domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
No_one
4hr ago
I really can't rule out someone making AI waifus that'd .. work as advisors to boys.
Certainly once AI gets (suppose AIs were as good at people as socially adept people, but of course had more data..) better, that'd probably work.
But who'd pay for all that compute ? We generally don't do things to solve problems but to help ourselves.
jeroboam
5hr ago
I just bought an account with 1 million karma. Now I want to reach all the people who like me so I can spam my product.
Oh wait... I can't.
Karma is absolutely useless beyond a minimal amount needed to get around spam filters on some subs.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-01990-8?fromPaywallRec=false
Global GDP is estimated to be 3.2% lower (lower/upper decile: 1.2–5.4%) at +1.5 °C of global warming, compared to a world with no further climate change beyond recent levels. At +3 °C, global GDP decreases by 10.0% (5.1–14.9%).
The damage of climate change, up to 10% of global GDP, is such an enormous sum that it is always cheaper to instead invest in carbon reduction and reduce climate change.
Of course all the same arguments and attitudes from before apply here: If one doesn’t believe in the scientific consensus in climate change why should one believe the financial modeling and projected costs of extreme weather events are correct?
Regarding the comparison and how to deal with uncertainty: I think one main difference is that vaccination was not needed for the survival of civilization. But renewable energy and electrification is needed in any case, sooner or later, because fossil fuels are a limited resource. Even under most optimistic calculations we have only 100-200 years of oil reserves left.
No, it is not, although the most moderate individual priests are probably with the FSSP. In general the FSSP has the biggest tent out of the major traditionalist groups while the others have tighter control over individual representatives, but the ‘typical’ FSSP line will be a bit more socially and sometimes liturgically conservative than other English-speaking traditionalists, although the SSPX probably does more purity testing. Conservative, top-down organizations with a history of purging their ultra conservative wing(in fairness, usually for genuine bad behavior) do not tolerate unapproved right wing radicalism very well.
Of course a slim plurality of the IRL tradcath world is French-speaking, and rules of thumb like that could easily be different across a language barrier.
DradisPing
5hr ago
The Irish left wing open borders position alway confused me. Isn't being upset about British immigration 300 years ago their whole thing?
stav
5hr ago
First of all, there is no such thing as Red Tribe. It was a thing made up by Scott that is completely unscientific and in my opinion a terrible classification system so I just reject it outright. Second of all, even if I did accept (which I don't) the backbone of this Red Tribe is the American South which were the most violent racists for the vast majority of the US's history. These were the same people who fought a war to keep slavery and fought tooth and nail to keep Jim Crow era segregation. Unless you want to say Jefferson Davis, George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, and the KKK were all leftist or Marxist (which Hylnka did) and do giga Chad levels of DR3, his theories are completely inaccurate. They don't map onto historical realities. If you sent him back in time to these Red Tribe people he claims existed and he told his theories to them about what they actually thought, they would clearly say he is 100% wrong. If you heard him argue the Civil Rights movement and what happened, he would say conservative good old boy whites were fighting segregation and hippie Marxists leftists (Rosseau influenced of course) were fighting to keep segregation. This is laughably false. You may think this is uncharitable but this is literally what he thought. I saw him write out multiple variations of this.
Plus, he commits a political version of Lewontin's Fallacy in regards to political taxonomy where if something has many similarities it is obviously the exact same. And of course, there's really only two political tribes (Hobbes and Rosseau) and he got to define them (which is why he liked Red/Blue tribe so much).
fishtwanger
5hr ago
You seem to be reacting very strongly to something, and I'm not entirely sure what, but we might be closer than you think.
By "nature documentary", I mean that although we happen to be following one little fellow around with our camera, and building audience identification with him, the choice of subject is either largely arbitrary, or selected after-the-fact when we know who gets a result we're interested in. But there's many of these potential subjects operating at any given time, with various degrees of success. If we only follow the stories of young stags who win the mating contest, or successful leaders of movements, or successful startup founders, we don't get a complete picture of the lifecycle, and can fool ourselves into mis-attributing the amounts of ability, tenacity, opportunism, and luck that are required for success. And to the degree that the OP's goal is building a theory of what happens, I think it's important to look at all the angles.
But for people who grew up under 90's liberalism, that sounds like the choices to follow particular "entrepreneurs" are freely made, and if this is what you assert, I'm prepared to push back with examples from both the market, nature, politics, and social movements.
