domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
07mk
3d ago
Even many people who are aware, in principle, that echo chambers exist seem to have a remarkably poor time recognising when they've found themselves inside one. Echo chambers, like "biases", are things that happen to other people. I'm actually not persuaded that the average person with an undergraduate degree would be better equipped to recognise that they're in an echo chamber than the average person without an undergraduate degree.
Empirically, I can't disagree. What I find confusing is that, everything you wrote here is also basically common knowledge. Everyone who knows anything about bias knows that the bias of considering oneself above the biases that other people fall for is very common. As such, if you observe other people's biases and think yourself above them, the obvious conclusion would be that you're falling prey to such a bias and should break out of it by challenging yourself with objective research that challenges you.
At least, if you're motivated to write a good work of fiction that can appeal to people outside of your echo chamber. I have to conclude that a high proportion of major fiction writers have no such motivation. The hunger for status within one's echo chamber is often greater than the hunger for money, I suppose.
HereAndGone
3d ago
I think his problem is that he doesn't and won't come out and say explicitly what the hell it is that he really believes, his own 95 Theses if you will. This makes it very difficult to argue with him, since anything he may have posted that you want to dig into, he comes back with "that's not what I think so you're wrong".
I don't mind a bit of the ould sneering contempt, I can dish that out myself, but I do want to know what precisely the sneering is about.
HereAndGone
3d ago
Whatever makes The Motte appealing to most of the people here doesn't seem to exist to the left of the motte.
I think it's the arguing! When you have a site that is all "so we do all agree that purple is better than brown" on some topic, then there's not much left to discuss about purple and brown, so there's not much point in hanging around for the fiftieth post on how great purple is. I think TheSchism was a charitable project and even a good idea, but I also think it was mostly Trace's pet project and now that he seems to be busier elsewhere then there's not as much input and not as much drive to get people engaged and recruited.
aldomilyar
3d ago
Yeah I'm broadly the same. Jews have outsized success in the modern economy/culture, but I'd also much rather have them than Indians since I think my incentives are better aligned with Jews and Indians are more palpable 'KPI optimizers' who I feel are far more open to downright grift and don't throw up the same level of actual scientific, cultural and technological contributions that I actually benefit from. Also end of the day there's far less Jews than Indians (even if assuming it'll mostly only benefit upper castes) so that also puts a natural cap on how egregious things can get.
aldomilyar
3d ago
I wouldn't consider myself antisemitic perse. I think they have an outsized influence on Western politics/culture and I think it's kinda funny that the whole grievance studies thing has now pivoted to start vigorously ass-biting on the Israel v Palestine solution after they've essentially actively cultivated and allowed a lot of the oppressor framework stuff to take over the culture. On the other hand, I'd much rather live in a one-state Israel than in a one-state Palestine and I think any peaceful, productive resolution is far more likely to come with Zionism than vice-versa. Only one group there is likely capable of producing a viable nation-state that'd actively advance the status of all peoples (provided they were peaceful).
Like on the aggregate I think Semites have an outsized influence on a lot of things, but nonetheless are sufficiently aligned with my own personal interests and incentives that most of those influences have been broadly positive so uh carry on Illuminating albeit with a hope that the genie getting out of the bottle on Zionism might lead to less courting of the colonial grievance studies vibes.
07mk
3d ago
I very much disagree that college students know that they are sheltered and don’t have life experiences.
You're probably correct on this. But it's still confusing to me why. Everyone knows that everyone is missing something due to having limited experiences. Everyone knows that they fall under the category of "everyone" and therefore they must be missing something. It doesn't take much research to find out that life in the modern West, even as a lower class person, is extremely sheltered and protected compared to the norm of humanity. College students have disproportionately high access to research material and disproportionately high experience doing research. If they truly want to write a good novel or film script about a setting or characters they have little personal experiences with, any mid-level intelligent person in that situation should be able to put 2 and 2 together to realize that they need to step out of their bubble and dive into research to learn about lives and circumstances far different from their own.
