domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
pigeonburger
18hr ago
Yes, but that does not mean the opposite people are not also successful.
Corvos
18hr ago
An appreciable number of women (at minimum) go for guys who observably aren’t reliable and don’t have their shit together.
Crowstep
18hr ago
Because our welfare system is set up in such a way that they only need to work for five years before being entitled to live off the taxpayer indefinitely. And the statistics suggest that, as low-skilled immigrants from third world countries, they are much more likely to end up doing so than say, Polish graduates.
pigeonburger
18hr ago
This is just laughably not true. It's not quite on-par with advice like "just be yourself!", but it's not far off.
I would say it's true. It's just that "trustworthy" is a bigger concept to unpack than it looks like. Being trustworthy is not like dateless guys thinking they're a catch because they're a "feminist ally" or because they think that it's all so easy not to be an asshole and that if they had a girlfriend/wife they wouldn't be abusive to her and wouldn't cheat on her, etc...
Those people are not trustworthy, they're untested. It's easy to think you'd never ever cheat, if you've never had the opportunity to, if you've never been on the receiving end of an attractive woman signaling she'd be up for no-strings-attached sex.
Being trustworthy means being reliable and having your shit together, and making women at ease in your presence.
In the current year, a Cambridge supervision costs £45.86 for a 2-undergraduate group (the most common), so £23 per student. A science student gets 60-80 supervisions a year, an arts student slightly less. So a total cost for supervisions of c. £1400, or about 10% of breakeven tuition. (There is a lot of uncertainty about what the breakeven tuition at Oxbridge actually is - as at all UK universities, overseas students cross-subsidise domestic ones).
InfrequentPoster
Formerly Lurker
18hr ago
When you say
You know, maybe that would be good advice if the circumstances were different, but you have to remind yourself that picking up 30 year old women who have had multiple partners is signing up for a high divorce rate and possibly raising the children of others.
I think you are misreading what OP said:
find a man who sticks with you for several years (while you are on the pill, and proving he is not a cad), and finally, around 30, get married to a man you TRUST to support you and your children.
The "ideal" state described is not waiting till 30 and then figuring out who to pick. It is to pick around University and stick with your choice. The children (and marriage) wait until the woman feels safe both by herself (that is she has education and a job to support herself and potential children, if something were to happen to her bf/husband) and with her bf/husband. That is he proves that he is reliable etc.
This is certainly not ideal when it comes to having (especially many) kids. The biological window is limited (not only for women). But it is a perfectly rational choice of action fo women if you want to mitigate the risk of having a terrible husband who will not treat you well.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
18hr ago
tee hee =)
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
18hr ago
The antimodernist narrative is too broad. It typically takes the position that the past was uniformly better than the present, and that it linearly decayed towards the present day. Then antimodernists use this as a cudgel to attack almost anything they don't like about the modern world (HR, woke, college education, etc.)
I'm more of a fan of Arctotherium's take about a really specific aspect of modernity being the root cause, rather than modernity broadly being at fault.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
18hr ago
Matthew Yglesias has a repeated line that the middle class should not be able to afford full-service dining (except as an occasional splurge purchase) in a country with a functioning labour market.
I think this might have some truth to it, but there is an element of cultural choice involved. Some cultures have different expectations of "full-service dining" — I'm thinking of how American ones tend to push table turnover, whereas other countries expect to serve each table maybe once per evening.
But there is some reasonable bound on "how much time we spend on each other." One could total up "hours wiping butts" versus total hours worked and see that yes, having the median worker work 40 hours, 10 of which are spent wiping butts, is probably not sustainable. Maybe it'd be at 60 hour weeks, but I'd really prefer more leisure time. There are some real culture choices to be made about the relative merits of time spent on arts, capital investments (building stuff!), research, and medicine — is medicine an end, or just a means to it. It's honestly a pretty open question I'd love to see more debate on, rather than neoliberal "we can have it all" platitudes.
I suppose also that some historic cultures adopted senicide rather than spend time wiping (elderly) butts, although to my modern sensibilities that's rather abhorrent, but perhaps a bit understandable in resource-constrained situations.
hydroacetylene
18hr ago
I would definitely agree that risk aversion is behind the pitch of college and jobs to young women. Part of that is rational- the bottom whatever percent of both sexes is less appealing than it was in the fifties(and this goes for men too), and how are you supposed to make sure you find a commitment-oriented ‘good’ guy anyways? I predict that, contrary to the usual pattern, a dating app which vetted the applicants on basic questions(stable and full time employment, criminal record, etc) would have more women than men, at least if it wasn’t just a matchmaking service. Part of this is also irrational; there’s a cottage industry dedicated to convincing young women that the risk of being mistreated by men is much higher than it is, so don’t get too wound up about the commitment you desire.