On the one hand, at the level of the individual, of course there's free choice going on. But on the other hand, from the perspective of the potential organizer, it's all statistics, at least after the first few dozen people, and setting aside "whales" or important benefactors. It's treating the people as just another natural resource lying around, under-exploited, like an oilfield or an ocean or a bunch of horny dudes. Individual horny dudes obviously make choices about whether and where to spend money on naked Internet girls, but to the naked Internet girls they're a non-uniform resource which gets exploited as appropriate. (Attention being roughly proportional to revenue, as I understand the market dynamics?)
I think this would capture an important truth, that a mass of people looking for change can be a powerful force, if they can somehow be harnessed to all work together.
That's no really new, it's a message that all democratic countries bombard their citizens with.
I think this is the core of the misunderstanding? I can see how that looks a lot more naive and idealistic than I meant, and it looks like the mention of Lenin failed to set the tone. A herd of wild cattle is a powerful force, but if you can manage to round them up and brand them, they're all going to be eaten (or otherwise exploited).
To rephrase a bit, I think that when there are a mass of people desiring a particular type of change, that presents an opportunity for entrepreneurs to recognize and exploit this unfulfilled desire. It's not always the first who succeed; sometimes later ones will do it better. And the nature of the desire is important, in that the presented "solution" needs to cater to it. I suspect that people who come up with an ideology and then look for converts, are going to be less successful than people who find a group of potential converts and then come up with an ideology that makes them want to join (Hitler's path, IMO, although he was a part of the group himself), or people who just start improvising and don't care what they say as long as it gets crowds to cheer their name (Trump's path, IMO). Marxism is something of an exceptional case, but I think this model can cover it.
I haven't read Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals", but from what I've seen, it describes that middle approach (the Hitler one). Sure, it talks about doing everything to help "the poor", but ultimately it's about constructing an organization with yourself as a leader, and acquiring power, and the choice of ideology is completely irrelevant. The organizer may even think that they're doing it for the benefit of the people (and it's probably more effective if they do believe this, on some level), but it still boils down to "find an untapped source of power, and build an engine that exploits it", in the sense of a deck-builder card game. On the one hand, I do care about having good cards, but on the other hand, they're just pieces of cardboard that help me win the game. Maybe the solution I propose is "equal pay for equal work", or maybe it's "gas the Jews", whatever gets my power-base motivated. If the leader is just out for power, from a certain perspective there isn't a difference.
Is that sufficiently cynical? :-)
NelsonRushton
5hr 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.
"Many" is how many? I am skeptical of this claim of fact.
And what makes you say it was Democrats who pushed Civil Rights Legislation more than Republicans? For example, looking at the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 39% of House Republicans voted nay, but only 20% of Republicans, while in the Senate 31% of Democrats voted nay but only 18% of Republicans. I think the story was the same for other similar bills. Am I mistaken?
Ben___Garrison
6hr ago
Right, these politically motivated reposts are interesting to me simply due to novelty so I wanted to investigate more, but alas it seems that the duplicated post with comments has been scrubbed.
HighResolutionSleep
6hr ago
Irrespective of who is receiving them, what's the number of visas that could be issued within the foreseeable future for which shaking your fist at couldn't necessarily be considered evidence of xenophobia? Would a billion do it?
fartVader
6hr ago
Agreed on all counts. There are zero real democracies that have managed a transition from poverty to wealth. They all grew as autocracies and converted to democracies once stable.
India is unlikely to become autocratic, but the current setup has too many checks and balances. I am a big proponent of reducing states rights and opening the judiciary (primarily by allowing fast track appointments for those who excel at standardized testing , setting targets for case clearance as part of promotions and limiting the supreme court to matters of constitution, rather than morality).
That's a good start. India has fair elections. Let those elected to the parliament choose the path for the nation. Too much beaurocracy is no good.
Closedshop
話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必分
6hr ago
Staunch feminist in her early 30s meets foreign guy. Everything is going well, except that he walks out of a movie when it gets to a particularly girl-power scene. She has a two-week identity crisis over meeting someone so "anti-woman".
Please talk more about this one. What did the identity crisis entail? Was she astonished that someone could be so "anti-woman" or was it more self reflecting on how her own actions made her look to him? Or something else?
jeroboam
6hr ago
These are the type of posts which reach the front page of Reddit. The first one had 15.8k upvotes which means it reached hundreds of thousands of people.
The value of spreading a political message at that scale is far in excess of the value of a porn bot.
NullHypothesis
6hr ago
Factors Playing Into Korea's Gender War
Korea is susceptible to outside influence for a few reasons.
- Korea was a nation that occupied and had much of its culture destroyed during WWII and suffered enormous losses and destruction during the Korean war.
- Korea saw rapid economic development, transforming from one of the poorest nations to one of the richest nations in a few decades.
