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These Islamic societies were not majority Islamic- Islam degrades HBD capital over the long term by encouraging cousin marriage. As a scientific racist I'd expect you to pay attention to that.

Doesn't pass the sniff test since the great men of the Islamic golden age were, as far as I know, all Muslims. Any hard evidence for this position?

I think that, too, causes unease: some eager-beaver surgeon pushing for declaration of death while the patient is literally still breathing in order to get the organs as fast as possible.

I understand this is a common fear and I'm supposed to identify the doctor as some kind of monster for being insufficiently respectful of the likely dead. But, like, they're not chomping at the bit for those organs because they want to turn a profit, they need them to save other people's lives. I definitely do want safeguards put in place and to ensure the false positive rate is very very low and am in no way saying we should take healthy people's organs in some kind of utilitarian maximizing nightmare world. But sometimes the cynicism in this type of post rubs me the wrong way. We should all want the same thing here.

This is useful reminder about people in the present as well.

That was the edit window on Slate Star Codex. But it takes 24 hours before scores become visible; surely we can allow that much?

Where were they for the four years of nonstop gaslighting and censorship we endured?

One theory is that they might have some sort of relationship with the Bidens. I don't know if there's any true merit to the idea, am not endorsing it, and haven't seen more than idle speculation on this, so caveat emptor. But basic googling does reveal that Kevin Morris, who called himself one of Hunter Biden's "closest friends" and who loaned/gave Hunter Biden at several million dollars to tide him through his tax and legal issues, also has a long-standing relationship with Parker & Stone.

Very much YMMV, but frankly pulling punches for personal reasons makes as much sense to me as the idea that somehow the same guys who did "the snuke" suddenly converted to the resistance.

~6-7 years. At some point /r/themotte was linked on /r/drama and I found it that way. God, I miss seriousposting on Drama.

So it is not as big a deal as one might think. Got it.

Well, no, it's... a very big deal. It's the deal. But asking for a comprehensive explanation of how psychoanalysis relates to introspection and the problems thereof is kind of like asking "what does physics say about matter and how it moves?" How much time you got?

Can I ask for a recommendation on Freud and/or Jung here?

For listening material, and also probably the easiest place to start: look at the backlog of episodes for the Why Theory podcast, pick one that interests you (quite a few of them specifically analyze different works by Freud and Lacan), and just dig in. (Lacan was another important psychoanalytic thinker who took himself to be developing and expanding upon the work of Freud.) They're fun to listen to and they usually stay relatively grounded in terms of concrete examples.

For reading material:

For Freud, many of his works are self-contained and you can start almost anywhere, although I'm fond of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Totem and Taboo.

The book that actually turned me onto psychoanalysis in the first place was Bruce Fink's A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. It... does have a decent amount of woo jargon, but as the name implies, it's focused on showing how psychoanalysis works in a clinical setting, so you can skip the theory parts if you want and just read the case studies, if you want to get an idea of how this stuff actually works as a therapeutic practice using real life stories.

The Jung book that MBTI was based on is called Psychological Types.

I've had some success with making contracts with my own subconsciousness.

It's simply not possible to run away. You either decide that you're going to do something, or that you're not. You decide once, do you actually want to do X, or do you not want to do X? If you decide to do X, then simply do it. Figure out how you'd do that task in concrete steps, if there's a step you don't know, list the steps to figure it out (force applied in the direction of a vague thing simply doesn't feel good, and pushing any harder doesn't automatically turn a goal into a plan if your system 1 cannot do this without the help of system 2) As for the things you've decided to do, you might need to do them more densely (that is, don't waste too much time between them) until your pace is fast enough that your future dreams are archived fast enough for your liking.

In return, you get to feel no stress (perhaps you need to catch up on what you neglected before this happens). Also, the more you control your own life, the more you get things in order, the more decision-power your subconsciousness should give you in return (since you can be trusted with said power). What else can you demand in return? Confidence, peace of mind, energy, whatever you want.

Unhappiness is simply an a contract that people make with themselves without realizing it. It's called "I will be unhappy until I achieve what I want, because I can't trust myself to work hard if I don't feel unhappy". Keep in mind that this doesn't have to be true - some people might be more productive when they're in a good mood. Negative emotions are simply a signal that something is wrong, kind of like a fire alarm. If your brain does not think that something is wrong, the signal does not get triggered.

