domain:badcyber.com
Maybe better suited to the culture war thread, but I just had a long phone call with my friend from college, let's call her Caroline. Very atheistic, but fairly middle of the road politically. Went to Catholic School growing up, but was raised in a Jewish family (something to do with the school system in Phoenix. Recently has been getting more and more into Christianity both because she's dating a quite Christian man, and because she feels like we need God (and implicitly the Christian God is the only thing that works). I have a lot sympathy for this position, as I am a Catholic convert myself, although I haven't been to mass recently, as I no longer believe in many aspects of the faith. However this line of thinking, which is also espoused by many RETVRN posters on this forum, seems rather... myopic, both historically and just in general. Not only does 2/3 of the world's current population live without the Christian God, historically we have very successful nearly atheistic civil societies (Rome and Confucian China off the top of my head, although perhaps calling Republican Rome atheistic is a stretch). Perhaps you could argue that Christianity is better suited to the Western temperament, as it is the religion of our forefathers. This is what initially drew me into Catholicism, as Buddhism, despite being more intellectually appealing, couldn't connect with me on a cultural/spiritual level. Yet as @Hoffmeister25 has argued before, so is Germanic and Hellenic paganism, and those were violently destroyed nearly 1500 years ago.
So my question for all the RETVRN posters on this form (and also for those who agree more closely with myself) is thus. What is your best argument for why we need God as a society, and why the Christian God in particular? What were/are the flaws in previous/current societies that had at least surface level success (outside of the Modern West) that could be remedied with Christianity? For those of you who aren't Christian, I'd like to hear more about what your own spiritual/moral system looks like, and what your own vision of the future of society going forward is.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
7m ago
People who can't read are more easily taken advantage of. In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the narrator's grandmother saved up enough money over decades to purchase a plot of land to build a home. Once she thinks she's saved up enough, she hands over the money and signs a piece of paper that she thinks is the deed to the land. It wasn't.
It's difficult to overstate just how shitty the general atmosphere can get when you have a huge percent of the population that can be easily exploited like that. Increase the number of easily exploitable people and you increase the number of people exploiting them. Actually, I think anyone who's against low-skilled immigration can grok what I'm saying here. There will always be an underclass, but not every underclass is the same. I would prefer the kind that work hard and live in a high-trust way. Someone who can tally up money when the register is broken. Someone who can read through the terms of a lease. Someone who views smiles positively instead as a warning sign.
Geniuses are doing just fine. In many states, if you have a genius IQ you can actually qualify for an Gifted IEP and get a bus to another school district if they have a gifted program that your local school lacks. There are AP classes in most high schools, there are community college options, anyone can skip ahead an elementary year at any school in the country.
The ones who aren't doing just fine are the 120 IQ people who are too smart to need to learn how to study, not smart enough to seek out additional learning opportunities. They end up being bored in school and never develop the skills needed to get ahead.
wemptronics
11m ago
As with all funny but obvious malapropisms bored children's TV show writers did it before the internet.
sohois
16m ago
The two episodes were fine, nothing special, but their ability to rile up conservatives and the administration itself is by far the funniest thing they've done in a long time.
If I were to just look at episodes in isolation, my main concern would be the fallback on old jokes. They did member berries just under 10 years ago now (coincidentally when they first started doing Garrison as Trump) but have now resorted to "remember Saddam Hussein" and "remember that bank guy"
Hieronymus
18m ago
You also have to separate the Satanic Temple people — who are trolling atheists, from the LeVeyan Satanism people — who are somewhat more trolly atheists who admire Satan as a literary figure (he brought the light of true choice to man!) while not believing in the literal existence of Satan, from the actual, ritual and sacrifices to Satan people. The latter are considered dangerous even among practicing occultists.
Someone once described the first two groups as people “who worship Satan by pretending to worship Satan.” As an assessment it depends on Satan’s existence, but if you accept that it describes the situation well. It’s still worth distinguishing them from those who deliberately and unironically worship Satan, of course.
It's pretty bad. At least in my case it's the combination of relatively few matches (about 1 new match a week), plus the lack of response to relatively thought out initially messages (+sometimes follow-ups). What's worse is one of my roommates has loads of success, but he's pretty scummy when it comes to women on dating apps. Leading 3-4 of them along at once pretending that he's going to commit. It feels really bad: I've decided to delete the apps and have been focusing on running and work while still socializing with friends.
