domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
bro
just now
Are there any examples of the "We're X! Of course we Y" meme that aren't unbearably cringe?
I've only ever encountered them with the extreme selection bias of being reposted on Twitter as ragebait, and it's really hard to imagine any that wouldn't be. But surely there are less awful examples that make the lolcows keep thinking it's a good idea.
AvocadoPanic
just now
Awarenesss
4m ago
I have effectively made the decision to move out of my home in the middle-class Dallas, TX, suburbs into an apartment in the fun part of town. I am debating whether I should rent the home out or sell it and would like advice and/or experiences from my fellow Mottizens. I am leaning 75/25 in favor of selling given the thoughts below.
Background:
- 26 year-old male in committed relationship that I expect to result in marriage. We would not move into this house together if we got married.
- Home is appraised at $380k and has a 30-year mortgage with 3% rate. Monthly payment all-in is $2200 and expected to go up due to property values increasing.
- Home is in a socially "meh" area with meh schools and stroads galore
Pro-sell thoughts:
- I do not have the time to manage tenants unless they are truly very quiet nor am I willing to risk getting shitty tenants and having to deal with them
- I can simply pocket the cash and have peace of mind about not having to worry about the house and its illiquidity, tenants, etc.
- I am moderately risk-adverse when it comes to money and investments and it can cause me stress. If I were to move to an apartment and have a vacant home, my combined mortgage and rent would be about 80% of my post-tax income. (I have plenty in a brokerage account that could cover me, but I don't want to sell that.)
Pro-rent thoughts:
- More equity: I do not care about making a large monthly profit off of the house (maybe $100-200/mo to pay for emergencies), but rather building equity so I can get more money when I eventually sell
- Property management companies can, but not always, do a good job of not letting anything make it to the homeowner (from what I've read)
- If I get lucky and find excellent tenants, I can treat them very well to increase the likelihood of them staying (but this is still risking it)
- My area's real estate market is relatively in-demand with little sign of slowing down (not including reasons that affect all U.S. cities), which may allow me to sell a bit quicker than other markets, especially if I sold for below market value (which I'm fine doing if absolutely needed)
- 3% interest rate is very good and I suspect we won't see that for a long time
5434a
11m ago
Some blend of the three. John is a lazy thinker so he defaults to lazy explanations: He's the only thing that matters, so any obstacles he encounters are deliberate sabotage, and that sabotage is the worst possible kind, and so you should feel sorry for him because he's the only thing that matters, and if you don't you might as well be dead to him. Egocentrism, probably with some sort of neurochemical deficiency that biases his perceptions towards negative interpretation.
And maybe some people have picked up on those vibes and started actually fucking with him because why not, he's a miserable sod who already thinks everyone is out to get him anyway so they might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. At that point he's "right" but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
it's how I model people
You model people as being like John, or you model people the same way John models people?
AvocadoPanic
13m ago
Booth was hugely popular and successful, perhaps the most popular and successful of his day.
AvocadoPanic
21m ago
not so gay song
Not gay at all. He's engaged to a woman, Padre Pio and the Apostle Paul are his spiritual role models.
The video is fun too https://youtube.com/watch?v=kmg8EAD-Kjw?si=igvoPTcj2GAdBn9i
AvocadoPanic
32m ago
UK - A gay guy sings while buff male backing dancers gyrate on eachother
Nul Points from tele voting
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
36m ago
As a person who regularly calls other people "murder victims" as a muttered insult despite not being particularly homicidal, I would lean toward option 1.
AvocadoPanic
39m ago
Maybe they're still salty over Isreal's use of fraudulent Irish passports / identities for their intelligence agencies wet work.
AvocadoPanic
42m ago
She's said that she thought Isreal should be excluded if they're excluding Russia.
This made me suspicious about the sources of historical anti-witch propaganda.
Do we know how unified the witch communities position on Isreal / Zionism is?
