domain:felipec.substack.com
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
10hr ago
Yeah priests have been far, far more helpful to me in my personal life.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
10hr ago
This is an oversimplification (inevitable, perhaps, when discussing Hegel) but Hegelian philosophy is sometimes explained through the metaphor of an acorn.
I know one such quote, but the point there is different, illustrating his dynamic hylomorphism:
The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely different; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. But their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this constitutes the nature of the whole.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
10hr ago
I agree that there are people who must be contained for the benefit of others, that's not what I'm saying. It seemed as if @WhiningCoil was making the argument that all progressives are insane and need to be imprisoned or killed. Perhaps I read it wrong.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
10hr ago
I'll bite. I have an EV, and it had nothing to do with virtue signalling (and being "green" was little more than an afterthought). I bought an EV because when I was looking for new cars, I tried them out and loved them. The torque, the smooth ride, the lack of vibrations, noise, or smell. I will probably never go back to ICE. The convenience of never having to go to a gas station or get an oil change again really is awesome.
It does of course come with some caveats: I was able to put a charger in my garage. Charging at home is the real game-changer for EVs. And I mostly only drive locally. @100ProofTollBooth is right that I wouldn't choose it for a "go explore remote mountain trails" car. (That said, modern EVs have a 300+ mile range, so it's not that easy to run out of battery without very poor planning.)
Also, I did not buy a Tesla, and again, not because I have Musk Derangement Syndrome. Teslas have the best software, generally, but other than that, a lot of EV makers beat them on comfort and performance (and I just don't like having everything be controlled by a tablet).
Corvos
10hr ago
nobody wants to self destruct
I think you’re wrong about this. Many people lean into their problems rather than out. Sometimes because - as cope - they convince themselves that they’re self destructing in order to live up to their ideals and then self-destruct harder to prove it. Sometimes because they sabotage themselves rather than risk failure with no excuse.
TitaniumButterfly
11hr ago
But he also isn't bitching about you on an anonymous forum for contrarian autists.
If there's a valid point here it's extraordinarily minor and this was a terrible way to make it. The post doesn't scan to me as even close to bitching.
quiet_NaN
11hr ago
The genius of Musk was not to invent the electric car, there were EVs on the market before Tesla was a thing. The difference was that these cars were very clearly not performing as well as ICE cars given and more expensive.
By contrast, a Tesla is (I think) on par with high-end ICE cars in how much fun it is to drive. For example, if you wanted a car to impress women in 2014, I think you could do worse than a Tesla: not only is is as good a status symbol as a fancy German car, but you will also get bonus points with any woman worrying about climate change.
The fact that fancy German car makers now produce electric vehicles is mostly due to Tesla's success.
If a woman has sex, she might get pregnant. No one's forcing her -- outside of rape. So she either accepts the chance of getting pregnant or doesn't. That's a choice.
And I can promise you that the man in the situation isn't getting told "Golly that wasn't your fault, there's nothing you could have done, don't worry about the resulting human life, that would be asking too much." Because people understand that men, as adults, need to be held accountable.
Hieronymus
11hr ago
I had a somewhat different experience of the evangelical church growing up than you did, though I can see where you are coming from. I remain in the congregation where I grew up, a Baptist-adjacent Bible church in a blue state.
That tone has severely softened in recent years, as white Catholics have become the standard-bearers of the religious right in many ways, but there's a serious way in which the often harsh, but nevertheless informed critiques of more traditional forms of Christianity within historic Protestantism have been flanderized in evangelical circles to an absolute rejection of the Christianity of non-evangelical forms of faith -- indeed out of ignorance.
I’d say that our attitude toward Rome growing up was guarded, sometimes harsh, but not particularly uninformed; of course I have a deeper understanding of the critique as a middle-aged man than I did as a teenager, but that’s true of many things. We didn’t talk about the Eastern Orthodox much, but there weren’t a lot of them around. Our attitude toward middle- and even high-church Protestants was reasonably positive so long as they were strong on Scripture and held to sola fide.
I agree that the general evangelical attitude toward Rome is much less guarded today than it was. Opinions on Eastern Orthodoxy are pretty mixed, but the most common attitude is to regard them as eccentric Roman Catholics. (I will give you that this one is pretty uninformed.)
That said, evangelicalism has also been characterized by a firmer affirmation of conservative social doctrine than spiritual doctrine (I'm not saying spirituality isn't important to them -- I'm saying their emphasis, especially to people who grow distant, is often perceived to be culture war instead of spiritual development), and so leaving evangelicalism is often associated with leaving social conservatism.
