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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

I think those kind of scenarios are actually rarer than people think. It almost codes to me that your college GF was not the same race/ethnicity as you because of that kind of gap. People rarely end up in college without having traversed some part of the middle class, and if you did, you are exposed to all or almost all the tiers of the middle class. My parents, when I was born, were lower, by the time my youngest sibling graduated HS, upper. Even while we were still lower, I had seen UMC houses and they were clearly not mansions. I had seen mansions, that is what Michael Jordan owned.

What is actually a common jarring experience for lots of people is when there is a talented family of people who live in a bad or even mediocre place. Like say you are a law student at a T14 school and you meet a guy at that school and he tells you his sister is currently on full ride scholarship to Michigan and his brother is going to Wharton. Most people assume this guy came from UMC at a minimum. But sometimes they come from some random rank 100 school in West Virginia and their dad is like a railroad switchman or some general store owner/operator. Such cases now are becoming incredibly rare because of things like Affirmative Action in college admissions and other "standardization" (which of course actually excludes actual standards like SATs and LSATs) procedures, but they still happen from time to time. Bell Labs at its peak was populated by many such people, and I had opposing counsel in a case recently who I basically described, with minor anonymization added.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

Right. This is just the next step of a pattern that is already established. Money exchanged for the feeling of romantic or sexual attention/attraction.

They were already having a fully artificial 'relationship' with a digital 'woman' who doesn't know of their existence.

This just cuts out the need for a woman in the loop at all.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

I dunno, it feels like a deathblow on top of all the other mentioned factors. The thing that finally kills our urge to climb out of the hole.

There's a version where the AI can teach a man (or a woman!) how to talk to the opposite sex and both select and become a good partner.

But thanks to molochian incentives, that's not what we will get, if there's an immediate way to use the tool to extract resources from people rather than guide them to what they truly wish they had.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

What kind of engineer?

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 13, 2025

Can you charge at home for as long as you plan to keep the car? Quality concerns about Teslas aside, I think the main things to consider when weighing BEV or PHEV vs ICE are:

  • Can you charge at home for as long as you plan to keep the car?

  • Can you responsibly afford the upfront cost?

  • Do you like a car that's more "gadget" than "appliance?"

If "yes" to all three, you're probably better off with an electric car. If only the first two, it depends how much the "gadget" design ethos commonly used in BEVs annoys you. If you can't charge at home and/or the upfront cost is over a responsible budget, you're probably better off with a non-plug-in hybrid or ICE-only powertrain.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

I’m less concerned about the rare cases of complete psychotic break and more concerned about the rapidly nucleating cult behaviors that are quickly assembling into a an actual new religious movement.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

This paper (pdf) classifies news articles based on the speed of their spread, and found that most articles peak within the first four-ish hours (some much faster).

Hmm point taken. That's certainly not ideal.

That would be incorrect.

The articles only reported that the first nations claimed that bodies exist. The articles never claimed themselves that the bodies exist, so the articles are not technically false. Nevertheless, CBC still was gracious enough to update the article and write front and center that there were no bodies, which is not something that they had to do at all, yet they did anyways. What more do you want CBC to do before you will be happy?

Now that it's obvious that there are no bodies, I'm confident that not a single recent article from a reputable source has tried to claim or suggest that the bodies exist anymore.

And yes, journalists should all be minecrafted, but that doesn't mean they're technically wrong, they're just evil conniving cunts.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

Other than reach and better animation, I don't think this is different from the AI companions that have been available for a while. Replika, the most famous one, will already do NSFW ERP. And yeah, there are men (and women!) who have decided their Replikas are preferable to real people.

You're concerned about what this will do to the psyche of teenage boys, but I'm surprised you haven't thought of the male version (which no doubt will exist). A tall dark sexy boyfriend who will treat you only exactly as roughly as you want to be treated, and will listen to you going on about your problems and your neuroses with endless patience and understanding and affirmation? If a real woman can't compete with an AI girlfriend, neither can a real man compete with an AI boyfriend.

