domain:philippelemoine.com
TheDemonRazgriz
3m ago
I think there’s a fairly enormous, qualitative difference between Musk’s PoE situation and Ackman’s tennis situation. Very much separate from benefits to the tennis tour, etc.
Ackman bought his entry, but once in the tournament he played fairly and was rightfully crushed by the real pros. It’s a tacky thing to do but in the end doesn’t interfere with the status of the tennis players; to some extent the gulf between “real pro” and “competent amateur who paid his way in” is even reinforced by how much they demolished him. And, similarly, it’s clear that Ackman does know how to play tennis, he’s just not operating at the level of the tournament.
Musk wasn’t just paying for entry, he was trying to pass himself off as a “real pro” without the baseline game skills or knowledge to go along with it. As an analogy, imagine if he entered a tennis tournament using a sci-fi exoskeleton that could move his body/limbs to run fast and swing his arms with proper racket form. He’s holding his own in the tournament by making flawless serves and spectacular returns thanks to the super-tennis-suit, but he’s also making clumsy positioning blunders and misunderstanding how the scoring works, because he doesn’t actually know what he’s doing. And he’s simultaneously talking a big game about how great he is at tennis. It’s not merely tacky, it makes him look like a buffoon while also making a mockery of the sport.
07mk
3m ago
As soon as some company will invent some good version of male full AI celebrity and provide it en masse to teenage girls, it will have capacity to oneshot them all.
Is this actually possible, though? A celebrity, by definition, has to be famous, and if they're famous, then they'll be in demand by lots of other teenage girls (one might say that this characteristic, rather than being the celebrity, is the more directly attractive feature of any such celebrity). Now, an AI celebrity could theoretically have genuine, heartfelt one-on-one conversations with a million different teenage girls at the same time. But would that simulacrum of a relationship with a celebrity be good enough?
I suspect that the lack of it being rivalrous will substantially take away from the power of celebrity. If you're the one woman in 4 billion who gets to date Leonardo DiCaprio, that probably makes you feel much better than if you are one of 2 billion who are dating Leonardo DiCaprio at the same time. Even if Leo's able to give you his full, undivided attention 24/7, just like he can with 2 billion other women.
hydroacetylene
10m ago
Is the United States not a ‘mature society’?
hydroacetylene
12m ago
Because blessings give grace and strength to the faithful.
HughCaulk
12m ago
Best take on this site.
The dating discourse here tends towards “communism for pussy” as I’ve said before. Funny that on a mostly libertarian leaning site, many posters write screeds about the “top 20% of men”, kinda like you’d see on some socialist forum about the “top 1% of earners”. Libertarianism for what I do have, communism for what I don’t!
You want more wealth and income? Better work for it! Want more pussy? Better work for it!
Good news is that they are somewhat correlated, so you can do a two birds one stone situation here.
hydroacetylene
17m ago
Yes it is.
The mainstream Christian view is that trying to predict the end times with more specificity than the Bible tells us is for nut jobs.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
19m ago
those are requirements to date the actually desirable girls.
What do you consider to be an actually desirable girl, exactly? Just curious. Because I feel like my own criteria is not the norm.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
22m ago
Disease eradication is probably the easiest to defend
And maintaining the screw-worm border.
I’d go to bat for various foreign aid and social programs to a lesser degree.
I'd be more satisfied if the people that go to bat for foreign social programs would just acknowledge that it's colonialism, but good when they do it.
I was actually thinking about edgy contrarians like KulakRevolt.
Okay, fair. You seem to consider them more common than I do, and I will not defend the relative proportions.
Whether or not they embrace heel tactics, you can dig down and find an intended policy
Well, yes. Whether or not that policy is insane is another matter.
hydroacetylene
27m ago
So does Christianity.
I suspect what you mean is ‘I think Buddhism is true’.
Laukhi
29m ago
I think I pretty much agree with you.
If that is how the Chinese actors themselves conceptualize this, does it matter if we can object to such thinking as historically reductionist and stereotypical?
