domain:alakasa.substack.com
aqouta
4m ago
Responding to a[ late response from last week's culture War.] (https://www.themotte.org/post/950/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/205324?context=8#context)
I'm aware of this the various accounts of AGPs and I think back to Scott's musings on the anorexia and other culture bound illnesses. His conclusion didn't seem quite right either.
I think what's going on is that the human mind is capable of innumerable states. The uncharted territory of the mind shifts with great plasticity, but once examined begins to harden and harden in response to the type of examination. Like shining a bright on a photopolymer, call this the photopolymeme theory of identity.
The type of examination is dependent on the environment, which is not random. In a trans naive environment you are still exposed to gendered binaries constantly and there is plenty of plausible cause to start that hardening process in a peculiar direction, maybe you made a friend of the opposite gender in kindergarten and when they care takers separate out their charges by gender the nubile mind recoils in being split from your friend and some part of the identity hardens in that you belong on that side of the divide. Maybe a million other things.
When you introduce the trans meme into the environment suddenly you go from identities lightly hardened by stray beams of light to precision directed lazers etching the face of the meme on kids at industrial scale.
It's generally accepted that reading webmd had a normal effect of convincing many people that they have whatever obscure disease they're currently looking at. Symptoms tend to be vague and our senses have difficulty differentiating between imagining symptoms and having symptoms. I'm convinced that when you ask every kid Ina generation to carefully examine whether they're really trans with a laundry list of symptoms that could just be normal cisgender experience you're going to be hardening a lot of plastic minds.
I like this theory because I don't think self described trans people are usually lying. I think they've examined themselves and found these features. I think trying to reshape that hardened plastic might be difficult, painful or impossible. I think adults are probably entitled to shape their identities as they please so long as they don't harm others in the process.
I also think that as @TracingWoodgrains has described before, when talking about frames and cages has some validity. Can we be sure that the Chesterton's gendered cages we're ripping down weren't vital frames that kids need to provide structure for their identity?
sliders1234
7m ago
That is obviously the Latino versus black debate. It appears the IQ gaps are relative small but the criminality eventually seems to disappear in Hispanic populations but not black populations.
Folamh3
14m ago
The kernel of truth at the center of this is that even men who are objectively, even wildly, sexually successful can still harbor the sexual resentment that sits at the core of the incel label.
I acknowledge that the phenomenon you're describing is real, but I wish we had separate terms for "men who resent women because they can't get laid" and "men who can get laid, but resent women because of lingering grievances brought about from earlier rejections".
sliders1234
19m ago
I think this analysis has a fatal flaw in it. Sotomayor is an affirmative action appointment and hence her ability is no greater than a generic democrat. If Sotomayor was essentially Michael Jordan than all the arguments for keeping her on the bench would be in play. But she’s basically Javale McGee and a replacement level justice.
It’s definitely an interesting thought experience that it can be beneficial to keep a justice on the court but I can’t agree with the actionable part of it and basically view Sotomayor as low IQ (relatively) without the talent to be great.
Considering some of his recent statements, maybe Nate believes that the Democrats have got off the deep end, and are dragging the country in the same direction. From that perspective, a republican supreme court can help avoid some of that, or at least won't contribute to it, while Democrat supreme court would end the first amendment for example, and implement a woke partisan agenda.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
39m ago
Fast forward a few years, and it becomes normal for leftist women and their male ‘allies’ to dismiss anyone and everyone as ‘incel’, even married men with children as long as they come across as sufficiently deplorable to the average feminist.
The kernel of truth at the center of this is that even men who are objectively, even wildly, sexually successful can still harbor the sexual resentment that sits at the core of the incel label.
Incel, properly understood, is more like "unemployed" than it is like "disabled" or "nerd." Most men are involuntarily celibate (they would like to have sex but can't find a partner) for periods of their life. I've expanded the metaphor elsewhere:
We could distinguish [] between the "unemployed" incel and the "disabled" incel. Almost every man goes through periods when he is looking for sex and can't get it, very few young men are permanently physically incapable of getting laid. We could further distinguish among the unemployed incels the three general types of unemployment in Econ 101: Frictional, Cyclical, Structural. Virtually every man has periods of Frictional celibacy, between girlfriends or hook ups or busy at work or on a long term sojourn somewhere not amenable to casual sex. Obviously there's not a "business cycle" to sex, but we could substitute that for the lifecycle of the man himself, almost all men are ready and willing to have sex long before they are able to obtain it, and most are willing to have sex long after they are too old to interest most women. Those two categories are unimportant to us, they may participate in incel discourse for a time but ultimately they'll get their "fair share" of sex over a lifetime. It's the third group, Structural Incels, we should worry about. The Structurally Unemployed are those whose skills have been made redundant by industrial changes and reorganizations. Your coal miners or carriage makers. People who will never get laid with the skills they have. The solution to that is always training and help changing careers. Some people don't want to train and they don't want to change careers, well tough luck then. Sitting around whining you should have a bigger paycheck because you are the best carriage maker in ten counties, and failing to acknowledge that no one buys carriages!, is a bridge to nowhere.
