domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
8m ago
Generally the mods want a little more for a top level comment btw, at least summarizing the link preferably.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
14m ago
"Wrong but you can't tell how wrong it is" seems to be worse than "wrong and you can immediately tell that it is".
This is afaik in artifact of excluding violent deaths in the statistics, not the reality on the ground. Obviously it is silly to exclude violent deaths but include childbirth if you want to understand the differences in life expectancy between men and women, yet it is all to common. See for example this letter in the journal of the royal society of medicine.
In many known societies, males had far higher violent deaths rates, to such a degree that adult women would frequently outnumber adult men. For a particularly extreme example see the paraguyan triple war, at the end of which women outnumbered men 10:1. Only in long peace times you would have higher life expectancy for men. This also isn't just due to large-scale wars with modern weapons in the more developed societies; hunter gatherers often have even higher violent deaths rates "just" due to skirmishes.
Obviously we do not really have reliable data of actual life expectancy for most of history, but I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the ancestor statistic is a simple result of enough men dying a violent death sufficiently early so that the 2:1 is simply the gender ratio in the adult population.
Rov_Scam
22m ago
I"m left of center, and I'd love to help, but I read that comment about five times and I'm not sure what you're asking. It would probably have been better to write a gloss of the (article? comment?) and ask a specific question rather than post it and ask if it's "accurate". Now's your chance.
OliveTapenade
28m ago
I hope it's clear that I don't consider political influence within the United States to be any reflection of the merits of a tradition. I'm in the devout rump of mainline Protestants - I am, on my typology here, definitely one of the losers. Meanwhile many of the churches that I think will be relatively strong in the future - Mormons, Baptists, and so on - are in my eyes either heretics, or borderline-heretics. There is, I think, probably an interesting book to be written on Christian heresy and its contours in America. (And not the Ross Douthat book. A different one.)
At any rate, that the Orthodox have no political influence is not a criticism of them. The position I suspect the Orthodox are in, and will continue to be in going forward, is the one from an aside in this old article:
However, [Rod Dreher's] situation is complicated. Given his own membership in the Orthodox Church, one would expect him to have quite high regard for civil society, or at least for the magistrate’s role in cultivating and preserving Christian society. That said, one astute friend remarked that because Orthodox Political Theology has such an expansive view of the power of the magistrate, perhaps Orthodox Christians default into a kind of Anabaptist separatism in nations where the magistrate is not Orthodox.
That is, the ideal Orthodox political order, historically, has been one in which the church is to some extent integrated with the state - as in the Byzantine empire, or the Russian empire. Spiritual and temporal authority are intertwined. However, when one practices Orthodoxy in a state where there is zero realistic chance of such integration occurring, Orthodox communities in practice engage in a kind of 'retreat', focusing on internal cultivation. If there is a visible surge of interest in Orthodoxy at the moment, my hope is that much of that interest relates to that question of spiritual cultivation or maturation, especially as a community, within a political order that grows increasingly impious.
I wonder if it might be interesting there to look at the experiences of Orthodox communities in the Ottoman empire. I know very little about that, but it springs to mind as a good case study for how to maintain Christian faith intergenerationally while living in a proudly non-Christian political order.
It is my hope, at least, that there is more of a turn towards the obligations of personal Christian moral formation. My tradition is Methodist and I have noticed, at least among more traditionalist Methodists, some interest in the counter-cultural disciplines of the early Methodists. Maybe we need more Holy Clubs. Whatever church context it occurs in, though, I think there is a desire for more rigorous moral formation among some younger Christians, epsecially the more intellectual types.
You mention the growth of a kind of 'Western folk religion'. I'm not sure how far I want to go with that. There's a sense in which there are already Western folk religions like that, especially in America, which has long had both a civic religion and an implicit set of American spiritual norms that cross multiple denominations and religious traditions. Those religions are evolving as the cultural terrain changes, but I don't think a new one is coming into being from nothing. There will be some sort of spirituality - nature abhors a vacuum, including a spiritual vacuum - but I suspect more of a modification of what is already present, rather than something brand new.
quiet_NaN
41m ago
Minor technical nitpick: I think something "open source" is carrying a bunch of connotations which do not apply to LLMs. It is a bit like if I called a CC-BY-SA photograph "open source".
