domain:natesilver.net
If you want solutions, they exist.
[Citation needed].
I've been on psych meds and getting therapy since 2004.
Edit:
I don't know you or your life situation.
I've posted on my situation repeatedly here on the Motte (and the subreddit before that, and SSC before that), if you search through my post history.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3d ago
@Capital_Room , take some happy pills, for god‘s sake
This is me on "happy pills." I've been on multiple psych meds, including antidepressants, since my first suicide attempt back in 2004.
Tacherus
3d ago
The Pitt as a lagging culture war indicator
So I’ve been watching The Pitt with my wife lately.
The premise of the show is to follow doctors and nurses in an ER over a single 15-hour shift, much like the old show 24.
The show has been praised for its accuracy and I certainly find it intense at times.
That being said, I’m halfway through the Emmy-nominated season and while the medical drama part is solid, I’ve been repeatedly struck by the culture war aspects of the show.
According to Wikipedia, development began late 2023 after the writers strike and into 2024. The show premiered in early 2025 and has already been renewed.
It’s good and I’ve enjoyed watching it.
That being said….
There’s a bit of a culture war time capsule effect that shows up from time to time. It’s intermittent but fairly heavy-handed I think:
- a medical student is lectured on intent vs impact after offering the aid of a social work to a homeless mom
- a trans woman is treated for a cut and a med student draws attention to the “misgendering” of insurance records. We’re told it’s cool to have fixed this
- we’re shown the “correct” way to interact with an autistic patient. A sr resident has apparently never done this before and is in awe of a second year “neuro-divergent” resident who helps the patient
- a 17 year old girl is brought in for an abortion. The doctors commit fraud to make it happen and even talk the kids mom into it
It’s hard to convey from the descriptions but there are two themes I want to comment on.
The first is what is treated as something to joke about vs a Very Special Message. We get jokes about drug addicts with nicknames, jokes about frat boys in car wrecks, jokes about whether a medical student killed someone or just got unlucky. No joking around though when it comes to using terms like “unhoused.”
The other major theme that to me comes out strongly is a vibe of knowing the answers to all these political issues. There’s never any exploration or even acknowledgment of a controversy beyond as an obstacle to be dealt with.
For instance (mild spoilers) the girl coming in for an abortion evidently missed the 11 week deadline. No problem! Doctors will just lie. The mother of the patient isn’t on board but that’s ok the doctors will browbeat her into it and suggest the daughter will never speak to her again if it happens.
Sometimes even the doctors don’t know what to do like in the case of an incel with some violent journaling or a patient who’s been poisoned by his wife—she claims without evidence or corroboration that he’s molesting their daughter and we’re horrified to learn that she might be the one in trouble!
Overall though, the attitude is one of “we know the answers but sometimes society isn’t quite caught up yet.”
Will be curious to see how the tone of shows like this changes having now entered an era of “reckoning” and “post-mortems” of democratic hubris.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Yes. The whole point of democracy and a nation-state generally is that it's supposed to be for the people, not some market product to be bought and sold among scheming elites.
No good having '1 man 1 vote' but having the guy you elect serve some foggy mess of donors, lobbyists and media instead of you.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Everyone always talks about how much money there is in politics. This is the wrong framing. The right framing is Ansolabehere et al’s: why is there so little money in politics?
Personally, I do not think that Jewish money is any worse than gentile money, and you would require significantly higher levels of antisemitism in the US before "I may be funded by billionaires, but not Jewish billionaires" becomes a selling point in US politics.
Even if billionaire money is a problem in politics (and it can be argued that it is -- look at the maximum marginal income tax and how it has evolved since 1950, not that I expect billionaires to pay even that), this is a coordination problem. Almost all of the present politicians are where they are because they are cozy with rich donors, cutting down on campaign funding would really disadvantage them over competitors. And unilateral rejection of funding would hurt your own side.
It is like going to medieval Europe and saying "if we all coordinated to disallow metal weapons and armor, wars would be a lot less bloody which would be better for everyone". Even if all the nobles could coordinate to accomplish that, no knight wants to be beaten to death by a peasant with a stick, so they would still not do it.
Also, there is this guy whose shtick is that he does not accept big campaign donations, but for some reason I think few of the "Jewish money ruins everything" demographic are going to vote for Bernie.
Indeed. We need to reclaim manual labour from the lower classes. I like (some types of) manual labour, it gives the mind good rest after a hard day of work. I'm not unique in this either and nor is this a new thing: the elder Count Bolkonsky in War and Peace was an impassioned wood worker.