What we see is a lot of guys retain the incel talking points and resentments, that they formed when they couldn't get laid, even after they are getting laid. A lot of guys continue to hate women for withholding pussy even after some women stop withholding it! A lot of guys who came into themselves are still mad about rejections in high school. Which I understand, there was a period between 16-18 when it seemed like I had somehow already missed the boat: every girl I hit on who didn't reject me immediately eventually told me she had lost her virginity some time ago to her [asshole] ex bf, and that now she wasn't really interested in that kind of thing anymore. And it's easy for those kinds of rejections to fester, even after one goes to college and none of it matters anymore. Or, a lot of guys who came into their own after college, once they got a good job, feel like they missed the boat in that ok fine I can date women now, but half of them got fat after college, and i can never get that back, they're always going to resent not getting it back then.
That's the dynamic I think you're seeing!
DradisPing
46m ago
The ginger gene is recessive, so you'd only need to worry about quarter asian ginger grandkids.
and the 'average' temperature is overall higher than without.
This is the part that you still have not shown. I would appreciate it if you would do just the thermodynamics 101 energy balance calculation to show the effect.
A packet of air on the surface on the day side will perhaps pick up energy from the surface. This warms the air, but also cools the surface. If this packet of energy is moved to the night side, it will deposit it's energy onto the surface; the surface will warm and the packet will cool. This tends to equalize temperatures between day and night sides but cannot provide a net increase in temperature (of sum of day and night side) due to conservation of energy. The global average temperature is still blackbody (day side being warmer than blackbody and the night side being colder).
getting as cold as they do without an atmosphere (-100ºC on the moon), much like how a blanket works.
No, the blanket analogy is invalid. If the gas is transparent to radiation, then it provides no barrier to radiative heat transport from the surface. In fact, the presence of a gas would reduce the insulating effects because it provides a conductive/convective path away from the surface (vacuum being the best insulator).
curious_straight_ca
1hr ago
What is your theory here? Why do you think you'd be able to entirely stop trans stuff, but not be able to accomplish a half-measure of 'only adults can transition after a year of psych evals'? The former seems easier, unless you want to go full nrx
stuckinbathroom
1hr ago
It's fallen out of favour here now, but in my own town there used to be people going out on the harbour or out to the beaches when the tide went out so they could gather mussels etc. for sale.
Molly Malone?
Astranagant
1hr ago
Yeah. It's just an evolved version of "virgin" "neckbeard" or any of the thousand other insults that women use to insinuate that someone isn't having sex. No reason to look so deeply into it.
The only mildly interesting aspect is the one whereby it's usually the case that people who vociferously argue that women shouldn't be judged or shamed for their sexual exploits are the same ones who are usually a hair trigger away from shaming men for not having sex (but they will also shame men for caring too much about having sex, or for going about getting sex in the wrong ways, or whatever else have you).
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1hr ago
Contra Nate Silver on Political IQ Tests OR On the Limits of Moneyball Philosophy
Nate Silver, on his new Substack argues that Sonia Sotomayor should retire, and that if you don't want her to retire you're a moron. Some pull quotes:
However, I’m going to be more blunt than any of them. If you’re someone who even vaguely cares about progressive political outcomes — someone who would rather not see a 7-2 conservative majority on the Supreme Court even if you don’t agree with liberals on every issue— you should want Sotomayor to retire and be replaced by a younger liberal justice. And — here’s the mean part — if you don’t want that, you deserve what you get.
...
In my forthcoming book, I go into a lot of detail about why the sorts of people who become interested in politics often have the opposite mentality of the world of high-stakes gamblers and risk-takers that the book describes. Both literal gambling like poker and professions that involve monetary risks like finance involve committing yourself to a probabilistic view of the world and seeking to maximize expected value. People who become interested in politics are usually interested for other reasons, by contrast. They think their party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers on the major questions of the day. And sure, they care about winning. But winning competes against a lot of other considerations like maintaining group cohesion or one’s stature within the group.
