domain:samschoenberg.substack.com
Tanista
2m ago
It's easy - start with bench pressing 300lbs and then do it every other day for 6 months and you'd be golden".
It's not. It's "nobody cares what you look like at the gym, trust me. Just go and do something - anything - and you'll see that it gets easier."
For the vast majority of people, even introverts or people with anxiety issues, this incremental task is doable and gets easier over time. Maybe not pleasant, but that's a different thing.
If a person legitimately cannot perform the task or parse the underlying point behind it or introspect as to why, maybe they need a therapist. But there are people - probably more - for whom this is good advice.
SSCReader
5m ago
Well Hobbes believes the natural state is war of all against all. So the idea here is that everyone is really such a killer if left to our own devices. And war (or other catastrophes) just removes the oversight we would normally fear.
SSCReader
7m ago
Essentially (to my understanding) that people assume our rules and norms are self-enforcing whereas in actuality (as per this theory) without significant effort we would exist in the "state of nature".
So thinking that men would revert to such a state when deprived of the social efforts to repress our base instincts means you are noticing the hole in our current (mostly Western) mindset.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
7m ago
Exactly what it says on the tin. Modern civilization is so successful at hiding the base reality of violence that props it up that it's easy for people to forget it even exists. That we're just animals in a well organized pit.
Though I would argue, here this distance from violence rather manifests in being so delusional that you think a bear isn't a death machine that can eat you alive on a whim if some armed man isn't around to save you.
2D3D
8m ago
SEX AND THE BIG CITY
or
THE LAST UNINVADEABLE THIRD SPACE
In the digital age of escorts on demand and cheap flights to indulge in sex tourism, why would adult entertainment venues that offer sex-adjacent services persist, when one can get your rocks off for a much cheaper price? In observed practice within Asia, these venues exist not for booze and girls, but for establishing membership in the brotherhood: you are in our world now, and the initiation is sin.
This came about after I made a post about the adult entertainment scene in Singapore in a necro'ed thread when I saw @Pasha complain about the lack of visible seediness in one of Singapores premier red light districts. Details about the mechanics therein can be found here for context and to provide a primer for my below.
https://www.themotte.org/post/981/smallscale-question-sunday-for-april-28/211124?context=8#context
So what is this brotherhood mentioned up top? Basically it can be summed up as 'I need to know you will not fuck me over when push comes to shove'. This is perhaps foreign to professionalised pseudoacademics where people are best experienced as minimizeable windows on a zoom call, but in professions relating to physical goods and services, human trust is a shorthand for task success: better to get shit done with someone you know has your back than to waste tims searching for the MBA approved 'best fit'.
This is not limited to physical tradespeople like laborers and soldiers, but includes B2B sales professionals, commodity traders, shipbrokers, construction/civil engineering. In these environments, decision makers responsible for multi million dollar trades and projects care less about saving a rounding errors worth of marginal savings in favor of knowing who to yell at when shit goes tits up.
In the KTVs and Indian Dance Clubs and Thai Discos in Singapore, the patrons are often groups of men, usually professionals in the same cluster. Oil traders and refinery site managers, construction project managers and engineers with their lawyers and bankers, shipbrokers with agents. The booze and the women show up, the mens wallets open up, but more importantly their mouths open too. Industry gossip is adjacent to insider activity, and being part of these networks gives incredible insight into the movements and activities of not just the people in that group you are with but those groups they are part of as well. By joining or initiating these activities, an opportunity is presented to quickly establish a bond with the other men present, to immediately let it he known that you can be called upon when needed. There is incredible power to be had when you are one of the first names on the tips of powerful peoples fingers, and for many punters a successful night is not when your dick gets wet but when you get the phone number of a useful contact.
