domain:anarchonomicon.substack.com
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
2m ago
She claimed that many women who responded with "bear" were victims of violent rape who literally would rather die than be raped.
In that case you can ask them the same question again but now where they have a cyanide capsule they can break at anytime to commit suicide if the man/bear starts doing bad stuff to them and they'd rather die. I don't think this would make many of these women switch from bear to man.
epohon
3m ago
A related question, who coined the phrase Leviathan-shaped Hock? It's been living in my head since I read it in one of these roundups.
zeke5123a
6m ago
I think Hobbes is wrong. Most of the time most people are like hobbits. State of war is the oddity; not the normal.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
9m ago
And "nimrod" has been a British word for "skillful hunter" for decades.
Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
14m ago
It is a very niche game that demands a lot from the player. It's neither pretty nor streamlined. The UX is tolerable but far below par. You really have to want to play this game to get your fun out of it.
That said, if you do commit, here's a shameless plug of my guide: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3195937264
The standard commentary says that it's mostly just meant to focus a chaotic redeployment from other sectors of the front on the UA side, since even losing some irrelevant frontline villages would have an adverse impact on UA morale that is already cracking. The Ocheretino breakthrough seems to indicate that rotations and redeployments are currently Ukraine's weak spot - single brigades hold stretches of the front successfully even if they grumble as they have been forced to do so continuously for over a year, but the moment they are rotated out it's a gamble whether their green replacements will even take their positions or flee upon their first encounter with a FAB shockwave. Entrenching a new defensive belt presumably requires at least some experienced troops to be pulled from elsewhere (rather than throwing new conscripts into a new frontline to figure out things for themselves from scratch), creating a myriad of such opportunities as their former positions have to be replenished with new troops.
RU might also correctly expect that in that particular area, the remnants of the RDK (for whom Ukrainian leadership evidently has little love, but who are also a priority target for Russian spite) will be used as first-echelon cannon fodder.
Finally, do we know the 50k actually represent an upper bound on what could be committed to this offensive if it develops in a promising direction? How hard is it to rapidly redeploy troops to somewhere within 50km of the old Russian state border? Surely attacking with ~200k right away if you can afford to would be better, but in this conflict in particular massing so many troops at once might actually just make them an easier target.
MotteInTheEye
18m ago
I think it's pretty difficult to construct a realistic hypothetical on which to test intuitions. Yours doesn't really work because the woman is choosing between an actual man and a report of a bear (by the man), which is a very different comparison.
epohon
21m ago
The way he does. I don't think there's anyone in the world who under the right circumstances would not be my enemy. And I'm not talking about thought experiments and fictional scenarios like Hunger Games. Under common everyday circumstances.
roystgnr
24m ago
Would Plato’s account of the trial and death of Socrates be better if there were a possibility of Socrates simply... not dying?
This is a weird example to give. Unless Plato pulled another Atlantis here, this was an account of a real historical event where there was a possibility of Socrates not dying. (not "simply", but via something like the hypotheticals you brainstormed). Was that reality just a confusing mess of possibilities, which could only become art once its complexity and unpredictability were stripped away? If so, is that a damning thing to say about reality, or about art?
One argument in the Teaching Paradox series of blog posts is that the games embody a certain historical theory, and players are essentially forced to make the same choices as the nations did
CK2 teaches the incentives of patriarchy better than any other game I can think of.
CK2 teaches many things — why the protestant reformation was a big deal (everyone gets a CB on heretics), why national identity didn't play an important role in politics until the 18th century (elites branch-swinging across Europe for different titles), why primogeniture was an improvement over the equal inheritance of the Franks despite the bad son problem (it keeps the dynasty strong and its holdings united).
When I first played CK2, it made me realize how the Marshall Plan mindset clouds my thinking, and that past governments were not "just stupid" for not focusing on infrastructure/tech. My first CK2 game was on Tutorial Island (regular people call this place Ireland), and I immediately sent my spy master to study technology from Al Andalus while saving money to buy an irrigation building. Economy, research, then conquest: the 4X order of operations. Twenty years later, I managed to improve my tech to best in Ireland, and I constructed a fancy new well to double my feudal dues. My neighbor country, meanwhile, had used his spymaster to fabricate a title on my lands, and instead of building infrastructure, he bought mercenaries. He conquered my county. Game over.
Sadly, the sequel CK3 is just a map-painting game. It doesn't have as many embedded historical lessons.
non_radical_centrist
29m ago
Are there any major bloggers in the rat-sphere who are significantly pro-Palestine, anti-Israel? I think everyone I follow is either pro-Israel or basically neutral
roystgnr
32m ago
But she can replicate the effect of having died back then by simply committing suicide now.
