domain:pedestrianobservations.com
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2hr ago
So I had a cousin commit suicide this year. I don't know the exact means and methods he used, seemed garish to ask at his funeral, and frankly it doesn't change anything to me how he did it. He suffered into his 50's with mental health issues, and I can only assume the ruins of the life he was still inhabiting overwhelmed him. I wish he hadn't done it. I wish I could see him again, have a cigar, and shoot the shit for another evening. I wish it wasn't so hard for him to exist. But I can't change it.
The pain it caused in his mother, who he saw all the time, and his sister, who he saw less often being states away, was beyond words. That said, as nightmarish as that act was to them, there at least was no 3rd party to the act to complicate their feelings of grief. There were no accomplices who gave him advice, walked him through the act, supplied him with means and methods, or even just did it for him. When all was said and done, he took all the guilt for the act to the grave with him, and saved his family the further grief of having anyone else to be angry with, anyone else's actions to judge.
I can accept that some people just want out. I can accept that though it may be painful for their families, their decisions about what to do with their life is theirs to make. I don't think I can accept third parties being involved, making it easier, "normalizing" it, and complicating the grief of an already unimaginable difficult thing to cope with.
Before I was born, a culture war was fought over ending life, and the defenders of it ran on the slogan of "Safe, Legal and Rare". 63 million abortions in the United States later, it's clear this was just a slogan. I don't know why I would trust these same people a second time.
Well, not me personally, I wasn't alive for "Safe, Legal and Rare", but you know what I mean.
2rafa
2hr ago
That’s because it’s the easiest topic to grandstand on because it gets almost no opposition. Even our few trans posters have had very heterodox opinions on the subject, and everyone else (again, including the liberals and leftists) tends to be opposed to the standard libleft position on the subject.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3hr ago
· Edited 2hr ago
I'm rather torn on this issue.
On the one hand, I do think that people have a fundamental right to commit suicide if they want to, and I think it would be healthy if we as a culture took some steps to demythologize suicide. Specifically, it would be nice if we could revoke its status as a "superweapon"; all too often, certain unsavory individuals will use "you're making me suicidal!" as an emotional manipulation tactic to immediately end all rational discussion and assert the priority of their own immediate desires. If these outbursts were met with indifference instead of panic, maybe people wouldn't be so quick to go there. Alan Watts once mentioned that he would occasionally get people coming up to him and telling him that they were suicidal, and his response was always, "Ok! Well, you can do that if you want". And in the majority of cases, the person would immediately start feeling better upon hearing this; it simply "deflated" whatever problem they had become fixated on. What happens sometimes is that people get stuck in a powerful negative feedback loop where they feel suicidal, and then they realize that that desire is bad and wrong and they shouldn't want to do that, which makes them feel even worse, which makes them more suicidal, and so on and so forth. By demythologizing suicide, you make it a less attractive option in the first place and you cut off the feedback loop.
On the other hand, you are correct to point out that there are clear dangers associated with suicide becoming a "business" (or even worse, an "institution"), and this institutionalization is indicative of a fundamental underlying current of cultural nihilism.
Pitt19802
3hr ago
I generally use it as a search engine that I can ask more specific questions to than I can ask google.
I think its pretty helpful with travel planning, I feel like it lets me dictate more degrees of freedom than google does.
I'm taking a trip with my daughter next month, my daughter wants to go ziplining, "Can you help me find ziplining places, we're starting at A, ending at B, anywhere roughly along the route ..." I find LLMs handle that sort of thing better than google does. "We going to be in X for 2 days, what's some things we should do?" "Ehh, I don't think we would like that, what else" "Ehh, how expensive is that, is there something more affordable?". idk, couple iterations of that get you to something pretty workable.
iprayiam3
3hr ago
I think another comparable industry is trans-medicalism, which is clearly, and documentably associated with profit motivations, and led to an incredible rise of something that was once much much rarer.
much of self_made's response below is a predictable mix of techno-libertarian priors and false assurance against corruption (or simply runaway incentives to overexent) by profit-seeking via ideological purity.
In most professions, especially those with an ethical or ideological core, the profit motive coexists with, and is often constrained by, professional ethics, reputational incentives, and a genuine belief in the mission.
Again, with the case of trans, we can se that was is laughably not the case. We saw the ideological core of trans distort and blind a lot of otherwise obvious ethical, and reputational issues. And we are seeing the backlash now.