Which is why I have to conclude that these people don't have motivations to write good fiction.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3d ago
I don't know exactly what you've seen, but my guess is you've seen some of the more nuanced moderate Nazi-like posters who dislike Jews and/or Jewish Supremecists but don't call for their death. And are strawmanning/patern-matching them to the more classical Nazis. I think there's a really important distinction, because first and foremost, the rational Nazi does not want you to die. They might dislike, want you to have less power and influence, might want you to leave, but they don't want you to die and if they saw you on the street they would not attack you. Second, the rational Nazi does not necessarily hate you, personally, if you are not yourself a supremecist. They might not even be a bigot at all, in the same way that an anti-woke person is not necessarily a racist.
Eh... one of my gripes about our most dedicated Joo-posters is that, no, they don't literally say "Death to Jews, Hitler did nothing wrong!" (because that would be uncouth, and also against the rules), but when pushed about what solutions they suggest to the Jewish problem that they describe incessantly, they punt, they waffle, they evade.
"So, do you want to kill Jews?"
"How dare you!"
"Okay, so should they be, like, put in camps...?"
"I never said that!"
"According to you, Jews are bad and destroying our society, so should we disenfranchise them? Forcibly deport them? Just ostracize them? Isolate them in ghettos? What?"
"I'm not answering your stupid questions!"
Now, whether our resident neo-Nazis do in fact secretly wish that they could gas all the Jews, or just have a generalized impersonal antipathy towards Jewishness, I don't know. I'm sure in person they probably are capable of being nice to individual Jews, and wouldn't look our Jewish members in the eye and say "You should die." But clearly they think Jews, as a class, are collectively responsible for evil. It's hard to believe their preferred solution wouldn't eventually result in something bad happening to Jews as a class, including Jewish members here and Jews they know personally. I'm sure a lot of Nazis had Jewish friends and maybe even felt a little sad when their Jewish neighbors got put on a train. And yet.
I suppose they might argue that their preferred solution is that Jews renounce their Jewishness and denounce other Jews and "Jewish supremacy," and the "good Jews" who do this could be allowed to keep (some) rights, but the Joo-posters also tend to favor biodeterminism and argue that being insular, conflict-prone, and parasitical is intrinsic to being Jewish, which suggests that really, Jews Are Just Like That, and that hardly leaves a lot of peaceful solutions on the table.
So that's why I think "Dislike you and want you to have less power, but wouldn't literally attack you on the street" isn't really a compelling argument for believing that anti-Semites do not, in fact, want Jews to die. Maybe they wouldn't get their own hands dirty and would like it to happen out of sight (as most Germans did), but they won't object to it happening.
HereAndGone
3d ago
That we practice "leftist affirmative action" and the Darwins and the AlexanderTuroks (whether or not he claims/admits to being on the left) go way too long without being banned
To be fair, I don't think Alexander is particularly left or right (I think he's probably somewhere in the spectrum of liberal to centre-right). What he is, is extremely hung up on class and status. He's obsessed with what he deems to be low-class/underclass behaviour (especially around women's sexuality as baby mamas) and hence why he always brings it back to abortion as the social climbing panacea (keep the underclass from breeding more underclass, keep aspirant working class to lower middle class types from falling back down the ladder by not letting them become single teen moms). He wants marriage and family and the rest of it, but on the proper timeline of "get educated, get a job, get married and have the appropriate number of kids, avoid sleeping around as a teen, avoid sleeping around like a ho in general, and if you do get pregnant without planning it, get an abortion so you don't ruin your life and more importantly your social status as nascent middle class". Thus his grudge with the pro-life right, because we want the sluts to keep their bastards who will then leech off the state for life (putting words into his mouth there, but that's the impression I strongly get of how he feels about it). If we were truly responsible right-wingers holding conservative values, we'd be all for discreet abortion to maintain decorum and enforce social conformity around correct behaviour.
hanikrummihundursvin
3d ago
Right back at you.
