domain:betonit.substack.com
AvocadoPanic
14m ago
They barely had the conceptual framework to understand mental illness in the first place.
Are the current year frameworks better or just different?
Unless there's some identifiable treatable organic cause for the anxiety, mood or personality disorder might the patient improve just as well be guarding against and rebuking the demons of pride, envy, sloth, lust, etc? Especially if most of the available therapy interventions perform as well as each other.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
21m ago
yaslighting
I am so so using that term from now on...
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
35m ago
This form of reasoning is alien to me. I don't think queues are Gods spoken word like the British but I don't entirely disrespect them either. For the most part, I respect the queue and don't cut in, ever.
I don't see any reason at all why one would give up their first place in this situatioin. You were right, they were all wrong. You stood in the real queue, they stood in the false one. Why does the abstract queue matter here???
The whole point of a queue is to serve in order of arrival, and you arrived first. If your logic is extended, then the first person to leave their house should get on first! The game theory of this doesn't work either. You WANT the system to reward good judgement and punish bad judgement!!!
This is just a pathological level of oversocialization, to have even had these thoughts occur in your mind... Jesus Christ. I wish I knew you, so I could take advantage of you.
AvocadoPanic
39m ago
It is seen as empowering and feminist to socially pressure women into denying one of the most natural human impulses, that of having and raising children, so that they can get more educated and make more money.
This is often reinforced by the meme that as a woman you should not be dependent on a man. In my experience this does a disservice to those who believe it. My wife and I are mutually dependent on each-other, in our complimentary domains. She's been a full-time homemaker the past 8 years. One of her friends from uni, who is now literally a witch, was shocked to hear that she is dependent on me financially.
I see it as the value she provides to our home and our four children far exceeds the value of her working for an employer. We'd be unable to pay a person of equivalent caliber to perform the work she does for our family.
SteveKirkland
46m ago
Having lab-grown meat available as an option does not force anyone to eat it, and it doesn't take away traditional options
It literally does, they literally say that's the goal, I am literally looking at a half-million dollar federal grant right now that talks about using vat meat to "disrupt traditional livestock production in a just and equitable manner" https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_20196702329856_12H3/
I hate lies so much. People telling low effort, stupid lies right to your face and sneering at you for daring to point out they're lying, it makes me so angry I feel like throwing up and smashing things.
Why do you do it? It can't be strategic because the strategy is stupid and ineffective. Do you just enjoy the feeling of gaslighting people? Fucking stop it, because it's poison.
MartianNight
53m ago
Yes, I agree that failing to do something useful in the past shouldn't prevent you from doing something useful today, but by that very logic, the government can still ban any number of unhealthy foods if it wanted to.
That's why I don't buy the explanation that the ban on lab-grown meat was motivated by concern for public health, because if that were true, the government would also be banning alcohol, tobacco, sugary drinks, etc. If you want to explain the meat ban in terms of public health concerns, you have to explain why none of the other, much more effective, bans are happening.
Of course, in reality it has nothing to do with public health, but simply waging the culture war. DeSantis is trying to own the libs by banning something that they advocate for. DeSantis himself said as much:
“Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” said Governor Ron DeSantis. “Our administration will continue to focus on investing in our local farmers and ranchers, and we will save our beef.”
Nowhere does it say that public health concerns were the reason for the ban. Instead, it's all about “fighting the elites” and “saving our beef”. If lab-grown meat was provably more healthy than regular meat, DeSantis would still oppose it for the above reasons.
And of course the whole reasoning is bogus. Having lab-grown meat available as an option does not force anyone to eat it, and it doesn't take away traditional options. The idea that allowing anyone to eat lab-grown meat would result in everyone being forced to eat it is a classic example of a slippery slope fallacy.
Tenaz
53m ago
Alexander the Great clearly beat all mother's throughout history in achievement.
In achievement, maybe. In prestige, Mary the mother of Jesus has him and probably all other men beat.
Tenaz
54m ago
I think $14/hr. Tbf though these guys aren't the brightest and I'm not sure I'd even describe it as a career "choice." Like leaves, they were blown around by the winds of culture until they happened to end up as aides.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
55m ago
This problem is avoidable by not having shitty books to begin with.
AvocadoPanic
55m ago
To claim that modern society has devalued motherhood and femininity, or made them low status, is completely backwards.
Is your argument that modern society values motherhood more? That there have never been so few women per capita becoming mothers, to me is evidence against this.
Complementarianism, may be expressed more now, I suspect for much of existence it went without saying, but was no less true.
functor
1hr ago
Counterpoint: Say something about someone's mom who is from a traditionalist culture and if you survive the reaction you should reevaluate women not being valued. Mothers and matriarchal figures are highly respected.