Also much like the trans question, we are going to have two movies on one screen interpretation of any rapid rise: A need being met vs creeping pressure and social memeplex.
Self-made's objection is again the same tautology that is used to defend an ever growing number of trans individuals as self-justifying:
A person who travels to another country in secret to end their life has, by their actions, expressed a powerful preference.
If powerful preference is the driving justification, then people with ideological motivations will push their hand on the social memeplex / overton window, even if just to make the existing number with these preferences or marginal preferences more free; it will cost lots of money to do this, and lots of money with be made. And then the number will grow inorganically.
This is exactly how it works.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
Welcome!
It's always interesting to get a perspective from another part of the world, though that always comes with a built-in inability to comment on it much, due to the same lack of familiarity that makes it interesting to begin with. It's a bit sad to hear the same sort of controversies are taking place in a completely different culture. What's worse, even the pushback that followed doesn't feel like cause for much optimism, as it reminds me of various backlashes in the Western internet ~10 years ago. Here's hoping China is on a different trajectory, and not just a bit behind on the same path.
FistfullOfCrows
3hr ago
I look forward to being paid in 𝔹asilisk coin [tm]
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
the admins were most upset about discussion of the trans thing which was comparatively minor.
There go 80% of my AAQCs...
2rafa
4hr ago
The political situation was never bad enough to warrant an exodus, the admins were most upset about discussion of the trans thing which was comparatively minor.
I do think we should return. It was good for discoverability. At the same time I am of course grateful to Zorba and the others who created this place.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4hr ago
A person who travels to another country in secret to end their life has, by their actions, expressed a powerful preference. That preference is not just for death, but for a death conducted on their own terms, which in these cases explicitly involves secrecy from their family. They tell their loved ones they are going on holiday. They, allegedly in one case, forge letters and create fake email accounts to maintain the deception. This those not strike me as ideal, but I can't really condemn someone who is clearly this desperate to die.
From the patient’s perspective, the ideal outcome is one where their autonomy is maximally respected. For the clinic, this presents a dilemma. Who is their client? The patient who is paying for a service and demanding confidentiality, or the family who is not their client but has a profound emotional and moral stake in the outcome?
If they were merely a profit-maxxing company, the answer becomes clear. They could, with ease, tell the family to fuck off, or something a tad bit more polite than that. After all, they followed the letter of the law.
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 Maureen Slough did indeed forge a letter from her daughter, the clinic was not simply "skimping on postage". It was being actively deceived by its own client in a way that pitted its promise to families against its duty to the patient. The failure to make a phone call seems like a clear error. But in a context of deliberate deception, we can see it not just as a cost-cutting measure, but as a failure to be sufficiently paranoid in the face of a determined client. And the paranoia would have been pointless, the family has no legal right to stop the process. At most, everyone feels better if they're on board.
I run into similar issues every week. Hospitals are forbidden from divulging patient details, even if the voice over the phone claims that they're a brother/wife/best friend. Especially if the person has capacity to make decisions, and this lady seems to fit the bill.
Second, the characterization of Pegasos as "a business" may be both trivially true and misleading. Of course it is a business in that it charges fees for a service. But reducing its motivation solely to profit maximization seems to be a category error. It appears to be a mission driven organization, an ideological entity that must also be a business to survive. The people running it are almost certainly true believers in the cause of bodily autonomy and the right to die. They charge money, like many an NGO does, to pay the bills and keep the lights on.
Their own site says:
At Pegasos we philosophically believe that no one should be prevented from a VAD with us, simply because they lack the financial resources. Pegasos hopes that in the future we will be in a position to provide financial aid to those who would otherwise be unable to avail our service.
And I believe them. The regulatory paperwork alone must be an awful nightmare. If Charles Schwab is handing out big bucks to save on the expenses of more longterm pods and chicken feed, they're not getting a cut.
Finally, we must be wary of the availability heuristic. We are reading these stories in the newspaper precisely because they represent catastrophic failures. The family who has a peaceful, well-communicated experience with an assisted dying clinic does not generate headlines. At least not after the first dozen times.
We have no access to the base rates. How many clients does Pegasos serve in a year? For what percentage do these communication breakdowns occur? It is possible that these tragic cases represent a small number of "glitches" in a system that, for the most part, functions as intended by its clients. Or it is possible that they represent a systemic failure. The point is that from this handful of terrible anecdotes, we cannot know. You can come up with lurid anecdotes for just about anything, and in medicine?