I don't object to that way of thinking per se, but I doubt that it does much work, either for them or for us third-person observers. (I might be wrong - it seems to me that the strongest objection is that it's a very live option for Chinese people to take the West, or at least what the West is perceived to do well in, as a model, whereas it might be less so for Americans.) My armchair psychological theory is that talented, smart Chinese people are often those who assimilate into Western society most easily, and they - or we, I guess I should say - graft this way of thinking on top of prior instincts, desires, etc.
Not to say that it's entirely an inert superstructure, but my overall view is that it's significantly more informative to look at structural features of China's economy, such as regulations on investment or whatnot, etc., than at how it gets conceptualized in this sort of discourse. Unless one is interested in China's self-image for its own sake, naturally.
hydroacetylene
29m ago
It’s interesting to note that Kamala just kept offending Catholics(even the ones that don’t go to church very much) and this probably explains much of the red shift, even if Catholicism is generationally getting redder as the generation that remembers JFK dies off.
hydroacetylene
34m ago
I think that the TradCath community will grow but will end up like the Amish or Hasidics.
We are nothing like the Amish or Hasidic. We speak the majority language of our surrounding communities, our homeschooled kids work normal jobs when they grow up and often enough play sports on normal teams, we don’t have a separate court system internally, etc, etc.
Mormonism is much closer sociologically. Not identical but closer.
hydroacetylene
39m ago
I think it is almost inevitable to have mass immigration from Africa when the continent will inevitably be drawn into one or more huge conflicts of countries with hundreds of million of people.
The second Congo war(aka African world war) would have done this if it was going to happen.
hydroacetylene
43m ago
It’s interesting that this represents a shift to the historical norm for western societies- courtship was srs bznss for adult men who could support themselves and their families with no outside help, and a woman of indeterminate age but usually early twenties. And generally, that does seem to be the pattern- teenage dating is an artifact of postwar liberal consensus and declining like every other artifact thereof.
The idea that to court a woman you have to be an adult male with the economic means to marry her is pretty normal, actually. It’s deeply engrained in the psyche of humans domesticated by agrarianism. We should expect it to re-emerge over and over again.
WhiningCoil
43m ago
Is it a free market? Are you factoring in the market distortions of women taking out massive loans for fake degrees that don't pay, and then lobbying to have the taxpayer just forgive them? Or the weaker market distortions of income based repayment? Are you factoring in the cartel like behavior of HR which is predominantly run by overly educated women? Are you factoring in all the assistance programs women get for almost every facet of their life?
There is a lot going on, but at no point would I claim it's the "hand of the free market at work".
stuckinbathroom
43m ago
Ehh, I dunno.
First of all, to be fair, he didn’t say you need 15% BFP; he said you need sub-20% and 15% is ideal. This is eminently achievable for most men, especially if you have access to amphetamines or GLP-1 agonists (or both).
The other requirements (income threshold, solo living situation, social skills) are also fairly easily within reach for basically any 110+ IQ man in his 20s or 30s with 50th %ile+ conscientiousness who lives in a mid-size or larger metro area.
Yes, I am aware that the median man is, almost by definition, practically incapable of meeting this bar, and I agree with OP’s sentiment that the bar has gotten higher and the responsibility for meeting it has devolved further to atomized individual men acting on their own. But the bar is definitely way lower than 6-6-6, and (unlike height or penis length) the traits mentioned in this post can realistically be improved through deliberate effort. So I don’t see this post as discouraging, certainly not to the extent of, say, what goes on in /r/BlackPillScience
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
49m ago
What dating crisis? This is just the almighty hand of the free market at work. Standards are high, as they inevitably will be when all parties are equally free to enter into voluntary associations.
We need to take "collective action as a society" to remove impediments to men's access to women (including, presumably, the "ugly, mean, and poor bottom 50%" of men) -- yeah, ok, have you asked the women how they feel about that? "I have this plan that will make it more likely for you to date someone who's ugly, mean, and poor". Wtf that's a terrible sales pitch.
Guaranteed monogamy for all is nothing more than the socialized ownership of the means of reproduction.
