domain:betonit.substack.com
Gaashk
39m ago
Yeah.
Also, in my circles "self care" has mostly been co-opted by non-self actors to try to get people to do what they want them to. People do not take a personal day off of work for "self care," but rather to do a thing that they like. The people talking about self care in those words are the ones running restorative justice circles, pastors talking about "prayer and fasting as self care," an employer pushing "we all need to practice self care! Call this number for a free telephone therapy session" (presumably as an alternative to taking a half day off to see a real therapist, or asking for better working conditions). Now when I hear it I think the speaker is trying to get me to replace my actual preferences with something they consider better or more virtuous.
hydroacetylene
42m ago
Historically? They worked, and the people who studied torah all day were a minority like Catholic priests or nuns. But once you could get paid to do torah studies, an obvious incentive structure developed.
Felagund
48m ago
This isn't evidence, exactly, but it seems pretty plausible that western institutions and culture (e.g. having more individualistic and high-trust societies) made it easier for those of european descent to flourish, making their success greater than the effects of the IQ gap alone?
incidence of mental illness has skyrocketed in step with the wide spread adoption of therapy culture
That is hopelessly confounded. For most of history, the only treatment for mental illnesses was beatings, blood letting, the asylum, or maybe some mercury if it was syphilitic.
They barely had the conceptual framework to understand mental illness in the first place.
Besides, we know that the stressors of modernity are bad for mental health in of themselves, just look at social media and dating apps for recent examples. Atomization of families, loss of the (false) comfort from religion and so on.
Not everything is a mass psychogenic illness. I would bet a great deal of money that things like depression, BPD, bipolar disorder and the like aren't. And therapy helps, at least when we now recognize and formally diagnose those who could need it.
My own ADHD would certainly have gone undiagnosed, as would so many other conditions (not that therapy does anything there, the drugs help).
therapy itself is mostly trash (which is why we can't make any meaningful improvements to the practice after over a hundred years), it only works in as much as it is the socially acceptably path to resolve such issues. I imagine if we could check, running amok would have been found to be an effective above placebo 'therapy' as well
I feel like my citations speak for themselves here. Is it a good thing that we have the option of paying money to talk to someone in private instead of running about with a machete? I'd be curious to hear how that's not the case.
I'm not defending therapy culture. It's infantilizing to say the least. But actual therapy works well enough that we often consider it the firstline treatment before resorting to the funny drugs. And that's a considered decision made by multiple independent bodies, on the basis of a great deal of evidence.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
Let me make my argument absolutely clear then.
The failure of the government to ban some subset of unhealthy foods does not prevent the government from banning other unhealthy foods. The fact that the government has failed to ban trans fats, refined sugar, etc, etc, etc is not an argument that the government should not ban lab grown meat. Making that argument is taking a government that sucks, and claiming it needs to suck more. It's claiming that because the government has done the wrong thing before, it's not allowed to do the right thing now. That's a silly argument.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1hr ago
Human tongues are pretty sensitive, they can pick up very tiny differences in texture and taste.
Well aktshually, the sense of taste is rather gross, with the tongue only really being able to detect basic aspects of salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami, and the vast majority of what people would consider flavor, including all the subtleties, are from olfactory sensing. That's why if you hold your nose it's difficult to tell the difference between an apple and an onion.
It doesn't affect your point at all. I just thought it was interesting.
Spookykou
1hr ago
One wrinkle for me when trying to think about the efficacy of therapy is that the incidence of mental illness has skyrocketed in step with the wide spread adoption of therapy culture. This is supposed to be caused by increased awareness, but then you have things like Scott's Anorexia in South Korea story, that push me towards a different theory. Therapy culture is horrible, and therapy itself is mostly trash (which is why we can't make any meaningful improvements to the practice after over a hundred years), it only works in as much as it is the socially acceptably path to resolve such issues. I imagine if we could check, running amok would have been found to be an effective above placebo 'therapy' as well. Outside of a handful of mental illnesses with consistent cross cultural manifestations, everything else is either conversion disorder with people trying to fit their negative emotional states into a culturally understood framework, or increasingly, excuses for shitty behavior and to avoid accountability. The framework spawned by therapy culture in the west is particularly bad, mental health awareness is bad, stoicism is probably correct.
Baby steps. Get people over the hangup of "it's not ok to just ban things, only leftists are allowed to do that!", then work on "woah you can't just throw communists into an alligator swamp, thats only ok when communists do it!"
If they can ban dishwashers that actually wash dishes and then raid people who import ones that work, we can do the same to them. And anyone who complains needs to be reeducated.
Bad Therapy is largely about that kind of thing. The premise is that there are always risks to any intervention, and when the target audience isn't suffering from debilitating mental illness, the risks outweigh the benefits.
My father experienced something similar with his sister, due to a "repressed memories" therapist.
The identity preference ratchet is something else, though, from what I've heard. Something more like Marxist class warfare, but for identity groups. Cain and Able, Kulaks, misdirected Leviathan, that kind of thing.