Regardless of whether your conclusion is right, it doesn't follow from this argument. Even to someone for whom rape is worse than death, rape+death can be (and likely is) still worse than rape-without-death.
hyperbolic social signalling
I want to believe this, but I didn't even expect the "bear" answer to be popular in the context of signalling, so I'm clearly not modeling people correctly ... if there are people who would answer "bear" as some weird rhetorical point, couldn't there be people who would decide "bear" in real life too? I'm imagining a woman hiking alone in a canyon (unprepared for any sort of combat), when a male hiker catching up to her shouts that the park rangers got a report of a bear further down the trail ... but I'm trying to imagine the woman then breaking into a run away from the man and toward the bear, and I just can't seem to do it, not without adding a bunch of assumptions that weren't in the viral question.
100ProofTollBooth
37m ago
You're right. And it wasn't lost on me the weird parallel between Hobbes and feminists that emerged when I wrote the response. I can't say I've totally wrapped my own head around it. All of us Trads do say "We need trade values or else society will fall apart." But it's couched heavily with the idea of personal choice; "You can choose to not follow Trad values, but then your life is going to be shitty." I'd contrast that with the progressive concept of culture which is fundamentally authoritarian; "You MUST adhere to the approved cultural norms, or else you are dangerous and will be excluded from society."
"Teach men not to rape" is too far of an extreme because I think the implicit assumption is that men are born with the rape module turned up to 10. I don't think this is the case. Men (and women!) are born with the basic mammalian firmware desires for food, water, shelter, reproductive activity. The duty of society is to teach men and women how to go about fulfilling these fundamental needs in pro-social ways.
Appreciate your comment. One of the better "stop and made me think" situations I've had on here in a while.
Of course many of them are with Zendaya with whomever the male lead is
Maybe we should thank God Challengers didn't do well or we could be hearing about this for a decade.
but the sheer amount of complaining about how Zendaya is too ugly to be paired with Hollywood men should by itself indicate that this happens quite often.
I think this is part bitter Twitter racist thing and part "woman who glams up (she looks better on the red carpet than in many films) well enough to be liked by women but isn't a sex symbol, so men complain" thing.
You hear similar things about how Taylor Swift isn't really sexy and I don't think she really gets into racial issues.
popocatepetl
43m ago
Social analysis of the bear-or-man meme is a waste of neurons. The initial poll showed very-online urban women did not know bears were at all dangerous. After that, all discourse has been a toxoplasma of gender war signaling — feminists get to signal how super-duper-extra they condemn men with a cherry on top, while anti-feminists get to grandstand about how stupid and man-hating women are.
There's nothing else to it.
RaiderOfALostTusken
44m ago
I know I saw a chart of incident frequency on airlines and it hasn't increased. Boeing planes having problems has become newsworthy, so now everything is being reported on - but this kind of thing has basically always been happening.
2D3D
45m ago
Is there any great work that would be improved by the addition of choice, by the addition of alternate possibilities
Choice sucks. Most players in Bethesda or freeform character created open world games go for troll runs because the available choices end up sucking pretty hard and are inconsequential or inconsistent. Railroaded games don't offer choice beyond letting players play the game in different styles, and that has always lead to tighter narratives with greater emotional depth. The denouement of achievement is better savored when the outcome is amenable to the player.
LLM generated missions are unlikely to be any better than the standard algorithmically generated quests and maps of Roguelikes or Bethesda style radiant quests. By their very nature within a game a quest cannot significantly affect the world, otherwise other aspects of the game get broken. Unless the world is fully dynamically generated each playthrough and allows full destruction of not just the environment but the very engine itself, any LLM game quest will just be a high quality filler anime episode, inconsequential and distracting from the core experience players are actually intending to invest their time and effort in.
Botond173
47m ago
I'd imagine the meme originates from the US or Canada, which are enormous countries with enormous areas of wilderness, where relatively crowded forest trails aren't the norm, so women's preconceptions are different.
Tanista
49m ago
One argument in the Teaching Paradox series of blog posts is that the games embody a certain historical theory, and players are essentially forced to make the same choices as the nations did
CK2 teaches the incentives of patriarchy better than any other game I can think of.
roystgnr
52m ago
Why is he influencing people to work on AI?
Intentionally, because of his belief (at one point, at least; he's gotten much more pessimistic lately) that the least-bad way to mitigate the dangers of "Unfriendly AI" is to first develop "Friendly AI", something that also has superhuman intellectual power but that has values which have been painstakingly "aligned" with humanity's. ... I originally wrote "best way", but that has the wrong connotations; even in his less pessimistic days he recognized that "get its capabilities and values right" was a strictly harder problem than "get its capabilities right and cross your fingers", and thus the need to specifically argue that people should deliberately avoid the latter.