To the degree that LLMs are like traditional software, the source code -- the human-readable inputs which decide what a program does -- would be a neural network framework plus the training data (most of which is crawled/pirated rather than open source licensed).
Compiling would be the process of training.
In normal open source software, almost all of the effort goes into creating the code base. Compilation is basically free, and you compile your code a zillion times in the process of building your codebase. With LLMs, training is really expensive. Nobody downloads your sources, everybody just takes your binary, the weights.
With a normal open source project, you can easily git clone the sources and compile. If you run into a problem or need the program to do something differently, you just edit the sources and compile again, and if you think your changes might be generally useful, you make a pull request upstream to start the process of getting them into the official version.
With LLMs what you git clone are giant inscrutable matrices. If you are really good, you might be able to tweak the weights a bit so that the LLM will talk about the Golden Gate Bridge all the time. But this is a gimmick, not a general improvement. If you want to actually make the model more useful for purposes you have in common with others, you need RLHF, which is computationally expensive again.
This is an important difference between how traditional open source software interacts with the users and how "open source" LLMs interact with the users. I would thus propose to use the name "open weights" for LLMs, which carries none of the connotations of "users will contribute bug fixes".
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
44m ago
Correct! Hence why I said "Christian orthodoxy" as opposed to "Orthodox." I admit that the language get a bit confusing ahaha, thanks for clarifying.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
45m ago
@Blueberry this is what I meant if you're curious.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
45m ago
Mostly a set of techniques to help settle the mind from the vast distractions in the modern world. A more direct praxis for us to enter states where we can perceive the spiritual world of angels, demons, etc, and get in touch with God.
The ancient Christians recommended meditation or watchfulness before entering into any prayer whatsoever. In the modern world I believe that almost none of us truly are in that mental state due to our myriad distractions. I think Buddhist meditation and understandings could be quite useful for revitalizing direct, contemplative experience of the divine amongst Christians.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
47m ago
Not being against the Gays is one of the more salient points
No, this is not true at all from my perspective. Not only is it not one of the things Buddhism offers, Buddhism itself is strongly against gays, and also women. If you look into the roots of the Buddhist tradition there is far stronger sentiment and prohibitions against sexual perversion than in mainstream Christianity.
That being said, I do think the modern Church has a perhaps too myopic focus on sexual sin sometimes.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
52m ago
Thanks for the blunt takes! Interesting views here, very realpolitik. I do agree with most of your take on the Protestant denominations in the U.S., seems as if their cultural moment is fading. Sometimes I wonder if a new religion will come in to pick up the slack, like the "western folk religion" @Stefferi mentioned above, but more formalized.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
58m ago
Great comment. Yeah I do think that the Western folk religion is quite dominant sadly, especially given how uhhh.... poor it seems to be at actually improving people's lives or leading to useful social organization.
I had to laugh at the (often imagined.) All too true.
Listening
1hr ago
This isn't really something I'm commenting on, but it is culture-war related and I do genuinely want to know, so...
Can anyone who considers themselves left of center comment on the accuracy or lack thereof of this post? Is this a thing, or more something particular to this specific guy.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
Yes, seems like a storm in the teapot. Anyone doing statistical analysis and worried about the effect of trans people will want more information on what the column actually tracks. Simply saying "the column name is gender, therefore it refers exactly to ..." is always precarious.
but it's hilarious to me that the conservative administration was basically ceding the point here by differentiating at the schema level that "sex" is different than "gender".
I think the steelman of the Republicans would be "there is only biological sex, and 'gender' is a word popularized by our enemies to imply that social roles associated with a sex are worth tracking separately".
But yes, that level of language policing is a bit funny. Not that the woke left has never purged Problematic terms when they were in power, but at least they had the fig leaf of 'it is not about ideology, but the bad term is hurting really people!'
As soon as these countries reach some development/income threshold, the floodgates will open. Syrian Civil war caused huge exodus despite it being only country of 23 million in 2011. In hypothetical continuation of Africa's World War in 2050 let's say involving Nigeria with 400 million people living there, or complete collapse of Egypt if they will have huge war with Ethiopia with combined population of also 400 million, this will completely change the calculation.