So why the sex revue? Well it is because of the steady decline of third spaces that have been invaded by credentialed professionals, especially women, who dislike legacy networks that are impenetrable. There are legit professional reasons for this, such as contravening of KYC protocols or tender processes, but for the most part the dislike of legacy networks stems from jealousy. There are plenty of women who have successfully entered halls of power, especially in Thailand and Hong Kong where female scions are groomed for succession by their fathers, but for the most part a lack of trust in these women to bother with handshake agreements leads to their exclusion from networks of power. Thus, the networks must be dismantled as much as possible, starting with removing the exclusivity of their assembly grounds. Male only social clubs have steadily been eroded to be female inclusive, from the Knights of Columbus to Freemasons, and other threads have highlighted youth organizations being the starting point of this rot, with the Boy Scouts being mixed gender while girl scouts remain female exclusive. Whatever organizational benefit there is to opening up the genders, it does mean there are less third spaces for men to discuss the ongoings of power.
Therefore, the last venue is the strip club, the sauna, the banya, the KTV. The men say they are going there to be sexual degenerates, and many often are purely socially retarded men seeking base human interactions, but the true sustenance of these places is being the third place that women have zero interest in demeaning themselves to enter. That alone will ensure their continued presence even as the world gets continually anonymized into the homogenous digital soup: the last bastions of human connections will concentrate under the pressure, hardening its borders to continual external forces till they are fully impenetrable.
zeke5123a
15m ago
I would say it is upwards of 50% in commercials. And then forget the pairings, just generally there won’t be a white man in a commercial.
Personally when something is that frequently out of whack it goes beyond “natural” to something else.
And yes, I see it way more in commercials compared to other media.
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
18m ago
2 sounds like nonsense, but 1 and 3 are at least plausible. I think another underdiscussed component of the dress colour of the bear question is that in recent years, the threat of bears seems to have been massively memed up in American outdoorsmanship-adjacent circles, at least based on sheer volume of "this is how to survive a bear encounter" videos that Youtube injects into my feed, the comments on them and the vibes of the 4chan "innawoods" greentext corpus. If you are a host of this meme (which is likely to correlate with being male), you might think of it as common knowledge and not consider the possibility that women responders don't actually think of bears as uniquely threatening (as in some other cultures), instead parsing the answers as saying that from a baseline of your threat level assignment to bears, they think men are worse.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
19m ago
Could technological society cause the proliferation of “inhuman” behavioral traits? And could such an outcome be unfavorable even if it were a technologically-utopian society? When I imagine the end goal of human existence — when all obligations and all unnecessary stresses are eliminated — it’s something like an eternal state of playfulness and “deep” emotion. The deep emotions are friendship, love, awe, wonder, tranquility. These to me are intuitively terminal. So the optimal end goal of human existence is to optimize for these propensities. These traits or propensities are superior to, say, an eternal state of playfulness where people do combat sports for fun. A terminal enjoyment of striking another for fun is inherently inferior to a terminal enjoyment of singing odes to beauty, love, and peace. If we imagine two paradises, the fighter’s paradise would exist on a lower level.
But what if industrial society causes the proliferation of traits whose terminal values are something like “neurotic competing over social superiority” or “enjoying puzzles”? These are selected for today, and if you have both of these traits you can make loads of money. And that’s all well and good when they are instrumental to keeping the economic engine churning. But what if if changes human nature? A paradisal state where people do puzzles and aggressively fight and subvert each other to obtain the highest status also strikes me as an inferior paradise. While instrumentally useful right now, it can change human nature for the worse.
gattsuru
21m ago
[caveat: there are some parts of this discussion area I'm not going to describe, either publicly or in private messages.]
Any? Throw YOLO onto a Jetson, some batteries, and a decent lens, have fun. Start with one of a dozen preconfigured models, maybe use the VisDrone dataset if you want to put a bit of effort into tweaking something. Probably about 2k-10k if you're buying all pre-built (maybe a bit more if you want non-DJI).