Unintentionally, because he doesn't get to pick and choose which of his arguments people believe and which they disbelieve. Long ago I wrote this about evangelism of existing AI researchers, but much of it applies to prospective new ones as well:
Existing AI researchers are likely predisposed to think that their AGI is likely to naturally be both safe and powerful. If they are exposed to arguments that it will instead naturally be both dangerous and very powerful (the latter half of the argument can't be easily omitted; the potential danger is in part because of the high potential power), would it not be a natural result of confirmation bias for the preconception-contradicting "dangerous" half of the argument to be disbelieved and the preconception-confirming "very powerful" half of the argument to be believed?
Half of the AI researcher interviews posted to LessWrong appear to be with people who believe that "Garbage In, Garbage Out" only applies to arithmetic, not to morality. If the end result of persuasion is that as many as half of them have that mistake corrected while the remainder are merely convinced that they should work even harder, that may not be a net win.
Botond173
53m ago
I would assume that you primarily mean vetting by the family of the male, not the female?
In short: no. In a patriarchy, the family of the male fulfills the role of raising him up to be a prospective husband, because that’s in their interest. They put incentives in place to ensure he doesn’t turn into a lout, a gambler, a hobo etc. The family of the female basically does the mirror image of this, plus they restrict the girl’s social life in the sense that she only moves around in the wider social circle of the family where everyone is assumed to be vetted. To put it in cynical terms: she’s basically provided a pool of, say, 5-10 potential husbands, and she’s free to choose from them, under the supervision of her family and the families of those 5-10 guys. (Maybe it’s just 3-5 guys or whatever, but that’s not important.) That is the extent of the mating choice she has. It is in this sense that her family is vetting her future husband. This is feasible because the social circles of the future spouses either overlap or have direct connections. There are strong social bonds, a sense of community, social capital etc. Of course, people aren’t only getting vetted on an individual basis, their families are also getting vetted.
Again, I’m no sociologist, but I assume this is how this all went down normally. These societies no longer exist, so it’s all bygone history anyway.
I think that in many patriarchal cultures, not being especially rapey was not part of the vetting process on the side of the man.
You’re absolutely correct. In the current sense of the word, it wasn’t part of it because it wasn’t seen as relevant. In a different sense of the word, though, not being rapey towards virtuous women in your social circle was 100% part of it. Of course, feminists will happily explain to you that the patriarchy is a horrible shitshow with a wholly backward concept of rape. Which is basically true, in the sense that yes, it’s a system which, in certain circumstances, gives you covert license to rape a woman whom you encounter in the woods. If, for example, she’s a loud alcoholic whore who had abortions, belonging to a family that your family has a feud with. Or if you’re a soldier of a victorious army on enemy soil etc. And again, these societies had a vastly different concept of the word ‘rape’, but I don’t think it’s necessary to go into detail here.
If there was a common denominator, it was perhaps to certify that the male was able to fulfill their expected role in society and support one or more wives and their children. (Of course, such vetting processes are also heavier on the upper end of societies. I am not sure how it was on the lower end: "This helot man has managed to survive for two decades without starving or being slaughtered or maimed by the Spartans, that makes him husband material?"
Yes and yes.
I am also skeptical of claims that the female's male relatives filtered especially for a kind man. In societies where marital violence and rape were considered normal, why would they?
And you’re absolutely right to be skeptical. A patriarchy has no concept of ‘marital rape’, for example.
SSCReader
58m ago
Well if it takes a well developed cultural system to leverage us into not behaving that way, then are we not just repressed rapists? Just ones buried under years of conditioning? Teach men not to rape indeed..
Just to be clear I don't 100% agree with Hobbes here, though I think it is as you say partially true. Just noticing the similarity in positions between somewhat feminist thought and the Hobbesian conservatives.
It's easy - start with bench pressing 300lbs and then do it every other day for 6 months and you'd be golden".
It's not. It's "nobody cares what you look like at the gym, trust me. Just go and do something - anything - and you'll see that it gets easier."
For the vast majority of people, even introverts or people with anxiety issues, this incremental task is doable and gets easier over time. Maybe not pleasant, but that's a different thing.
If a person legitimately cannot perform the task or parse the underlying point behind it or introspect as to why, maybe they need a therapist. Because I doubt caveating internet discussion even more (and losing the low-hanging fruit you can easily influence) is going to fix this.
That's a very good point ... but doesn't that flaw make my man-vs-potential-bear scenario as favorable as possible toward not choosing "man"? If we imagine instead that our hiker first saw the bear herself and turned around, and then encountered a man in between her and the trailhead, it feels even wilder to imagine her turning around a second time and taking her chances with the actual-bear after all.
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