domain:alexberenson.substack.com
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
2m ago
Is there an article about Claude being untucked? I can't find anything in particular.
zeke5123a
4m ago
Isn’t the answer “the people voting are different than the displaced people?”
hydroacetylene
4m ago
That’s what I thought you meant and that’s what I replied to.
hydroacetylene
4m ago
The vaccines are shitty and untested. But that’s also all they are. They aren’t some depopulation conspiracy; they were rolled out among the elderly first, after all.
I mean I also know lots of people who had babies after getting them.
yofuckreddit
5m ago
There have been so many great comments and threads about increasing longevity, but the only thread I can find through search-fu is a lil old.
Assume I know that what I really need to do is eat less, exercise more, and be happy. I agree.
But I'm now in a place I want to solve problems with money and convenience instead of hard work. I'm willing to take on a reasonable amount of risk for unproven supplements. To summarize the previous thread, some hot topics included:
- Creatine (already a convert, love it)
- Boring stuff (Fish Oil, Vitamin D, Vitamin C - none of which I take right now)
- Phenibut (Very interesting, and I occasionally have high-stakes meetings I could see using this for but haven't pulled the trigger)
What else would you suggest or discuss?
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
5m ago
I have enough presence of mind to not get swooned by an AI yet. But I must admit that voice is really something, they nailed it. Its warm, and inviting in that very distinct (she wants to fuck me but also loves me) way and doesn't come off as fake... It's definitely gonna rack up some casualties.
cjet79
7m ago
Come on man. There is no goddamned way that anyone posting here is unaware of the core of the story.
There are other good reasons to ask for context:
- To avoid talking about nothingburgers. Sometimes people have weird news feeds and they get small incidents show up on their feed.
- For future readers. We do keep a list of old quality posts. The reader of a post is not just the people here this week.
- For additional depth and discussion. For example, if they had linked Brown University they could have started a discussion about divestment.
Yeah, they did that - it's right there!
Yeah they sort of did, which is why I half parroted their words.
Some of you seem to very much live in the culture war. You are very aware of what is going on and the latest news. And you also seem to want to replicate that newsfeed here?
I'll admit I just don't get it. If I didn't read this website I'd probably be unaware of a large portion of the culture war. I am not certain I would have known about the campus protests if I had not read about it here on TheMotte. I specifically need the context. I basically live under a rock. I hangout with my family and my neighbors, and we talk about local stuff mostly.
At the same time I don't want a scrolling doomlist of every item in the culture war. That is what twitter and mainstream news outlets are for. I don't visit those websites because I don't want the scrolling doomlist of every item in the culture war. If there is something novel and interesting to be discussed about a particular item, sure, lets have that conversation.
What do you want here exactly? Do you want this to just be a twitter clone (but with indents!) where we write a few sentences to performatively crap on our outgroup? I don't see the point.
RegularlyExpressed
19m ago
Germany is the obvious counter-example.
I'm not asking to cancel every length post. A mod saying
Black people, whose natural inclinations are adverse to lifelong monogamy, quickly devolved back into their ancestral mating patterns when released from the straitjacket of traditional Christian morality.
Please proactively provide evidence for controversial claims when you make them
Is completely fine.
Removing the rule is also fine.
But don't write rules that sound lovely, but which you're not willing to enforce.
But if one cancels every lengthy post which contains some claim which might be controversial and is not backed by evidence then there will be very few posts left.
I don't personally believe this. In this particular case, Fox News reporters somehow manage to write litanies of right-wing talking points without succumbing to these kind of things, so I have every confidence that OP could have too, if they had felt like it was expect of them.
I think people fall to the standard they can get away with, and it was clear when the top-level comment was posted that the mods were never going to mod it.
RegularlyExpressed
25m ago
but they even tried to do it with Harry Potter.
Do you mean they tried to cast North American actors/set the film in NA? That would have been hilarious.
Pynewacket
25m ago
this may sound out of left field, but How would you have felt if you didn't have breakfast yesterday?
Corvos
26m ago
This feels though similar to Americans do not travel to other countries but everyone in Europe does therefore everyone in America are uneducated proles.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure I follow.
All of Europe seems to have outsized capital countries, but the countries are probably more comparable to regions of the U.S.
Bear in mind the language problem. In America, everyone speaks the same language everywhere (more or less). In Europe, lots of people speak English but realistically only about 10% have more than a few phrases they remember from school, so moving is hard. In Asia there's basically no overlap at all.
cjet79
28m ago
that many of them perceive the barrier to entry to be too high.
Exactly! Its a perception thing, so I am trying to clear it up by changing that perception. WhiningCoil and others are making it more difficult by adding to the false perception. You of course are asking them to stop posting these bad interpretations of the rules, and thus discouraging posting, right?
Saying that they're mistaken, it's really not that high, isn't going to change anyone's mind.
There are different barriers to posting. One of those barriers is being afraid that the mods won't like your post and you'll get banned or in trouble. I can lower that barrier. I can't lower other barriers like "I don't know what to post about", or "I don't really want to talk about anything".
incognitomaorach
33m ago
Absolutely, the main point does stand. I'm unfamiliar with the French case, but London's role as a central capital of a single polity probably contributes to this phenomenon. London's been an immigrant city (internal migrants) for 600 years, the closest thing to "standard" English is based on the London prestige dialect, which itself was just a variety of that spoken in the East Midlands- the population churn was constant. Prior to 1750 there was basically London, a few market towns, the other national capitals (Dublin really) and that was it for cities. Places like Rome, Milan, Naples, Munich, Cologne etc. were all independent city states, or capitals of smaller polities which later unified, which must have encouraged the decentralised growth.