Silver's core argument is that Sotomayor, at 70, is old; and according to models the Democrats are unlikely to control both of the Senate and Presidency in the near future, and that therefore Sotomayor should step down now when it might be possible for Biden, Schumer and co to replace her with another Democratic justice.
I find this take to be indicative of the flaws in Nate's own mindset, the Moneyball/Analytics/Sabermetrics venue that Nate comes from applied to politics, and to a certain extent to Rationalism more broadly, so I'd like to dig into why this is so wrong point by point. For the purposes of this argument, I am viewing this from the position of, as Silver defines it, a progressive or a "person interested in progressive outcomes" who would prefer liberal outcomes to SCOTUS cases. We will also assume that Sotomayor is a decent judge. It's not a particularly interesting argument if we argue that Sotomayor sucks, and anyway there's a point about that further down. I've loved Nate since his PECOTA days, I'm not reflexively anti-analytics, but it has to be balanced with humanity.
Much like the Moneyball Oakland As famously put together talented regular season teams that failed in the playoffs, Silver's approach to politics is about grabbing tactical victories, but will never deliver a championship. Sabermetrics types have long derided concepts like veteran leadership, man-management, The Will to Win, clutch play; we can't measure them on the numbers then they don't exist. Yet while analytics have value, so does traditional strategy, team variance isn't entirely random. Let's examine how some of this applies to politics here:
Flaw 1) What Gets Measured Gets Managed Silver builds a toy model, demonstrates that within his toy model SCOTUS seats are really valuable, then assesses possession of SCOTUS seats based on raw-count of votes by partisan appointment. This is an extremely limited view of what impact SCOTUS justices can have. Sotomayor is 70 years old. Going by most projections, she has about 16 years to go. There's some indications of poor health outcomes, balanced by the fact that she'll get top-tier medical care. For reference, Scalia would have been 70 in 2006. Scalia was very important between 2006 and his death. His impact in general has been almost immeasurably huge on American jurisprudence, even the court's liberals owe a lot to Scalia in their opinions. He achieved this mostly by sheer force of will and intellect, and a long stint on the court. Clarence Thomas is another example of a justice who slowly came into his own, and in the last ten years (his age 65-75 seasons) has gone from punchline to influential intellectual force. SCOTUS justices take time to develop, both in terms of their intellectual impact and in terms of their relationships on the court. Replacing Sotomayor early may buy you a few extra years of a nominal democrat on the court, but it may cost you a more influential judge in the meantime. Silver, because his toy model can't account for jurisprudential influence, ignores all this. It's impossible to model, so it is ignored, or worse derided as fake and gay.
Flaw 2) Defeatism Silver derides politicians as irrational, for foolishly believing "their party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers on the major questions of the day." This is accurate, but also ignores the point: if you don't think your party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers, then you shouldn't be doing this. The only reason to get into politics is because you think you can win. If you can only lose, you need to change strategies. Silver's models predict that Democrats won't control the Senate for some time; that is within the power of the Democrats to change! Replacing Sotomayor because you likely won't control the Senate for another 16(!) years is like signing a high-priced closer to get a .500 baseball team an extra win, you still aren't making the playoffs. It also ignores history: the Senate has changed hands repeatedly, 8 times since 1980, or roughly once ever six years. If you start from the assumption that the Democratic message is basically unpopular in much of the country, such that they will never hold a Senate majority, then the Democratic party needs to rebuild from the ground up. Don't waste energy lobbying for Sotomayor to retire, lobby for Ds to pull their heads out of their asses in the heartland. If Democrats don't think they can win majorities, they shouldn't be Democrats, and shouldn't care about the SCOTUS majority. If you don't see a path to victory for your project, you need a new project. There's even a sort of "tanking" argument to be made that strategically, 6-3 and 7-2 aren't that different, so it doesn't matter if Sotomayor is replaced by an originalist, and it's politically better for Ds to face a brutally conservative SCOTUS, which might allow them to pass laws to bypass SCOTUS altogether, rather than a mildly less conservative SCOTUS. The only path to a liberal Majority on the SCOTUS is for Ds to win the Senate and the Presidency, repeatedly, they need to be working towards that goal, not maintaining their minority.
