment like the Soviet Union. The CCP is out to benefit Chinese and justifies it's rule as a meritocratic rule of experts.
I agree the CCP reaction will be interesting and they may very well be hard against all this, but if they are it's not going to be against based on a slaveish adherence to blank state theories that they don't subscribe to and their entire society is organized in opposition to.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
AFAIK, Tesla’s battery and motor tech is very competitive, and sees use in aftermarket retrofits. That can’t be a huge market, and I suppose it could be a political or branding statement, but I take it as evidence that their fundamental parts are decent.
It’s the interiors and user experience that has always bothered me about Teslas. Fragile paneling, that big ugly screen… I could tell a story where Tesla was able to surpass legacy automakers in their core design, but failed (or chose not) to compete on making it feel luxury. That’s the kind of decision I could see Musk making, especially when pressed for time and money. But perhaps it’s too tidy .
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3d ago
What he really needs to do is negotiate tariffs with Powell instead of the Europeans. Powell has more of what he wants, and is a better negotiator.
PokerPirate
3d ago
My wife basically arranges all my/our socialization. From my perspective, people just randomly show up and leave. I login to the motte when I'm waiting for the code to compile.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
3d ago
the term would be gibberish to him
Indeed, and it continues to be! I think we're talking past each other a bit and/or you're underestimating the degree to which academia shapes a thing by naming the unnamed. It is not The Way, but in describing it they hem it in from it may otherwise have been. The thing that existed before is not the same that exists after, and in some sense can never be again.
At any rate, I appreciate the input and your general tendency to remain calm and forthright.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
3d ago
I don't expect us to come to agree on much of anything but I always appreciate your input.
This particular example enrages me because it was much more direct than what I think you're suggesting- it was about withholding vaccines from older, high-risk populations and distributing them to young, low-risk populations by virtue of race. I think the people that suggested this should've been first in line to Seven Pounds for health equity, if they believed it so strongly.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
I’m not convinced that it makes sense to count potential people as, well, people.
The eggs which are never fertilized don’t get to be living people, either.
TIRM
3d ago
Also the main character has a fatal heart condition and says he has a 99% chance of heart failure with a few years. He collapses clutching his chest partway through the film. He is entirely medically unqualified to go on a multiyear space program.
The central point of the film is the opposite of what was intended. They would be right to reject him.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
3d ago
trying to negotiate an accounting identity ... which is precisely the thing Trump says he wants them to stop doing
And is now firing people for similar! If he wants Powell to lower rates, bad job numbers would help...
TIRM
3d ago
I'm quite skeptical about an exodus of American academics. I'll believe it when I see it. My prediction is a tiny portion actually leaves.
sodiummuffin
3d ago
That isn't really how people think about counterfactual people in other contexts. Relevant post from Scott:
In my latest essay, I try to list the major points I'm aware of that puncture the progressive narrative on economics, without trying to directly touch on the Culture War's social fronts.
Reality Has a Poorly Recognized Classical Liberal Bias
I think most people here have enough exposure to libertarianism that they are at least aware of these issues (even if they don't agree with them). If you think I missed one or I'm somehow dead wrong please do indicate so.
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