07mk
3d ago
It does directly address the issue and has nothing to do with hypocrisy, though. The issue being raised is that LLMs are fundamentally unreliable due to being unfixably prone to hallucinations. The way it's addressed is that humans are also similarly fundamentally unreliable, yet we've built reliable systems based on them, and that proves by example that being fundamentally unreliable isn't an insurmountable hurdle for generating reliable systems.
I don't understand how this doesn't address the issue in the most direct, straightforward way possible while completely avoiding anything to do with accusations of hypocrisy. The only way it could be better is if someone actually provided the specific method of generating reliable systems using modern LLMs.
aldomilyar
3d ago
From my experiences on the apps a couple years ago I also feel like the artifice of dating apps make it way easier to just X somebody on a single awkward interaction or factor that doesn't meet approval. Both since there's a sense of millions of alternatives, but also since you're most likely never ever ever gonna run into that person again.
Back when your perceived options were like tens of people in a geographic area and you'd keep running into people at Church, hobbies, extended friend groups or whatever it paid a lot more to be civil and not ghost at the first turbulence.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
While I think a 1 week ban might be a bit excessive for that post alone, I can not say that this was a high quality post.
Your whole first meandering paragraph reads like a strawman to me. If you really described "new narrative on the Online Right", you could have linked and quoted them directly. Then I would know that I am looking at a weakman instead of a strawman at least.
Then you treat HBD (including scare quotes) as a synonym for white supremacy. Guatemalans are ethnically a mixture of Hispanic and Mayan ancestry. I do not know a lot about Latin America, but I think the Mayans had one of the well known pre-European empires, and probably had less of a link between violence and reproductive success than the Aztec. At least provide a link to some self-professed HBD proponent claiming that Guatemala is a ""third-world s***hole"" due to their genetic makeup.
Your post was bad for reasons which are totally orthogonal to you being anti-HBD. If you had started
Anyone remember that whole "Trump's tariffs will destroy the economy" thing?
and then proceeded to present a strawman of free trade proponents, that would likely have netted you less downvotes, but it would have been just as bad.
It is well known that this is a forum where the majority of people are witches, which means that they get away with being snarky sometimes when they really should not. Sure, being extra-snarky, getting -39 downvotes (but also 12 upvotes) and a ban is very theatrical, but not constructive. Instead, I would prefer if you reported comments stating pro-witch opinions which were inflammatory and poorly sourced.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3d ago
more people are single nowadays and unhappier nowadays because more people have avoidant attachment styles in the past
There are a lot of structural/social factors to look at before we zoom into the individual level and start talking about "attachment styles":
-
We invented a technological solution for boredom. You can entertain yourself infinitely without ever leaving your house. Many people find it easier and more fun to stay at home and watch Netflix than to go out to bars and clubs, talk to people, enter into relationships, etc.
-
Women's economic independence means that the range of men they find attractive is increasingly restricted, because men have fewer things of value to offer them. ("I have a career, I make more money than a lot of the men I know, I don't particularly want kids, what do I need a man for?")
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Dating apps and hookup culture make it so that it's easier for people (well, some people, anyway) to achieve sexual gratification without entering into a committed relationship.
Anecdotally, the majority of men I know are in committed relationships right now. Frankly, none of them fit the "classical" definition of a "high value man". They are perfectly average people, with average looks, average jobs, average levels of social acumen. So in spite of the structural factors I listed above, I really do think that a lot of the "singleness epidemic" is due to a combination of personal choice and unrealistic standards.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
3d ago
Thank you. Why in the world is he dead set on winter? Assuming it's not all posturing, which of course it may be.
Crowstep
3d ago
I've never really had good mental image of what it's like for normal people with normal appetites let alone obese people with obese appetites
Imagine drinking water made you fat. You can try to dehydrate yourself, but ultimately your thirst will win out.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
3d ago
When I did keto for a bit after having a fairly crappy diet, the initial cravings were intense, especially sugar cravings. I felt "alert" all the time and almost uncomfortably energetic. A sort of pre-conscious craving for junk food and carbs would ebb and flow during the day, and when it was at its worst it was hard to do anything else (usually just for <10 minutes). The closest feeling I've had is feeling incredibly horny as a teenager, though even that was only maybe one-quarter the intensity, more of a distraction or nuisance than a debilitating condition. And I wasn't even that fat, my BMI was like 25.5 and I just wanted to lose 5-10 pounds. I imagine it's much worse when you're losing much more and eating much less.