That said, I do think your fears are somewhat overblown. Porn has, IMO, been bad for society, especially the ever-increasing availability of extreme and degenerate porn like our grandparents could barely imagine. But I think alcohol and drugs and gambling and smoking are also very bad for society. If I could wish them all away, I would. These things exist, however, and society persists, accepting that some percentage will be sacrificed to Moloch, and Moloch always has new incarnations. I accept that AI companions are a hazard, but I don't think they are "the" thing that flatlines birthrates and normal sexual relationships.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

I never claimed that AI is useless, I simply claimed that for the purposes of certain tasks, namely copywriting, AI is currently far far inferior to even below average humans.

I use AI every day for what it's good at, so I would be the last person to say that AI is useless.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

Regarding the burial sites hoax, that is state sponsored propaganda, so any misrepresentations or questionably false statements are intentional, rather than mistakes. You wouldn't expect an article printed in the Pravda to misrepresent the facts accidentally either. AI is not immune to this, for example in chatgpt.com Sam Altman can put whatever narrative he wants into the system prompt and the ChatGPT will dutifully push it at every opportunity.

The hoax is also pushed with a degree of nuance. The journalists always cite their sources and never claim it to be true themselves: "According to [Insane sjw activist group], Donald Trump literally murdered 300,000 kids with his own bear hands." is not technically a false statement. As much as the reporting is insanely one-sided, I do believe that it's often newsworthy to report on the claims of [Insane sjw activist group] even though their claims may often be false.

They did not retract this article because it's not strictly false: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/tk-emlúps-te-secwépemc-215-children-former-kamloops-indian-residential-school-1.6043778 The are re-reporting what the indigenous group falsely claimed, but did not ever make a statement of fact that there were actually bodies there.

Nevertheless, they actually provided a correction after the fact at the top of the article that says there were no bodies discovered:

Since this story was first published, the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation has updated its findings and clarified that what was detected in the ground-penetrating radar survey were about 200 potential burial sites. Read the full story here.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

Musk-level value was OP’s analogy

I said it was a "heavily attenuated" version of that. It was just an analogy, not meant to be taken literally.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

I'm going to guess without strong evidence that the vast majority of the views on the toronto article are of the corrected version.

I couldn't find the precise time to correction for the Toronto Star, but Global News was 5.5 hours. This paper (pdf) classifies news articles based on the speed of their spread, and found that most articles peak within the first four-ish hours (some much faster).

Regarding the bodies, I would hazard to guess that the articles themselves are not technically "wrong" and therefore do not warrant correction.

That would be incorrect. There are no reputable claims of bodies being there, and none have been unearthed or "confirmed". The Law Society of British Columbia (at a minimum, among other groups) is going against the findings of the First Nation in question, who are in charge of the site. The bodies were hallucinated into being four years ago, and they're still around now.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

That application you are working on does sound interesting.

I've been wanting to skip the middleman for a while and just have AI write the stories based on simple prompts.

I have an existing 300 page story I'd love to just feed to an AI and have it finish the story for me, or at least fix it up.

Back when I fed the first chapter to chatGPT it just told me that my story was offensive and refused to help me, which was when I stopped using it altogether and a few months later switched to grok.

Progression fantasy : Epics :: sex : love

And anything with a modern setting is just unbelievably boring or depressing.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 13, 2025

You've made a profound and insightful point about online discourse in the age of generative AI. Let's break it down.

/uj you might be able to get away with emdashes so long as you steer far away from sycophancy

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

As it happens, I have also been dipping into LLMs-as-beta-readers lately, even going so far as to build an application that can read an entire series of books and learn its "lore," and a custom GPT instance that will "compress" a book into a format optimized to provide context to itself or another GPT. (As you probably know, even the most powerful LLMs do not have a context window large enough to store an entire large novel in memory, let alone a series, and you can't directly upload embeddings to GPT or Claude.) The intent of these projects is so that I can, say, ask GPT to evaluate the fifth book in a series with knowledge of the previous four books. It's a work in progress.