Actually doing it well gets harder. There's been a little bit of effort into image-based localization, to avoid GPS jamming, but for technical reasons (off-nadir sunlight suuuuuucks) it's annoying as hell to work with, and you probably want it or something like it, in addition to your main sensor payload. Some human identification is easier than others. And actual decision-making for more complex stuff is a Coding Project.
100ProofTollBooth
21m ago
Women it appears are aware of the Leviathian shaped hole, even if they have mever heatd of Hobbes.
An old redpill/manosphere saying was "Men are the real romantics, while women are, at the end of the day, the hardcore realists"
Validity of that statement aside, I think your phrasing is far better and more inclusive of real cultural dynamics.
Of course that is just a subset of the idea that more of us would murder or commit violence in general in the absence of a restraining force. The state of war of all against all.
Is this not self-evidently true? Societies with weaker social/cultural/legal system infrastructure have higher rates of physical violence, SA, etc. There's the infamous (repeated!) studies on Papua New Guinea pointing out how it's Heart of Darkness levels of pain and chaos.
Does this mean that inside the heart of every man is an eager but repressed rapist? Of course not. That's on-its-face wrong. The entire point of well developed social/cultural/legal system development is to leverage the inherent social conformist nature of humans to build broad pro-social patterns of behavior. In fact, those who fail to conform in the extreme are either/both (a) locked up permanently and/or (b) labeled as cognitively malfunctioning. This is a good thing. What could be looked at as "boys will be boys!" behavior to an A.D. 1000 viking is now seen as "criminally insane and unsafe for anything besides lifelong warehousing."
If I were a woman, I would take tinder et al any day over a random pre-1900 mating system.
And that is what they are doing, but as with many of the things modernity has produced, it feels good but is actually bad for you and society.
Tinder basically only selects for looks and short term fun, but unlike your parents, it's not going to pick someone who will want to make you an exclusive partner. So female you is going to suffer from the common malady of the situationship era, she's going to pine for guys out of her league hoping she can lock one up, fail to do so and grow into a leftover woman who resents men and insults them with bear analogies.
Whether that's a better or worse fate than marrying a brutish viking warrior that still provides, I don't know. Maybe it is actually better. But the battered viking's wife has children, and the bitter wine aunt does not. Surely that enters into the calculation.
Maybe your parents don't care that much about your feelings when it comes to mate selection, but they do care about important things that are now excluded from the process, to everyone's expense.
100ProofTollBooth
28m ago
As I understand it, it's the assertion that whenever someone identifies a societal problem and begins asking "why is it like this? what can we do about it" the answer is that the identified problem arises from something we ought to already be aware of; base human nature.
The solution (what Hlynka used to point to as the piece that would fit into the "Leviathan Shaped Hole") is often some mix of traditional cultural values, a stronger executive within the state Apparatus, more rigidly defined social roles for men/women/minorities/majorities. I'll admit that on this last part, I could be a little wrong as Hlynka's writing was often a little impenetrable.
I hope I'm close enough here.
YoungAchamian
30m ago
As an AI engineer. Almost none. No one I know in this space, coworkers, colleagues, friends, and myself ever heard of this guy before running into Rationalists/Lesswrong spaces and that after we/I decided to pursue a career in ML/AI. The ones besides me that have heard of him, have an overall negative opinion of him. Several consider him a loudmouth idiot.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
32m ago
the core artistic advantage that video games have is that they force the player to experience the decision-making that goes into a choice, not just the rationale and consequences
Yeah. I didn't want to go into all the requisite nuance and bloat the post to astronomical proportions, but, obviously interactivity can do a lot of things that are artistically fascinating. Tim Rogers's excellent analysis of Earthbound touches on these issues.
No_one
42m ago
In this day and age, shooting someone with the heart attack gun and getting away with it is vastly harder to get away with.
You can do it on journalists, Breitbart looks like a bit sus case perhaps.