Hieronymus
28m ago
… the true goal- spending money
Is this true in a sense other than those which are true for unions and government agencies in general?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
28m ago
Y-Yes? That's literally what I said about myself in the first post. Is that supposed to be some insightful zinger?
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
32m ago
It is a permaban... for anyone who "takes their ban like a man", to paraphrase slightly. But apparently if someone comes back hat-in-hand begging for forgiveness and promises to be a good boy, it's not necessarily a permaban. So it's part of a dominance game.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
36m ago
Why use MBTI when OCEAN is available and makes better predictions?
Because MBTI (or you could say more generally, "Jungian typology") is a language for talking about internal phenomenological experience; it's not a tool for making behavioral predictions (although behavior is obviously correlated in an important way with internal phenomenology). OCEAN could perfectly predict all human behavior for the rest of time, while also simultaneously telling us nothing about what it actually feels like to be a given individual, from the inside.
See the other reply I just wrote for some examples.
And how is the Fi/Fe dichotomy different from just Agreeableness?
There's certainly a high degree of overlap, yes. The biggest difference is that I've here proposed a(n admittedly highly speculative) mechanism that helps explain why some people are highly agreeable and some are not, along with an attendant phenomenological account of what being an agreeable or disagreeable person feels like from the inside. And furthermore MBTI makes additional predictions about Fe and Fi being correlated with other (rather specific) psychological and personality traits, instead of simply treating it as an isolated and free-floating random variable.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
47m ago
As an INTP, it falls to me to point out that MBTI are basically zodiac signs for nerds.
The model certainly does predict that you would be predisposed to do that, yes!
As an INFJ who naturally wants to see everything, particularly other people, in terms of patterns and underlying meanings (even in cases where these "underlying meanings" may admittedly be delusional), there are few things that tickle my brain more than systems like MBTI which allow me to view people as individuated instances of stable generic archetypes, whose behavior can be explained by (or at least, statistically correlated with) underlying hidden variables. But it is precisely because I am highly conscious of this subjective bias within myself that I am all the more conscious of the need to submit my thinking to critical inquiry.
Naturally, there are 4! ways to arrange the first letters, and for each possibility you can pick the first suffix, so you should have 48 types in total. Luckily, 32 of these are swept under the rug
Well, no, they're not swept under the rug. It's simply an axiom of the system that when one of the perception functions is introverted, the other must be extroverted, and similarly with the judgement functions. "You're seeking on the outside what you lack on the inside", would be the poetic way of phrasing it I suppose.
With a large enough sample size and a precise enough conception of all the "cognitive functions", this could ultimately form the basis of a research program for empirically checking the model's predictions, although, as I have to reiterate, it's ultimately not behavior we're looking to validate, but rather internal phenomenology and underlying thought patterns. And because two distinct underlying thought processes can manifest as the same external behavior, any attempt to empirically validate the model will result in endless fractal complexity (you have to ask people to introspect, and you have to trust them to be honest, and you have to verify that we all agree on the meanings of the key terms and we're not talking past each other, and so forth. This does not in any way imply that the study of internal phenomenology is fruitless or pointless. It simply means that phenomenology is more of a task for philosophy than it is for empirical science).
Each of these letters then gets a paragraph reading like a horoscope
Funny that you bring up Si in particular, because the most dramatically successful empirical prediction of the model to date for me came when I asked someone about Si, which I'll get to in a moment. I agree that the description of Si you quoted is vague and vulnerable to the Barnum effect. You really need to synthesize a lot of examples and a lot of different descriptions of the functions from different angles before a clearer picture starts to emerge. But nonetheless, I would submit that even the vague description of Si you quoted is already more interesting and less horoscope-like than you might expect.
What does it mean to think in a "stable" and "linear" fashion, anyway? Does everyone think the same, or do we think differently from each other? Could some people legitimately be described as thinking in a more stable and linear fashion than others? Consider for example the description that urquan (who I believe to be an INTP) gave of his thought process, and compare it to the description that FistfullOfCrows (who I believe to be an INTJ) gave of his thought process. urquan's is intrinsically highly verbal, while FistfullOfCrow's is only verbal after some conscious effort. I would submit that based on these descriptions, they don't think in the same way, and that furthermore urquan would be described as the more stable and linear one. This immediately raises a number of further questions: how many different "ways" of thinking are there, anyway? Are the two descriptions I cited just mere idiosyncrasies that are unique to the individuals in question, or could they represent isolated instances of more general patterns? Could your "way of thinking" be correlated with other psychological and behavioral traits?