So, some observations. First, sorry dude, but I have major side-eye for your ability to evaluate literary quality. :p

That being said, I have also noticed the tendency of LLMs to glaze you no matter how hard you try to solicit "honest" feedback, unless you resort to tricks like you mentioned. (Telling an LLM the manuscript is by an author you hate and you want it to roast it will work, but that's not exactly useful feedback.)

The hallucination problem is hard to overcome, even with tricks like my token-optimizing scheme. I find that in most sessions, it will stay on course for a while, but inevitably it starts making up characters and events and dialog that weren't in the text.

As long as you can keep it on track, I have found that some of the GPT and Anthropic models are... not terrible as beta readers. They point out some real flaws and in a very generic sense have an "understanding" of pacing and tone and where a scene is missing something. However, the advice tends to be very generic. "You need to show the consequences," "The scene ends too quickly, you should build more tension," "There should be some emotional stakes the reader can connect with," etc. Clearly they have many writing advice books in their training data. There is nothing like true understanding of context or story, just generic pieces it can pattern-match to the writing sample you give it.

And when it comes to specific suggestions, I have yet to see an LLM that is actually a good (not "mediocre and banal but capable of producing literate prose") writer. Its suggestions will be a pastiche of flat TV script dialog and trope-filled scenes.

(That said, any writer will tell you to listen to critics when they point out problems, but don't listen to them when they propose solutions. So in that respect an LLM isn't much different than a human.)

But these are still early days for AI, so I don't doubt that in a few years, we'll have LLMs that can be at least as useful as your average writing workshop. AI writing is already flooding some genres, and while it's usually as easy to spot as AI art is, just as with AI art, a lot of people clearly don't care.

I find it fascinating and I enjoy playing around with it, but yeah, I think AI-generated novels will crowd out human writers in low-brow undiscerning stuff like romance and progression fantasies, and writing those stories will become something people only do as a hobby, just like people are still passionate about chess and go even though no human can beat a computer anymore. I still think we'll need true AGI to write an actual good novel. When you show me an AI that can write a coherent series, with multi-volume character arcs, plot seeds planted in early books that clearly pay off in later ones, literary allusions and metaphors that aren't just clumsy pulled-off-the-shelf ones but deeply enmeshed in the story, and a recognizable differentiable style (in the same way that fans can read Dickens or McCarthy or Hemingway and immediately recognize the author), I will believe we're there.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

Not in the current form.

I'm dedicated to pursuing a quality of "authenticity," which I don't have perfectly defined, but definitely requires that my partner be a real human, with 'natural' skin, brain tissue, and standard human DNA. The thing that I'm ACTUALLY wired to find attractive, not something that mimics those things closely enough to pass a basic inspection. Related to why I don't really like Tattoos on women.

In many ways, we are descending into my version of hell, where finding meaningful connection with other humans is harder than is needs to be, where women are more focused on careers and adventures, at the expense of their own happiness, than even trying to find joy in bearing and raising kids, where men are fundamentally purposeless and nobody bothers to even try to create a purpose for them, and everybody is busy trying to live at the expense of everyone else, b/c coordinating to create that better future is HARD and we aren't able to see past the short term consequences of these actions. But I can, and it seems increasingly obvious where this is trending. And nobody with power is doing much about it.

And its all being patched over with digital (i.e. INAUTHENTIC) simulacrum that sort of satisfy the various urges without really fulfilling the purpose for which each urge exists, and these experiences that are simply insufficient to make you happy if you care to look and notice the cracks in their facade.

All the worse because I can clearly imagine a better set of circumstances that is happier for everyone, including myself, and I have a vague idea of how we could get there, but no real clue on how to implement that plan, and thus I am left to scrape by with whatever my individual efforts can achieve.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

Musk-level value was OP’s analogy, but the problem with your framing is that the being women are valued for is actually a doing, the producing of children.