By the way, a thing you might have accidentally done to yourself, is attempted to break out this loop - and then interpreted the attempt negatively. For instance, if you had limited success, then rather celebrating it as a small victory, you might have considered it a small failure, but punishing your attempts at improvement is dangerous, it's conditioning yourself into believing that change isn't worth it. Some even say that chronic depression is this kind of meta-level learned-helplessness.

By the way, you might want to try energy-drinks / coffee. If these calm you down and help you get stuff done, you might have ADHD.

Wouldn't keeping editing but removing deletion be pointless? You could just edit your post, change it to the text "[deleted]" and get effectively the same result as deleting it.

I got it to write some emergency (and therefore generic) substitute plans, and it produced a downloadable doc, which probably saved me three hours, so I appreciate that. Apparently Teachers Pay Teachers is now a bit scammy, and also I'm unwilling to spend my own money on that kind of thing.

I tried getting some advice on a personal project a month or so ago, and GPT 4 kept saying things like "that's awesomely profound and deep!" with each step, which was annoying, but I hear the new model might be better, and also it does better when just told to knock it off, which I didn't try.

GPT 4 hasn't been very useful for conversation, since by default it produces essay length answers (and sycophancy), but I haven't tried any other models.

It's been reasonably useful for summarizing light research and making concept art.

I’ve always read Caplan as mostly talking about college specifically, not really anything K-12. And I agree to a large measure, that the current model of

  1. Get credential
  2. ???
  3. Get hired for tons of money
  4. Profit

Is flawed for a number of reasons. It doesn’t work for those kids incapable of attaining the diploma. It encourages the dumbing down of educational standards to allow the stupid to get on the path toward a diploma, and allows banks and schools to get rich financing this. It creates a ratchet for the actual talent who now must get ever higher degrees to prove “no im not just here because I paid tuition I actually learned something worthwhile in school”. And it wastes lots of time that could be put to better use.

I argue that at this point higher education credentials are a fetish. They are not worth something for their intrinsic value, but because both the holder and the person reading about the diploma on a resume believe it means something. It doesn’t.

The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt was published in 2007 and blew up the polisci academic space, it was the first book to openly address the odd relationship Israel has with the US (and the groups which make it possible). I think it gives a pretty good cross section of US-Israel relations as they were in 2007 and previously and is a great help explaining many of the current institutions/habits that have been placed under a great deal of stress since Oct. 7. While groups the like ADL have smeared it as antisemetic, it very much is not, it's not some conspiratorial "expose" but an academic investigation (one of the authors is a jew, too). Not very much emphasis wrt Gaza but they authors spend some time on Palestine.

Why do we need God

We are social creatures who pursue social things; that is 99% of our existence and joy, we are fish in social waters. God is a kind of social perfection which allows for optimal human flourishing (or the pursuit thereof) via social cognition. God is conceived in such a way that He supercedes all other social pulls and pressures. Functional descriptions of God, in which He is heard and obeyed because of His social force, are both prior to any philosophical speculation about divinity, and primary in the theistic world religions. Functionally, God is that which demands full attention and allegiance. If you have a community which has full attention and allegiance to God — the Blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see, to Him be honor and eternal dominion — and that God is good, even Love, then you have a good community. Everything else is implementation detail or distraction.

Why do we need the Christian God

The Christian God is especially good. The will and interest of God is shown in Jesus, who is widely considered to be one of the goodest persons ever, even by anti-theists. Christians have been at the forefront of relieving social and moral ills for centuries. There are 2000 years of odes and elaboration upon Christ which can be read by Christians (though some of this is theological, meaning it is worthless). There are 3800 years if you assume that Christ was foreshadowed in Genesis and Job, and if you subscribe to the ancient idea that every culture has a shadow of Christ, then you can see Him in every world myth. Even more importantly, Christians have the best and most reverent music.

The competitor to Christianity is just Islam, which has serious problems in terms of effecting wellbeing. Its liturgy is required to be in Arabic; its music (they don’t call it music) is set in stone; the figure of Muhammad is not as pristine as the figure of Jesus; its emphasis on Hadith makes it too legalistic and ritualistic to be truly utilitarian; some of the Surahs are no longer relevant; etc. This God is not your Father, but the Christian God is (ideal in an evolutionary sense).

