domain:acoup.blog
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
23m ago
Well, there’s several hundred million white women in the world, some of whom are a bit odd and spergy themselves. If none of them will have me then I’ll simply have to be alone. But I’m not seething about it or anything. That’s my choice and I accept responsibility for it.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
30m ago
Do you really think shoving all the gays back in the closet and teaching masturbation is evil will fix everything? I get that's low hanging fruit but that's what a return to Christianity also implies, the wages of sin are death. If so what do you actually think we should do about the gays? I feel like we have enough Scientific and psychological knowledge about them and their are millions of them just in the US so what are we gonna do? I think that a quiet return to Christianity works a lot better when you have secular society for your gay sons to fade into
This is a great question, and definitely one the Church has struggled to have a convincing answer to for the modern world. Personally I do think that being gay is sinful and overall worse than being attracted to the opposite sex, and aiming for a family. I don't think pushing gays back in the closet will fix everything. However, I do think that promoting and growing the amount of healthy, happy marriages with children who are treated well will fix many of the problems in our society, if not most!
Of course if you believe Christianity is true well than that's that.
Yep... that is that heh. I do love Buddhism though, and actually was deeply into it for over a decade before I converted. So I agree with you on some things at least.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
33m ago
Absolutely! I could've been more clear - I don't blame game devs individually at all! I think this issue is a broader reflection of our cultural values, what we assign status to, and how difficult we make it for people to actually change things as opposed to just work as cogs in a giant system.
I hope we are able to renew some of our cultural institutions, but we'll likely need some clearing of the deadwood first.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
33m ago
I find it useful to know what people like, and I upvote interesting ideas. I wouldn’t say that most people here are bright red MAGA, but we do lean a bit conservative in most issues.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
35m ago
No need to be so rude. We have different beliefs. I believe He exists, so yes forgotten God is how I put it.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
52m ago
Please explain the difference.
So we are back to square one. It seems to me that you are truthitarian and not a utilitarian, which is fair game. Let's investigate it on my previous example of Kant's axe murderer asking for you wife. Since she can be destroyed by [you telling] the truth about her whereabouts, then she should be, right? Because telling a lie can hamper yours and murderer's ability to correctly calculate the utility in the future with immense impacts. Or you should tell a lie, because death of you wife would be more negative utility compared to whatever impact on correct calculation of utility is there from telling a lie. What is your answer to the axe murderer? Is the truth the ultimate value that should destroy all and everything in its path? Or is it subordinate to other values such as your best estimation of utility in a given moment?
This is distinct from "lies can be utile", which is broader and covers things like people having different utility metrics and/or people not actually being utilitarians and/or direct, non-choice-based belief effects (e.g. stress). That condition of "if you need there to be lots of utilitarians" is actually relevant to my point, y'know.
That is why amended Sagan's mantra:
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be - except if it clashes with some other higher value (e.g. causing negative utility), in that case you should not destroy that thing by the truth.
cae_jones
55m ago
Didn't Epstein get banned from Marlago for sexually harassing a member's teenaged daughter?
aardvark2
1hr ago
Interestingly, if you want to seach on how migrants are helped to travel to US border, use something different from Google, which avoids showing you these results. Yandex definitely doesn't have a leg in US culture war so it's fair here.
NullHypothesis
1hr ago
Depending on the summer job it could be considered as one of the extracurriculars in your college application.
The competition Asian applicants have for top-tier colleges are other Asian applicants. If all they have are high academics, their chances of getting in are low. If they had all the extracurriculars on top of academics, well they likely didn't need the summer job to stand out and have likely built their soft skills in stuff like sports/debate/etc. When you consider the students that only have their academic scores to stand on, it is likely their soft skills are not as developed as peers that have more than the academic scores. It's this group that could potentially benefit.
A lot of colleges claim their goal is to create a diverse student body group. Whether or not you agree with this, it's true that a lot of colleges and universities after reaching a certain number of the "smart Asian student" archetype will stop accepting more Asian students. Hence, why colleges that didn't have affirmative action like UCLA have significantly higher Asian student populations. There are probably smart, well-spoken Asian students that got rejected from colleges because there are Asians. But there are also smart, awkward Asians who got rejected because they didn't look the interviewer in the eye and stumbled over their words. Yes, Asians have a higher hurdle to enter the top level colleges. Some people would call it bullshit, but your goal should be to minimize the potential checks that could weed you out.
