domain:doyourownresearch.substack.com
Sloot
5hr ago
C) There's literally no reward for resisting this message, and fewer women are worth BECOMING adequate for.
"What's the reward for passing the years grinding hard and working on yourself?"
"If you're lucky, maybe one day you'll meet a girl who'll settle down with you after she's had her fun."
"What's the reward for passing the years gooning and goombling?"
"If you're lucky, maybe one day you'll meet a girl who'll settle down with you after she's had her fun."
"Well then..."
There a fun dramatic little scissor statement happening in the rationalist / post rationalist corner of twitter at the moment. Started by @_brentbaum talking about his girlfriend's high agency:
i learned something about agency when, on my second date with my now-girlfriend, i mentioned feeling cold and she about-faced into the nearest hotel, said she left a scarf in a room last week, and handed me the nicest one out of the hotel’s lost & found drawer
I, and many others, chimed in saying hey wait a second... this is actually kind of concerning! Some of the negative responses:
- not to burst your bubble but isn't this kinda stealing?
- you can just steal things
- I suspect your about to learn a lot of things
and my personal favorite:
- was it shaped like a giant red flag?
As I said though, this is apparently a scissor statement because a ton of people also had the OPPOSITE reaction. Some examples:
- God damn
- She's a keeper
- my wife is exactly like this
etc etc.
Now the reason I find this fascinating is that it's one of the clearest breakdowns between consequentialists and virtue ethicists I've yet seen in the wild. Most people defending the girl of 'scarfgate' are basically just saying "what's the harm? nobody ever goes back for those scarfs. besides they're like $20 most of the time anyway."
Unfortunately a lot of folks get drawn into this argument, and start saying things like well, what if somebody comes back for it later and it's gone? Or what if someone's grandma knitted them that scarf?
To me, going down the consequentialist route is doomed to fail. You can justify all sorts of horrible things in the name of consequentialist morality. (Same with deontology, to be fair.) My take is that this is wrong because she directly lied to someone's face, and then proceeded to steal someone else's property. The fact that most people think it's cute and quirky is probably down to a sort of Women are Wonderful effect, imo, and then they use consequentialism to defend their default programming that women can't be bad.
Either way, curious what the Motte thinks? Is scarfgate just salty sour pusses hating on a highly agentic women? Or are there deeper issues here?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5hr ago
I would say if the judge is repeatedly doing something like this and they’re constantly issuing injunctions that get overturned, then yes. Would not think that a single overturned injunction would reveal partisan hacking unless the injunction is so bad on the merits of the case that he clearly shouhave known better.
dr_analog
razorboy
5hr ago
I could imagine 20 years from now where an increasing share of international business is done in Chinese rather than English, I guess.
It's not a huge win, just possibly more useful than Spanish.
faceh
5hr ago
Yep.
There's a 'clumping' effect on the bottom end when there aren't strong incentives to stay in the middle road (due to that not getting you what you want, and STILL carrying the risk of losing it all).
You either have so much wealth that you can afford to lose tons of it, or you have like NO wealth, and don't give a single care due to having nothing TO lose.
And as you indicated (and as young men are noticing...) if you can't catapult yourself to the former position of fuck you, then it starts making MORE sense to drop down the latter, and lower position, because at least you can do what you WANT to do, rather than play by rules you can't change and punish you heavily.
Sloot
5hr ago
This would be dysgenic though, for it would most influence the reproductive decisions of those who are poor and relatively high in negative risk aversion.
Something like a 20% of chance of 100K paid out linearly over 5 years in the form of non-refundable tax credits would work better. Thus, for one kid, you get a shot at getting a tax refund of 20K in a given year for five years, but only if in that given year you paid at least 20K in income taxes. Non-refundable, so if you only paid 15K in income taxes in a given year, you only get a refund of 15K that year; if you paid zero or less you get refunded zero. This would stack, so a pair of twins could get up to 40K knocked off your taxes a year for five years.