- Korea is a relatively small country, with most business and culture highly concentrated in the capital city of Seoul. Nearly 50% of the population live in or near Seoul.
- Korea has rapidly adopted the internet. Almost 98% of Koreans own a smartphone today, the highest in the world. Korea was quick to adopt the internet when it was able to and it has become a major part of daily Korean lives.
There are some other factors to consider that tie into the Korean culture war:
- There are huge expectations from Korean society. From a young age, Korean children are bombarded with expectations about education, dating, looks, physique, social status, success, etc. There is a reason Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Korean women have one of the highest rates of plastic surgery in the world. For example, a lot of Korean women (and even men) have their literal jaw bone cut and removed to restructure their face.
- Korean web culture and gaming/webcomic culture is a huge part of Korean lives. There is a reason the first professional mass-scale competitive esports, Starcraft, arose out of Korea of all places. So a lot of users are susceptible to changes/things in those spaces.
- Many Koreans are struggling economically, a point which is covered in depth in @rokmonster's response.
- Mandatory military service for Korean men. All men have to serve 1.5 years in the military (used to be 2 years until very recently). The compensation for military service is very little, so Korean men feel like they are penalized when trying to enter the workforce. Factor in the increased amount of women entering the workforce and men are starting to feel like they are falling behind.
- Factor these together and you end up with many Koreans that go to video games, webtoons, etc as a means to escape their highly stressful lives. So anything that can be seen as an attack on video games/webtoons/ etc. is going to be highly impactful. Factor in the shared culture and Korean's time/access to the internet and this leads to more explosive results and drama that bleed into Korean culture and life.
Here is an interesting comment I found on reddit with some stats:
Have you heard about Japan's herbivore men? That a large statistic of men aren't having sex or dating? Korea is worse. From demo 19-39 of age, roughly 75% of respondents see dating as a fear or dangerous. Reasons include: possibility of inflicted violence, gender discrimination, gender related crimes like falsely accused of SA (men) or becoming a victim of illegal recording (women), record low interest in marriage etc.
On a question "Is Korea is more favorable towards men or women?" Each sex accused each other of having the advantage and both believe they are the overwhelming victim. Historically, legitimate sexism against women did exist prevalently. But today, it's really a grey area for most developed countries where gender-specific issues do exist but it's the most equal the 2 sexes have ever been. Compare gender equality 50 / 100 / 250 / 500 / 1000+ years ago where women were second class citizens.
75% of young people are afraid of dating. That's a huge number. Korea had its own version of #metoo across many politicians, celebrities, etc, with some cases even ending in suicide (for both victim/accused). People are too stressed studying and working, they don't have the time to date. No doubt Korean internet/social media is having similar effects warping people's perspectives the same way it is doing to people in the west, and you also end up with Koreans that have warped views of the genders.
It's also interesting that both genders view themselves as the victim and that the other gender has unfair advantages. There likely is an element of truth to their claims, and this is a classic case of the grass being greener on the other side.
Megalia's Legacy And Influence On How Feminism is Viewed In Korea
This isn't the first time Korea's gender war caused huge controversies in the country. Megalia was a highly controversial feminist website that had a large influence on shaping Korean views on feminism during 2015 and 2016. According to Wikipedia, 50% of women in Korea considered themselves feminists and 25% of them attributed Megalia as the reason for it. That's 12.5% of women being influenced by a singular group, and supposedly Megalia was extremely full of misandry, with statements wanting to kill all men, calling men bugs, if they had a boy they would abort, celebrating actual stories of men being murdered, and other standard anti-men statements take up to the next level of extreme.
Just some examples of things members in the community did:
- A teacher encouraging a male student in middle school to commit suicide.
- Poisoning men with antifreeze.
- Kindergarten teacher indicating she wanted to have sexual relations with a male child.
- A more comprehensive list in Korean: https://namu.wiki/w/%EB%A9%94%EA%B0%88%EB%A6%AC%EC%95%84/%EC%82%AC%EA%B1%B4%20%EC%82%AC%EA%B3%A0
To try to keep things fair, here are some points in support/defense of Megalia:
- Statement of Megalia was satire to highlight how men talk about/treat women in Korea. They were taking what men said and just changing the genders around.
- Megalia brought to attention issue of hidden cameras in women's bathrooms.
- They raised awareness of violence against women, organizing around tragic events such as the murder of a women from a man who claimed he did so because the hated all women.
- Megalia shut down sites such Soranet, which distributed illegal pornographic material.