And again, I do not think this necessarily needs to be some single source of issues. It is just one of possible outside pressures that will destabilize already fragile situation inside the West.
georgioz
1hr ago
It most certainly does not. The average human alive has twice as many female ancestors as men.
This is an often cited fact, but it hides more than it shows. Historically women had lower life expectancy compared to men thanks to horrible death rate during child birth. Yes, they may have managed to reproduce - but so what. It was their family, mostly males who took care of now motherless children. Without men these children would not survive.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
I'm going to see a performance of Hamlet next week. What are the best essays or YouTube lectures to help me understand the play or take an alternate view of it?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr 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.
DRC (official population estimate: 100 million) has been in a state of chaos and civil war for decades, yet the amount of Congolese who have immigrated to the Western countries has remained comparatively small (120 000 formally in Western countries according to this link, even if you triple or quadruple this number to account for the illegal migration it would be less than a 1 % of that official estimate.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
Query: do you think current atheists were born of atheist ancestors?
Let’s just say that I used to work as a developer for a large German company. Note past tense.
For the first year I could only install new software or drivers by making an official request and having the Indian IT support do it via remote access. You can imagine how well this worked for embedded systems development where you regularly need to use some new piece of external hardware or random IC manufacturer’s legacy software tool.
The best part? All of the daily work could have been done on a rando, burner laptop as email, team chat, source repositories and build system were all in external cloud services. Literally the only things I actually needed intranet access was to put my hours into the SAP system once per month.
georgioz
1hr ago
I think that female pattern is a little bit different. They are as prone to parasocial relationships as men on onlyfans, but they fall for status and fame - think about boyband members, movie stars etc. 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.
How do you think religion in the West will interact with the Culture War in the next few elections, and in the future?
I think what will happen in the West is some mix of lebanonization, balkanization and brazilianization. The situation is similar to that of Yugoslavia or Lebanon or many other countries, where you have intersection of various ethnic, religious, tribal or even national interest in constant conflict resulting in confusing mess. There will be foreign shocks, 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. For religion, you can insert progressivism, christianity, islam and classical liberalism as actors in this religious conflict.
Culture War can lead to civil war, but I think that people in the West have a very skewed view of what it looks like. People like Tim Pool are too much married toward scenario of US Civil War or Spanish Civil War, which while confusing was more or less fought as a standard war. What will more likely happen is more akin to Lebanon or Yugoslavia, where decades old status quo of deliberately constructed balance of internal tensions slowly deteriorated, only to combust quickly, suddenly and violently. Or you can look into other conflicts such as what we now see in Ethiopia or South Sudan or even Syria, where you have incredibly confusing web of loyalties and where belligerents are unclear and alliances constantly shifting.
I'm not left of center, but I'll comment anyway.
Of course he's correct. Of course people want to feel like underdogs, of course they want to feel like they have their own "secret club" that the Squares In Power don't have access to. Like, duh. The right is very much not immune to this. Being the underdog lends moral credibility to your cause, it galvanizes your base, there's an intrinsic thrill to the feeling of powerlessness itself, etc.
But, and here's the kicker, all of this applies to the left too. And he's so close to getting it, he's describing everything perfectly, "for the right it's really all about their libidinal investment in their own symbolic matrix of floating signifiers, they love the struggle itself more than what they struggle for, the goal of every political cause is ultimately just to reproduce itself", and I'm nodding along going yes yes yes... but then he has to tack on, "but of course the left isn't like this at all, when we talk about microaggressions it's just a purely rational response to objective conditions of oppression, there's nothing libidinal to analyze there, no siree", and I'm like... no you were so close! Everything you were saying about the right applies to the left too, they're exactly the same in this regard.
I not infrequently have this experience when reading posts from leftists, where they're right on the ball and they're so close to understanding everything, and then at the last minute they veer off into "...but of course, we are Good and they are Evil, and that is the chasm that separates us". Their ideology is axiomatically predicated on the explicit denial of this aspect of their own psyche, so they remain forever blind to it.
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