So why do they pretend to care? Status games. Accusations of "appropriation" are a convenient way to signal higher moral status. If you can get a high-ranking person to grovel before you, you are higher status than them. If you can get a competitor fired for wearing a silly costume, then your chance at the top job just increased. This is why woke status games are most extreme in situations where 100s of people compete for a sinecure such as a college professorship. It's a crab bucket mentality.
Yup, that's a big factor for sure. I have seen exaggerated Italian accents coded as racist, or at least very insensitive. Nobody cares about us Brits :(
Woke people don't just appropriate. They want to actively erase non-Anglo cultures. Witness, for example, the use of the term "Latinx". Or the insistence that traditional people abandon their customs and religion to support LGBT ideology.
Absolutely, it's the old chauvinism in a new form, with no excuses this time. For all its flaws, old Hollywood was just trying to make films that sold well at home, and the cultural appropriation was an unfortunate consequence. The woke should know better.
To oversimplify, I think that real complaints about cultural appropriation like mine or the Australian Aboriginals (which by definition come from cultures lacking soft power) got filtered through woke Americans who did have soft power, and were redirected by those people for their own ends. Often unconsciously.
Spookykou
39m ago
Personally I find legal discussions to be the most 'valuable' I have no domain knowledge but they seem to consistently get a good back and forth and express opinions that just do not seem to exist outside of this place. Often I wonder if TheMotte could be a better lawyer for Trump than whoever he has hired based on the strength of their arguments. Trumps legal troubles as presented by 99.99% of the internet, he is clearly guilty and wrong and the case against him is iron clad, Trumps legal troubles as presented here, absurd novel legal theory that requires literal time travel to be a crime.
Just, love reading it.
fartVader
39m ago
I'm guessing this is South Bay or thereabouts. The Dumbarton bridge marks the beginning of Asian (south and east) tech town. Indians and Chinese tech workers are eating up the area from Palo Alto to San Jose back up tp Fremont. But that is silicon valley proper, so it's hardly surprising.
The rest of California and the Bay Area is not infested with Indian and Chinese tech workers taking over.
stav
41m ago
Fair enough. But CA is 100% run by Democrats so it’s hard for me not to see people being angry and saying let me vote for this other populist guy just as a reaction. They tried Bernie but he turned out to be a massive sellout. Yet they continue to vote Biden to “save our democracy” or “prevent fascism”. America has become unrecognizable yet these people vote for Biden who is part of the cabal that did this.
Spookykou
46m ago
I think it is unlikely that a fear of getting banned is very relevant to this issue. I think that people feel at least a mild incentive to upvotes a top level post where the poster clearly put in effort even if it is not particularly interesting, so most large, well formatted top level posts get at a minimum 20 upvotes and some engagement.
I think it is far more likely (I'm not projecting here honest) that people are worried about making a top level post that sits at 2 upvotes and gets no engagement, rather than a fear of being 'banned' or any other mod action. Honestly, if a modhat came along leaving the only comment saying you didn't try hard enough, ten people would suddenly come in out of nowhere to defend your post even if they would have never engaged with it otherwise.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
47m ago
FWIW, this isn't why I don't talk about Ukraine. I don't talk about it because it seems like a morass of propaganda to the point where I haven't been willing to try to do the work to understand what's closer to the truth. Maybe I'm wrong and it's actually quite legible if I were to dig in, but right now, it doesn't seem like a good tradeoff for me.
jeroboam
52m ago
Let me be annoying and argue with your steelman case, which I acknowledge you are offering to keep the conversation moving.
Few woke people actually care about appropriation. For example, it's perfectly fine to talk in a silly Italian or British accent. "Its-a bigga pizza pie-a".
But it's actually worse. Woke people don't just appropriate. They want to actively erase non-Anglo cultures. Witness, for example, the use of the term "Latinx". Or the insistence that traditional people abandon their customs and religion to support LGBT ideology.
So why do they pretend to care? Status games. Accusations of "appropriation" are a convenient way to signal higher moral status. If you can get a high-ranking person to grovel before you, you are higher status than them. If you can get a competitor fired for wearing a silly costume, then your chance at the top job just increased. This is why woke status games are most extreme in situations where 100s of people compete for a sinecure such as a college professorship. It's a crab bucket mentality.
cjet79
53m ago
@somedude @WhiningCoil @Stellula
Tagging all of you due to confusion about the low effort posting.
This is an example of a short post that meets the requirements: https://www.themotte.org/post/1002/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/212011?context=8#context
Context:
So a bit of a time ago there was a discussion here about the gender war, demographic implosion and political male-female divide in South Korea. rokmonster stated that "Seoul is the only city worth living in [there]" as self-evident fact, apparently.
Analysis:
As someone who knows little about Korea, I find this puzzling. Aren't there other large cities there?
Opinion / jumping off point for discussion
I'm sure there are. Are they really that bad? And if yes, what is "that"?
7 sentences, 73 words, 425 characters. That does not seem very long to me. It does not seem like a 40k word essay. It does not seem like a wall of text.
Will we continue to have this discussion again and again every month? It does not make our job easier when you spread inaccurate interpretations of the rules, especially overly hostile interpretations that would scare people off from posting.
It also relates back to the tendency for Rats to engage publicly in performative utilitarianism, which seems to be the order of the day among Pro-Israel supporters to begin with.
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