I maintain that the risk of Mr and now-Mrs good enough marrying, provided that they’re basically compatible adults seriously intending to make it work, is very low, but that many people ignore one or the other or the third condition. There are simply fewer Mr and Miss good enoughs than there used to be, it seems like modern secular(here used in the sense of ‘in mainstream society rather than a subculture’ rather than to mean ‘non-religious’) dating worries more about vapid nonsense than about big picture compatibility, lots of people don’t have the serious intent of making it work no matter what, etc.
I don’t have a good solution on a society wide level.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
18hr ago
Most people don’t do everything “in order to work.” They work in order to live here, or raise their kids, or buy that new car, or whatever. What makes migration special?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18hr ago
One of the problems with UK immigration law is that substantive policy issues of general public concern that ought to be legislated are instead put into the Immigration Rules. This causes two problems:
- Regulations don't get the automatic deference from the Courts that statutes get. If Parliament changes the law, then legitimate expectations be damned. The only laws Parliament might not be able to make are retroactive criminal laws.
- The government can tinker constantly with the rules, so they do. Whether or not it should be legal, ratting on the implied contract with legal immigrants because you needed a quick response to a tabloid campaign is bad policy. Also every time you change the rules gives the Home Office another opportunity to screw up the implementation, most of which they take.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
18hr ago
I don't think your observations are at all incompatible with the fairly standard antimodernist narrative. i.e.: that Modernity started hacking away at everything old and sacred without any sense of what was load bearing, and eventually had to hit things that truly were.
ABigGuy4U
18hr ago
I think some people failed to realize that 3D printers, while useful, were not literally the replicators from Star Trek
TitaniumButterfly
18hr ago
Well, if you're 'just trustworthy' (and able to provide) I'm confident that you'll be able to have and raise children. Maybe not your own, but...
ABigGuy4U
18hr ago
I’m not sure it even would be Putin, Xi and the American deep state in charge by then. It’s whoever controls the AIs. That might end up being governments but I don’t think that’s at all guaranteed, especially in the longer term.
If you want to fix this on a personal level, as a man, be trustworthy and the whole reproduction thing will come pretty easily.
You know, maybe that would be good advice if the circumstances were different, but you have to remind yourself that picking up 30 year old women who have had multiple partners is signing up for a high divorce rate and possibly raising the children of others. All in a society where all the shit you've accumulated over years of not actually getting any from these women can just be handed over to them through divorce.
Men would happily sign that deal blinded by lust, but it's 30 year old women we're talking about. If you're a trustworthy man, you either are lucky enough to get married young or you're fucked. That's just how it is now. Blowing up marriage has consequences.
In the societal level, focus less on pushing women into childrearing and more on pulling. What are the advantages? How do they mitigate risk? And what’s in it for them, on a practical and day to day sense?
Changing the incentives means radical social reform that actually forces people to pair bond before they have economic independence. Anything less is simply going to be as unsustainable as what we have now.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
18hr ago
It’s a weaponized system. The ADA is designed so anyone claiming a disability can make hostage threats. You won’t give me the exact testing situation I want — you’ll hear from my attorney. And as such it’s almost impossible to hold to any real standards of rigor. Timed tests are too much for ADHD students. In class tests are too much for autistic students. Brain damage? Open book and notes. But no in class essays as that’s too much for dyslexic students. Accommodate all of that and you’re basically down to making tests a formality.
I can agree on the broad strokes here, but the marriage + baby boom that happened in the 50s is a pretty evident counterexample. The Industrial Revolution was mostly played-out by that point and there were plenty of creature comforts and trappings of modernity, yet the marriage rate ticked up by quite a bit. Any story on birthrates or gender relations that is just a broad trend of the modern world sucking, and which doesn't take into account the booms that happened in the 50s is woefully incomplete IMO.
My take is a bit different from yours. It's that second-wave feminism in the late 60s and 70s let women earn their own keep, which meant marriage became far less of a necessity for basic survival. This made women choose men more for "love" than provisioning, which made us regress to our biological roots. Women all naturally want a high-value man and so they broadly chased after the same small percentage of guys (in other words, women's standards went up). These lucky few men got their pick of the lot and could treat women like barely-sentient fleshlights. The dating market effectively got worse for everyone except the lucky few guys, and now women broadly hate men since their opinions are formed on the small % that have the least incentive to commit. This led to a collapse in marriage rates, which ended up collapsing birth rates as well.