AvocadoPanic
45m ago
We heard booing for both.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
46m ago
This sounds like a very unhappy and mentally unhealthy way to negotiate life with half the human race, believing unironically that they all hate and want to castrate you. If you are being serious and literal. (Which I doubt.)
okay, so you knew she had justified her speculation, having read the linked article, and you still wrote a comment claiming she didn't
and now you're dropping that having not addressed any part of that support and are claiming because you haven't seen "others in the media" or foxnews/oan talk about it, it's without support? what? why would I or anyone care what foxnews or oan think or do about anything
this is just dishonest
AvocadoPanic
51m ago
identify with Hamas and take the side of our enemies
There are lots of groups that have a dim view of Hamas' enemy. In the US I've only seen those on the left taking the side of Hamas. Are there groups on the right also aligning with Hamas? On the right I see more "let your enemies fight".
AvocadoPanic
31m ago
6
quiet_NaN
32m ago
I don't see it.
America’s weak point is clearly potential civic disunity which could result in balkanization along racial, religious, or cultural lines.
You can claim that Social Justice Progressivism aims to kit racial and ethnic cultural fault lines in society, perhaps.
However, the main fault lines I see today in the US are not Black vs White or New Immigrant Culture vs Traditional US Culture, but rural vs urban and SJP vs MAGA. If any religions are involved in fault lines, it is Christianity! (Notably, rich vs poor is not a big rift.)
While I can not disprove that Hari Seldon looked at the civil rights movement in the 1970s and saw that despite the racial barriers slowly falling, the end result would paradoxically be an increase in racial tensions, and set up SJP as a way to avoid a race war, I find this highly unlikely.
I think the roots of SJP in the civil rights movement started with relatable, noble goals and had the bad luck to mostly achieve their goals. So they did what any movement would do and picked further goals. Some, like gay rights, were again noble enough. Some, like insisting on equality of outcomes instead of color-blindness were IMHO harmful, some were mostly silly empty symbolism (like Confederate statues -- if you have the majority to blow them up, whatever, but this is not a decisive battle for the future of the US in any case.).
epohon
43m ago
Stop your doubting. I swear to you on everything I care about that it is an actual honest belief of mine that females loathe and wish emasculation and grievous harm on every men they're not attracted to, which attraction comprises less than one percent.
epohon
50m ago
With apologies to @Capital_Room (not really) I'm reposting his hypothetical:
Let us consider a hypothetical character named John. Here is what John has to say about some of his coworkers:
Alice at work keeps stealing my parking space; obviously, she wants to murder me so she can have it all to herself.
Bob bumped into me in the hall yesterday; obviously, he’s a threat to my life, since he clearly shows a willingness to inflict violence upon me.
I suggested to Carol that we use a red background on the webpage, but she used a blue one instead. I can only conclude that she wants to kill me so that I stop showing up her lousy ideas with my better ones.
Dave made a comment about the smell of fish in the break-room after I reheated my lunch in the microwave. Obviously he hates my culinary choices, because he hates me, and intends to assassinate me.
Emma in management announced the new work schedule, and the set up for Monday afternoons conflicts with one of my hobbies outside work. She obviously created that whole schedule specifically to attack me personally, because she’s plotting to destroy me.
Frank called me a “paranoid nutjob.” He’s clearly out to get me and wants me dead.
Greta says I’m constantly exaggerating how much people don’t like me to play on people’s sympathy. She’s obviously plotting my death.
Henry made a comment about how I frequently accuse everyone of wanting to kill me, which only goes to prove how much he wants to kill me.
(Cartoonish, yes, but it’s a deliberate excess for purpose of illustration.)
What’s the best explanation for why John is Like This?
John is paranoid — maybe a classmate tried to stab him on the playground as a kid, and now he views everything through the lens of that trauma, or something.
John is cynically engaging in hyperbole to win over others into taking his side — he found out that exaggerating how much hostility he encounters engendered greater sympathy, and he just kept ramping it up in intensity.
John frequently contemplates killing anyone he disagrees with or dislikes — he’s engaging in “typical-minding,” believing that everyone else shares his own murderous hate.
Disregarding that this is a metaphor for the Jews or whatever, it's how I model people. What is the best explanation?