I've already presented a quantitative analysis. The slope doesn't seem very slippery to me and it certainly hasn't reached the point where fair and open-minded advocates feel beholden to shut the whole thing down.
The Swiss have had legal assisted dying since 1941. If the "businessification" of death inevitably leads to this kind of procedural slippage, we should have seen decades of this. We should have a mountain of data on Swiss citizens being bundled off to industrial parks by greedy doctors against their families' wishes. Instead, we have a few tragic stories, mostly involving "suicide tourism," where the informational and logistical challenges are exponentially greater.
The complaint about tracking the ashes "like she was a parcel in the post" is emotionally powerful. But what's the alternative? A private courier hand-delivering the ashes internationally? Who is paying for that?
will become a business, when we get into business territory, it's about profit
A tired and overly generalized critique. Do the police run Burglary 101 classes when the crime rates get too low? Do cardiologists open McDonald's outside their hospital? Do the hospital admins squeeze tubes of trans-fats into the sandwiches served at their cafeterias?
In most professions, especially those with an ethical or ideological core, the profit motive coexists with, and is often constrained by, professional ethics, reputational incentives, and a genuine belief in the mission. A scandal like this is terrible for Pegasos, both for its "business" and its "crusade." It invites negative press, legal scrutiny, and tarnishes the very cause they champion.
HereAndGone
4hr ago
they need them to save other people's lives
Mmmm. That's a bit too much like the thought experiment about the surgeon kidnapping people and killing them for their organs - is he wrong or is he in the right? And there does seem to be some financial inducements involved, or at least alleged.
I think people are uncomfortable with revising definitions of death to be "this person isn't dying fast enough so we can break them down for parts, let's say that if they're not up and about dancing flamenco, they're toast and we can start cutting".
HereAndGone
4hr ago
Thank you for the explanation. It still seems a longer way round than just remembering the times tables, but if it works for people to understand the principles, I suppose that's the main point.
HereAndGone
4hr ago
Following up on the post about assisted suicide, here's more about that Swiss clinic which is the subject of allegations by an Irish family:
Two families whose loved ones ended their lives at a Swiss clinic in secret have said they are heartbroken that another family has been put through a similar ordeal.
Anne Canning (51), from Wales, travelled to the Pegasos clinic, near Basel, to end her life in January following the tragic death of her only son. She told her family she was going on holidays.
Under similar circumstances, Alastair Hamilton (47) travelled from the UK to the clinic in 2023.
Following Mr Hamilton’s death, the clinic reportedly promised last year that it would always contact a person’s family before carrying out an assisted death.
However, Ms Canning’s family claim they were never informed.
Last week, the daughter of a Co Cavan-based woman who ended her life alone at the same clinic told the Irish Independent that the first she knew that her mother had died was when a volunteer for the group sent her a WhatsApp message.
Maureen Slough (58), who had a history of mental illness, travelled to the Pegasos clinic on July 8, having told her family she was going to Lithuania with a friend.
Now, I'm not going to argue over the right to die, when is suffering intolerable, religious objections, slippery slopes or the rest of it. What I'm going to do is say that this is a business (indeed, this is a claim made in the story by one of the families). And, just the same way that IVF has become a business, and embryonic selection (see the Herasight proceedings) will become a business, when we get into business territory, it's about profit. And to maximise profits, we reduce costs. If that means setting up a clinic that looks like a blocky industrial estate unit and skimping on postage, so be it.
There's some indication, at least from claims by these families, that procedures are not being followed through, or at the very least, merely rubber-stamped and not, in fact, keeping the promises they made about communication with and informing the families:
The Pegasos group said it received a letter from Ms Slough’s daughter, Megan Royal, saying she was aware of her mother’s wishes and accepted them.
It also said it verified the letter through an email response to her using an email address allegedly supplied by Ms Royal.
Ms Royal said she never wrote such a letter or verified any contact from Pegasos, and her family think Ms Slough may have forged the letter and verified it using an email address she created herself.
Her family have questioned why Pegasos staff did not ring Ms Royal on a number that Ms Slough had supplied to them for her.