There might sometimes be a steel man for people to use HR scary words about discrimination and toxic environments when they really just have kind of a shitty manager who's bad at managing or something. As far as I can tell, unless it's absurdly obvious and well documented, if an employee complains that their manager is bad at their managing job, they will be met with disinterest, possibly irritation towards them, rather than the manager. Perhaps they will get in trouble for wanting clear directives or trying to enforce their own boundaries in the face of the shitty manager at some point. They will probably not get a better manager. If they go on about HR scare words, on the other hand, the company will go out of its way to protect them from reprisal, and they might actually get put under someone else. That's a win for the employee! So that's what they're incentivized to do.
TwiceHuman
2hr ago
I don't see any puzzles here, I don't consider Nietzsche all that difficult to understand, and I don't like secondary sources at all (I do read translations, though).
Human beings cannot be rational, as they can only follow their own nature. Even if their nature leads them to attempt rational thinking, it's still their nature which is in charge. This is why Nietzsche psychoanalyzes people. He was also intelligent enough to do this to himself, no doubt. Of course his work was motivated by his suffering, if you think Nietzsche lacked self-awareness you underestimate him.
Nietzsche liked exceptional people. But everything exceptional is rare, and the rare couldn't exist without the common, so he doesn't even want to do away with the rabble. And of course his writing isn't for everone, just like this website isn't for everyone. It's not just best for you that certain people never find this website, it's also the best for them that they stay away. It's not a moral statement or a kind of discrimination, it's a matter of compatibility.
The higher man will care about aesthetics and not just about objective things. This is because he is in touch with his instincts, because he has his own values, and because the top of the hierarchy of needs is more spiritual than physical. The subjective is a luxury, as is having suboptimal preferences. But most importantly, higher type of people say "yes" to themselves and to life (they're life affirming and of good conscience).
Nietzsche liked humanity, and he seemed to have a problem with modernity and some fundemental misunderstandings that society has with human nature (mostly because slave morality forced us to lie about human nature, until the lie became how we decided things ought to be). An easy example is every belief which ruins the conscience of men. Society is filled with people who are terrified of the possibility that they aren't "good", and who tries to look for evidence that they're "good", and who try to prove to themselves and others that they're "good". They also look for ways to "become a good person", but this is nonsense, for being a good person leads to good actions, not the other way around. You can only become who you are. So society turns pathelogical over simple errors.
Look at the death of nationalism, for it can be understood as self-destructive behaviour, the preference of something other than oneself. "Humanity are a plague", "Having children is bad", "Cats are better than people", "Power/ambition/competition/discrimination is evil". It's all a hatred of elements which are essential to either life itself or to humanity. So such philosophy is ultimately the preaching of death. Nietzsche regarded this as worse than evil, and that's because evil people still prefer themselves. Evil people still enjoy life. This can be summed up with "Narrow souls hate I like the devil, Souls wherein grows nor good nor evil."
Life is hard to justify with all of its suffering and striving
Read the end of Zarathustra. It's a little hard to understand, but when you feel joy, you say yes to what is, and in that moment, everything is redeemed, including all the suffering you went through just to experience that moment. But Nietzsche considers happiness and suffering to be of secondary importance, and considers their focus to be a symptom of degeneration (just like hedonism, which is the optimization of pleasure, is a superficial and unhealthy way to live)
I don't like being rude or excessively critical, and I'm open to counter-arguments, I just... Feel like it all makes sense.
laxam
2hr ago
'Moving on' is how you deal with trauma and distracting yourself helps with that.
My wife just had an uncle she was close with die suddenly and this is really the first big family death she's experienced. I and her took some time off, she's playing lots of a game she likes, I'm taking her out to eat. She's still dealing with moments of intense sadness but, in general, is dealing with it really well, essentially entirely because I'm not letting her dwell on it.
I've had an inordinate number of deaths in my family, starting from pretty young, and the hard truth is that you never really 'get over it' but you absolutely move on. I still have moments of sadness to do with my mother's death decades ago but they're few and far between and it otherwise doesn't effect my life. Picking up and keeping going is how to deal with hard spots in your life. Real mental illness is different but, to be honest, most people going to therapists don't have real mental illnesses.
Tanista
2hr ago
an embarrassment that is disliked by its own peers, but still to be defended from outsiders
DeBoer has outright stated that, in his ideal world, "the wokest person you know" get 90% of what they want. Combine that with his strident attitude towards gender topics (where his anti-idpol takes give way to annoyance that anyone has an idpol skeptical take)...
So yes.
MartianNight
2hr ago
I'm just trying to pin down the argument here. If the argument is “the government should ban unhealthy foods in the interest of public health” that's a position that's easy to understand, whether you agree with it or not, but adopting it would imply banning a bunch of traditional foods too.
If the argument is “the government should ban unhealthy foods, but only if they are new” then the logic is less clear: why does it matter if an unhealthy food is new or not? You should be able to defend the “only if they are new” qualifier, unless your real motivation is something different (e.g. irrational hatred of lab-grown meats or the people who advocate for them).