Having a lottery reward capped at annual income taxes paid would still preserve a lot of the fun and hype, but would be less dysgenic. The payout over five years has the added benefit of selecting for those with a modicum of future time orientation.
faceh
5hr ago
Its MORE likely that Gen Z guys are "inadequate" because
A) They've grown up in a society that both teaches them they're worthless AND that women are inherently better than them. (also gives them almost no real 'purpose' to contribute to)
B) The women they interact with have ALSO ingested that same message, and will reinforce it to those men.
C) There's literally no reward for resisting this message, and fewer women are worth BECOMING adequate for.
I dunno, I think that's the basic causal situation. There's literally no other way you can spin it.
Porn and gambling addictions, for example, are much more widespread in this generation than in the previous ones, and male employment is often less stable.
And this just swept up young guys on its own? A bunch of guys just UNILATERALLY, for no reason whatsoever, decided not to become worthy? Just like that?
Why?
The end result being that women are unhappy seems incidental to the devaluation of masculinity.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
6hr ago
Yes, how dare Estonia... attempt to inspect a tanker, possibly one traveling in its territorial waters?
Well, was it in its territorial waters or not? This seems like it's the deciding question, since ostensibly all actors involved more or less agree on the underlying conventions. There is a corridor of international waters along the centreline of the Finnish Gulf. The version I've read suggests that the tanker was following it (indeed, why would it not?), though some insinuate that it might have veered narrowly into Estonian waters at some point during the incident? It's pretty hard to discern the facts in a conflict where so many consider it their patriotic duty to lie if it makes their side look better.
I don't see anything wrong with Estonia attempting to enforce the sanctions the West has imposed on Russia, and trusting in its alliance with the West to then back it up when it attempts to enforce them.
Well, it all depends on what in fact happened, and what the sanctions really say. Are they in fact an explicit guarantee to participating state that amounts to "we will give you military cover to seize Russian ships in international waters"? Are they ambiguous, or in fact explicitly not saying that much? It's known that the Estonian state has a white-glowing hatred for Russia, and if they could press a button that made the US and Western Europe fight a hot war against it, they probably would (regardless of how the would-be belligerents feel about it). I could easily imagine a situation where whoever formulated the sanctions did not anticipate such a situation, but left enough ambiguity and lack of clear public information that Estonia saw something that to them looked like the aforementioned button and decided to press it.
quiet_NaN
6hr ago
There are (roughly) two kinds of religiously motivated murders.
One is the sacrifice, where you want to send your god a juicy piece of meat or some virgin pussy or kid as a bribe or tribute. Generally, the sacrifice is a mean to an end, the process is really a transaction between the one sponsoring the sacrifice and god. Sure, you might get extra virtue points for sacrificing your favorite daughter, but if she happens to have her period on the set date you can just sacrifice another daughter. Generally, you want your sacrifices to be pure and hale. Sacrificing a lame goat or a disobeyant child might be seen as an insult, after all.
The other type of murder is a punishment for a religious transgression, real or imagined, such as witchcraft, blasphemy, heresy. This is primarily a matter between the accused and the community, just like a secular crime.
This is well illustrated by the concept of the scapegoat. You start out with two goats. One stays pure and is sacrificed to god, the other gets the sins transferred to it and is then abandoned in the desert, for god to punish it as he wants. Full of sins, it would not make a good sacrifice for god, after all.
While punishments are widespread, pure sacrifices of humans are very much optional for religions. In the religions of the book it only appears (to my knowledge) in YHWH's fucked up little mind games he plays with Abraham, with the sacrifice being stopped. The Romans -- themselves not shy about infanticide -- likewise stamped it out where they could.
Of course, there are also mixed forms. For example, the Christian tradition of burning someone at the stake for religious transgressions is very much reminiscent of burnt sacrifices by earlier religions. I think that sometimes, it is explicitly stated that the purpose of this form of death penalty is to purify the victim so that they can get into heaven despite their crime. This is more seen as a 'favor' to the victim than as a favor to god, but parsing it as "souls for the soul lord!" does not seem entirely wrong.