The same way that someone in the comments over on ACX described her experiences with IVF and why the clinic downplayed/ignored her problems, it's the same answer here: it's a business now, and profit (not the message about "we'll compassionately give you what you so emotionally desire") is the motivation. And the more it becomes just another business, the more slippage we'll see. No, I don't mean slippery slope, I mean this kind of thing: we don't email you, you have to track your mother's ashes "using a code, like she was a parcel in the post", and hey, verbal promises aren't worth the paper they're written on, we're legal in this country so too bad.
Standards only last as long as the brakes are on. When we take the brakes off, then it's a business and death (and life) is a commodity to be monetised.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5hr ago
The man who is currently President of the United States, with the support of most Motteposters, did not want a rematch - he wanted to be inaugurated despite losing the election.
I don't seem to recall anyone on the Motte saying "Trump lost, but he should be inaugurated anyway". I seem to recall a lot of questioning of the integrity of the elections. The option for rematch with stricter security measures was indeed absent from the conversation. From either side.
Also, you know as well as I do that Georgescu wasn't disqualified for what he did on TikTok, he was disqualified for paying for it with illegal foreign donations.
Oh spare me. It was clear he was going to get disqualified before anyone said anything about muh illegal donations.
"Do you feel emotions as physical sensations or intense thoughts?"
I'd say that most people feel emotions physically - e.g. you are so anxious before an important event so that you want to throw up. You are so angry that your hands tremble and maybe even contort into fists. You are so ashamed that you feel your face and ears turning red in wave of hotness.
In fact I think there was some post possibly back in reddit TheMotte days, where there was somebody promoting a theory of polytheism being born of these particular physical foci of emotion. I do not remember it that well, but the gist of it was something about the fact why you had god of war or lust and so forth with specific rituals and physicality - down to actual representation of that emotion in vocabulary: like the words heart, bile, spleen, gut, stomach etc being associated with courage, hatred, anger, anxiety, fear etc. The theory was that your actions were driven by that particular emotion associated with that part of you body related to a specific god who had domain over it. In order to be integrated you had to appeal to this multitudes integrated into you being. Monotheistic religions like Christianity integrated all these emotions into one person, putting reason/logos on top of all of it, as the ultimate ruling principle.
But I still think that rational thinking is a reflective stance, there is still a need to control the emotion on a physical level in order to analyze it. But the underlying physicality is still there - how could it not be. Stress or fear reaction are famously related to various levels of hormones with large impacts on physical state. Just because you have more experience controlling them does not mean they do not exist physically.
I even think that a good way of controlling/regulating your immediate emotions is to disassociate yourself from these physical effects - you posit your ego as an observer of physical impact of your emotion as if you are some curious anthropologist of yourself, not fighting or appeasing them directly from within the paradigm.
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
5hr ago
The man who is currently President of the United States, with the support of most Motteposters, did not want a rematch - he wanted to be inaugurated despite losing the election. He also called for criminal prosecution of various election administrators who had not committed crimes.
Also, you know as well as I do that Georgescu wasn't disqualified for what he did on TikTok, he was disqualified for paying for it with illegal foreign donations. Which is something the Trump admin is also happy to spam calls for criminal prosecution over.
quiet_NaN
6hr ago
Many of the UFO believers double down when the prophecy doesn't happen.
Tangentially relevant sequence post: Evaporative cooling of group beliefs
quiet_NaN
6hr ago
While likely challenging to implement, I think the preferable way to go about it would be to store the version history of every comment, like github does with comments.
That gives you the best of both worlds. You can edit in typos and strikeouts for statements you no longer endorse. You can even delete a post as a way to de-escalate. But intentionally writing a top level comment and then deleting it as a kind of ding-dong-ditch will be pointless, because any reader is just one click away from reading what you originally wrote.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6hr ago
If they don't, they get banned, so the problem deals with itself.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6hr ago
Yes? Zorba fixed a bug I found particularly annoying like 2 weeks back.
The Motte is mostly feature complete, but changes do happen.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6hr ago
I am unsure of whether or not that's warranted.
I think the reasons for Zorba planning an exodus were based in clear merit. We did attract the wrong kind of attention. It was better to leave on our own terms than scramble after the subreddit ended up quarantined.
I wouldn't be averse to us re-activating the sub, but I think that's an option best used in extremis. We're here, we're functional. The moderation tools are so much better. The Reddit experience, in general, is so much worse.