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
The Sting is one where I never spoil it for people, but despite being made of twists, I never tire of rewatching it.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
Plus, most of the Internet is liberal-aligned by default, why would they be specifically drawn here? I imagine those who do are attracted by the quality of discourse, if nothing else.
Kinda. Out of places where I can go and find people who disagree with me and test my mettle against them, it's the one with the best quality of discourse.
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
I told them "classical" and they didn't know what that meant.
I don't actually know how I'd define classical without mentioning names, and time periods. What makes a piece of "classical" music just that? I know it when I hear it, but I can't define Beethoven vs. Modern Piano piece in a way that's actually a legitimate definition.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
I think if you're toeing the PC line 100% then why would you choose to be here and be uncomfortable?
Mainly, it's a kind of test I put myself through. I want to believe true things; I want to be sure that, where my beliefs and the consensus align, it is because the 'PC' position genuinely seems correct to my best judgment, not just because it's what everyone else in my bubble is saying. Thus, I find it useful to get into civil arguments with dissidents and contrarians so as to regularly confront myself with their best counter-arguments and, having faced them with open eyes, reassure myself that I still just don't find them convincing at all.
Secondarily, insofar as I believe my opinions to be correct, and that it's better for other people to believe true things, engaging with my opponents is a chance to change some minds and - essentially - "redeem" some of them. Bodhisattva-style. But this is more of an ego-stroking, self-congratulatory justification and if I'm being dead honest, most of the actual motivation is coming from the first thing. Helping people see the light on the margins is more of a positive externality.
(Also: I guess I do have a few points on which I differ from the, like, bog-standard Blue Tribe catechism. But there are many individual subjects where my genuine opinions involve nothing I wouldn't and haven't said in the presence of the most mainstream leftists you can imagine, and I still get into Motte arguments about those, so I think the point stands.)
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3d ago
I’m not unsympathetic to the ideas that you present in broad strokes.
Figuring out an exact death count and sussing out exactly which of the stories told are true is difficult because everything seems to be memory and hearsay, not documents, photographs, videos, or other forms of records that can be examined. Many of the stories seem pretty fantastic even for a work of fiction, let alone a retelling of history. Things like medical experiments and torture in odd and grotesque ways seem less like something that happened and more like confabulation or rumors that get repeated as fact. The human mind is actually pretty good about inventing wild stories about gruesome torture and murder. And Theres the issue of Nazis not keeping up with quotas and simply exaggerating numbers so the higher ups don’t fire them or whatever for poor performance. You can do this easily especially with paper records. Just count fictional people, or count the same person several times— thus a Gay Jewish political prisoner counts on three different tables. That’s just the side of the camps.
And the allies both during and after the war have every incentive to exaggerate the numbers, tge stories, etc. which gives them the ultimate heroic story about themselves and their civilization and why you should be on our side. I don’t think most modern people understand just how much of the logic of WW2 has shaped how we think about our moral universe, our political and social systems, and ourselves. It’s basically the “state cult” of the modern neoliberal order. Hitler has replaced Satan as the ultimate evil in the moral universe, more or less. And for nearly a century, most regimes that we must go to war with are in some way like the Nazis. Depending on which side you take on Israel and Palestine, the other side are Nazi-like. So was Saddam Hussein, Slobodon Milosovic, and dozens of other leaders. Often you’ll hear “stories” of Nazi-like war crimes. In the first Gulf War, George H W Bush claimed that babies were thrown out of hospital windows to be caught on bayonets. In Serbia, they claimed concentration camps. It’s an easy way to manipulate people into support for a war by appealing to the founding myth of the modern age.
I certainly think there was a lot of killing of camp prisoners. Probably on a fairly industrial scale. I would put the full death toll at somewhere between 6-10 million, and much of the violence was genocidal. It happened. That doesn’t mean all the stories are true, nor does it mean that the camps had anything to do with why the allies were fighting the war. We didn’t care about them until they became useful to us.