I can’t speak to your experience, but in mine people who leave evangelical Christianity tend to move toward social liberalism first, then when this clashes with evangelical Christianity they abandon evangelicalism. It’s a commonplace that when a young man comes to his pastor and says, “I just can’t accept the truth of Christianity any longer,” the correct response is, “Who is she?” Also common today are people who want to accommodate their friends on LGBT issues and leave their evangelical churches when those hold fast to the biblical teaching.
To those leaving it may look like the church is prioritizing social issues over spiritual things. But striving after obedience to God’s will revealed in Scripture is fundamentally tied up in spiritual things. (“If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” and, “Faith without works is dead.”) You can be socially conservative without being an evangelical Christian, or a Christian at all, but it’s no coincidence that socially liberal churches also have a low view of the Bible.
(There is a smaller cohort that leaves evangelicalism directly for more liturgical churches. This is a different phenomenon, and most of them don’t think that evangelicals’ positions on social issues are too conservative.)
… and I'm simply reflecting on the market failure where the mainline Protestant churches that have already been there for a long time now aren't even considered as an option, and are themselves being out-competed by "woke evangelical" churches the same way the megachurch is out-competing the Bible church on the street corner!
I agree that this demand exists, but in my world it’s less than one might suppose. I expect that most “woke evangelical” churches will fade away in a generation or so as the children of their members abandon any connection to Christianity.
chooky
11hr ago
I mean, it is a pretty reasonable expectation that whatever method of birth control used will just work. Unexpected pregnancies certainly exist outside of rape!
Tree
11hr ago
Yeah, in practice they just go in and talk and talk about themselves without pushback, creating a 'history of me', the end result being that they 'learn' that the original source of all their problems is that their parents/siblings have screwed them over in childhood and there’s nothing they can do. It’s incredible, what garden-variety therapy accomplishes. They blow up their small, real problems to gigantic proportions, convince themselves they cannot be resolved, and also destroy their relationships with their closest family members.
WhiningCoil
11hr ago
I should note my own prior here; you're much better off with a priest than a shrink.
I would not be shocked to see a study with a dataset supporting that exorcism is a better mental health intervention than therapy.
dr_analog
razorboy
11hr ago
Hmm yeah, snap is installed (which I expected) and lists some random packages. Apparently I installed ghidra and thunderbird with it, both for one off projects.
Easy enough to just nuke them now, and snap entirely. Thank you for your vigilance, sir!
Sunshine
11hr ago
People who make their politics, religion, or sexuality the center of their personality generally are not emotionally healthy. TBH, I think we have an ongoing mental health crisis that’s manifesting itself through politics.
If I may reframe this, healthy people do not make politics, religion, or sexuality the center of their personality.
quiet_NaN
11hr ago
I think that likening the rationalists treatment of AI to the anti-finasteride crowd is a bit unfair to the former.
Now, AI has been a theme with rationalists from the very beginning. It would not be totally unfair to say that our prophet wrote the sequences (e.g. A Human's Guide to Words) as an instrumental goal to be able to discuss AI without getting bogged down in pointless definitional arguments. That was almost two decades ago, in the depth of the AI winter.
Scott Alexander wrote about GPT when it was still GPT-2, it was the first time I heard about it. It is fair to say that AI is the favorite topic on LessWrong, with Zvi minutely tracking the progress with the same dedication previously allocated to COVID. Generally, the rationalists are bullish on capabilities and bearish on alignment. But I feel that Eliezer's "dying with dignity strategy" haha-only-serious April's fool is overconfident in a way which is not typical of LW. In practical terms, it does not matter much if you think that p(ASI) is 0.15 and p(doom) is 0.1 or if you think they are 0.95 and 0.9 respectively.
We do not have a comprehensive theory of intelligence. We have noticed the skulls of the once who have predicted that AI would never beat a chess master, succeed at go, write a readable text, create a painting which most people can not distinguish from a human work of art and so on. This does not mean that AI will reach every relevant goalpost, reverse stupidity is not intelligence, after all.
We are in the situation where we observe a rocket launch without the benefits of any knowledge of rocketry or physics. Some people claimed the rocket would never reach an altitude of more than twice its own length, and they were very much proven wrong. Others are claiming that it would never reach 1km, and they were likewise proven wrong. From this, we can not conclude that it will obviously accelerate until it reaches Andromeda, nor can we conclude that it will not reach Andromeda.
Wrt the AI 2027, the vibes I remember getting from browsing through it is that it mostly Simulacrum level two, and came across as the least honest things which Scott ever co-authored. The whole national security angle is very much not what keeps LW up at night -- if China builds aligned ASI, they have a whole light cone to settle. What will happen to the US will just be a minor footnote in history. But the authors recognized that their target audience -- policymakers in DC -- will likely be alienated by their real arguments about x-risk. By contrast, national security is a topic which has been on the mind of the DC crowd for a century, so natsec was recruited as an argument-as-a-soldier.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
11hr ago
As long as the discussion is respectful and aimed at understanding each other’s different views, it should be tolerable.