If we end up in a state where we don't have the active user base to justify our existence, that's about the only situation where I think dusting off /r/TheMotte truly becomes the obviously correct procedure.
For those of you who aren't Christian, I'd like to hear more about what your own spiritual/moral system looks like, and what your own vision of the future of society going forward is.
There's something to be said for the clarity of childhood skepticism. At five years old, watching my deeply religious grandparents prescribe antibiotics instead of prayer to their patients, I experienced what some might call an epistemic crisis but what felt more like noticing that the emperor had no clothes. The world simply didn't behave as if gods were running the show.
This wasn't the dramatic deconversion narrative you sometimes read about. No crisis of faith, no dark night of the soul, no angry rejection of divine authority. Just a quiet observation that the people who claimed to believe most fervently in divine intervention were the same ones who reached for medical textbooks when someone's life was actually on the line. Even at five, this struck me as a pretty significant tell about what people actually believed versus what they claimed to believe.
I have prayed precisely once in my life with any degree of earnestness: My mom was pregnant, and wanted me to wish for a sibling. I asked for a baby brother, and look at how that turned out!
(I love my brother, even if he's also a flawed individual, but I don't think Ganesh had much hand in things by that point. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a logical fallacy most five-year-olds haven't learned the Latin name for, but many seem to understand intuitively. The universe appeared to be running on autopilot, following comprehensible patterns that had nothing to do with cosmic intervention.)
So there I was, barely 5 years old, and ever since, I began to claim I was an atheist. My family was rather confused, since they couldn't see why I'd say such a thing.
I was expected to study, instead of hoping that prayer to the relevant goddess would get me better grades. Religion didn't seem to add very much.
Fortunately, my family, despite being somewhat religious, were a very understanding and open-minded sort. They never pressured me to actually believe, nor punished me for my clear atheism.
I went to a Christian missionary school (Anglican? Protestant? Didn't hear any Latin), so I am eminently familiar with Christian doctrine and found no factual merit in it. Even the teachers didn't seem to hold high hopes: Christian religious indoctrination was just what the system did, I do not recall a single person at school who gave up their existing religious framework in its favor. Parents fought to send their kids here because it was supposedly a good school, with strict discipline and high standards. They'd have been flummoxed if it actually made anyone into a Christian.
--
If I had to summarize, and there's a lot of lossy compression involved:
I'm a transhumanist classical liberal with libertarian tendencies. I have my own idiosyncratic moral code, which collapses to normality in most circumstances.
Each piece serves a specific function in addressing questions that religious systems typically handle: What are humans? What should we become? How should we organize society? What do we owe each other?
Transhumanism provides the anthropological foundation. Humans are not fallen angels or made in God's image or inherently sinful creatures in need of redemption. We're the current iteration of an evolutionary process that has been running for billions of years, remarkable in our capacity for reason, creativity, and moral reflection, but still fundamentally biological machines with significant room for improvement. More importantly, we have both the ability and, I'd argue, the obligation to direct our own continued evolution rather than leaving it to the blind processes that got us this far.
My work (which pays the bills) is to act as a mechanic for a machine which didn't come with an instruction manual. It's little surprise that we could trace the orbits of the spheres centuries before we could reliably treat most disease.
Classical liberalism handles the political framework. Individuals are the fundamental unit of moral consideration, possessed of certain basic rights that create obligations for others and for institutions. Markets are generally excellent at coordinating human activity and generating prosperity, but they're tools, not gods themselves, and sometimes they fail in predictable ways that justify intervention. (Hence why I have libertarian tendencies instead of being a card-carrying member)
The libertarian tendencies emerge from deep skepticism about concentrated power, whether governmental, corporate, or social. Most problems that can be solved by force probably shouldn't be, and most things that people want to do to each other are none of my business as long as they're not violating anyone else's rights. If you want to be deeply stupid, then that's your perogative, as long as you leave me and mine alone.
I've noticed that most functional moral systems are actually quite similar in their practical prescriptions. Don't kill people, don't steal their stuff, don't lie to them, help when you can, be fair in your dealings, honor your commitments. The differences emerge in edge cases and in the theoretical justifications for these shared norms. I expect these edge cases to become increasingly relevant as time goes on. We will litigate this as we always litigate such things, with a lot of shouting, swearing, and on some occasions, violence. I would prefer as little of the latter as we can get away with. But I'm not a committed pacifist, there are hills I will die on, though I hope to get the other bastard first.