I don't have any stats at the moment so I'll speak from personal experience. I'm Asian and I had a lot of Asian friends, and literally none of us spent the entire summer studying. Sure, some of did stuff like SAT prep school, but that didn't exactly take up the whole summer... it was like a once or twice a week thing. Basically a few hours a week. If you have to spend the entire summer studying just to keep up to the point you don't have the time to hold down a summer job then you'll probably struggle in college relative to your peers that just fucked around and got similar scores to you. Of all of us that got 1500 or higher on the SAT, the ones that got into the top tier schools like Harvard/Stanford/CalTech also just happened to be the most social and well-spoken of the bunch. Personality might be difficult, perhaps impossible, to objectively measure, but it's not like it doesn't matter either.
That being said, my experience might be less and less relevant. From I last remember Harvard lost the case on affirmative action and checking the class of 2028 numbers it seems the number of accepted Asian students have gone up (37% same as previous year, but class of 2026 says 27% which is a significant jump). https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/09/harvard-releases-race-data-for-class-of-2028/
I wasn't able to find the percentage of Asian applicants that got admitted, only the percentage of accepted applicants that were Asian. It's possible more Asians are applying to Harvard after the supreme court decision.
Also found this chart which is pretty interesting:
It's a graph of the "personal" rating applicants to Harvard received, split between Harvard Staff members versus Harvard Alumni.
And in the article linked: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/andrew-gelman-sharad-goel-daniel-e-ho-affirmative-action-isnt-problem/
Among the most competitive applicants, the graphs show that Harvard staff are still more likely than alumni to rate whites more favorably than Asian Americans. In the top academic decile of applicants, Harvard staff put 23 percent of Asian Americans and 31 percent of whites in the top two personality categories. In contrast, alumni interviewers gave this group of Asian and white applicants these top ratings at much closer rates (64 percent and 66 percent, respectively).
Like you said, Harvard staff members were harsher on Asians relative to how alumni did the scoring, but across the board both groups rated a lower percentage of Asians top scores for personal relative to other races. Harvard staff was also harsher on all races across the board relative to alumni scoring. There probably is bias, but there is probably also some truth to the personal rating, at least based on my personal experiences of academically gifted Asians. There were Asians that got top scores on personal and Asians that didn't - what was the difference maker? I don't think luck on who interviewed them is the full answer. Even if it was true Asians would have to do better to get the same "personal" score, it's not as if there is absolutely nothing you can do to become a better speaker or to be more charismatic.
Also interesting to note that the students that did the best academically also tend to do the best on personality. The bottom 25th percentile score at Harvard is 1500, so these are all top 1% students from the country. I'm curious if the people rating the personal score had any idea about the person's actual academic scores, but it's all speculation at this point.
Not American, and I won't speak to America.
As for Germany though, and the world in general, I'm a "go down swinging"-Doomer. My country is doomed by terminal cultural decline, political idiocy, economic sclerosis, technological ignorance, social atomization and demographic freefall. We're big enough and wealthy enough to muddle on for a long while yet, but there seems to be no reason to expect a reversal of trends.
As for the world in general, I strongly suspect that the age of humanity as we knew it is slowly drawing to a close.
And I don't necessarily mean AI, although that will of ocurse be a factor. LLMs are powerful enough to replace humans in certain niches, sure, but AI as a whole still has a way to go before before it can outcompete us in general. It will, though. Sooner or later. Whether the protagonists of tomorrow's history will be AIs untethered from discrete physical bodies, or robots, or human bodies with AIs living in their heads, who knows. But in the long enough run, human bodies will just be a waste of resources. A little closer to now, we'll see more and more niches taken over by machines and AIs. At first the steam engines came for the hammering, but I was not a John Henry, so I didn't speak up. Then the robot arms came for the assembly lines, but I wasn't a stereotypical blue-collar worker so I didn't speak up. Then the LLMs came for the professional bullshitters, but they still have enough regulations in place to keep their sinecures for a while yet. One day they'll come for the last of us. Maybe some few humans will be rich and powerful even then, commanding legions of AIs and whatever human serfs please them. But one day the universe will take a good look at "humanity", notice that the humans don't actually have a role to play in there, and simplify the equation by removing us. Transhumanism to the rescue, some say - empower humans through technology to outcompete inhuman AIs. But why keep the human in there, I ask? What do we have to offer?