Flaw 3) Eliminating the Individual Silver assumes that any D is as good as any other D. That any D Senate is as good as any other D Senate, and any D justice is as good as any other D justice. This is misguided. The D justice that would get past this D Senate is probably going to be a milquetoast, below average, moderate. Sinema and Manchin wouldn't have it any other way, and no Rs have the guts to cross the aisle. If Sotomayor had the opportunity to retire with a 55 or 60 vote D majority, she could be assured of being replaced by a successor with a brilliant career ahead of him. If Sotomayor retires now, she's quite likely to be replaced by a third-rate non-entity. This is the Trump problem that made the original FiveThirtyEight blog unreadable since 2016: Trump didn't just accept the numbers, he changed them. That's what political leaders do: they don't accept facts on the ground, they alter them. Sabermetrics treats the ballplayers like numbers, probabilities of outcomes at the plate, but in order for every MLB player to get to the bigs, to become those numbers, that player had to believe in himself. He had to work hard, thinking he could get better, thinking he could win, even if statistically he wasn't likely to. Nobody ever made it to The Show surrendering to the numbers.
This kind of short-sighted, analytical approach to politics, slicing and dicing demographics to achieve tactical victories, is the noise before defeat. We saw the flaws in this strategy in the Clinton campaign, and to a large extent in the Biden '20 campaign where Trump vastly over-performed his underlying numbers. We're watching Biden '24 sleepwalk towards a possible November defeat, relying on demographic numbers that seem increasingly out of date. And while it's not all Nate Silver's fault, this kind of sneering bullshit is what drives people away from politics. It drives away exactly the people you need: people who irrationally believe in your political project, and will sacrifice for its success. It points away from leadership and towards management. It undermines coalitions by making it obvious they are only ever conveniences. It is bad politics.
TLDR: Nate Silver thinks 70 is a good retirement age for Sotomayor because we might not see a Democratic Senate Majority again for a while, but if we can't get a D Senate for 16 more years, what's the point anyway?
My mom and dad are the same height, name 5'6. It's always been a mild peeve that she can't wear heels, but they get along fine regardless. I'm by far the tallest on dad's side, and there are plenty of my male relations who were born after the immediate decade or so of privation from being penniless refugees fleeing a genocide ended. My mom was considered quite tall for a girl, by Indian standards of her time, though that's only just slightly above average now for the newer crop. Her side of the family did tend taller, but even then, uh, maybe like two of my maternal cousins once removed are taller than me? And it's a very big family.
My paternal grandpa was supposedly quite tall, but then again, he died of cancer shortly after being lined up against a wall, though the cancer got him only because the Pakistani lieutenant responsible for rounding up all "military aged males" in the village took pity on a 65 year old man quite obviously on the verge of death. Maybe they were being frugal with the bullets, but I like to be charitable.
So it's possible that my dad drew the short straw, semi-literally, and my mom's side was always taller than average.
It seems odd to write off possible wife and mother on the grounds that "she's not five foot nine, my possible sons possibly might be under six feet tall!"
Note that I never said a girl being short was a deal-breaker. I was planning to marry my ex after all, and she'd need 12 inch heels and a stiff breeze upwards to look me in the eye.
I wouldn't call my concern with the height of my future son irrational at the least, height matters for men, I'm suitably thankful for being lucky in that regard. Given that my brother is almost as tall (albeit much more handsome), I am modestly confident it wasn't a fluke. The genes for height are complicated, but there's an equation for a rough and ready estimate of the likely height of your kids, based off the average of the parents and adjusting upwards by 3 inches if blue, down if pink.
If I married someone 5' tall and had a boy, they will likely be around 5'9" tall, on average. This is only an estimate, maybe they'd be lucky like I was. I'd prefer not to take the risk, though it's hardly the end of world when it comes to my choice in partner. Just something that eats away at me from the inside.
Also, if you have short daughters, then you're just setting up the next generation of "this woman is too short to be the mother of my future sons", so better put them on HGH as well.
I expect gene therapy for any purpose, including height to be easily available by then. It's a shame it's not here in time for me, but if I ever went to the trouble of going the IVF route and paid for genetic screening, I suspect I could buy it. I don't want my son to be 7' tall, but even a humble 6' and change is acceptable. I'd settle for 5'10 assuming everyone else wasn't making their Uber-kids taller. I don't need IVF, I know (regrettably) that the swimmers swim.