In the meantime, I'm here for the ride. I am profoundly grateful that I don't have a God-shaped hole in my heart (or any holes beyond the ideal number and arrangement). Poor bastards, hopefully we can find a cure one day. In the meantime, I hope to serve as an existence proof that committed materialism is workable, and that I have plenty of meaning in my life without having to force myself to believe in falsities.
What do I hope for from the future?
In short: Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism (the homosexuality is optional).
We will, either in a decade, or over the long term, solve most of our problems. From the perspective of most of our ancestors, we already have it made.
But let's be more specific about what "solved" looks like, because I suspect most people's intuitions about post-Singularity life are either wildly optimistic in boring ways or pessimistic in ways that miss the point entirely.
The boring optimistic version goes something like: "We'll all have flying cars and live forever and never have to work!" This isn't wrong exactly, but it's like describing the internet as "a really good library." Technically accurate, completely missing the transformative implications.
The pessimistic version usually involves either paperclip maximizers turning us all into computronium, or some version of "but what will give life meaning if we don't have to struggle?" The first concern is real but solvable (I am not an AI Doomer, but I am Seriously Concerned). The second reveals a failure of imagination that would have been familiar to every generation of humans who worried that their children wouldn't develop proper character without smallpox and subsistence farming.
I genuinely believe with >70% confidence that we will have ASI by 2035. All bets are off the table then. But if it works out for the better, then I look forward to a life spent without the fear of death, disease, or hunger.
I know I would be happy in such a world. I do not need struggle or suffering to give my life meaning. I'd find something or the other to keep myself busy, until the stars burn out and then eons after. Should that somehow not turn out to be the case, then I am open to the idea of reworking my reward circuitry. That is a last resort, but I do not wish to be be both alive and bored.
In the short term ~10 years:
Little changes. We might lose our jobs, we might get Super-TikTok. We will certainly get some sick video games. Mortality rates will plummet, even if we haven't strictly invented immortality or cured all disease. Robot cars and butlers will make life much easier.
Artificial General Intelligence doesn't arrive like a bolt from the blue. By the time we have true AGI, we'll already have systems doing 90% of what humans currently consider "knowledge work." The transition will feel less like a sudden singularity and more like stepping from a fast-moving escalator onto an even faster one. Of course, Gary Marcus and Hlynka will continue being their usual selves as the AI wins Nobel Prizes.
In the longer term?
Eventually we stop being recognizably human in any biological sense, though we'll probably retain enough continuity that we still recognize ourselves as the same people who once worried about mortgage payments and whether to have children. Physical bodies become optional. Some people will keep them for sentimental reasons or because they enjoy the constraint. Others will exist as pure information, perhaps experiencing thousands of simultaneous virtual lives or extending themselves across interstellar distances at light speed. Still others will adopt bodies suited for specific purposes: aquatic forms for exploring Europa's oceans, radiation-hardened versions for stellar engineering, macro-scale versions for building Dyson spheres by hand.
I'm going to be having a grand old time, but I have the epistemic humility to not speculate too much on what entities that much smarter and more capable than me do for work or leisure. I hope to look back at the writings and dreams of the present me, and feel that I have always been the same, in the manner I can recall my attitudes and actions at the age of five and understand how that built the person I am today.
Even if I don't make it, I hope that the people of the future recognize that I was doing the best I could with what I have. I hope they feel a pang of sorrow for someone who wanted to be where they are, but was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. I hope this essay finds them, well.
x7q4v
7hr ago
In 2023, at a Wuhan University library study space, Yang Jingyuan (JY), a female master’s student in Economics/Law, was seated close to Xiao Mingtao (MX), a male first‑year undergraduate student. JY secretly recorded MX for approximately 70 minutes whilst seated near him for around 100 minutes. During this time, MX can be seen touching his clothed crotch area, reportedly due to eczema‑related irritation.
Once she believed she had obtained sufficient footage and had formulated a plan, JY confronted MX and demanded an official written apology on the spot, promising that this sexual‑harassment episode would be handled privately.