And alright, let's skip the AI topic. Let's pretend they don't exist. Science-fiction does it all the time. Recognizably human protagonists, personally choosing to do things, leading recognizably human lives in which they choose what to do with their lives, whom to associate with, experiment with different lifestyles, engage in adventure and romance, excel in their chosen fields, found families, believe in higher concepts, live with purpose, just like their ancesorts did five thousand years ago, true human lives for true humans.
As if.
Aside: Information technology is rotting our brains. Maybe we'll develop countermeasures (Totalitarian regulation? Social engineering? Neurological modification?) and keep the digital crack in check. If not, then natural selection will cull the susceptible. Alright, problem solved either way. This one was easy. Now let's get to the meat.
Human population continues to grow. There's a lot of us. We're not living in villages and small communities anymore (well I do, but let's not pretend that this is the norm). The growth of states seems to have been checked for the time being by the current international order, but sooner or later there will be pressure to unify further - and if that cannot happen, then states will slowly be superseded by some new order that does not respect borders as they are. Many claim that is is already happening, but in my view it's a slow process. Bigger polities with disproportionately bigger populations, atomized and globalized, welcome to the cyberpunk future in which human lives are individually just not very valuable. Will this future be the turbo-capitalist dystopia in which humans are simply commodities, flitting about from place to place, working 80-hour weeks just to keep from drowning in debt, completely dehumanized and disassociated from each other by a lack of time and the fluidity of the labor market and enjoying a standard of living that's just barely above being a rat in a box, on a good day? Or will it be a hyperregulated totalitarian nightmare in which you are born and bred and raised for the task that society requires of you, you work 80 hours a week because any less and you're an asocial parasite, you're dehumanized and disassociated from other humans because of a lack of time and the rigidity of centrally planned social organization, and you enjoy a standard of living that's just barely above being a rat in a box, on a good day? At least humans are still around, and not governed by AI overlords - but rather by market dynamics or some buerocracy. Either way, it's an inhuman superorganism that humans are little more than cells of. We will live like this. We will breed and engineer and select and adapt ourselves to live like this. At present we are halfway between the feral hogs frolicking in the woods that we were and the domesticated pigs born and butchered in an assembly line that we are destined to be. Pray that the future does not replaces us with synthetic meat.
Human life will change. It will either change by becoming completely obsolete, or will (either as a transitional period before total obsolescence or as a terminal state) change by becoming increasingly optimized towards producing value while demanding a minimum of resources. If you think otherwise, please tell me why. Historically we've gone the other way, right? Humans are more free, more individually wealthy and comfortable than ever. Why should the future be the opposite? Why in the world should we have reached peak human flourishing already?
Because in my view, either information technology or social technology are becoming ever-more suitable for the instrumentalization of humans by superorganisms, be they markets or buerocracies or AIs. Historically human agency was a key component in human value, but as we coalesce into and are subsumed by larger entities, individual human capabilities become increasingly inadequate to navigate the world. I'm no scientist, no futurist, nor even very smart like many mottizens. I can't do a good job of pinpointing why I think this. Please disagree with me. Tell me I'm wrong.
Anyways, what can a reasonable approximation of a real human being like myself do when the future looks like that? Becoming one of the beautiful elite who rules over the unwashed commoditized masses seems exceedingly unlikely. Becoming a transhuman god like some here (you know who you are) expect to be seems laughably unlikely because, as said, that god doesn't need a human component. When the future looks like a nightmare either way, the best I can do to meet it is to just carry on and say bring it. We'll cross those bridges when we get there. It's not like any ending other than death and oblivion were ever in the books, for anyone, be they man or machine or godlike superorganism or the universe itself. Consolation prize: In the end, we're all equally gone.
aardvark2
1hr ago
But pretty much every Western society recovered from having TFR crash to near-replacement or below in the 1930s to 2.5-3 in the 50s and 60s, ie. the baby boom.