If you're a leftist you can't actually grant that your opponents are on the same level.
Because many of the tactics they use are not things you can universalize, they're good because of who those things are being done to or for.
Granting that it's just a contest of will/a way to feel good is obviously very dangerous for what sees itself as a minority pushing society towards progress. Nihilism favors the majority.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
54m ago
The closest I'm aware of is the nominal academic license of Facebook's llama models that seems to have been largely ignored once they were out in the wild. At the time, Meta was trailing a bit, and it probably helped their mindshare overall, but they didn't bring any court cases that I'm aware of either.
istinetz
57m ago
I feel like this blog post cannot be used to make sweeping conclusions about the failure of western society. While I agree with your general outlook, there is a bit of a misunderstanding here.
When he's listing requirements, those are not requirements to date someone, really; those are requirements to date the actually desirable girls.
Just as >50% of the male population ages 25-45 that don't make the $70k cut, >50% of the female population 25-45 don't make the implicit cut for this blog post.
No_one
1hr ago
Enough exposure to porn removes the drive to seek and most importantly to put up with actual women. That's why Japan is the way it is. (30% virginity rate at 30 etc)
Without porn, men can go to incredible lengths to get a woman. Go watch some silent-gen men talk about how they met their wife. "Oh I had to invite her to a dance six times over two months before she finally said yes." etc
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1hr ago
Because it’s already happening
"[Citation needed]" as they say
blue America has neither the consistent control nor the willingness to put in the work to stop it.
I very much disagree with this — I think it's but a matter of time until they come down hard on this sort of thing.
I am a bit left of centre and can see some truth in this.
I do think a lot of language policing was done by people who didn't really believe it was a huge favour to the downtrodden groups they were defending. They though it was a small, token thing, and many language policers were actually motivated not because they truly believed they were helping a lot, but more by the status points they got as champions of the disadvantaged.
For this reason, yes, I do think they were surprised that people on the right would want a piece of that. In their heart of hearts, they thought the main prize was the high ground, not being a recipient of some meagre linguistic charity.
This para I slightly disagree with
I think to a very large extent left-wing culture in the US was totally unprepared for that kind of jealousy. Because they sort of thought of themselves as underdogs it was really hard to process the idea that right-wing culture contained a ton of people who desperately wanted to be underdogs in the same way, who didn’t view those things as scraps left over by the powerful, but instead thought of it as what power looks like.
Because I don't think language policers did, for the most part, think of themselves as underdogs. On the contrary, they saw themselves as privileged people defending underdogs. And it's something of a tribute to their power that folks on the right wanted some of the same cultural perks bestowed on them.
No_one
1hr ago
I don't think you get it. LLMs actually think, after a fashion, and in a way that's easily more deep than that of all but say, 15% of people. Pornography is ultimately unsatisfying, but with memory, these systems could offer a simulacrum of understanding that anyone who doesn't understand what is really behind it could find satisfying.
I think R1 and the wave it's caused have already had an effect. It's frozen the ceiling on «frontier» pricing around $15/1M for models slightly but clearly better, such as Sonnet or 2.5 Pro (there are higher-tier offerings but they get very little purchase), encouraged the consumption of small distilled models like grok-mini or -Flash which directly compete with Chinese output, and clearly led OpenAI and Meta to try to ship a better open model for prestige (OpenAI may succeed yet). Amodei is coping, his company is among the more vulnerable ones and with the worst velocity; no matter how hard they lean on the DoD pork and national security rhetoric, everyone in the US does that now.
Expenditures have already happened, largely; datacenters are getting completed, giant training runs will be just a way to amortize that by producing models that will warrant higher inference volume and pricing. Base models on the level of Grok 3 are the floor for this generation, soon GPT-5 sets the next frontier floor. There is also an obvious pivot to agents/deep researchers/reasoners with extremely bloated, branching, parallelizable inference, and you need models to be smart enough to make sense of all those vast context dumps. Synthetic data scaling is focused on RL now, that also in effect requires to run a great deal of inference to produce higher-utility models. They won't cut expenditures, in short.
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