domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
6m ago
Basically what @madeofmeat said. If a mod is in a discussion thread as a participant and someone says something rude/antagonistic to the mod, we generally will recuse ourselves and let another mod adjudicate. (This is not a "blanket policy." If you reply to me by saying "go fuck yourself" - something that has actually happened - I don't feel a need to recuse myself in handing out a ban.) But if a mod modhats you and you reply to the modhat comment with antagonism, you're escalating and that mod is entitled to decide message you're sending is "I will not follow the rules and need more serious consequences."
Note also that no one ever gets banned for responding to a modhat comment by saying "I think your moderation is bad and I didn't deserve to be modded." We probably won't agree with you, but we don't ban people just for arguing or disagreeing with us. What @FarNearEverywhere did was flat-out say "No, I will not follow the rules." If she's just omitted the "No," I'd probably have told her (again) to regulate herself and stop using her feelings as an excuse. If she'd wanted to debate why her post was too condescending but the one she was responding to (which she claims started it) was not, I might or might not have indulged her, but I wouldn't have banned her.
But if a mod says "Stop doing this" and you say "I will not stop doing this," well, what kind of response are you expecting?
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6m ago
No. The principles involved might include numbers, which would require a measurement of some sort to have a min and a max, but there are a few other qualifications which should be considered. For example, is it known that this person was freed from prison in their home country to get a visa to the USA? No visa.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16m ago
Almost everything we think and do in the modern world has at least some of its roots in the Enlightenment.
A lot of what we think and do has some of its roots in the Enlightenment. There are notable exceptions, a lot of those exceptions cluster in thought-space, and they form the foundation of Red Tribe.
The United States itself is a product of the Enlightenment (founded by Enlightenment thinkers etc.) and he was a super patriotic Red Tribe American.
America (together with Britian and their progeny) appears to me to be a clear outlier in the range of Enlightenment societies, throughout the entire history of the Enlightenment from its founding till now. It is nonetheless true that America has much of its roots in the Enlightenment, though, and I would argue that is why America is doomed. We didn't get enough of the Enlightenment to wreck us on the spot, but we got more than enough for the social equivalent of cancer, which we are now dying of.
Taking his arguments seriously we could also accuse him of all kinds of things that he would disagree with and doesn't believe in because of tenuous links.
In the first place, he is not here to defend himself, so it seems rather unsporting. But I am here, I am better at maintaining decorum than he was, and I'm willing to defend most of his arguments or make similar ones of my own. If you think taking my arguments seriously leads to absurd results, feel free to elaborate.
non_radical_centrist
20m ago
Sure, but I don't think we're going to ever get to that point anytime soon, because some questions are real hard to forecast. I don't think anyone today knows when say the Israel-Palestine conflict will next have a ceasefire, but that's something a lot of people would like to know. If we get to a point where we can forecast so well everyone agrees on when it's most likely to end, then that's mission accomplished.
This is a big problem on Manifold Markets and on Polymarket. On Manifold, there are a lot of market creators who write ambiguous resolution criteria or they even change the resolution criteria after people have placed bets. The resolution criteria often describe something quite different than what the question is literally asking. For example, there was a question that straightforwardly asked whether Israel blew up a certain hospital in Gaza, and then when it turned out the hospital hadn't been blown up at all and that the bomb had exploded in the parking lot, the question was changed to whether Israel was responsible for the explosion.
It has become common to resolve in favour of some nebulous, undefined "spirit" of the question, rather than the actual meaning of the question that was asked. A lot of markets become mainly bets on how the creator will decide to resolve it rather than on what the question is purportedly about.
On Polymarket, the resolution mechanism for disputed questions relies on a Keynesian beauty contest that has settled on an equilibrium where everyone assumes the simplest and stupidest possible interpretation, and now people are even contesting uncontroversial resolutions in order to take advantage of this broken system. There will be a question that resolves and everyone agrees that it was resolved correctly, but then the resolution will be contested and everyone knows the vote will go in favour of some hypothetical interpretation that would only work if everyone was retarded, so they vote that way. No one agrees with the interpretation, but everyone is incentivized to vote how they think everyone else will vote. And everyone knows the winning vote is expected to be the one that doesn't involve reading the full resolution description and doesn't involve using any sort of complex thought.