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
59m ago
called an x-phobe,
Any community afraid of this has no defenses worth a damn.
All of these are plausible depending on surrounding factors absent from the example. As written and inferring from base rates, and assuming some degree of mental illness on John's part, I'd think 1 is most likely, but 2 is fairly plausible, if we assume the mental illness is something along the lines of "pathological liar" that keeps him exaggerating even as it starts to fail to gain sympathy.
It could also be a more steelmanned version of 1, what if people do keep trying to kill him? Like, not these specific people at his work, he's still exaggerating about them, but what if it's other people? Maybe John lives in a really bad neighborhood and gets mugged once a week, barely escaping by throwing his wallet and running the other way. Maybe he has to fight tooth and nail and ends up in the hospital regularly badly wounded. Maybe it's not about John at all, it's just a really bad neighborhood and everyone who lives there gets mugged regularly, or maybe John looks like an easy target. But the repeated trauma makes him think it's a conspiracy and he's not smart enough to pick out the pattern: person in dark alley = mugger, person in office = friendly, and he just thinks all people have a 50-50 chance to attack him.
If we reduce his pattern-matching abilities even further, maybe he never actually gets mugged, but he keeps doing something stupid like climbing rusty fences and scratching himself, or drunk driving and getting in accidents that almost kill him, and generalizes that to people trying to kill him.
Or maybe he just watches too much TV and movies and people are trying to kill each other all the time (especially trying to kill the protagonist) and he thinks of himself as the protagonist, therefore people must be trying to kill him.
If instead, we increase his pattern-matching abilities, maybe he does regularly get mugged, or his friends and family members do, and he notices that most of the muggers in his bad neighborhood have a certain ethnicity, and so he becomes a racist. Or maybe he goes to the police to fix the issue but they don't take him seriously because he sounds like a paranoid nutjob (when he accuses the actual mugger and Alice from work in the middle of the same rant the police can't tell which one is real and which is exaggerated), then he becomes anti-cop, or anti-government, or anti-whoever is in charge of making the cops be so lax on crime and oh hey have you read this article about how such and such group is secretly controlling the government to be soft on crime or whatever?
Stepping out of the metaphor, which I think is somewhat of a weakman for this phenomenon, I think this simultaneously explains a large chunk of racists (in all directions), anti-religion, anti-capitalists, etc etc etc. Bad thing happens to person or to people that person knows, or hears from (sometimes signal boosted and exaggerated by the media, sometimes by word of mouth). There is a real pattern causing it to happen repeatedly, though sometimes it's a pattern as complicated as "The Entire Economy", it gets oversimplified, exaggerated, and then attributed to a particular group, and the people who believe this explanation become radical anti-that-group. It's a combination of paranoia and actual pattern recognition, because there usually is an actual legitimate instigating factor that is genuine Bayesian evidence against that group, it's just much weaker than would be needed to draw the exaggerated conclusions they come to. There ARE evil racist white men trying to keep minorities poor. There ARE worthless degenerate minorities who live on crime and welfare and contribute nothing to society. There ARE corrupt police officers abusing their authority. There ARE pedophiles in government jobs. There ARE Zionist supremacist Jews who want to control all of America and manipulate it into being pro-Israel. All you need is for someone to encounter some of these in real life, or evidence of them existing, and then the pattern matching can begin until it spirals out of control.
And some of these people will have genuinely convincing evidence on their side, by sheer random chance. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been mugged. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been unfairly harassed by police. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been stared at suspiciously by shopkeepers despite doing nothing wrong. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been laid off by a Jewish boss. They're going to look at the evidence they've seen with their own eyes and be unconvinced that it might be a coincidence. It doesn't seem like a coincidence, it seems super unlikely. If their life were admissible as a scientific paper it would reject the null hypothesis. p < 0.05. They're Jellybean people!
I think that's what a lot of this is. People who perceive patterns where there are none, people who pick out genuine patterns and misattribute them, and people who have coincidences happen to them that are rational evidence when viewed from their individual perspective but don't stand out when you adjust for multiple comparison tests.
More options
Context Copy link