Tree
6hr ago
The state should do more lottery-based rewards. A one-time 20K subvention per kid, that’s boring, and everyone knows it doesn’t pay for the child’s maintenance. But 20% chance of 100K, now you’re talking, people will keep pressing that button for the dopamine hit, then the gambler’s fallacy comes into play, they’ll be sure the 5th, 6th, 7th time’s the charm, and when you win it’s like getting a free kid, so you can get right on making the next one since you were already psychologically primed to pay for the previous baby.
snake
7hr ago
There's a reddit specifically for this kind of thing, but I will put it here anyway.
Also google and chatgpt are no good.
I am trying to find a story I heard long ago - it goes like this:
The son of the king won't speak.
The king goes round all these people who try to fix him. For example, he goes to a musical band, who perform the most grooviest dance you ever saw, it was so cool, everyone was dancing, like even the villagers, the king, the king's son. Next they sing the catchiest song you ever heard where everyone immediately joined in the singing. Except the king's son.
However no-one can fix him.
But then, the chicken comes around and is able to fix him. I can't tell you how he did it, because that would be a spoiler.
Forty-Bot
7hr ago
Charles Vance Millar (June 28, 1854 – October 31, 1926) was a Canadian lawyer and financier. He was the president and part-owner of the Toronto brewery of O'Keefe Brewery. He also owned racehorses, including the 1915 King's Plate–winning horse Tartarean. However, he is now best known for his unusual will which touched off the Great Stork Derby.
Millar's final prank was his will, which says in part:
This Will is necessarily uncommon and capricious because I have no dependents or near relations and no duty rests upon me to leave any property at my death and what I do leave is proof of my folly in gathering and retaining more than I required in my lifetime.
The will had several unusual bequests:
- Three men who were known to despise each other (T. P. Galt, KC; J. D. Montgomery and James Haverson, KC) were granted joint lifetime tenancy in Millar's vacation home in Jamaica, on condition that they live in the property together.
- To each practicing Protestant minister in Toronto, and every Orange Lodge in Toronto, a share of O'Keefe Brewery stock, a Catholic business, if they participated in its management and drew on its dividends.
- Two anti-horse-racing advocates (Hon. William Raney, Reverend Samuel Chown) and a man who detested the Ontario Jockey Club (Abe Orpen) were to receive a share of Ontario Jockey Club stock, provided they are shareholders in three years. Raney's and Chown's share were eventually given to charity and Orpen accepted his share.
- Each duly ordained Christian minister in Walkerville, Sandwich, and Windsor, "except Spracklin, who shot a hotelkeeper" was to receive a share of the Kenilworth Park Racetrack, located just outside Windsor, Ontario.
The tenth and final clause of his will was the largest. It required that the balance of Millar's estate was to be converted to cash ten years after his death and given to the Toronto woman who gave birth to the most children in that time. In the event of a tie, the bequest would be divided equally. The resulting contest became known as the Great Stork Derby.
Eleven families competed in the "baby race." Seven of them were disqualified, but eventually Judge William Edward Middleton ruled in favour of four mothers (Annie Katherine Smith, Kathleen Ellen Nagle, Lucy Alice Timleck, and Isabel Mary Maclean) who each received $110,000 for their nine children ($2.24 million in 2023 dollars). Three of the four had to pay back relief money given to them by the City of Toronto government. Two of the disqualified candidates, Lillian Kenny and Pauline Mae Clarke, each received $12,500 out of court in exchange for abandoning pending appeals.
fmaa
7hr ago
The vile part is the guilt transference. Christianity doesn't say that everyone's guilty but god forgives them anyway (not that I don't think original sin is a pretty vile concept as well), christianity says that god can forgive us because he transferred our just punishment by torturing Jesus to death (though he got better). That Jesus dying for other peoples sins is a meaningful moral concept.
If the mother of a criminal to be executed says "No, take me instead!", the official who says "Ok, sure" and executes the mother is an injust tyrant, regardless of how much genuine repentance the criminal feels afterwards.
