domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
Terracotta
just now
Jeff and Mackenzie started out in their early 20s in roughly the same position, collaborating on a business, both presumably thinking they had talent and some good ideas. So they make a great test case for the options facing young women who choose between (A) early marriage/kids and (B) pursuing their career.
Mackenzie chose A, stayed home with the children and after two decades got to be the unilaterally discarded middle-aged wife with no future, no vocation, no social or professional power, no marketable skills to build on, and zero credit or respect for the 25 years of work she put into the supposedly-so-valuable work of motherhood and family-building (just "literally marrying a dude," in your words). She gets to keep some of the accumulated assets of their joint family project-- much less than half-- and the male public is in broad agreement that she should be damn grateful to emerge with even that.
Jeff chose B, cultivated his career, and gets not just riches but power, public respect, a robust personal and professional network, and a vocation/identity that will stick with him well into his '70s, where his value will increase, not decrease, over time.
Explain to me again why you think young women should follow Mackenzie's path, not Jeff's?
To_Mandalay
just now
If that were true, we would expect traditional societies to be more willing to allow women to suffer and die in place of men, because they have less value.
Not necessarily. Women are valuable because they can give you sons.
"Female infanticide" is it's own phenomenon deserving of a name but not "male infanticide." The wiki article only gives the examples of India, China, and Pakistan, but gender-skewed infanticide was also not uncommon in pre-modern Europe. Not a lot of men in history were going "awwww man, another son?" when their wife popped out the latest kid.
2rafa
1m ago
Telling men to pursue fun degrees (creative writing, film, political science, etc.) rather than lucrative ones is like telling them to wear makeup and wait to be asked out by women. It's a fundamental denial of reality. Those who follow such advice will generally have drastically reduced romantic success. Their prospects will be fewer, worse, and less happy to marry them than they would have been otherwise.
My guess is that straight men who do creative writing and screenwriting get laid much more than straight men who do software engineering or physics.
They're around (vastly) more women, will have largely female social circles in many cases, meet more women in the course of their professions and have jobs that women would (in many cases) like to speak to them about. That easily cancels out the engineer's larger paycheck.
If you want to get laid as a man, studying English literature and spending your 20s and early 30s being a bum in a band and working part-time bartending gigs in Brooklyn is far superior as a sexual strategy than literally any white collar profession will be.
Silverdawn
I wake up 🔄 There's another psyop
5m ago
Wow, that is a very high-effort post!
2rafa
9m ago
From 2019:
In the 2017 election, 67% of Jewish voters backed the Tories and 11% supported Labour, according to figures supplied by JPR. A poll this autumn suggested that Jewish support for Labour in next week’s election could fall to 6%.
The first and as yet only Jewish Prime Minister was Disraeli in the 1860s and 1870s.
2rafa
10m ago
A January 2020 survey regarding Orthodox political views from the Nishma Research institute found that 53% of Modern Orthodox Jews identify as Democrat, liberal, progressive or left-leaning compared to 37% who describe themselves as Republican, conservative, right-leaning or libertarian.
They do skew Democratic, although the reason for this given by the head of the polling company is:
As a possible explanation for the overall leftward lean of the Modern Orthodox, Trencher pointed to additional 2015 polling data from the Pew Research Institute that found roughly 40% of the subset’s members to be ba’alei teshuva — those who adopt a fully observant lifestyle after having been raised not religious...When [those ba’alei teshuva] are asked if there’s anything that they do hang on to [once they start leading a more religious lifestyle], they say ‘liberal political views,'” Trencher said.
It's likely that as the born Modern Orthodox population expands significantly those politics will shift over time. There have also been some questions about Nishma's data on some Orthodox forums. There's other stuff like:
NEW YORK — An overwhelming percentage of Orthodox Jews in the United States plan to cast their ballots for President Donald Trump come November, according to a poll published Wednesday...The survey from the community’s Ami Magazine found that a whopping 83 percent of Orthodox Jews said they will vote for Trump, compared to just 13% who said they’d support the Democratic Party’s nominee, Joe Biden. Four percent of respondents are undecided, with just 20 days remaining until the election
Ami leans Chareidi but isn't exclusively so. It's a mixed bag, as the poll shows many people who call themselves Modern Orthodox are liberal Jews who were hooked by Chabad and started being religious later in life. They're not suddenly going to drop all their progressive politics because they become more faithful with age. But certainly it is true that being more religious is by far the single biggest predictor of conservative politics among Jews (as it is among whites and hispanics in many cases for that matter afaik).
TIRM
15m ago
gattsuru
15m ago
Yeah, it'd not be the sort of thing you could just plug in and make magic happen, but I could see a good lesson plan talking about cycles of temperature or relative humidity.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
34m ago
They still vote for the Democrats. And will continue to, because voting Republican (to a large and increasing extent) Just Isn't Done.
You might think that but you would be wrong.
What has happened is very limited construction, large population growth and a massive credit expansion, leading to a price spiral. Cost increases in housing almost all exclusively comes from increases in land prices. Building is relatively cheap.