And what's wrong with HGH anyway? Your body makes it by the bucketload during puberty and in small amounts elsewhere. It only causes issues if given too late, or produced by a tumour when the bones are fused, making you look like a gorilla. (Gigantism during puberty, acromegaly is the gorilla bit)
It's modestly expensive, but it'll pay for itself, and I'm not quite planning the future of my grandchildren yet. Though I do hope to be around to see them.
Believe me that most men couldn't give less of a shit about the height of a girl if she's cute. Women? Oh boy.
dale-cloudman
1hr ago
The day & night is relevant here. The sunlight has the potential to heat the ground to over 100ºC (212ºF). The reason it doesn't get that hot is because the ground conducts heat to the air, which then convects upwards. So the sunlight, during the day, has the power to heat the surface far above the blackbody average.
Then, you just need to compare temperatures at differing elevations to see that the adiabatic lapse rate has a real effect on the temperatures you find there. Compare bottom of grand canyon to top of grand canyon to high up on a mountain-top. The air pressure at all of these levels is, of course, higher than the air pressure would be without an atmosphere, which is zero.
So we know for a fact that gravity causing increased air pressure results in higher temperatures than those found at lower air pressures. This is observable, empirical, and irrefutable. I wrote some more detail about the lapse rate here: https://www.themotte.org/post/960/the-vacuity-of-climate-science/205320?context=8#context .
The atmosphere, thus-warmed during the day, then prevents the night-time temperatures from getting as cold as they do without an atmosphere (-100ºC on the moon), much like how a blanket works.
The net effect of the above is evidently that it is cooler during the day than without an atmosphere, warmer at night than without an atmosphere, and the 'average' temperature is overall higher than without.
Mantergeistmann
1hr ago
Having been involved in the sausage-making for DEI-mandated changes to video game art in the past
I would love to see an effortpost on that sometime, if you're up for it.
sohois
1hr ago
none of it makes sense until you get about 95% of the way through the game
This is true of pretty much all Final Fantasy stories. Actually the FF series is an interesting case study for this topic, seeing as games have been consistently released for the past 30 years with many of the same people involved again and again.
FarNearEverywhere
undereducated and overopinionated
1hr ago
There are also other measures of HBD besides raw IQ, most obviously in the tendency towards aggression and violence.
That, I agree, is the important thing, and the emphasis on IQ is not helping the real problem we need to tackle: why are some groups apparently predisposed to being aggressive and violent? Stupid but law-abiding is better for the whole society than smart but criminal.
curious_straight_ca
1hr ago
I agree that's a reasonable factor but it doesn't seem like a significant one. I'd be more amenable to an argument of the form "people can adapt to anything, and it's just not bad enough to override the confused desires that led them there", but they do not at all seem to be in the state of "would regret it but see as sunk cost", that feels very different.
curious_straight_ca
1hr ago
I don't think this is perfect. There are a significant number of people who seem to have developed something like transness, whatever you want to call it (and maybe there are different things that cluster), people who describe themselves getting off to the idea of being a woman and wanting to wear female clothes and only then learning about being trans and really wanting to be that. Here's an example, and this isn't strong cherrypicking, I linked Zack's blog in this thread.
On 6 August 2006 (I was eighteen years old), while browsing Wikipedia (likely the 31 July revision of what is now the "Blanchard's transsexualism typology" article?), I came across the word autogynephilia for the first time, and immediately recognized that this was the word; this was the word for my thing.
I didn't know it was supposed to be controversial, and was actually surprised that it had been coined in the context of a theory of transsexualism; I had never had any reason to come up with any ludicrous rationalizations that I was somehow literally a girl in some unspecified metaphysical sense.
I wrote in my notebook:
THERE'S A WORD FOR IT. There's a word for it. I don't know whether to be happy that there's an adjective for what I have, or sad that other men have it, & that it's not mine, & only mine. Bless Wikipedia for showing me [...] But still, after all emotions have fitted themselves away, there is the word. "Autogynephilia." So simple; I know all the foreign roots; I should have thought of it. "Autogynephilic." That's what I am.
notebook: THERE'S A WORD FOR IT ...
And:
Scarcity is a metaphysical fact, so why am I hurt when my word (which I didn't invent & only discovered a few hours ago) has so many connotations attached to it that I don't like? The dictionary definition is perfect for me, but all the exposition after that has to do with transsexualism, which annoys me, although thinking of it now, I suppose it would seem to be a logical extension to some. I'm autogynephilic without being gender-dysphoric—or am I? If transitioning cheap & fast & painless & perfect—wouldn't I at least be tempted? What I can't stand is transsexuals who want to express the man/woman they "truly are inside"—because I don't think there's any such thing. It has to be about sex—because gender shouldn't exist.