Forty-Bot
7hr ago
but these days most are set up by the original land developer and transmit from the first sale on.
Aren't they limited by the rule against perpetuities?
I'm not asking the internet. I'm asking themotte.org.
Also, it's still an expense to go visit all of the schools. If a dozen people here said "lol no, this is bad, here's why" and nobody had a convincing counterargument I would not bother.
The responses here have been helpful!
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
7hr ago
So is Churchill basically the British Abraham Lincoln, in terms of domestic praise? Or is this more about foreign perceptions of praiseworthy Brits?
I wonder if the same historiographical trends and forces that have happened to some extent over Lincoln have clear parallels for Churchill, or if the trajectory is very different. For example, modern emphasis on how Lincoln was willing to end the war keeping slavery intact, or suspending habeus corpus, was a racist, or a mini-tyrant. Unfair IMO, I think he deserves top billing as one of the best presidents alongside Washington.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
7hr ago
Why would you assume that the customer base of online sex doll retailers or the set of AI slop producers is at all representative of "average guys"? It's easy to come up with a model where both strongly select on a criterion that could be glossed as "preference for quantity over quality".
In general, that whole blog seems to be in the old genre of "everyone who disagrees with my tastes is falsifying their preferences or a degenerate, and here is some cherrypicked evidence".
gattsuru
7hr ago
Yeah, that's kinda the core of the problem, here.
There's a lot of arguments in favor of a muscular judiciary, and I've made a good number of them, but we don't have that. SCOTUS hears a tiny number of cases, a fraction of those they do hear either get punts or toothless GVRs, and the normal policy has been to fastidiously avoid interlocutory appeals and triple-check every case for sufficient jurisdiction and mootness, and even on those extremely rare events where they don't skip out completely we still get cases that don't want to make the law clear.
That's what makes this sorta thing gall. I don't think Trump has a particularly strong arg for the AEA stuff, and even if the birthright citizenship history is more complicated than most people think the stare decisis is pretty compelling. But I can name countless other issues, and every single time that the court punts on any situation where there is current and unrecoverable harm and the court hems and haws over the importance of procedural regularity, I'm going to point to this case. And I'm going to have a lot of opportunities to point to this case.
That's what the reported Russian threat was aimed against: "it will be five regions the next time we meet".
And it was a poor threat for the same reason. Good threats should never incentivize people to not comply.
The issue is not how many regions Russia wants to claim. The issue is that it no matter how many kms of regions Russia wants to demand the ukrainians turn over without fighting, it will still be in the Ukrainian interest to make Russia pay the resources they are willing to spend fighting km by km, rather than let Russia have both kms and the resources to conquer more.
A Russian offer that a concession of KMs will stop further aggression runs into the Russian credibility problem.
I agree that a major Ukrainian collapse is improbable, but it is not impossible. Russian operational competence is low, but most Ukrainian units are half-strength right now at best. If there's a lucky breakthrough, the 93rd might not be there to plug the gap in time. I am not talking about a total collapse, but a major realignment like the 2022 Harjkov counteroffensive.
Better a kharkiv further east within the regions that Russia insists it wants all of, than a kharkiv further west to be basis of claim a fifth region.
Turniper
8hr ago
Nah. Ours did a bit last year, and we just voted in 3 people to the board who ran on 'roll back the due hike and stop bothering people about clover in their lawn'. We got exactly that. It's like any other form of democratic government, you get what you vote for.
quiet_NaN
8hr ago
The idea that it was Pilate's job to follow "due process" and that he was "derelict in his duty" is delightfully ahistorical. The laws which Pilate followed were the laws of Rome. Roman law was not very concerned with the rights of non-citizens, their brothels and salt mines were full of slaves. And Jesus was very much not a Roman citizen. As a military governor, the job ob Pontius Pilate, as far as the Senate was concerned, was to keep the peace and facilitate the extraction of wealth. How he did this was totally up to him. If one day he woke up and decided to drown a tenths of the infants in Jerusalem in boiling pig fat, Rome would only object to that as far as it lead to instability.