Ben___Garrison
31m ago
I followed a few of these types of accounts, the ones that would repost old stuff to farm karma. Some of them were on /r/4chan, some were on bigger subs like /r/pics or /r/funny. What I saw was that a lot of them get banned pretty quickly, but some of them turned around and sold their account to a third party. The most common client seemed to be porn actresses trying to sell their videos. It seemed like the ones farming accounts were typically from 3rd world countries like Indonesia and Bangladesh, although I bet there's pretty stiff competition from chatGPT now.
Reposting something popular is pretty common, and I don't think it's particularly harmful even if it's a little annoying to see the same thing (but how many of us even remember Reddit posts from years ago)? There's a big difference between that sort of thing, and political manipulation via buying upvotes, which is theoretically doable but I don't think anyone has shown real evidence that it's widespread. The layman's idea is politics is an arena drenched in money with moustache-twirling villains engineering everything behind the scenes, but in reality it has a lot less money than the power it wields would presumably incentivize, mostly due to coordination problems.
Seeing an entire Reddit thread with similar comments is very strange, and it's a shame that the new thread you mentioned got taken down as I would have very much liked to examine some of the accounts to see what they're up to.
laxam
32m ago
You'd have to be pretty simple to think that most of the political stuff you read on Reddit or Hacker News isn't deeply manipulated.
You ever notice how political arguments usually have the same arguments, even the same sources? Plenty spreads through the networks of social media, I'm sure, but the idea that they're working from the same songbook because it's been provided to them by an organization is pretty credible. There's a LOT of money floating around, ready to chase after social influence.
Felagund
34m ago
which is growing
Yeah, I certainly got that impression.
and also tends to be the most moderate on hot-button issues
Huh, I would have expected the FSSP to be more moderate in general. Is that not the case?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
34m ago
Every single information and/or discussion channel/forum is getting shittier and shittier. I posit that in addition to algorithms maximizing engagement or minimizing whatever, it's also the userbase.
The true old timers will tell you that they wish September '93 would end.
Not that I disagree, but the observation is hardly new, and yet we're nominally still here. I sometimes wonder if it's bias in the observation, but maybe there are objective measurements somewhere.
Felagund
42m ago
Hell isn't unfair. We deserve it.
If anything, it's heaven that's unfair.
There's no way to reconcile that fate with any of the rest of the New Testament claiming God to be extremely loving.
Why not?
Glassnoser
42m ago
I'm guessing the first post is all real people and the second one is bots copying it. All the comments in the second post were posted within a very short period of time on a new post by accounts with usernames typically used by bots.
drmanhattan16
43m ago
The posters on HackerNews, ever blinkered, theorize that this is some sort of effort to farm karma in order to promote products. That theory is almost certainly not true. There is minimal commercial value to Reddit accounts.
Your rebuttal makes no sense. The argument is that these accounts are pretending to be people to sway people's decisions on the products they buy. The commercial value of an account doesn't factor into it.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
52m ago
I have a question, tangentially related but actionable nevertheless.
Every single information and/or discussion channel/forum is getting shittier and shittier. I posit that in addition to algorithms maximizing engagement or minimizing whatever, it's also the userbase. The average user is getting younger, less attentive and mostly importantly dumber. And this will only get worse as more of the third world with their sub 100 IQ's (Indians shitting up comments is a plentiful example) gain access to the internet.
Most of the internet is already unreadable to me. Not only is the discourse vaccous, it's actively harmful to my psychological and intellectual health.
Where do I even go in 10 years? Maybe Sam Kriss was right about the internet dying. It might serve me emails and host my software creations but it will not serve people like me anymore in the near future.
epohon
59m ago
Some years back I was marginally active on Reddit, not at the power-janny level, a post or a comment here and there, and having a handful of accounts to upvote myself, without any bots or efforts to circumvent detection, made a notable difference in the visibility of my quips and animal videos. Still you're dead wrong. Hacktivists aren't manipulating Reddit, because manipulation implies an outcome the target isn't desiring to happen.
stav
1hr ago
The 1960's example is a bad example because many of those Democrats switched to being Republicans such as Strom Thurmond after the Democrats started pushing Civil Rights legislation.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
The real issue with the tradcath marriage market is the missing step A- the social technology to force young people to take budding relationships very seriously and either call them off or get engaged in a quick timeframe is there. It works. It’s just, well, that requires a step A to get there and tradcath communities are extremely bad at that step A. I have yet to see a workable solution actually get implemented and it’s not as if there’s a single top down authority to make people adopt one.