A lot more people have this experience with 'being trans' than 'autogynephilia', and I've read the same thing about 'being trans'. I don't think this is compatible with an exclusively memetic diagnosis, even though I do think most currently trans individuals would desist and forget about everything related to it eventually if they were in a universe with no other (depending on your POV) TruTrans people / people believing in the meme. And I think as a result your ethical grounding has to actually be able to claim 'no, these people who didn't get it memetically shouldn't transition either' if you want to claim that the concept as a whole should go.
Some of the contraband shellfish quantities involved seem way too high for just personal consumption, and so we wondered if the motivation was selling their haul to some less-than-scrutinizing restaurants.
Do people not go harvesting shellfish as a commercial operation on Canadian beaches? It's fallen out of favour here now, but in my own town there used to be people going out on the harbour or out to the beaches when the tide went out so they could gather mussels etc. for sale.
The big deal here is salmon fishing, which is a perennial (though again, died down in recent years) tussle between the holder of the fishing rights on the river (who is selling them as part of the package of tourism to overseas fishermen for the whole experience) and the local guys fishing the river (poaching) and selling on the salmon.
Nobody round here is Cambodian (yet) so yeah, I think you can take it they're selling the shellfish on, well unless they're planning a multi-generational get-together of an enormous clam bake 😁
I'm going to go out on the opposite limb here and claim that Western (which is what we are really talking about re: whiteness) success is down to Christianity. A set of moral, ethical and cultural values that were imposed society-wide across a particular region for centuries shaped the mindsets and expectations of the inhabitants around things like the common good (keep the rules about over-fishing, and don't over fish because everyone should get their fair share, and a fair share is due because 'who is my neighbour/love your enemy/we are all children of God' etc.)
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1hr ago
In general I think formalism is a good thing. If we’re to have a debate on the merits of a certain social system or political ideology, we must know what it is that we’re actually talking about. If I’m advocating for “democracy” or “white nationalism” or “communism” it’s absolutely important to know what the terms actually mean. The first reason this is important is that it prevents people from speaking past each other. If “communism” is formally defined as “state ownership of capital” then we can be sure we won’t get lost in the weeds of talking about things that look like communism that actually aren’t like Kibutz or monasteries or nuclear families. It also avoids the issues of changing definitions and snuck premises. If we don’t define Communism, then either one of us are free to change the definition in ways that suit us. If I don’t agree with communism, I can redefine it to be only totalitarian socialism and dismiss everything else as “not really communism” even if it would meet the definition. If I’m in favor of communism, I can do this in reverse and start including Sweden as a communist country because some utilities and the health care system are state run. It also prevents to snuck premise problem where I talk about things that I really wish were part of the communist system but aren’t.
I agree with so much of this, but want to offer one piece of gentle pushback - there's an old sports axiom that you shouldn't do the thing that your opponents want you to do. Don't punt on 4th and 1, don't pitch to Barry Bonds, don't take a race out slow against Mo Farah, don't swang and bang with Derrick Lewis. I'm someone that absolutely despises Sotomayor and the view that the Constitution should be highly malleable to current-year preferences, and what I want is absolutely for her to keep her seat for the moment. This is my preference for purely strategic reasons - if she stays, she may well die and be replaced by someone that views the law much more like I do. If she retires now, it'll be an incredibly stupid spectacle with people insisting that we need another Wise Latinatm and it'll probably be some crank for the Ninth Circuit or something. Regardless of whether you take a Moneyball approach or a trad gut-feel approach, you should generally not give your opponents what they want.
For me, the best argument for her not retiring cynically would be that the goal should not be to game the institutions and that you should stand on the business of insisting that this type of institutionalism should be taken seriously. The problem there is that the left already views the right as having defected from that equilibrium by refusing to confirm Garland and then replacing Ginsberg almost immediately on death.
Your argument for the growth and influence of justices over time makes sense, but the problem really does come down to the object-level justice in question - it doesn't seem like anyone, left or right, sincerely believes that Sotomayor is an intellectual giant that's going to change hearts and minds. I'm sure there's a spin on this from her fans, that it's just that her detractors are a bunch of stupid racists, but it doesn't seem like there's any real disagreement that she's never going to be treated like an important intellectual figure in shaping future courts. This argument would work much better for Kagan, who generally is treated as a serious and influential colleague with incisive perspective by both friends and foes.
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