Here are some related drama that happened around that time related to Megalia that the west got some exposure to:
https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/4tk21u/id_like_to_share_a_disaster_happening_in_korea/ https://old.reddit.com/r/news/comments/4xummg/korean_actress_kim_jayeon_fired_by_gaming_company/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201225070116/https://np.reddit.com/r/manga/comments/4u5jbb/last_3_days_for_korean_manhwawebtoon_community/
To spare the details, there was a lot of controversy in Korea's internet, kdrama, gaming, webtoon spaces all tied to Megalia and feminism.
People made all kinds of attempts to tie Megalia and its influence to other related scandals. For example, in 2016 there was a huge political scandal involving then president Park Geun-hye being influenced/controlled by a shamanism cult. 2 million people ended up protesting and she later got impeached and arrested for the scandal. People online attempted to tie this to a conspiracy of hidden cabal of rich women in Korea using the media and politicians to support the ideas that came out of Megalia. Supposedly the Justice Party, the third biggest political party in outright declared public support of Megalia and members of Megalia infiltrated Korean news media, the Huffington post, politics to push their agenda. The source of this data is suspect so I would take this information with a grain of salt, but the point is that Megalia had such a huge impact on Korean internet discourse.
This is all past drama, but it had a huge net negative impact on Korean men's view of feminism. Even Korean women's support for Feminism began to drop due to all the controversy around it. More sensible feminists in Korea make sure to distance themselves from Megalia, but it seems to have left a permanent negative connotation of feminism in the eyes of Korean culture. If you look at recent trends, feminism has decreased outright support in Korea, such as the number of women in their 20s considering themselves feminist dropping to 31.3% in 2023.
Recent Korean Gender War Drama
I'm going to talk a bit more about the video brought up in the OP: Gacha Drama and the Korean Gender War
It's quite an informative video, although it misses some crucial context which is the information I covered above. It does seem like he covered the topic a bit in his follow-up video, but I don't have the time to watch it right now.
To summarize the video, there was controversy in a Korean gacha mobile game because a promised swimsuit skin (cosmetic purchase for a video game character) for the female character was a wetsuit, while the corresponding swimsuit skin for a male character was just a regular swimming trunk with his abs exposed. Gamers got angry and thought this was driven by feminist ideology and that their precious games were forced to be censored (remember how important games are to Korean culture?). They found a female artist on the project who had extremely feminist views (retweeting tweets from Megalia, except it was 5 years ago), blamed her for this, and pressured the company to fire her. However, it turns out this was completely false, the actual artist of the swimsuit skin was a male, and the main decision maker to give the female character the wetsuit was also a male. So to outsiders, it just looked like a group of gacha gaming incel men bullied a company into firing someone for political reasons even though said person's political views had no bearing on the decision the game company made.
Here is a decent writeup of another recent gender war controversy in Korea: https://old.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/18dz3je/least_biased_perspective_on_recent_megalia_hand/
Take a look at the hand sign in Megalia's logo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalia#Reaction_to_Gangnam_Station_femicide
While the official stance on the meaning of the hand sign is that it represents an equal sign, in reality, it was used as a way to insult men's penis size. It's basically a dog whistle much akin to the ok sign being a white supremacist symbol. Unlike the ok sign, which was a hoax perpetrated by 4chan, the Megalia hand sign was used by actual members of Megalia to insult men.
An online shitstorm happened about 2 weeks ago when an animation studio Ppuri (뿌리) was under fire because netizens discovered the infamous hand pinch sign in the promo video of Maplestory's Angelic Buster Remaster. At first netizens thought it may have been just a coincidence but upon digging into this studio's previous contract works for various gaming companies, more and more hand pinch signs were being discovered to no end (games: Maplestory, Dungeon Fighter, Blue Archive, Epic 7, Eternal Return etc). In many cases hidden within a single frame of a trailer.
Gallery of these hand signs found recently from just this studio.
However this hand sign controversy first appeared a few years ago with GS25's camping poster and a few other companies. The biggest difference between the incidents from before and the most recent one is that one of Ppuri's lead animator (Datso) was dumb enough to tweet that she worked on the Maplestory project. Revealing her past tweets and retweets linked to feminism and general misandry. Her tweet "I've never quit feminism, I'll keep doing it" has become a meme because of her phrase "은근쓸쩍 스리쓸쩍." Which I think is a really funny phrase but I have no idea how to translate it to English. Sneakily cunningly? So if you've seen the gallery and knowing this particular lead animator's political views, I think it's safe to say that it's no coincidence. It's also inconclusive to say that this animator is a Megalia user. Nevertheless the backlash has been significant.