Buddhism is irrelevant. Something like compassion meditation is awesome, and I’m sure there are some good stories. But this really isn’t good enough. Its not prosocial enough, its not dramatic enough, it doesn’t test us enough. If Christians wanted, they could steal all the good parts of Buddhism, but the opposite could not happen.

What were/are the flaws in previous/current societies that had at least surface level success (outside of the Modern West) that could be remedied with Christianity

I’m not sure precisely what you mean. Outside of the West, I can see Koreans enjoying better communities through Christianity, by inducing more sharing and fewer conspicuous status purchases. It could probably induce family formation. More selflessness means more philanthropy and less waste. That kind of thing. The current feminism hysteria could be cured by (1) revering the Mother of God, (2) revering Christ as the Saving Victim.

I think a 1 hr grace period is sufficient for typos and regrets. After that, lithography

My oldest LessWrong comment is from 2010. Some people (or was it just one?) on the TV Tropes forum kept linking to The Sequences to make points during discussions. This was around the time when Scott Alexander rose to prominence as Yvain, with classics such as "Beware Trivial Inconveniences", "The Least Convenient Possible World", "A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies", and "Eight Short Studies On Excuses". I followed him when he closed his Live Journal in favor of opening Slate Star Codex, and the rest is history.

Modern elementary school does have a much stronger childcare component than neighborhood schools in the past (though not necessarily more than boarding schools, which were somewhat more common). I could certainly imagine heading in the direction of educational assistants supervising children as they learn from interactive digital materials, or several educational assistants directly teaching phonics to the children if the older teachers find it too unbearably boring.

As far as hiring a 16 year old who's likely to quit to form her own family after six year or so, vs a 23 year old who's likely to take maternity leave at some point for an elementary teacher, it just depends on what the prevailing life path for the society in general is. As you mentioned elsewhere, elementary teachers are pretty conformist, and will teach at 16 if that's the Done Thing, or else go to college if that's the way to show you're conscientious and normal. I doubt there's a way back at this point, since generalist labor is increasingly automated, so there isn't that much demand for even more very young women to work before having kids.

I find this a little strange. Yes, rote memorization is a good idea. But every time I see someone criticize the common core methods it just seems like how I naturally learned to think about numbers? You definitely can truncate most of the steps, the point is spelling it all out. People will say the squares are pointless when you can just carry the one, but the whole point of the squares is to show how carrying the one works mechanically and how it works the same way with multiplication .

  • Naruto fanfiction (circa 2010) → Harry Potter fanfiction → TVTropes fanfiction-recommendation pages → HPMOR (circa 2014) → Big Yud's Facebook page → Slate Star Codex

  • HPMOR/r/rational/r/themotte

Or something like that.

a particular kind of Ur-American conservatism

The cuckservative kind mostly, boy did he blow his lid at the effective deployment of that term vs his chosen neoconish internationalist bullshit.

Where are you observing this stuff?

I know many lawyers plus many non-lawyers who are adjacent to the legal field.

I was thinking it's been a few years (maybe 5 or 6) since I watched a full season of SP, but then I realized the last one I watched was season 17. That was 12 years ago. How times flies.

I’ve just… never encountered this stuff. Maybe it’s just my religious background or my conservative community or maybe it’s happening under my nose and I don’t know it, but “married woman has an affair with a lothario” just… is not something I’ve ever encountered in my circles. Where are you observing this stuff?

Why do so many people think it's trivially easy for a "new religion" (as opposed to a new church/temple/whatever you want to call it within an existing and well-established denomination) to get tax-exempt status in the US?

Most people have zero understanding of the law in general. You can adjust "most people" to "almost 100% of people" if you're discussing a particularly fine point.

That said, it’s bewildering how… lacking in instinct for manipulation a lot of young women are.

You could amend that to "women." The amount of 30something married women I've seen fall for very obvious manipulation from a lothario is painful to contemplate.

How do you all interact with LLMs?

I don't. I do my best to avoid it at all costs. If it's built into something I otherwise need to use (search engines, Westlaw, whatever), I either disable it or ignore it.