(Note that all of this assumes that lab grown meat is unhealthy as a given, which I certainly don't believe in the strict sense, though I will concede there is some unknown risk associated with it.)
zeke5123a
3hr ago
Is it? People say that but is it true? If growth is just the result of more people then we aren’t increasing wealth. Growth per capita is what our model is based on, no?
If we bring in ZMP or NMP, then that’s a problem.
MartianNight
3hr ago
So are you arguing that without the extrajudicial home raids, the ban is useless? Because I'm fairly certain home raids aren't part of the current proposal.
MartianNight
3hr ago
Sure, let's say, when left to their own devices, people will choose to eat garbage. Is it the government's job to prevent this? If yes, then why single out lab-grown meat, when hot dogs, jellybeans and soda are just as bad? If not, then what is the basis for banning just 1 of 1000 unhealthy foods that people already consume?
sliders1234
3hr ago
Indians are fairly racists or in their case castiste.
The data shows Indian being a relatively low IQ country. But at the same time they have no problem finding extremely brilliant people to be US executives. It’s just the caste system and having inbred Ashkenazi Jew type groups.
As an investor I always heard the term India is the next big thing. 1.4 billion people where in America the ones who made it here are extremely successful. Until you start jumping into the hbd game it seemed logical India would be a very rich country because the population is huge and the Indians who come here are brilliant.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 For more information please reread this post
3hr ago
"Self Care". This is a synonym for self-indulgence, but with a good connotation instead of a bad one. Spending 8 hours watching netflix for example, in my grandfather's English, would be understood to be a moderately shameful act of vice. Now it can be referred to as "Self Care", in which case it is understood as a noble recognition of ones own weakness.
On the other hand, never taking any time for oneself can be somewhat corrosive to one's sanity....
I think this might be an instance of All Debates Are Bravery Debates.
aardvark2
3hr ago
not answering your question, but... combined powerbank + keyboard + wrist exerciser + crank energy generator
2rafa
3hr ago
The more you think about something bad that happened to you, the more upset, traumatized and poorly functioning you will be. It is that simple.
Therapy and therapy culture doesn’t work because it dredges up trauma and negative experiences. Repression does work, this is what stuff like ‘playing Tetris after a traumatic event reduces trauma’ does, it represses. Distract yourself, forget about it, and you can have a lifetime of happiness with a few bad occasional recollections.
It is so banal that it is barely worth saying: the less you think about something, the less you stew in it, the less it will affect you.
sliders1234
3hr ago
Disclaimer: That avoids doing anything for ADOS.
But that gets the right ratios and avoids negative selection bias. Even if I believed HBD was smaller but we still had affirmative action then Google recruiting at HBCUs is bound to fail. A 1400 SAT black high school student is going to select into Harvard and not go to the HBCU. I could almost say this is true even if HBD did not exists. New England private liberal arts schools have collapsed and can not compete with the big boys. If HBD was not true then the best HBCU would be like Amherst. And what does everyone at Amherst have a rejection letter from Harvard. Once you add in affirmative action and hbd the gap gets much larger.
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
And, interestingly, Brazilian Portuguese is much closer to the new world Spanish dialect continuum than European Portuguese and European Spanish, whereas new world French is kind of its own thing with little to do with either of them.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
4hr ago
But gosh golly gee whiz, I thought he was impartially banned not for the content of his existing posts but for failing to post upon a wide enough variety of subjects
That is correct. He was told to occasionally do something other than Joo-post. You thinking it's some gotcha that @self_made_human likes colorful mod notes is in character, since last time this came up, you made quite a deal out of it.
Because I figure we're about halfway to the point where "just post a youtube video about goat noises or something" suddenly becomes "ackshually we have to feel like they're good posts with sufficient effort" or whatever.
Yes, if we tell you to stop single-issue posting and you take @somedude's advice to spam threads with ChatGPT posts and YouTube videos about goat noises, you will get banned. When we ask people to do something or not do something, the intent is to improve discourse. The rules are not a legal contract where you can "get away" with shitting on their intent as long as you argue that you teeeeechnically (insert nasal whine here) followed the letter of them.
Also, keep golly-gee-whizzing me because you cannot contain your animosity if you would like to further test our catch-all "Being egregiously obnoxious" rule. You have a track record already of basically telling people that you think the rules are meant to be shat upon because you don't like the moderation here. You created this account just because you had a hate-boner for Hlynka. You're clearly a long-time member/alt with a grudge, and you only have been given this much latitude because we are so tolerant, even of haters who want nothing more than to shit on us. But that tolerance is not unlimited.
This feigned incredulity from Scott comes off as quite dishonest:
Hi, I'm Scott Alexander, I bounce around different Rationalist Group houses, where me and everyone else in my circle forms poly-amorous relationships with with our intellectual collaborators, and spend all their time building up inside jokes, private parties, etc. You see that piece in the New Yorker about the girl who was scared about AI? I was dating her, haha. Stole her from this other guy I used to do collaborate with.
Also Scott Alexander: I guesssss I could see some weirdos who'd want their work to give them to have some banter and flirtation. I don't know if there's a lot of people, but Hannania is entitled to his opinion here, as far out as that seems to you and me.
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