Inferior is a relative term, it simply depends on what we are measuring. With that said, the standard deviation for achievement is limited for women. Becoming a king is a greater achievement than motherhood. Alexander the Great clearly beat all mother's throughout history in achievement. However, few men live up to that level. The mother's aren't valued aspect is dependent on a culture where people think they can be whatever they want and they are comparing house wife to astronaut. Not average job of a man to mother of 2-3
Jiro
1hr ago
decisions they (the Israeli people and their forefathers in general, and Netanyahu in particular) made before were what got them in this situation to begin with.
Decisions such as being Jewish and alive at the same time?
cjet79
1hr ago
It does seem like individual taste buds are bad, but society wide taste buds are pretty accurate and good.
To_Mandalay
1hr ago
To claim that modern society has devalued motherhood and femininity, or made them low status, is completely backwards. Motherhood and femininity in general have been devalued for as long as patriarchy has existed, so pretty much the whole of human history. I can't think of any human cultures, let alone any of the big-name European and near-eastern ones that the modern west is descended from, which have not considered the female sphere and female pursuits to be intrinsically lesser than that of men.* The "oh, women aren't inferior to men, they just have different strengths/they're made for different roles" line you hear from conservatives nowadays (what Christians call 'complementarianism') is itself an anti-modernist rearguard action. For the great majority of the history of western civilization, philosophers, theologians, and intellectuals, whether Pagan, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or atheist, have been happy to state that actually, women are just strictly inferior to men. It's the reason you occasionally get figures like Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great who are praised for being essentially men in women's bodies, but you never get men praised for being essentially women in men's bodies.
What happened in more resent centuries isn't that motherhood and womanhood were devalued. Motherhood and womanhood were devalued way back in the primordial past, and only recently have women been allowed to escape such devalued roles at scale.
You can't make motherhood 'prestigious' because motherhood has never been prestigious. Closest thing would just be banning women from doing actually prestigious things.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Ironically, Afrikaaners would likely be one- the white TFR in South Africa is just below replacement and while I can't find sources that differentiate by ethnic background, at least not in a language I read, the English language ones note Afrikaaners as having larger families than British whites. Dutch Calvinists also have a comfortably above replacement TFR. American republican whites have an overall replacement level fertility rate; this points to subgroups with comfortably above replacement TFR. Mormons are surely one, and southern Evangelicals also have an elevated TFR and are basically an ethnoreligious group at this point. I suspect confessional Lutherans would also qualify. I'm uncertain at the size of the Laestadian movement, because the data is hard to collect and I don't read any of the languages in question, but their fertility rate is very high. Of course, the highest fertility rates in the world are the Pennsylvania Dutch. The Faroes have been above replacement for decades, although low population size.
If you move into eastern Europe, the Byzantine Catholic belt has an elevated fertility rate compared to its neighbors, and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in particular looks to have a fertility rate that at least pre-war was on track to reshape Ukraine's demographics. Certain Orthodox groups inside Russia claim a high fertility rate but might be lying. Orthodox Jewry famously has a high fertility rate as well. If you're willing to count southern European descent, a case can be made that Mexican whites are above replacement; Mexico refuses to publicize data on race, but it's knowable from the prevalence of the mongolian spot in Mexican hospital births that whites are increasing as a percentage of the population, and immigration to Mexico(as opposed to away from it) is overwhelmingly from brown countries.
Whites will shrink as a percentage of population basically everywhere in the world except for a few eastern Euro shitholes that no one wants to live in, which will see shrinking populations overall instead. That doesn't mean that white people are in danger of disappearing.
Bartender_Venator
2hr ago
Telling men to pursue fun degrees (creative writing, film, political science, etc.) rather than lucrative ones is like telling them to wear makeup and wait to be asked out by women. It's a fundamental denial of reality. Those who follow such advice will generally have drastically reduced romantic success. Their prospects will be fewer, worse, and less happy to marry them than they would have been otherwise.
Generally agree with your post, but this is quite STEMbrained. If you pursue a degree which makes you more interesting and fun to be around, requires developing social skills, and gives you a status hierarchy to climb, you will absolutely have more romantic prospects than if you were just grinding for money. Your future house probably won't be as nice, of course. To take political science as an example, if you're a reasonably-put-together, educated man who can bring himself to tolerate libs, DC is one of the easiest dating scenes in the world, full of attractive women looking for commitment but happy to hook up. The real downside is that these careers and status hierarchies encourage a prolonged adolescence of sleeping with all the easily available women rather than committing to one (and really, everyone ends up losing - if you want to climb a status hierarchy in creative fields, politics, etc., a good woman in your corner will do far more for your success than just the motivation to look good to girls).