The fact that he even personally bothered to preside over the case is more a concession to the political touchiness of the subject than any due process. Quite frankly, the local elites were really pissed at Jesus because he had interfered with their religion by causing a ruckus with the money-changers (which ultimately threatened their business model). And Pilate decided that it would be in Rome's best interests to placate them by putting Jesus to death. Given that the followers of Jesus did not rise up in rebellion, it is hard to argue that he was wrong with his decision. (A Gibbonite would blame the fall of Rome on Christianity, but Pilate could not possibly have foreseen that.)
Quite frankly, by messing with religious institutions, Jesus was kind of asking for it, either intentionally or in a FAFO way. Most places and times did not have strong freedom of speech norms, and Jesus would have fared little better if he had criticized dominant religious practices in pretty much any culture. If he had tried his little stunt in front of the temple of Athena or Saturn or Odin or a medieval cathedral or in early Boston or in front of a mosque in contemporary Tehran or Riyadh or in front of some Buddhist temple in Myanmar, he would have fared little better. Sure, in today's Western world, he might have gotten away with just a night in a prison cell and a fine (or no penalty at all if he had opted to practice his free speech by just demonstrating with a sign "God hates money-changers"), but of all the atrocities committed in the name of Rome, the killing of Jesus likely does not even make the top million.
Turniper
8hr ago
Ugh. This reminds me I need to get back into rigging for my game project. AI generated 3D animation clips can't come soon enough for me.
You mean the animal sacrifice aspect of Judaism? I agree it's definitely seen as somewhat barbaric by modern Western standards but for a good chunk of history it was pretty normal. Still practiced in parts of Hindu India and some Islamic countries, plus in Santería where that's a thing. You have to remember that part of that is because for a lot of history, animals were a major source of wealth. Judaism deliberately requiring the sacrifice of the "firstborn" or most "unblemished" of their flocks served multiple purposes - one, the fact that it was a bit of a waste was kind of the point, showing your devotion via valuable things; two, at least at some points in Jewish history, the meat would be used as a revenue and food source for the Levites, the priest tribe, who otherwise didn't have their own land; three, there's some doctrinal symbolism, both for Christians and Jews although the symbolism's exact flavor varies. I think that's relatively emblematic of the use of animal sacrifice in religion more broadly: ideas about drama, tribute, and symbolism (blood is a very obvious expression of life). I guess obviously, if you feel as a modern atheist that we are overcoming human nature or something, sure it might be
Or do you mean the moral idea of sin and guilt in general? I feel like that's pretty natural and human. People struggle with guilt in non-religious contexts all the time. Wanting someone or something to take away that guilt follows pretty logically. Even psychologists think a certain degree of guilt is healthy - it's more the shame side of things that can be harmful, or when it's excessive.
Edit: What exactly is the vile part? The animal sacrifice (poor animals, barbaric butchery) or the guilt bit? I guess you could consider wanting other people or things to take away guilt as somewhat maladaptive. But a full absolution via zero personal action/responsibilty is not typically the connected belief, except for maybe some born-again Christians, but I think they tend to be the minority, most still feel like some steps of personal improvement or reconciliation are needed (i.e. repentence).
No_one
8hr ago
I mean, somewhat. I learned about it from my first gf who was a wasn't even that unhealthily thin, 5'6", 115 lbs, exercised a lot and actually didn't have visible abs.
Body fat has a hormonal role and low body fat can be actually fairly harmful. Sure it's individual - she'd probably have been okay if she cut her exercise to half.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41574-019-0230-6
if TL;DR, wikipedia summary
Previously treated as being hormonally inert, in recent years adipose tissue has been recognized as a major endocrine organ,[3] as it produces hormones such as leptin, estrogen, resistin, and cytokines (especially TNFα).[2] In obesity, adipose tissue is implicated in the chronic release of pro-inflammatory markers known as adipokines, which are responsible for the development of metabolic syndrome—a constellation of diseases including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and atherosclerosis.[2][4]
While cute it's a bit concerning
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