Si-dominants (so, people who use Si as their "dominant function", the ISTJs and the ISFJs) seem to be more likely to report experiencing the external world through a sort of hyper-subjectivized lens, where direct sense perceptions are automatically associated in a literal, ineluctable way with memories and concepts that have personal meaning to the individual (I will simply include as a universal qualifier over all statements here that everything in individual psychology must ultimately be statistical rather than deductive, and not all "Si-dominants" will report the same experiences). An ISTJ on reddit described his experience as follows:
Si is a perception function. Si isn't comfortable when something is brand new. Si needs to gather data first, so Si starts out open minded when making observations and gathering the sensory information. Si is about pattern recognition based on past experiences or knowledge, through instant flashbacks. As a high Si user, I might see or hear something, and suddenly, I have an instant flashback to a memory. It’s not every detail, but it’s enough to catch the gist of the thought or feeling.
A high Si user will have these comparison flashbacks often and automatically. The constant flashbacks can be a bit annoying at times but it's often quite practical. A high Si user may reflect on their past, compare their experiences based on how they felt about them, and try to replicate positive experiences. When the high Si user last had the experience, how does it compare to the current experience, or an imagined new experience?
Si flashbacks are how high Si users are acutely aware of other people and their surroundings - what belongs and what doesn't. The flashbacks are why high Si users get nostalgic, why high Si users have a reputation for being organized and meticulous, and contributes to high Si users having a reputation for good memories.
Si leans on comfort. Si isn't comfortable when something is brand new. The high Si user preference for routine comes from flashbacks being useful for comparing the quality of experiences. A "routine" comes from the best thing experienced to date being repeated over and over. If it already makes a high Si user happy, they feel they don’t need to keep reinventing the wheel.
This is not how I experience the world. There's no Barnum effect going on here. The phenomenological experience described here is completely and utterly alien to me. I don't believe I've ever had any experience that could really be termed as a "flashback", much less an "automatic" one, even much less to the point that they became "annoying". I have personal memories, certainly, but choosing to explore them is always a voluntary process.
The Si-dominants seem to report experiencing the highest rate of involuntary flashbacks, although I have seen them sporadically reported among "secondary" and "tertiary" Si users as well. In general, any type that uses Si as one of their main functions seems to report an increased vividness of detail in personal memories, and simply a greater capacity for retaining personal memories in general (this could include both memories of personal life events, and "personal" memories in the sense of "I have a vivid memory of exactly what was on that Wikipedia page that I looked at last night"). One INFP (tertiary Si user) said that they were one day struck by a flashback of an unpleasant memory that was so vivid it was almost as if they were reliving it. I have simply never experienced anything like this, and I'm not even sure if I'm capable of having such an experience. In terms of raw sensory impressions, personal memories of actual events from my life seem to be about as vivid as imagined simulations of experiences I've never even had before.
Back to that "empirical success" I was talking about: based on a few facts about my mother's behavior and biography, I immediately narrowed her type down to ISFJ. There were simply no other choices. This is a Si-dominant type, so I would expect her to be more prone to experiencing these flashback sensations. She's never talked before about experiencing anything like this phenomenon in her life. But, I decided it would be an interesting test of the model, so I simply went and asked her, "mom, kind of a weird question, but do you ever just look at something, say in the house or when you're out walking or whatever, and you get a strong flashback that's kind of like-" and before I could even elaborate further, she immediately responded with, "oh my God yes, all the time!" And she launched into quite a vivid description of the experience. Frequently these flashbacks are to specific events from different points in her life, although sometimes they have a more abstract and ineffable "ancient" quality, which she always interpreted as visions of a past life (she's devoutly religious). She learned from a young age that not everyone has these types of experiences, so she learned to keep quiet about them and not share them. When I asked her if this is where her preference for routine comes from (she is extremely ritualistic in her behavior), she responded with "yes, that's exactly it! New experiences won't give me the flashbacks. I always like to have them with me, they help me feel safe and grounded". (I do not consider this to be a leading question. I too am rather a creature of habit, but in my case, that's simply due to a generalized anxiety about future possibilities. Describing my preferences as being related to any sort of "flashback" process is, as I have already stated, simply absurd to me.)