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
I was knowingly putting a toe over the line to make a point
Yes, my response should have very much been taken as a tongue-in-cheek nod to that. But tone is not always the same when read as when written, as we all know.
You've already got about a million replies, so I suspect there's nothing substantial I can still add to it all. If you even want to read any more!
So here goes. I'm a half-jewish German who strongly identifies as German and effectively not at all as Jewish beyond having some family members who do strongly identify as Jewish. By what German public schooling has taught me was Nazi Racial Science, I fully qualify as a Jew to be reomved, though. My Jewish ancestors managed to flee the Nazis as well as the Soviets unharmed, so I can't claim any tragic family history on that end, though it's entirely possible that they lost many friends that I never heard of. From the German side, I know of many who died in the war, much to the family's detriment.
Politically I'm somewhat all over the place, but cluster strongly with the right-wingers. And my position on WW2, the entire Nazi era and the Holocaust is - it doesn't matter. The epistemic wells have been poisoned. There are no more productive discussions to be had. Anyone except the most autistic historians, the most unfettered reparation-seekers and the most combative wokists will gain more by burying the entire period of history than by rooting around in it. "Never forget" is a terrible approach, in my opinion, and the opposite of what should be done. The consequence of forgetting it will be dropping a ton of poisonous baggage and become a lot more agile, for everyone involved. The consequence will not be the second coming of the NSDAP. And if Jews want to prevent future attempts at Jewish genocide, then IMO they should keep a weather eye on the Muslim world, as I suppose Israel already does, rather than alienate their actual or potential allies by constantly insisting on their historical guilt. I do admit it seems to have worked well enough for a time, and I cannot fault the realpolitik here, but as far as Jewish-German relations go it'll be an own-goal when teaching the Germans to hate themselves results in the islamification of Germany.
And I'll also sing along with the chorus of "please don't go, we want you here, we need people like you!".
This place is, to me, like a martial arts club. You go in, you find someone to spar with, and by the end of the day you learned something about your weaknesses and bad habits. And that just plain does not work when there's nobody around who's willing to expose and exploit those actual weaknesses. "One crow will not claw out another's eye", goes the German saying. When everyone here more or less agrees on their respective world views, there's just not much of value going on. One Witch will not knock out the other even when they're wide open, either because we subconciously don't want that weakness to be exploited (mirror neurons being a bitch) or because we genuinely aren't even aware of it.
The reverse of this is, of course, that any one contrarian to the consensus here will get pummelled. It's like going from boxing to BJJ and all of a sudden everyone's sweating all over you on the ground. It's admittedly disgusting, but if you endure it you will come out a much better-rounded fighter than you were before. Refuse to engage in grappling, and you'll never make it in MMA. I'm probably overstretching this metaphor. But on the other hand, if we here are a BJJ gym...then you can teach us a thing or two about striking. But either way, it requires that we get down and dirty with each other, and there will be complaints about faces getting punched and joints getting locked either way. To de-metaphor it: There will be downvotes and false reports and specious arguments and trolling and all that you might complain of.
So when people here advocate for tossing the jews into the ocean and blame them for all their country's failings - I'd exaggerate if I said I can emphasize; there are too many people here who are on "my side", as it were, and who go too easy on me. Maybe they just recognize that I'm just a midwit and not worth going 100% on. But that's exactly what ought to happen. I want you to stand up to me and tell me why I'm wrong. I most likely am. Who isn't? But I'd rather have that pointed out to me in an online textual sparring setting than by embarassing myself IRL. The alternative to that is simply going with the IRL consensus, but who comes to The Motte with that intention? Who here would not rather learn to be more effective as a contrarian?
I hope you stay.
Nah, Darwin drove me nuts because he explicitly stated that sometimes he just posted something that he didn't believe simply in order to start a row (and as Amadan pointed out, that often got people banned for responding). How do you have any kind of productive discussion if the other party is "ha ha, you honestly thought I was serious about that? man, what a maroon!"
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