The vast majority are living in housing that was built before the 35 year price rally, not a single subway station has been added during that entire period.
Some people, like my family, have won big and are now (dollar)multimillionaires, due to no effort of our own. Others, like people from out of town or their children are just fucked.
zeke5123a
36m ago
Talk to them. Understanding their beliefs. They don’t fit with progressives.
zeke5123a
36m ago
Alimony was the social invention. And Mackenzie Bezos got billions for literally marrying a dude.
hydroacetylene
38m ago
The boundary is, in fairness, pretty fuzzy.
Tenaz
40m ago
What, as opposed to "she's a witch, burn her" and the associated other super-compassionate pre-therapy approaches to a society's superfluous old women? Can you cite a single historical or modern context where men as a group eagerly step up to show respect and deference for (non-related) moms in their 40s, 50s, 60s, on account of the erstwhile life-giving properties of their bodies?
Why the non-related requirement? The point of honoring your mother is honoring the sacrifice she and her body made giving you life and then sustaining and raising you.
In many more traditional cultures, men remain more loyal to their parents, especially their mothers, than to their wives. This appreciation-for-life is truly seen as a life-debt which can't really ever be repaid.
Even on this forum, would the folks lavishly praising young motherhood also endorse really serious social consequences for wealthy men who ditch their aging wives to pursue younger, hotter options once the kids have become teens?
Well, I would.
So, my wife isn't exactly a horder. In fact she's pretty aggressively in favor of getting rid of stuff. The problem is she can't throw anything out. Everything must be optimally upcycled: Gifted to friends or family. Or listed on Craigslist free. Or de-composed into rags for cleaning or kindling for making campfires. Or set aside for fabric recycling. Or set aside for dedicated styrofoam recycling runs at the dump. Meat/bone scraps? Turned into soup stock. Egg cartons re-used for next trip to the egg farm. Etc. Etc.
She even refuses to take stuff to Goodwill (across the street!) because she just knows they ruthlessly throw away everything that's not economically viable and that just won't do.
It's really a perfect homesteader attitude. She would be perfect in a Fallout-style apocalypse. When she had time for this it was very cute.
But we have kids now and all of this bullshit is piling up faster than we can get rid of it in our storage room (aka my office) and it's an unsightly mess and she just stresses all of the time about how she has no time for any of this stuff and she beats herself up because if I take the kids out to give her time she's caught up between either exercising or trying to make a dent on this gigantic pile of garbage and it's mounting and there's no actual time in there for her to just chill and enjoy the empty quiet house.
Of course we homeschool so there's really actually no other time to do this because there are kids up her ass otherwise.
How do I convince her to... just throw all of this shit out? It's such an unbelievable waste of time and energy to be thinking about perfectly upcycling all of this shit all of the time, IMO.
Is this a sub-specialty of horderism she would be diagnosed with?
Lost_Geometer
47m ago
Given a choice between the story and the film, though, the story wins.
Tenaz
52m ago
I'm skeptical that it's even possible to measure this. Many things, including housing, have gotten more expensive, but also improved substantially in quality, a factor not really reflected in the inflation-adjusted numbers.
Stockholm has I'm sure grown and become more urbanized as well, meaning that apartments which would previously have been in residential areas are now basically in the city center. So you can probably get by (and access comparable jobs to what was available 30 years ago) living much further from the center of the city than you could before.
Nowadays rural and remote jobs are better too, so in one sense it's easier to live entirely outside the city than ever.
Tenaz
59m ago
It means they're consistently getting financial help from their parents. And somehow they're not fat.
jeroboam
1hr ago
The British Jews have been solidly conservative since like, forever. Continental European Jews also tend to be right wing.
Is that correct? If so, it would be pretty remarkable. As much as I hate it, the educated class tends to be left wing pretty much everywhere, and Jews are highly educated.
Would be interested in a source.
I'm pretty sure American Jews vote left wing because the American right has a history of racial discrimination, which Jews pattern match to Nazism.
This doesn't seem to parse. Surely the German right wing has a much stronger history of racial discrimination?
American Jews vote the way they do because it matches their identity and status signalling, just like everyone else.
NunoSempere
1hr ago
Augur had a seemingly solid system
This is not what I recall. Invalid markets resolved to 50/50, so you had users, chiefly someone who went by the moniker of Poyo, create markets that appeared to be legit but e.g., had the wrong date, so that people would bet & he'd win money when they resolved 50/50
Terracotta
1hr ago
What other blogs offer ACX-style lit reviews, "Much More Than You Wanted to Know" effortposts, or adversarial collaborations on controversial questions? Any favorites?
jeroboam
1hr ago
Tweet likes are probably a bad metric. Twitter doesn't have a downvote button. Outrageous posts that are net unfavorable can get massive amounts of likes.
But agree that support for ADL among non-Jews, non donor class rounds to zero.
Inferior in the great chain of being, in absolute worth, closer, in the mind of a pre-modern, to the Imago Dei
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