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AvocadoPanic
22m ago
Fixed
CanofWorms
24m ago
It's been a few weeks since I've responded to this thread as I have been abroad. But in the two weeks that I was out of the country I finished two books and am halfway through the third!
I picked up Notes From Underground based on the discussion from this thread: https://www.themotte.org/post/970/smallscale-question-sunday-for-april-21/205968?context=8#context.
I really enjoyed this book. It's been a while since I've read any Dostoevsky, and I recall him being long-winded and dry. Underground, being a bit shorter than some of his other work, was much more approachable.
While reading it, I was reminded of Elliot Rodger's manifesto. If you don't know, Rodger, a school shooter and notorious "incel", wrote a "manifesto" which was widely publicized and diseccted. You can find it on the internet if you feel like searching for it, but I won't link it here. The alienation in both works is profound, the scene where Underground's protagonist meets with four "friends" for dinner and insists on displaying his own greatness is a masterclass in uncomfortable writing. It reminded me of Rodger's own massive sense of superiority and narcissism, mixed with his incredible feelings of inferiority and self-loathing. Yet instead of shooting up a school, the protagonist of Underground visits a prostitute, where he is able to feel comfortable for just a moment before reverting to his sniveling self.
What I find so interesting about both of these works is that we all have a little bit of Rodger and the protagonist in us. We all have feelings of superiority and self-doubt. That is what makes Underground so compelling. Of course, what Rodger did was despicable and the way he is praised in certain corners of the internet is sickening, but I can also empathize with his plight. Feeling so alienated and alone from the rest of humanity is a curse. People can become socially isolated for a variety of reasons; mental illness, autism, social phobia, and traumatic experiences. It's not necessarily an individual's fault for experiencing this isolation. But it's absolutely their fault in how they respond to it. Maybe Rodger should have visited a prostitute, like the protagonist of Underground. Anyway, there's a lot to mine from this book and I am much obliged to that discussion and recommendation.
The second book I finished was 1984. I last read this when I was 16 and I don't think I appreciated how good this book is. I'll write more on this book next week.
I am now midway through All the Light We Cannot See. I remember the title being vaguely familiar, but didn't realize how big this book was until I did a little research. I'm don't typically gravitate toward the "Oprah book club" type, but this book is just really fucking good. Hope it keeps up.
Ponder
31m ago
History is filled with many examples of violence on massive scales (wars) and violence initiated over religious/superstitious beliefs (like the Salem witch trials). There are still wars in today’s world.
This desire and use of violence is part of the human condition. John has an attitude that helps him remain vigilant and alert to the fact that humans have the potential to resort to irrational and gratuitous violence. It seems like part of why John is like this is because it is an adaptive strategy to anticipate what might trigger violence in humans so that he can avoid triggering it in other people. Of course he is assigning incorrect probabilities to the violent outcomes, but the strategy still makes sense directionally.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
34m ago
Okay. Your belief is, in my opinion, insane, but I'm not going to try to talk you out of it. That said, as @netstack told you, if you want to make broad inflammatory claims like "All women want to castrate us," you'll need to do better than pointing at the SCUM manifesto. This is just a general rule here - you want to say "Group X has a terrible malign purpose and they are all evil," your receipts need to be more than a few members of Group X saying crazy things.
AvocadoPanic
50m ago
Preemptively drive them away through support of some culture war topic?
AvocadoPanic
54m ago
Cyrano as a service. I don't hate the idea.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
55m ago
Thanks for the recommendation. Mind sharing why? I have deliberately avoided all of the modern re-envisionings of the series, and the ads for this one don't at all convince me to abandon this strategy.
faceh
58m ago
I made some money on a prediction market by betting the film would receive decent reviews. Every previous entry had received good reviews, and the trailer for this one looked good.
Maybe I'll actually bother to watch them.
OverexertIvyClosure
1hr ago
Has anyone successfully paid a third party to run a dating profile? I really thought this would be a well-established market but I can only find a handful of extremely sketchy looking services I don't trust at all.
I am a loser who photographs poorly and I'm not good at talking to girls online, but I have a fair bit of money, so I'd pretty happily trade someone who's good at this a few hundred dollars per actual date who shows up (subject to sane constraints--no pros, not homeless girls, no one too old to have kids, not morbidly obese, etc.). I'd rather kill myself then ever swipe again, but I tried for six months to meet girls offline and got nowhere...so it's tinder or die alone like a pathetic loser.
faceh
1hr ago
Well, the biological explanation (mostly feeding into 1, but can also feed into 2 or 3) is an enlarged amygdala in the brain. Which can be genetic, a result of intense trauma, and potentially other environmental factors. Or a mix of those.
So this simply means that any signals coming into the brain get fed into the amygdala, the amygdala analyzes any possible threats in those signals, and inevitably finds and amplifies those signals, then sounds the alert to every other part of the brain, which then acts as though the threat is real whether there is such a threat or not.