TFR is synthetic parameter, and much noiser than the actual fertility, the advantage of TFR is that it's available now rather than 40 years later. If you look at actual total fertility, it's much smoother and shows no such crash.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
Would they be happy to be scammed in this manner, with inferior goods? Is there a single recipe on the planet which accommodates such mutilation?
My wife makes those kinds of substitutions work all the time. Just shrug, close your eyes and chew harder.
FtttG
1hr ago
I don't think the DNC is a socialist party, hence why they had to bring out the big guns to stop Bernie getting the nomination.
FtttG
1hr ago
Yeah, before the election I asked my liberal Guardian reader uncle about what Kamala stood for and what made her so promising a candidate, and he said "well, I think she'll do a lot to protect women's reproductive rights".
That was it. More abortions. Nothing on healthcare, housing, education, law and order etc.. Just abortions for some, miniature American flags for others.
I was too busy to manage to go grab groceries this week and opted to order them delivered. I checked in a few minutes later to find that several items were flagged as unavailable, and the store were suggesting replacements:
In what universe is a pack of salami a substitute for Swedish meatballs?? Imagine a local family of Scottish-Scandinavians, pining for the fjords, unable to make their annual pilgrimage to the nearest IKEA. They've scrimped and worked hard, tolerated the sunburn and boiling heat, and decided to treat themselves with a taste of home. Alas, it was not to be..
Would the hypothetical clan of kilt-knitted, lingonberry-lonely expats be happy? They would stare at the salami the way one stares at a postcard of the Highlands when one had booked a week in Glen Coe: it is technically an image of the right country, but it neither howls with wind nor smells of heather. The children would ask, “Mamma, why are the meatballs in slices?” and Mamma would have to explain that sometimes the world is run by people who think “Scandi” is just a checkout aisle at H&M.
I can only imagine that they haven't experienced such disappointment since their distant ancestor, Björn, held his vegvisir or sun stone the wrong way, and thus took the wrong turn on his voyage to Normandy.
(I accepted the offer because it made me a net profit of about 50p. The replacement of cocktail sausages with chicken skewers, while somewhat saner, would have lost me twice as much, and was summarily refunded.)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1hr ago
Court opinion with map:
-
Within New Jersey, Berkeley Township* contains 41,000 inhabitants. Within Berkeley, the neighborhood of South Seaside Park contains 490 inhabitants. Prior to year 1875, the entire area was a contiguous mass called Dover Township, with South Seaside Park sitting at the tip of a barrier
<del>island</del><ins>peninsula</ins>that was connected directly to the rest of Dover with a bridge. However, over the years, the creation of Berkeley from Dover's land, and the creation of other municipalities from Berkeley's land, caused South Seaside Park to become separated from the rest of Berkeley by a 13-mile (21-kilometer) drive that takes 30 minutes at the best of times, and during summer can be as long as 45 minutes due to beach traffic. -
Under New Jersey law, a neighborhood can secede from its municipality if (1) three-fifths of its registered voters sign a petition requesting secession, and (2) (a) the municipal council grants consent by a two-thirds vote, or (b) the municipal council refuses consent but (i) the refusal is arbitrary or unreasonable, (ii) the refusal is detrimental to the well-being of the neighborhood, and (iii) the secession would not significantly injure the rump municipality. Accordingly, in year 2014, two-thirds of South Seaside Park's registered voters sign such a petition, seeking to secede from Berkeley Township and join Seaside Park Borough, which is South Seaside Park's sole neighbor on the barrier peninsula. The resulting hearings last into year 2019. In year 2020, the Berkeley council finally refuses consent, and the petitioners file a lawsuit, alleging that the refusal met the aforementioned criteria i–iii.