As I get older, I increasingly find mindkilled flag-waving from my own camp just as distasteful. I don't want to be friends with someone whose Prius sports an "8647" bumper sticker, but nor do I want to be friends with someone with "Liberal Tears are Delicious" on the back of their truck.
I've never dealt with online dating, but I always imagined that the "no MAGA" is a blessing in disguise. It outs people as shallow thinkers or deranged partisans and makes it easier to sift them out of the pool. It would be much worse to go on several dates before finding out the truth.
But after filtering them out, is there much of a pool left? My gut feeling is that the answer might be no, because I'd guess that stable, happy, conservative or grill-pilled single women probably get enough attention IRL that they don't need to use apps. And that any woman who apparently fits that profile might be playing a character (wheat field tradwife) or have some baggage. Is that the case?
sockpuppet2
11hr ago
Though they also find that 30% of mtf have phantom penises after bottom surgery, what do you think is happening here? If the phantom penis is caused by a body image where it should be there, then shouldnt the mtf be at
0?
Again, I'm underwhelmed by the study/paper (which is a shame, because it's an interesting topic, which hasn't gotten much systematic study), but A) one also wonders why phantom limb or cismale phantom penis sensation rates aren't either 0% or 100% and B) I'm guessing that stumbling blocks in the brain "remapping" nerve endings after anatomy is transformed is different than the brain's response to amputation, making post-vaginoplasty phantom penis sensation worthy of study, but not dispositive of some sort of "latent female internal body image." (After all, the claimed rate is half that of cismen.) Low rates of transmale post-mastectomy phantom breast sensation (10% of transmen the study, vs 1/3 or more in ciswomen) would be more significant.
For another perspective on vaginoplasty and phantom penis sensations, here's a case report from the same year (pdf - includes surgical photos), in which Japanese vaginoplasty surgeons claim phantom penis sensations are sometimes experienced in the first few weeks after surgery, but one patient needed a revision surgery to remove excess erectile tissue. Ramachandran and McGeoch didn't include how long their MTF survey responders experienced phantom penis sensations, increasing the possibility of that finding being a red herring.
sockpuppet2
11hr ago
... a friend of mine ... That being said, he's still an asshole who got what was coming to him after running around on a perfectly fine wife who desperately tried to keep the marriage together. I can't believe I went to his second wedding.
You can't believe a second woman was willing to marry him or that you were willing to attend? How/why are you friends with him?
TitaniumButterfly
11hr ago
Happened to me.
After ten pretty happy years of marriage, my first wife found tumblr and flipped hard left circa 2015. Delivered our baby, abandoned our family for another state (I have total custody), cut most of her hair off, dyed the rest blue, now works a dead end job with not enough hours. A while later, I realized that I still had access to her private twitter (which I don't really use at all), checked in, and she's posting about how many days she can't even get out of bed due to depression. Did gain weight, but that's from slender to, by American standards, moderately chubby. Based on what I've seen, her life revolves entirely around various fandoms.
Doesn't seem to have money for anything but ugly tattoos.
Latest news via the grapevine is she's marrying a woman who lives as a man.
I've stopped trying to make sense of it. God has been good and now I'm with the woman of my dreams and a lot more children. Deleted my old twitter account so I don't have to worry about the temptation to voyeurism anymore. Sincerely wish her all the best. Far away from my kids.
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
Sûre, but every dataset available gives the same answer- blues have worse mental health.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
11hr ago
they serve overpriced "funeral food"
What does this mean?
ZanarkandAbesFan
11hr ago
I wonder if they're getting any takers.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
11hr ago
I find it ironic that you would pick HBD as your example because to me it HBD reads as this precise dynamic only in reverse.
That is to say i think that a lot of people who are culturally progressive but who otherwise find themselves on the wrong end of the intersectional stack, end up fixating on racial differences and other structural "-isms" to avoid the more uncomfortable implications of thier beliefs regarding individual responcibilty/agency. Or acknowledging that the old John Wayne, Bill Buckley, Ronald Reagan-type "Stern Fathers" may have been Right all along.
This sounds to me like something that happened in the 50s and 60s back when ~lifetime employment and "being a company man" were still possible. But I still think there's a weak form that survives. There's a sort of brotherhood of fathers that I've noticed in interviews, both as an interviewer and interviewee. Being a father shows that you've got a definite course plotted out in your life, that you know what you want, that you've got obligations to meet, and that you've got a certain level of resilience. You can append asterisks to all of those qualities because there are of course massive exceptions, but the odds are good. I definitely give fathers a few bonus points during interviews, and I'm closer to my colleagues who have kids.
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