Scary thing, is that this means that if you say something positive to them, they'll immediately assume you're lying and look for any angle that could be used against them. If you say something negative, they'll take this as a direct 'attack' and (over)react accordingly. And if you say something neutral, they'll immediately take the worst interpretation and (over)react accordingly.
And you don't say anything they'll assume you're thinking the worst thing about them.
This is how their brain works on a literal physical level, so when I encounter someone who fits this profile I immediately model them as a ball of neuroses and paralyzing anxiety and self-esteem issues, which tends to trigger a pity response. This disarms any anger I may have, and I usually then take pains to distance myself from this person since there's little I can do to calm them down when they are cognitively wired to feel threatened by almost every single stimulus they encounter.
zeke5123a
1hr ago
In American sports, you do have the ultra skill guys who can compete against the physical brutes. But skill is not enough and athleticism is not enough. Either one will only make you good. Greatness requires both.
And again I can’t stress the point of physicality enough. Physicality isn’t primarily about athleticism but it is hitting. Aggression.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1hr ago
All of these are plausible depending on surrounding factors absent from the example. As written and inferring from base rates, and assuming some degree of mental illness on John's part, I'd think 1 is most likely, but 2 is fairly plausible, if we assume the mental illness is something along the lines of "pathological liar" that keeps him exaggerating even as it starts to fail to gain sympathy.
It could also be a more steelmanned version of 1, what if people do keep trying to kill him? Like, not these specific people at his work, he's still exaggerating about them, but what if it's other people? Maybe John lives in a really bad neighborhood and gets mugged once a week, barely escaping by throwing his wallet and running the other way. Maybe he has to fight tooth and nail and ends up in the hospital regularly badly wounded. Maybe it's not about John at all, it's just a really bad neighborhood and everyone who lives there gets mugged regularly, or maybe John looks like an easy target. But the repeated trauma makes him think it's a conspiracy and he's not smart enough to pick out the pattern: person in dark alley = mugger, person in office = friendly, and he just thinks all people have a 50-50 chance to attack him.
If we reduce his pattern-matching abilities even further, maybe he never actually gets mugged, but he keeps doing something stupid like climbing rusty fences and scratching himself, or drunk driving and getting in accidents that almost kill him, and generalizes that to people trying to kill him.
Or maybe he just watches too much TV and movies and people are trying to kill each other all the time (especially trying to kill the protagonist) and he thinks of himself as the protagonist, therefore people must be trying to kill him.
If instead, we increase his pattern-matching abilities, maybe he does regularly get mugged, or his friends and family members do, and he notices that most of the muggers in his bad neighborhood have a certain ethnicity, and so he becomes a racist. Or maybe he goes to the police to fix the issue but they don't take him seriously because he sounds like a paranoid nutjob (when he accuses the actual mugger and Alice from work in the middle of the same rant the police can't tell which one is real and which is exaggerated), then he becomes anti-cop, or anti-government, or anti-whoever is in charge of making the cops be so lax on crime and oh hey have you read this article about how such and such group is secretly controlling the government to be soft on crime or whatever?
Stepping out of the metaphor, which I think is somewhat of a weakman for this phenomenon, I think this simultaneously explains a large chunk of racists (in all directions), anti-religion, anti-capitalists, etc etc etc. Bad thing happens to person or to people that person knows, or hears from (sometimes signal boosted and exaggerated by the media, sometimes by word of mouth). There is a real pattern causing it to happen repeatedly, though sometimes it's a pattern as complicated as "The Entire Economy", it gets oversimplified, exaggerated, and then attributed to a particular group, and the people who believe this explanation become radical anti-that-group. It's a combination of paranoia and actual pattern recognition, because there usually is an actual legitimate instigating factor that is genuine Bayesian evidence against that group, it's just much weaker than would be needed to draw the exaggerated conclusions they come to. There ARE evil racist white men trying to keep minorities poor. There ARE worthless degenerate minorities who live on crime and welfare and contribute nothing to society. There ARE corrupt police officers abusing their authority. There ARE pedophiles in government jobs. There ARE Zionist supremacist Jews who want to control all of America and manipulate it into being pro-Israel. All you need is for someone to encounter some of these in real life, or evidence of them existing, and then the pattern matching can begin until it spirals out of control.
And some of these people will have genuinely convincing evidence on their side, by sheer random chance. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been mugged. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been unfairly harassed by police. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been stared at suspiciously by shopkeepers despite doing nothing wrong. 1% of people will be in the top 1% for people who have been laid off by a Jewish boss. They're going to look at the evidence they've seen with their own eyes and be unconvinced that it might be a coincidence. It doesn't seem like a coincidence, it seems super unlikely. If their life were admissible as a scientific paper it would reject the null hypothesis. p < 0.05. They're Jellybean people!
I think that's what a lot of this is. People who perceive patterns where there are none, people who pick out genuine patterns and misattribute them, and people who have coincidences happen to them that are rational evidence when viewed from their individual perspective but don't stand out when you adjust for multiple comparison tests.