It doesn’t seem like there’s an epidemic of bad marriages or whatever, tradcaths expect to have to make sacrifices to have a marriage work out and a preexisting framework for deciding who sacrifices what. That may not be perfectly fair, but it’s highly workable and intuitive.
stav
1hr ago
I was literally going to make that same metaphor with humans and apes. Hlynka was incapable of seeing this. You go back far enough and almost all intellectual movements in the West have common roots. Almost everything we think and do in the modern world has at least some of its roots in the Enlightenment. The United States itself is a product of the Enlightenment (founded by Enlightenment thinkers etc.) and he was a super patriotic Red Tribe American. Taking his arguments seriously we could also accuse him of all kinds of things that he would disagree with and doesn't believe in because of tenuous links.
stav
1hr ago
Almost everything we think and do in the modern world has at least some of its roots in the Enlightenment. The United States itself is a product of the Enlightenment (founded by Enlightenment thinkers etc.) and he was a super patriotic Red Tribe American. Taking his arguments seriously we could also accuse him of all kinds of things that he would disagree with and doesn't believe in because of tenuous links.
HighResolutionSleep
1hr ago
Is the only principled position either zero immigrants or infinity immigrants?
jeroboam
1hr ago
It's All Astroturf
I came across this post today comparing two Reddit threads on LateStageCapitalism, posted 10 months apart, with essentially the exact same content, including top level comments and replies but with different user names.
Discussion on HackerNews.
The posters on HackerNews, ever blinkered, theorize that this is some sort of effort to farm karma in order to promote products. That theory is almost certainly not true. There is minimal commercial value to Reddit accounts.
The alternate explanation seems obvious. Hacktivists are manipulating Reddit to promote far-left ideas, creating fake accounts to post and vote. This does not take much imagination. In fact, Trump supporters were doing the very same thing in 2016 prior to being stomped by the site admins.
You'd have to be pretty simple to think that most of the political stuff you read on Reddit or Hacker News isn't deeply manipulated. It doesn't take many votes to sway things in one direction or another. All it takes is a few downvotes to keep dissenting voices from even appearing in front of real users. On the other hand, with a few upvotes, your own content will be featured front and center. It's comically easy to achieve.
It's been said that most of what you read on line is written by crazy people. I think it's worse. I think it's written by people who are trying to manipulate you.
100ProofTollBooth
1hr ago
They’re bankrupt and trads are scared of student loans. Right now the trend is against small Catholic colleges
I didn't know this. Thanks.
who are shifting towards charismatic Catholics to make up for it.
So .... protestants.
the broken marriage market
Yeah, I was remiss to have left that out. I think part of the thing about the Gen-Z Catholics that is worrisome is they think that tradcathin' will make marriage easier. It won't, it just makes the commitment to the idea that much more serious. The massive external danger is that the secular world looks at marriage as an easy in-and-out situation that one can simply eject from if they feel like it gets in the way of "who you are" (or other such nonsense).
Gaashk
1hr ago
Except the UMC-raised men don't have the same financial status now as the UMC women did when they were growing up; they're earlier in their careers and thus lower on the finance/status ladder than the women's fathers were.
It seems like a person would have to be awfully stupid not to notice this about their own life?
The latter are actually double whammy, as higher rents hurts UMC men's ability to save for a home/family, and higher home prices means that their diluted savings don't go as far when it comes time to get married and buy a place.
Hence why in America women generally contribute to housing costs. I'm not sure about the statistics, but Americans mostly seem to buy houses when already engaged/married/ready to have a baby. Do they not in Korea? If not, why not?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
Is it the expectation In Korea? Certainly for hardcore traditionalists, though hardcore traditionalists wouldn't want the wife working at all. I am not convinced the current parenting age generation is so inclined, though it makes for a rich discussion to believe so.
Supah_Schmendrick
1hr ago
Running a household used to be a complex operation requiring the deployment of a lot of different technical and personal skills as well as management and long-term planning. If modern labor-saving machinery and industrial techniques have obsoleted this role and made people unhappier, perhaps that might have implications for the obsoleting of further social roles and jobs via technology.
How does anyone who isn't born a pathological misanthrope come to believe this?
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