On the topic of marriage and kids, I don't notice a particular difference in career paths between the young people I know who are getting married and having kids and those who aren't, except that there seems to be a gulf in fertility and age of marriage between the ones who went to state schools and the ones who went to "elite" colleges.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Some are men who pursued useless degrees and now work as aids.
Now that's an interesting career choice! How much does it pay?
Spookykou
2hr ago
That is hopelessly confounded.
It is certainly confounded enough that I did not mean to imply that I have some sort of formula that accurately describes the relationship, but are you contesting that the relationship exists at all, or do you think it is not big enough to meaningful inform how we think about the efficacy of therapy? My thought process here, in simple terms, would be that a person who is having a shitty time but does not exist in therapy culture, has a less shitty time than the same person in therapy culture. So, a study that finds that people who show up with depression get better after therapy, has the problem for me, that I do not know if that person would have had an equally bad condition in the counterfactual where they don't know what depression is. Imagine if the anorexia in South Korea story is correct, and previously Korean girls never got anorexia, and now a bunch are getting it. Someone coming along and telling me that therapy does better than a placebo at treating their anorexia with super high-powered top-tier most excellent and well replicated research, is still not offering me a particularly compelling defense, if I think therapy awareness campaigns 'caused' the anorexia in the first place. See also all the stories of, trauma counseling that traumatized someone.
I'm not trying to say that the myriad forms of mental illness have no basis in real human experiences and emotional states. I just think it's possible that therapy, and the (unavoidable?) downstream therapy culture, might actually be a bad way to structure a societal understanding and response to those feelings.
Is it a good thing that we have the option of paying money to talk to someone in private instead of running about with a machete?
Maybe? It isn't easy for me to evaluate the counterfactual. I have no idea exactly how destructive a, the way to deal with bad emotions is to go a little wild and break stuff, society needs to be, the purge is (probably) too far, the way I dealt with stress as a kid (running around yelling), probably healthier than what we do now.
dr_analog
razorboy
2hr ago
On the other hand, never taking any time for oneself can be somewhat corrosive to one's sanity....
In the last several years I transitioned from being a single hedonist bachelor guy going out every night to hang with friends and go to shows to a married guy with 2 kids + a step kid who works from home and of the time I'd consider "to myself", 99% of it is working out. No drinking, no entertainment media, no friends. I probably socialize once a month at most. And... I actually feel pretty happy and fulfilled and sane?
I'm not sure what to make of this. The satisfying and fulfilling power of family life or something?
I recently heard of yaslighting, which is where instead of convincing someone their true beliefs are delusional, you affirm their delusional beliefs and convince them they're true.
Seems to apply to a lot of things (especially transgenderism) but what I have in mind is college degree choice. Plenty of female-oriented degrees such as psychology, behavioral science, speech pathology, etc. require a Masters in order to really start working in the field. Seemingly, most of the people who study those majors just aren't aware of this.
I'm unsure whether these women just haven't googled the most basic facts of the career they'll spend their next 4-6 years pursuing, or whether they're semi-deliberately deluding themselves. My guess is the latter. If you're going to college to get married, you need to look like you have your own ambitions. Pursuing a highly-educated mate just isn't a respectable goal for women anymore.
My mother is one of these women. The way she describes it, she finished her Psychology bachelors and only then realized it would take another couple years to make a career out of it. She's extremely smart, conscientious, and logical. I can't imagine her as someone who would just forget to look into these things. During that time she married a man who would go on to become very successful, and I think that (marrying a good man, that is, not necessarily a rich one) must have been the ultimate goal all along, whatever she told herself in the process.
I'm starting to see a similar phenomenon among my siblings. My brothers have laid out step-by-step plans for college and their eventual careers. My sister just wants to study Psychology because it's interesting. None of them would breathe a word about the different expectations between the genders--the topic is somewhat taboo--but they nevertheless have Gotten the Message and are all pursuing seemingly effective strategies optimized for their gender.
My wife and I have broached the subject of Psychology careers a couple of times with my sister, and she seems actively disinterested in thinking it through. I expect she, like my mother, will get married sometime during or just after her Bachelor's degree, and claim she was unaware she needed a Master's to turn the major into a career.
This is all well and good. I find myself continually amazed at how good normies are at unconsciously separating reality from social reality and smoothly living by them both without acknowledging the contradictions. The problem arises when someone doesn't get the message and thinks the social reality is the reality, that men can "study what you enjoy" for 4 years in college with no lasting impact to career prospects or marriagability, or that women can do the same without searching for husbands and things will work out for them.
My wife is a teacher. Most of her coworkers fall into these categories. Some are men who pursued useless degrees and now work as aids. Others (the school's speech pathologists, behavioral interventionists, psychologists, etc.) are women who didn't end up getting married during their Bachelor's, and now are working very slowly towards Master's degrees while working.