So, all in all a very fascinating event. Of course, one data point does not a successful model make. But, if nothing else, I am extremely grateful to MBTI for alerting me to the existence of these "exotic" phenomenological experiences, even if the distribution of these experiences in the general population does not ultimately match the distribution that would be predicted by MBTI.
eee
59m ago
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
I don't think it was intended as a German pun, just to mock his name and imply he's foreign.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1hr ago
Why use MBTI when OCEAN is available and makes better predictions? And how is the Fi/Fe dichotomy different from just Agreeableness?
GoofyGoose
1hr ago
Getting the bottom 10-20% over the bar (even if this takes extra effort) is by far more important.
At the risk of sounding unfair, this seems like a rationalization for equality or “fairness.” I don’t see the huge societal problems. I assume most people who can’t read are not very smart, so reading won’t help much.
OTOH, geniuses can use what they learn more effectively. Competition and markets lead to them generating consumer surplus they cannot fully appropriate. Therefore, we should focus on them first.
Except our education system is so bad, I am sure we could fail at that and ruin the geniuses.
NYTReader
1hr ago
It does make sense that you would stop watching after this episode. After all, the episode was speaking directly to someone like you.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
What is the general state of online dating?
Previously, I left that particular cesspit some 10--15 years ago. Back then, I used various text-based dating websites. The dynamics were what I would describe as toxic. The platforms I used had unlimited messaging for paying users. I think the dominant strategy for guys was to message all the women they considered attractive using canned messages optimized through careful A/B testing. This lead to the women's inboxes to be full of messages which resulted in a very low response rate -- which was frustrating because I would typically put my emotional energy reserves of a few days into writing an initial message. (Today, I would experiment with sending a short comment which requires less energy. "nice shoes/helmet/whatever" or something.)
I think that with the advent of LLMs, text-based dating has probably jumped the sharks completely. If a woman gets texted by a guy who refers to her profile text, quotes her favorite authors and is generally very engaging, then 99 out of 100 times it is just some dude using an LLM who has spent five seconds looking at her profile picture before forwarding her account to his chatbot.
(I still think there is a niche for LLM-based dating where users explicitly engage with the site's LLM instead of each other and clarify their preferences through text. "Yes, I told you that I am into guys who read a lot, but the person you suggested to me just is a big nerd, I am not into that." etc. Not sure if it would offer any advantage over the status quo for women, though. Also, there is probably a cousin to Arrow's theorem stating that there is no dating system where participants are incentivised to state their true preferences.)
So how are the swiping apps these days? (Personally I think it would be more sustainable for me emotionally because swiping right is a much smaller investment. Swiping right on 100 women and not getting any matches would not significantly update my world view, while composing longer texts to three women and not getting any replies would be painful.)
Or whatever is the next hot thing in dating?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1hr ago
No, it is not. It's not a formal rule. And no, we're not going to rewrite and rename things just to satisfy autists.
It's a laptop cpu...? Do people buy expensive laptops in order to run local llms on them? Just curious.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1hr ago
Really? I've defended people I despise against attacks I consider unfair. As for five adults on the planet enjoying her books... what?
anti_dan
1hr ago
Because why? You think its unreasonable to think blacks are bad at choosing candidates?
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2hr ago
Has anyone here used the new AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 all-in-one chipset for running local AI? Like Apple M, it uses a unified memory model, so you can dedicate up to 96GB to GPGPU/NPU tasks.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
3hr ago
That is just an attempt at absurd humor, intentionally juxtapositing things that are usually thought unrelated (concept of safe space with , first world citizen Randy wants safe space against charity shaming which feels bad). South Park does it often, sometimes it lands, sometimes it doesn't
The scriptwriters clearly attempted to interrogate wider concept of safe space. Episode starts with Cartman disliking comments about his weight, eventually Butters has to censor all the social media to make it safe from criticism. In the end, Reality almost gets the point, and the adults proceed to comically misunderstand (something that South Park also does often).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3hr ago
Why do so many people think it's trivially easy for a "new religion" (as opposed to a new church/temple/whatever you want to call it within an existing and well-established denomination) to get tax-exempt status in the US? Because I keep encountering people blithely asserting this, despite it being my understanding that the IRS treats every "new religion" as nothing but an attempted tax-evasion scheme unless and until conclusively proven otherwise.
Doesn't flush
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