No_one
44m ago
Why'd you need to assassinate politicians if you can
-
ensure only the right ones get elected
-
get rid of them by non lethal means that make them out to be crooks, not martyrs
Spilling blood is way too risky. It's the laziest, dumbest solution.
Lethal chemicals are not that hard to procure and blow darts are not that hard to mount to drones.
Poisoning people isn't easy, blow darts are not very useful, and politicians have security. Modern tech makes a successful getaway hard to pull off.
At the moment, yes, drones and explosives probably afford a fair chance of getting away with it, especially as they can be guided through cell phones unless your target is Putlet, of course or possibly the US president.
However, anyone smart enough to cobble together such a drone understands you don't affect an ecosystem by pinching off a single flower.
yellowgreenred
49m ago
Watch an NFL game this fall.
I'll pass.
I don't think most people dispute that there is probably a higher proportion of interracial couples in commercials than there are IRL, but that doesn't mean interracial relationships are an oddity. They're normal, in both a biological sense and as a reflection of what you'd see in cities and towns across the US, so why not portray them and tick your diversity box?
Also, part of the point I was trying to make, and as @Steferri says below, is that the black man-white woman pairing tends to stick out but that doesn't mean it's nearly as prevalent as people assumed in last month's post. Of the two dozen movies in my post, Somebody I Used to Know is the clearest example of BM/WM, but it'll probably stay in your mind over other movies because Alison Brie stars as the white woman.
ulyssessword
56m ago
Is there any great work that would be improved by the addition of choice, by the addition of alternate possibilities?
IMO, the core artistic advantage that video games have is that they force the player to experience the decision-making that goes into a choice, not just the rationale and consequences.
One argument in the Teaching Paradox series of blog posts is that the games embody a certain historical theory, and players are essentially forced to make the same choices as the nations did. That is to say, in the "Interstate Anarchy" themed game, you had to build an army, opportunistically raid neighbors, and build unstable alliances against stronger foes. If you didn't, your nation would be overrun and destroyed. If you have an argument against that ("Why can't we just be nice?" etc.), then you can try it in the game and see how well it works for you.
I'm not sure which great works would benefit from that treatment, but I'm guessing there are some. Or maybe those works are "great" because they're perfectly suited to their medium, and we can only make new, distinct ones.
Awarenesss
1hr ago
Fair point. I think this a benefit of a property management company—they are consistently transactional by nature and requirement, whereas my softheartedness would probably vary by tenant.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1hr ago
the Leviathian shaped hole
I admit to not being enough of a Hlynka scholar. Can someone explain what this actually means?
AI War is an asymmetric RTS where armies/fleets scale into the thousands/tens of thousands. I can vouch for the original game being quite fun, but I haven't tried AI War 2.
There is also Planetary Annihilation (:Titans), an RTS played across one or more planets (yes, spherical maps), which is intended as a spiritual successor to Supreme Commander which is mentioned below. The micromanagement there feels more finicky than in AI War, but the graphics and feeling of scale are vastly better and I would still consider the game to be an underrated gem (hobbled by the typical Kickstarter project issue of having been half-baked at initial release).
Awarenesss
1hr ago
It’s only one right now. He’s an old friend who is living there for the cheap rent (which I’ve promised not to raise) and to spend more time with me. If I moved he would too, and even if he stayed and I increased rent, it wouldn’t be enough to cover what I need.
zeke5123a
1hr ago
In my experience, women conflate SA with rape claims whilst expanding SA to many things that are very far from rape. Further women obviously are not interested in applying skepticism (generally) to another woman’s claim of rape. No 3 sounds like someone who has internalized bad stats.
Well if it takes a well developed cultural system to leverage us into not behaving that way, then are we not just repressed rapists? Just ones buried under years of conditioning? Teach men not to rape indeed..
Just to be clear I don't 100% agree with Hobbes here, though I think it is as you say partially true. Just noticing the similarity in positions between somewhat feminist thought and the Hobbesian conservatives.
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