No_one
3d ago
It's a profoundly uninteresting, predictable and depressing semitic squabble that doesn't involve continuous high-intensity ground combat between armies. In short, it's not actually a war.
SSCReader
3d ago
Even if you don’t accept any hereditarian claims, you still have to worry about things like Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, childhood malnutrition, and even neglect/abuse leading to stunted cognitive/physical development, etc. Again, these things are not guaranteed to make the child a ticking time bomb, but the likelihood is far from zero.
This is true, but exactly why the claim that nature had stomped nurture was untrue in the original post. It's not an invasive species. It's a damaged plant. It's a small tomato plant that you got from your neighbor who alternately overwatered and underwatered it, the pot was too small and the dirt was mostly bark, and they gave it crazy amounts of plant food and also somehow meth.
You can't draw a conclusion that it's a virulent invasive species when it overgrows its pot and grows tomatoes with blossom end rot. It may not be able to give you tomatoes you can eat. It may simply grow and take up space your other plants might need, but it doesn't necessarily tell you a lot about nurture vs nature. And it's reasonable to expect people to know that. So if they do in fact treat it like it is an invasive species not a damaged one, it does still tell you something about them. Especially when:
Or to put it another way, I've worked in social care, many of the babies taken for adoption or fostering(and this was in the UK so they were mostly white), have huge problems, as you point out, fetal alcohol syndrome being a huge one. And my colleagues would spend extensive time warning prospective adoptive parents and foster parents and trying their best to prepare them for the idea this was going to be a long painful slog in many cases. We're not nurturing an invasive species, we're trying to rescue a damaged baby we have decided we ought not let die or be neglected. Even when we know that it is likely that baby will have many problems and may in fact cause problems and pain for their new parents.
It's horrible for the parents involved and many of them hand kids back when they can't cope with them, but that was the job they signed up for. To give a kid a shot. You are deliberately choosing to trade your time and effort and yes pain in exchange for possibly healing and raising a wounded child. It's not invasive, you deliberately brought it into your home. Yes absolutely do so with open eyes, about the issues they may well be facing, but it's not an invasive species, or even a cuckoo left in your nest against your will (as the most recent clarification by Coil) it's a burden that was chosen. Recognize that it is a burden yes, but you don't then get to pretend it was an invasive species.
The ghetto infant didn't just hop the wall one day and end up in your garden. He or she didn't have a choice where they ended up, you made that choice for them. If you as the adults didn't think carefully enough about what looking after them was going to entail, then that is on you, not the infant.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Nick, 30 ans is not willing to let himself be conscripted by the million by governments he know doesn't care about him one iota and sent to the eastern front. Do you think all the young 'citizens' of immigrant origins who don't care about Europe one bit would let themselves be conscripted by the million, without starting to chimp?
How hard can it be to conscript these migrants? The US conscripted blacks in ww2, despite an extensive segregation regime and discrimination... Just blare war propaganda about how the enemy is subhuman nazi-commie orcs looking to rape and murder everyone you love. Go out on the street and grab them, draft them. That's what the Ukrainians do and it works out for them despite horrific casualties. The real problem is that the migrants aren't good at fighting compared to Europeans or Russians. One Russian brigade could've kept Assad in power, tiny Russian forces easily coup African nations: the MENA riff-raff are no match for European troops,. Nevertheless, if the Ukrainian population pool were 500 million rather than 20-30 million, I can't see how they could possibly lose the war save nuclear escalation.
The Ukrainians surely know their govt is grossly corrupt and doesn't care about them, sending them on pointless cross-river incursions, defending random towns to the last man for political reasons. Yet they fight on.
However, I admit that if the political front collapses then Europe does lose.
Russians would say they don't care about Germany/Poland
But if they go in on the Baltics and NATO gives up then NATO is a complete joke, they're dispensed to the cuck chair of history. Poland would be on their own. Germany would be on their own. And only then would they truly be in danger because Poland or Germany alone are no match for Russia. Surely you know how much the 'Putin Soviet Empire Imperialist Expansion Warstarter' crowd howls now, they'd be screeching and wailing if Putin did go in on the Baltics. Their frame is already dominant in elite circles and would only be further strengthened by an invasion. Taking Putin's word that he won't go further would be too much of a humiliation for these people.
As to ...what talent? NATO, the organisation, basically exists as sinecures for officers. European armies are small and have zero experience with modern warfare and not much critical equipment. No vast reserves of artillery. Shortages of air-defense missiles. Drone components would have to come from China, too.