American culture gets a lot of things wrong, but imo nothing so badly as gender roles. We encourage women to overeducate, in the process aging themselves out of the possibility of having children, and depriving the next generation of those who could have been their smartest and most capable mothers. It is seen as empowering and feminist to socially pressure women into denying one of the most natural human impulses, that of having and raising children, so that they can get more educated and make more money.
Telling men to pursue fun degrees (creative writing, film, political science, etc.) rather than lucrative ones is like telling them to wear makeup and wait to be asked out by women. It's a fundamental denial of reality. Those who follow such advice will generally have drastically reduced romantic success. Their prospects will be fewer, worse, and less happy to marry them than they would have been otherwise.
Telling women to not look for husbands in college, and focus on education, is similar, though its results manifest in different ways. Such women will (as they get more educated) grow increasingly unable to find comparably "impressive" partners. Many will remain single, sleeping around but never committing, while a few will "settle" many years down the road. Neither situation is great for raising a family.
Sometimes the people in the middle are hardest hurt--those who haven't bought into the modern secular ideology or the trad religious one. Women who don't go all-in on their careers, but also don't actively seek out husbands in college, and so end up in dead-end jobs with whatever mediocre husband they end up with.
American tfr fell to 1.62 in 2023, its lowest rate ever, and is even lower among our most intelligent and conscientious. Financial incentives meant to correct this in places like Finland and Turkey have accomplished very little overall. The problem is not financial, it is cultural and legal. People need to think of advice like "study your hobby and things will work out" as a malicious lie meant to signal a luxury belief. Motherhood needs to be far more prestigious than any career. Couples need to be allowed to mutually agree to contracts incentivizing them to stick together.
The truth is and always has been the truth, but more people need to be made more consciously aware of it. If women want large families, they need to start before finishing their Master's. I burned a lot of credibility with my immediate family getting married as young as I did, and sacrificing my social life and physical health to be financially ready for children quickly. This was the right decision, but it pains me to say I probably won't be able to convince them to do the same until after the crucial window has passed. I hope to convince you, though, or if you are already convinced, to offer you some ammunition convincing those you care about.
For the vast majority of people, the quality and quantity of their children will have far more of an effect on the future than anything else they could do. If you like being alive, and/or find it meaningful, it is likely your kids will too, and bringing them into the world to experience the joy of existence is an enormous gift you have the power to offer them. Less important, but still significant, 71% of Americans are happy with their decision to have children, or wish they had more, while only 10% wish they had less.
Whether for selfish or selfless reasons, having children early is the right call for most people, but our culture has conducted an enormous yaslighting campaign to prevent this from happening until it's too late.
This feigned incredulity from Scott comes off as quite dishonest:
He has some broader point that I have trouble interpreting - basically that corporations used to be cozy, chummy places full of banter and flirtation that everyone enjoyed...Still, Hanania really hammers in this point that we should apparently all be angry about the loss of corporate flirtation... books doubling as interesting settings for pornographic stories, but I’m otherwise unable to fathom the level of Hanania’s enthusiasm here.
Hi, I'm Scott Alexander, I bounce around different Rationalist Group houses, where me and everyone else in my circle forms poly-amorous relationships with with our intellectual collaborators, and spend all their time building up inside jokes, private parties, etc. You see that piece in the New Yorker about the girl who was scared about AI? I was dating her, haha. Stole her from this other guy I used to do collaborate with.
Also Scott Alexander: I guesssss I could see some weirdos who'd want their work to give them to have some banter and flirtation. I don't know if there's a lot of people, but Hannania is entitled to his opinion here, as far out as that seems to you and me.
Gaashk
3hr ago
Yeah.
Also, in my circles "self care" has mostly been co-opted by non-self actors to try to get people to do what they want them to. People do not take a personal day off of work for "self care," but rather to do a thing that they like. The people talking about self care in those words are the ones running restorative justice circles, pastors talking about "prayer and fasting as self care," an employer pushing "we all need to practice self care! Call this number for a free telephone therapy session" (presumably as an alternative to taking a half day off to see a real therapist, or asking for better working conditions). Now when I hear it I think the speaker is trying to get me to replace my actual preferences with something they consider better or more virtuous.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
Historically? They worked, and the people who studied torah all day were a minority like Catholic priests or nuns. But once you could get paid to do torah studies, an obvious incentive structure developed.
None of those are his job though. And while his job as a blogger is connected to that, his job as a psychiatrist is not, and is much more likely to be used by him as his model for what a normal job looks like. You could argue that his membership and status in the rationalist community leaves him out of touch with how many people are largely socially isolated outside of work, but I don't see how this is such an obvious point as to imply dishonesty. Though I do think it would be good if he delved into it in more detail - does he think it's more realistic to reverse the trend of social isolation through non-work communities?
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