as a man, be trustworthy and the whole reproduction thing will come pretty easily
This is just laughably not true. It's not quite on-par with advice like "just be yourself!", but it's not far off.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
18hr ago
I have a hobby of listening to university lecture courses off youtube or whatever a few times a year. I try to keep up with the reading as I listen to each lecture. When I've talked about this with people, they've often asked if I really get anything out of it. And, having attended classes at some similar schools, I can say: compared to the students in the class, I'd probably be in about the middle third. Obviously there are advantages to in person attendance, there are advantages to being able to ask questions, there are advantages to talking about it with my classmates, etc. But even at a top school, the bottom third of students on any given day didn't (really) do the reading, or they are hungover, or they are worried about something else, and they never participate in class or talk to other students about the material. I don't "go to class" until all those things are good. The top third are at least doing the reading and chatting about it, maybe asking questions occasionally, maybe the best of them are going to office hours; I miss out on that. But I'm comfortably that I get about as much out of watching an old Yale lecture series on Ukrainian History as a mediocre student at Yale did in that year.
Now I might need to update that assessment. I might be a top 10% student just by doing the readings and paying attention.
Classes at elite universities have long abandoned the idea that they actually teach skills and knowledge, in favor of the idea that they pre-selected the best kids, made sure they could pass basic tests, and then certify them to other users (employers, professional organizations, other universities), and assume that graduates will have obtained the skills to learn whatever they need to learn later. This pre-selection effect is where you get comedy like dropping out of Stanford after the first day of classes, eventually it will simply be that you get accepted but don't go.
And there's a paradox at work here: at selective schools the student qualifications over time have gone nuclear, while the actual work done at the schools has cratered. The vast majority of my friends report that with their scores and qualifications of the time, they never would have gotten into their alma maters. (Though one can debate how standards behind the numbers have disappeared).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
19hr ago
People are wiping butts instead of waiting tables -> more of those robots that carry food from the kitchen to the table + normalize selecting & paying for food using a ticket machine at the entrance as in Japan.
Matthew Yglesias has a repeated line that the middle class should not be able to afford full-service dining (except as an occasional splurge purchase) in a country with a functioning labour market. He sees the market shift from low-end full-service restaurants to high-end fast-casual dining as (a) driven by rising low-end wages and (b) an entirely good thing. So the official rat-adjacent neoliberal shill position here is
People are wiping butts instead of waiting tables -> restaurants targeting middle-class clientele continue to switch from a full-service to a fast-casual model.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
19hr ago
I tend to agree. Curves tend to have the purpose of hiding failure. You can objectively fail the material and still pass. I find a lot of monkeying about with the grading end of college and almost all of it does the same. Grading scales in the 1989s had A= 100 to 92, Cs were 85 to 72. Anything under 72 was pretty much failure. Now it’s 70 to pass, and 90 it an A. Curves are much more common. And I’m finding a lot of schools now allow extra credit, class participation and other “free points” to goose grades. Until upper division courses, Theres a good bit of handholding as well, as major tests and papers are mentioned in class and in some cases the students must produce drafts of papers and outlines at intervals to make sure they’re working on them.
I think it's fundamentally a mistake to think about these foreign care workers as workers. They are not people who migrated in order to work, they are people who are working in order to migrate.
You can think about them as wakalixes if you want - it doesn't change the tradeoff that if you eject the people doing work either someone else has to do the work (in place of what they are currently doing) or the work doesn't get done.
Labour-driven immigration is, regardless of the motives of the immigrant, fundamentally a commercial transaction with terms set by the host-country government on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Empirically, Singapore and the Gulf Arabs have demonstrated that you can offer low-skill immigrants much less favourable terms than the West does and still get takers.
After an attempt to fact-check your comment about Zimbabwe, the specific context of the UK care worker visa appears to be a furphy here. It looks like there was an order-of-magnitude drop in the number of care worker visas issued before the change to dependent visas, driven by a crackdown on outright fraudulent applications in late 2023. So this particular case wasn't choosing the wrong-side of a trade-off, it was failed implementation due to administrative incompetence. For anyone familiar with the UK Home Office, this is unsurprising. For anyone familiar with the Johnson-Sunak Conservative regime, this is also unsurprising.
I like this analogy. I wonder why I haven't heard it more often when people talk about LLMs being glorified autocomplete.
I really don't think it's just a scaling problem in its entirety. I find it plausible that scaling only gets us marginally more correct answers. Look at how disappointing ChatGPT 4.5 was despite its massive size.
If you're going by Scott's 2027 article, it says that little of real note beyond iterative improvements happen until 2027, and then 2027 itself is supposed to be the explosion. Then they claim in some of the subarticles on that site that 2027 is really their earliest reasonable guess, and that 2028 is also highly plausible, but also 2029-2033 aren't unreasonable.
The issue with FOOM debates is that a hard takeoff is presumed to always be right around the corner, just one more algorithmic breakthrough and we could be there! I feel like Yud is set up in a position to effectively never be falsified even if we get to 2040 and AI is basically where it is now.
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