What are the least unbearably cringe examples of the "We're X! Of course we Y" meme?
I've only ever encountered them with the extreme selection bias of being reposted on Twitter as ragebait, but it's really hard to imagine any that wouldn't be. Surely there are less awful examples that make retards keep thinking it's a good idea. Like how did this meme not die at birth?
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/israeli-official-expelled-over-use-of-fake-passports-1.678818
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-20424935.html
I was living in Ireland for this. It was well reported but didn't really persist.
Awarenesss
1hr ago
I have effectively made the decision to move out of my home in the middle-class Dallas, TX, suburbs into an apartment in the fun part of town. I am debating whether I should rent the home out or sell it and would like advice and/or experiences from my fellow Mottizens. I am leaning 75/25 in favor of selling given the thoughts below.
Background:
- 26 year-old male in committed relationship that I expect to result in marriage. We would not move into this house together if we got married.
- Home is appraised at $380k and has a 30-year mortgage with 3% rate. Monthly payment all-in is $2200 and expected to go up due to property values increasing.
- Home is in a socially "meh" area with meh schools and stroads galore
Pro-sell thoughts:
- I do not have the time to manage tenants unless they are truly very quiet nor am I willing to risk getting shitty tenants and having to deal with them
- I can simply pocket the cash and have peace of mind about not having to worry about the house and its illiquidity, tenants, etc.
- I am moderately risk-adverse when it comes to money and investments and it can cause me stress. If I were to move to an apartment and have a vacant home, my combined mortgage and rent would be about 80% of my post-tax income. (I have plenty in a brokerage account that could cover me, but I don't want to sell that.)
Pro-rent thoughts:
- More equity: I do not care about making a large monthly profit off of the house (maybe $100-200/mo to pay for emergencies), but rather building equity so I can get more money when I eventually sell
- Property management companies can, but not always, do a good job of not letting anything make it to the homeowner (from what I've read)
- If I get lucky and find excellent tenants, I can treat them very well to increase the likelihood of them staying (but this is still risking it)
- My area's real estate market is relatively in-demand with little sign of slowing down (not including reasons that affect all U.S. cities), which may allow me to sell a bit quicker than other markets, especially if I sold for below market value (which I'm fine doing if absolutely needed)
- 3% interest rate is very good and I suspect we won't see that for a long time
5434a
1hr ago
Some blend of the three. John is a lazy thinker so he defaults to lazy explanations: He's the only thing that matters, so any obstacles he encounters are deliberate sabotage, and that sabotage is the worst possible kind, and so you should feel sorry for him because he's the only thing that matters, and if you don't you might as well be dead to him. Egocentrism, probably with some sort of neurochemical deficiency that biases his perceptions towards negative interpretation.
And maybe some people have picked up on those vibes and started actually fucking with him because why not, he's a miserable sod who already thinks everyone is out to get him anyway so they might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. At that point he's "right" but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
it's how I model people
You model people as being like John, or you model people the same way John models people?
AvocadoPanic
1hr ago
Booth was hugely popular and successful, perhaps the most popular and successful of his day.
AvocadoPanic
1hr ago
not so gay song
Not gay at all. He's engaged to a woman, Padre Pio and the Apostle Paul are his spiritual role models.
The video is fun too https://youtube.com/watch?v=kmg8EAD-Kjw?si=igvoPTcj2GAdBn9i
AvocadoPanic
1hr ago
6
AvocadoPanic
1hr ago
UK - A gay guy sings while buff male backing dancers gyrate on eachother
Nul Points from tele voting
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
I don't see it.
America’s weak point is clearly potential civic disunity which could result in balkanization along racial, religious, or cultural lines.
You can claim that Social Justice Progressivism aims to kit racial and ethnic cultural fault lines in society, perhaps.
However, the main fault lines I see today in the US are not Black vs White or New Immigrant Culture vs Traditional US Culture, but rural vs urban and SJP vs MAGA. If any religions are involved in fault lines, it is Christianity! (Notably, rich vs poor is not a big rift.)
While I can not disprove that Hari Seldon looked at the civil rights movement in the 1970s and saw that despite the racial barriers slowly falling, the end result would paradoxically be an increase in racial tensions, and set up SJP as a way to avoid a race war, I find this highly unlikely.
I think the roots of SJP in the civil rights movement started with relatable, noble goals and had the bad luck to mostly achieve their goals. So they did what any movement would do and picked further goals. Some, like gay rights, were again noble enough. Some, like insisting on equality of outcomes instead of color-blindness were IMHO harmful, some were mostly silly empty symbolism (like Confederate statues -- if you have the majority to blow them up, whatever, but this is not a decisive battle for the future of the US in any case.).
What about Abdulrahman al-Awlaki? I suppose being the family of a political enemy is "political grounds" but then that decays into agreeing with me.
Unlike you, I'm not convinced that the ceremonial power structure of the US maps onto its real power structure. In a presidential election, who the ruling class is is almost never on the ballot. And when it is is precisely when the historic assassinations start to happen.
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