JY subsequently pressed the university for disciplinary action against MX and for preferential treatment as a victim of sexual assault. She circulated the video and the written apology online amid a wave of feminist activism in China in 2023, garnering wide support. Personal details of MX and his family members—including their occupations and backgrounds—surfaced online, with many voices supporting JY and amplifying female victimhood. Wuhan University awarded JY a distinction for her thesis, among other recognitions, and she was admitted as a doctoral candidate at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU). MX was later disciplined by Wuhan University and, according to some reports, expelled.
JY sued MX using the evidence she had gathered (the video and MX’s written apology). The court dismissed the case on the basis that MX’s written apology had been produced under duress. This was evidenced by an additional clip showing JY threatening MX on the spot as the apology was written; JY’s lawyer voluntarily supplied this clip to the court.
Court decision happened on 25 July of 2025. Around August 2025, JY posted online again from multiple accounts, stating that she had been accepted by HKBU for a doctorate in law, and that she did not think Mr Xiao (MX) would be accepted into any programme of similar prestige. In the same posts, JY said she was aware of efforts for MX to apply to a university outside China and that she would submit evidence of MX’s alleged sexual‑harassment acts to any institution to which he applied.
By August 2025, the ebb and flow of feminist movements in China had produced different sentiments. Voices emerged emphasising the damage that JY’s posts—and the 2023 wave of online support—had caused to MX and his family, leading to stress and harm. MX developed mental‑health issues during this time.
JY’s master’s thesis became the most downloaded thesis from Wuhan University. Multiple errors in key components of the award‑winning thesis were identified, some pertaining to econometrics and others to different areas. JY has since been permitted to make corrections to the submitted and published thesis, and has claimed that she was harassed by journalists while working on it, which caused her mental‑health harm.
As of 9 August 2025, Wuhan University officials had yet to provide an official response to netizens’ scrutiny of how the 2023 case was handled, as well as to questions about the recognition of the quality of JY’s master’s thesis.
Hong Kong Baptist University, a lower‑mid‑ranking tertiary institution, was also under netizen scrutiny for the decision to accept JY onto a doctoral law programme. It has since hidden acceptance‑decision information and made no statements regarding online pressure.
A sizeable number of netizens remain supportive of JY, linking her success to the life and death of feminist movements in China.
Conversely, some companies have reportedly either explicitly or quietly rejected internship or job applicants who are Wuhan University graduates, citing concerns either about the actual quality of candidates or about the ethos and culture of the university’s management.
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It is reported that, in Chinese universities, more severe cases of sexual assault—for example, rape—may result in the victim being awarded degrees without completing required components of study or examinations, and being guaranteed a place in postgraduate studies with a scholarship that would normally require a qualifying examination.
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In China, sexual harassment and rape are, in key legal formulations, recognised as offences against females.
Jingyuan Yang (JY): 杨景媛 Mingtao Xiao (MX): 肖明韬 https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hant/武汉大学图书馆争议事件
Hi, first time poster here. Had discussion with a friend who recommended me to the motte.
I grew up in China, went to Wuhan University.
My experience with what I understood to be feminism has been leaning more towards the negative: I found vehement advocates tend to be fueled with anger, and riddled with what I perceive as various forms of double standards.
I think advocates of the Chinese feminist movement should be allowed a 2-year live and work experience exchange to India.
Also, Chinese internet sphere is kind of scary.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
7hr ago
Re. 4: Does public school teach that you should make sacrifices for the common good? Do public school kids have to take a stake in their school by cleaning the classrooms and serve each other lunch? All I remember is stuff like "ANYONE can be president, even YOU" and "America is great because of freedom to do whatever you want and the right to the pursuit of happiness (cf. "don't yuck my yum," "different strokes," etc.)" I think many Americans underestimate how individualistic America is. It is alive and well in America.
R. 6, if it was a higher priority there would be more time ensuring basic competency instead of pushing the barely literate out the door with a diploma.
Re 1 & 2, I'm not so sure. If the daycare function were curtailed (say, only half days or something) I am quite sure that they wouldn't cut half the teaching staff. Public school employees are heavily entrenched, and they can always trot out thought-terminating expressions like "investing in our future" and "funding education" and "helping people of any class achieve the American dream" or whatever that American voters are seemingly helpless against.
The top of the Urban Institute list for 4th grade reading is Mississippi. Number 2 is Lousiana, number 3 is Florida, number 6 Kentucky. Mississippi isn't the only Red State doing good; it's not even the only standout. Mississippi is most notable because it was the worst before.
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