The industrial capacity Europe retains is still considerably more than Russia in terms of machine tools, steel and especially high-tech industries. And let's remember that this is still Europe, these are the people who conquered almost all of the world. Even appallingly misled there's still latent competence on the continent. There isn't so much in the way of artillery but the raw fundamentals are just superior to Russia. A scale-based advantage beats a time-based advantage in a long war. European armies are small? They'll learn and grow in battle like America in WW2, like Ukraine and Russia today. They have some 2 million professional soldiers!
The US may well lose in Asia but at that point it's a new world order and all bets are off, NATO may well disintegrate or we see full WW3 or something else.
Alabasata
3d ago
This is because the public, by and large, doesn't have much money to spend on politics. They're trying to kneecap anybody with a competitive advantage. If it's not money, it's exclusive access. If it's not exclusive access, it'll be something else.
It's bottom-half people complaining they're not winning. And unless you have a strategy to profit off of the long tail, they're not worth listening to.
Tree
3d ago
Do people still invite you to their birthday parties? Come on, give him the transhumanism eternal life pitch, not this lifelong decay whine, not today.
Mantergeistmann
3d ago
Israel-Gaza aren't waging war
Is this you saying that Hamas doesn't represent Gaza, that without statehood Gaza can't be considered a political entity capable of international relationships such as existing in a state of war, that it's only a wider aspect of Israel's war against Iran due to Hamas being a proxy (unlikely, given that you state Israel-Iran is not a war), or that the war is so one-sided that it hardly counts despite Hamas's best efforts to put up a fight?
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
3d ago
At risk of coping, I would actually contend that video games do in fact teach useful skills, just not all games do, and the skills are very narrowly applicable. MMOs are the obvious outlier here, since the social aspect plays a large part, and e.g organizing raids is quite literally management work even if low-ish-stakes (and even then people certainly get mad just like IRL), my Classic WoW-playing friends regale me with tales of literal Excel spreadsheets for loot distribution.
On another note, autism simulators like Factorio or Path of Exile are very good at teaching soulless optimization systematic thinking, "seeing through" the immediate picture and user-facing things in general to the complex tangle of underlying systems beneath, which I think is a generally useful skill in life, besides a part of my literal job description right now as a mid-tier IT monkey. I'm plenty stupid for a nerd and definitely starting to feel the IQ gate required to advance further in the field, so I wouldn't say I'm the kind of gifted person who would naturally grok such things either, my interests absolutely made a tangible difference. This is definitely not the best course my life could've taken, but it's certainly far from the worst, even just mitigating the NEET attractor and throwing myself into wageslavery already averted a lot of the worse outcomes even if I'm not always happy about it.
(Tangential and somewhat edgy but my pet theory is the "systematic thinking" part is largely why gamers are so infamously Based - as "seeing through" visual/verbal veneers to the core beneath becomes ingrained and reflexive, you start to second-guess your lying eyes and Nootice an awful lot. Unfortunately the skill at keeping your Nooticing to yourself is purchased separately.)
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3d ago
Israel and Iran seem to at least have stopped shooting at each other for the moment, but Israel and Gaza are still going at it.
Well then where's the bathroom at asshole?'
To which the appropriate response is: "Your lack of a comma after 'at' clearly shows the difference between a rural south education to one delivered in the rarefied halls here; thank you for proving my point." (and no, adding the comma in doesn't fix the problem, it just goes back to the whole "don't end clauses with a preposition" problem).
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3d ago
They brought rabbits over so they could chase and shoot them. They did bring over invasive work animals as well, however.
Ioper
3d ago
Both endurance and physical strength usually peak around age 30.
Explosive strength and recovery time peak earlier though, so depending on what you value you may or may not peak by 25.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3d ago
To do so is a blatantly dehumanising use of language that I believe could easily prime those who engage in it to see such a group as less than human, and therefore to be dealt with in the manner you would deal with non-human pests.
You might have had a point sometime before the year 2010. But since that time we've seen this principal stretched to the point of excluding all views outside the progressive standard, and not only that, typically applied selectively. It's a slippery slope with no Schelling Fence, as the rationalists put it. So the entire principle must be discarded. Hitler wasn't the first to compare various people to non-human animals in a derogatory way, he won't be the last, and that wasn't the main problem with him. Sure, if someone's out there saying "black people are vermin", I can reasonably conclude they're scumbags, but trying to suppress that is not a good idea. And if I start building fences around that such that anything even close is also verboten, I'm likely just trying to create ideological uniformity.