Personally, I think this hand sign thing is blown a bit out of proportion, maybe some of these are intentional but I also think from certain angles and resting positions that pinching hand gesture can just come out naturally. Regardless, it's become a tainted symbol and something animators/game developers have to be conscious of in Korea now. Outsiders looking into the current Korean gender drama just see a ridiculous controversy, but they don't have the contextual understanding of how tainted feminism and anything associated with it has become in the eyes of the general Korean public.
I also don't think their concerns are completely unfounded even if you ignore the context. If you've been following gaming, you'll know about all the controversies related to gender/beauty that have riled recent produced names, especially from Western developers. There were controversies regarding body types, characters made to look ugly (such as in Pokemon Go), progressive storylines/ideas being pushed via Sweet Baby Inc. the list goes on and on. These trends can be argued to stem from a Feminist perspective. Stellar Blade is a recently released title from Korea that opted to not play into those tropes and instead allows a main character to be a conventionally sexually attractive female, but even that game now has a controversy around censorship. For Koreans looking at these developments on the West, it's not far a stretch for them to want to protect entertainment being produced in their own country from meeting such a fate.
Ultimately what comes to the West is highly filtered and the only reason these stories even come here is because Korean games/webtoons/tv shows/drama/kpop has a fan following. Actual gender/political war issues are less likely to make their way to the West because the number of people who would care about such things is significantly smaller.
DradisPing
6hr ago
StackOverflow has been going downhill for a long time. Goodhart's Law, "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
It's now full of thirsty newbie coders who are desperate to get answers in the hope that their StackOverflow profile will and them a job. Unfortunately being eager to help isn't useful it you're looking for specific domain knowledge.
DradisPing
6hr ago
There are professional social media botting firms that also do political posts either for money or just in their spare time. The people who work there support the cause and they can use it to sell clients on their work.
jeroboam
6hr ago
because manipulation implies an outcome the target isn't desiring to happen.
This is a good point. In the past, both left-wing groups and right-wing groups sought to manipulate Reddit. Both were successful. Back in 2016, many posts from /r/thedonald reached the front page. Then their subreddit was banned.
Now only left wing groups are allowed to manipulate Reddit. It's anarchotyranny.
Ben___Garrison
6hr ago
Well, I know some subreddits ban accounts under a certain age, and Reddit likely has additional filters for accounts that come on and immediately start advertising for porn. Buying someone else's account that has at least some legitimate-looking activity probably goes a long way to evading that.
The open internet is clearly dying. Most discussion now happens now on walled gardens such as Discord and Facebook.
LLMs will make this much worse. For example, ChatGPT-5 has been presumably been trained on internet data such as as StackOverflow. But no one will post any more questions to StackOverflow since GPT-5 will just give them the answer directly. StackOverflow will die. Rinse and repeat for any site where people once posted questions.
MiddleAgedMan
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
6hr ago
I spend nearly all of my message board time on either the Motte, Data Secrets Lox, a few other small-volume boards, and a finance board more oriented toward long-term investing. Pretty much everything else is direct blogs/substacks and an occasional quickly-regretted venture onto Twitter.
The key is smaller groups that are either gatekept or uninteresting to the general public. Everything else is garbage.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
6hr ago
Thank you! I had heard the term before but totally forgot about it, so I appreciate the info.
Ben___Garrison
6hr ago
The Border Emergency Authority is a "break in case of emergency" tool that's specific to the crisis happening now. It sunsets in 3 years, so it won't be relevant if AOC takes office in a decade unless it's renewed. If it's not used then it would be no different than the status quo, but the rest of the bill expanding funding for border security and plugging asylum loopholes would still be in place. It's in no way formalizing that 5k migrants a day is "fine", it's simply a trigger when opaque and extraordinary measures can be taken.
Trump did NOT need to pass this bill to stop immigrant caravans.
Trump was really no better than Obama when it comes to border crossings. A lot of it is driven by the relative strength of the economy, but also by non-US factors like the state of Latin American countries especially in the Northern Triangle. Your answer of "Trump didn't need this" is exactly the handwavey "Biden Bad" thing I was talking about in my earlier post. The assumption you seem to be coming to is that the tougher laws are all just a ruse, that Biden must be doing something sneaky, but this is effectively unfalsifiable.
It’s toothless. If the POTUS is of the wrong party then the border is open.
This law doesn't open the border. If you think it does, you're fundamentally misunderstanding what the bill does.
Sure, we can't rule out at some point genius autistic developers might create some AI models based on a combination of their personalities and some fantasy waifus of there.
But how's that something that's remotely relevant now ?
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