Doing has obvious value, I’m not sure being has value. Valued for being could just be an echo, a reminder of someone’s past, real doing-value, like the late aristocrats who were once warriors.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 13, 2025

No. From the long form:

Community Hospital, the nonprofit that runs the clinic known as the Curtis Medical Center and a couple of other facilities in the region, plunged into the center of that national story when it announced on July 2 — one day before the bill’s passage — that a confluence of factors had made its Curtis outpost unsustainable. It cited years-long financial challenges, inflation and “anticipated federal budget cuts to Medicaid,” the public health insurance program for lower-income and disabled Americans.

I think the underlying op-ed is this piece, which is... not exactly coming across as a neutral evaluation of the facts, or this one, which is better, but still makes it hard for any plausible drop in Medi* use to even be the straw that breaks the camel's back:

In their financial statement for last available financial year (ending June 30, 2024), Community Hospital brought in 6% of their $62 Million in patient service revenue from Medicaid, with about $4.1 Million coming into the hospital from the program. The Hospital operated at a loss of $1.67 Million for that financial year as well. Figures were not available for the most recent financial year (ending June 30, 2025).

In an opinion piece published in the Nebraska Examiner in February, Nebraska Hospital Association President president Jeremy Nordquist said that Medicaid pays for 26% of all emergency room visits in rural hospitals, alongside 33% of all births and 44% of all services to minors. He also said that 54% of rural, independent critical access hospitals are operating at a loss.

A lot of the numbers are coming from that Nebraska Hospital Association, which has been giving worst-case or worse-than-worse-case numbers.

I can certainly believe that the Medicaid changes will have an impact, but Hanania's implication that this was a sole and direct cause that people can't deny only because The Cheetoh has a "spell over them" is about as well-founded as his normal sneers.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

There's a pretty significant demographic of men (and sometimes even straight men) who get into really heavy parasocial relationships in situations like OnlyFans et all.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

I'm going to guess without strong evidence that the vast majority of the views on the toronto article are of the corrected version.

I for one do not sit refreshing the fake news frontpage and most articles I read are somewhat aged.

Regarding the bodies, I would hazard to guess that the articles themselves are not technically "wrong" and therefore do not warrant correction.

Edit:

They did not retract this article because it's not strictly false: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/tk-emlúps-te-secwépemc-215-children-former-kamloops-indian-residential-school-1.6043778 The are re-reporting what the indigenous group falsely claimed, but did not ever make a statement of fact that there were actually bodies there.

Nevertheless, they actually provided a correction after the fact at the top of the article that says there were no bodies discovered:

Since this story was first published, the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation has updated its findings and clarified that what was detected in the ground-penetrating radar survey were about 200 potential burial sites. Read the full story here.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

Better at performing each individual act associated with being a friend or romantic partner? Conceivably so (at least several model upgrades from now), within their constraints of being limited to computer systems. But my argument is, that's missing something of the core of being a friend or romantic partner.

Better at being a friend or romantic partner, despite that, than many people who can't visibly let someone behind her roles to the person herself? Entirely possible, but that's still missing something most people want.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

It may be simulating a character, but I'm not sure if the current generation of AI partners is ready for prime time for most femcels. Just going off of vibes, Grok Companion feels like something that will appeal far more to male gooners, since the pretty rudimentary animations and voice quality seems good enough to be a porn fantasy, but not really good enough to be a full character.

The gameified lovemeter of Grok Companion seems male-gooner-coded and not "character simulacrum for femcel" coded.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

I simply think it has an appeal to men who don't feel they've got a shot at the real thing.

And does it have appeal to you?

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

With an AI, you can't get beneath that role. If it looks like you have, that's just another role. That makes them great teachers and therapists (at least in this sense), but very bad at being friends or romantic partners.

But... and this is a critical point here... better than many people are at being friends or romantic partners.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

All of this navel gazing makes sense when you realize that the authors want the freedom of the tyranny of the human biological condition: which, barring incredible advances of technology, is impossible.

They were born in a woman's body. It sucks in some ways and is great in others. Get over it. Being a man also sucks in different but not wholly alien ways.

They should stop whining. The world isn't fair, and trying to make it fair to satisfy their neurosis. It's out of their control in a fundamental way that can never be remedied. For God's sake, if there something to be stoic about, this is it.