To be clear, I'm not accusing him of personally wanting to genocide or start a race war against blacks or anything, nor is this about being squeamish and finding the language offensive. But I think when you normalise referring to groups in such blatantly dehumanising and contemptuous terms, there is a clear risk of it contributing to a culture that views violence against them as legitimate.
This principle, on the other hand, was never any good, and is even more obviously applied selectively. This is just "don't express your bad ideas because you might convince other people of them".
There is nothing about acknowledging HBD or even arguing for explicitly racist policy that requires you to engage in this sort of thing, and the only thing it accomplishes is to potentially egg on the next mass shooter
This principle ("stochastic terrorism") was not only not any good, it was always in bad faith (suppression of bad ideas is such an old idea I don't know about that one). Note that some Trumpists have picked it up (sometimes ironically, probably sometimes seriously) to blame the assassination attempts on Trump on their opponent's rhetoric. It's less a slippery slope than a vertical drop.
Feel good stories told by liberal/progressive/leftists go something like this:
To connect the dots, adoption and / or fostering seems to be a great way for this old man to plant trees, especially if biological children are completely ruled out. There is undeniably a population crisis and replacement rate is an issue, but from a (gross?) utilitarian perspective the population crisis is about productive members of society. Adopting and / or fostering well kills two birds with one stone: it reduces the population that is at-risk for homelessness, and creates more productive members of society.
Wow, very noble and inspiring. It speaks to one on an emotional level, fills you with hope and positivity for the future. There is no counter argument without being a bad person or uncouthly bringing up some giant baggage of heterodox arguments that immediately look bad and emotionally divorced.
So @WhiningCoil gave a feel bad story as a contrast. Or a 'feel reality' story. Depending on ones predispositions.
You would not be the first non-right wing extremist person to fail to engage with the direct 1:1 mirror rhetoric you would otherwise extol as just and noble. Faced with forlorn elements of reality laid bare.
One would be inclined to blame your environment for keeping you away from any competing emotionally resonating narratives, but as can be seen, you are the one picking those. And as someone who spent years of his life making the aforementioned heterodox arguments against all the feel good stories, and having that very fact used against me as an argument, I can't say I have much sympathy left to give for your self inflicted predicament.
TowardsPanna
3d ago
What's the most interesting place you've traveled and why
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
3d ago
Happy birthday!
At the age of 25, you're at your physical and cognitive peak, and it's all downhill from here. Your mind slows down, though your productivity is kept up by knowledge/wisdom compensating for decreased fluid intelligence. Your body slows down, becomes weaker and frailer, but this can be temporarily alleviated with exercise and a fastidious attitude towards your health.
Don't worry, it doesn't become obvious until about a decade later. The initial slope of the decline is gentle, you can make a good picnic on that plateau.
No_one
3d ago
Lasers suffer from range issues in air to a great degree. Close to the ground power delivered falls with square of distance. So keeping the sky clear from 20 kilometers is really, really difficult even if you can track the target flawlessly and it'd be extremely costly even now. Not realistic.
I've heard both sides are reporting some success with some adapted laser welding units against FPVs, which aren't exactly sturdy and at 200m it might work. These units are now cheap ~$5000, but require a power supply.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3d ago
Weak player != scrub. In the weak sense of the word, the Scrub is someone who has no interest in gitting gud. Sirlin mostly uses the term in the stronger sense that the Scrub is someone who does not want to play the game that competitive players are playing because they consider some expert tactics (like throws in console fighting games) that are clearly permitted by the rules and considered a key part of the game by competitive players to be unfair. You see a bit of this in competitive bridge with the debate about exotic conventions in competitive bidding, but in general weak but competitive players play against strong opposition and hope to learn from the experience.
With the notable exception of contact sports where too large a skill gap creates an unacceptable risk of injury, the size of acceptable ability gap for social and competitive play is the point at which the weaker player never wins anything at all. In chess that is about 400 ELO points, but in bridge the luck element and more granular results (you play about 7 hands an hour) means that it is the difference between a decent club player and a world champion. I know several people who play racket sports socially in groups where the weaker players never win a match but win enough points/games to keep things interesting. You can cover an even wider range of abilities if the game supports handicapping. I don't know how large this gap is in console fighting games.
What you can't do is allow a true scrub to play against anyone who isn't playing the same crippled game that he is.
This rant was only 50% serious! Alas, transhumanist immortality is, at present, aspirational, and the weakness of the flesh as it inevitably decays and fails you is not.
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