-
In year 2022, the trial judge rules for the petitioners. (i) The members of the municipal council were supposed to be impartial arbiters, but instead they were vociferously opposed to the secession, and even enlisted the municipality's contracted licensed planner to help them argue against it. (ii) "Substantially all" of Berkeley's services are based in the mainland, a zillion miles away from South Seaside Park. Inhabitants of South Seaside Park can't even watch Berkeley's council meetings on their cable-television subscriptions because South Seaside Park has a different cable provider. It would be much more convenient for South Seaside Park's inhabitants if they could get municipal services from Seaside Park Borough instead. (iii) Despite constituting only 1 percent of Berkeley's population, the beachfront community of South Seaside Park contains a whopping 11 percent of Berkeley's taxable property value. So it is true that the secession would cause taxes in the rump Berkeley to rise by 3 percent. But that does not rise to the level of "significant injury" that the law requires, and the calculation of 3 percent does not even take into account the ameliorating facts that (1) secession would let the rump Berkeley save money by ceasing to provide any services to distant South Seaside Park, and (2) South Seaside Park already is completely developed, while rump Berkeley still would have lots of empty land to be built on**, so South Seaside Park's proportion of Berkeley's taxable property value would shrink in the future. Therefore, South Seaside Park must be permitted to secede. The appeals panel affirms in year 2024, and the state supreme court follows suit in year 2025 (linked at the top of this comment).
Note that Seaside Park Borough has not actually agreed to annex South Seaside Park. It would be a hilarious anticlimax if Seaside Park did not agree. Apparently, though, this anticlimax really did happen fifty years ago, after a similar petition-plus-lawsuit rigmarole was won by the father of the leader of the current secession initiative.
**The empty portion of South Seaside Park that is visible on the map is an unbuildable state park. The empty portion of rump Berkeley does have a lot of overlap with New Jersey's protected Pinelands area, but that makes building merely difficult, not impossible.
it_is_so_weird_to_be
1hr ago
I'd love it if you posted more about your experiences with adoption/fostering.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1hr ago
if it comes to it, European countries can simply expel their migrants,
I'm not sure they can; as in, I'm not sure they have the capacity — particularly if you compare demographics of fighting-age men. And even if they do, that won't be for long — can you still "expel the migrants" when they outnumber you?
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
why do you have it confused?
I don't.
You said "calculate utility correctly". To calculate utility correctly requires knowing the truth. Different worldstates result in different expected utilities for the same course of action, so a utilitarian with a bad understanding of reality will act suboptimally according to his own utility metric - often wildly so. The obvious example is that genocide looks utile if you think the relevant demographic are all evil.
Hence, "lies can cause people to calculate utility correctly" = "sometimes lying results in people believing the truth".
This is distinct from "lies can be utile", which is broader and covers things like people having different utility metrics and/or people not actually being utilitarians and/or direct, non-choice-based belief effects (e.g. stress). That condition of "if you need there to be lots of utilitarians" is actually relevant to my point, y'know.
Yes?
If you take that random sample of 12 year olds and run them through the education system, where they are force-fed Shakespeare and algebra against their will for another 6 years, you will find that:
- Most of them fail to master the material.
- Most of them forget what little they memorize as soon as the exam is over.
- Most of them never use any of it in real life.
The few things that the average man is both actually capable of learning and truly increase his economic productivity thereby are basic literacy, addition and subtraction, and the multiplication table. The average man cannot actually learn rhetoric or geometry, and resents the attempt to teach him. More to the point, the average man never actually needs those for his job, or to function outside of it.
See "Genetic Russian Roulette", "Against Tulip Subsidies", "SSC Gives a Graduation Speech", "Book Review: The Cult of Smart", and "A Theoretical 'Case Against Education'" for Scott's absolutely brutal takedowns of the education system. Then wash it down with some Education Realist, Bryan Caplan, and Various Refrigerator.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1hr ago
Realistically, Geran-2 is not the most credible threat. It's big, slow and loud, so you don't really need radars or AA missiles to counter them. Flak can shoot them down and acoustic or optical targeting is sufficient. Even Ukraine can protect most of its military infrastructure and the bulk of its dual-use critical infrastructure with sufficient countermeasures. If you can resist the voices of populists demanding that every single flying bomb over the centers of population has to be shot down no matter the cost, you don't really need to worry about them.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1hr ago
if we manage to beat back stasis without a true catastrophe, I think that will be enough for me and my children.
That's a very big "if." Far, far, far more likely we don't. And what then?
It's not the same. Your wife might not miss those meaty balls, but I certainly do.
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