I think this is a complex class based thing. There are probably seven or eight clearly defined social sub-classes of upper middle class people; the home of two childless widely published academics and the home of an investment banker - big law lawyer couple with three kids and the house of two doctors who live in a second-tier city but consider themselves to be particularly cultured and the home of the chair or chief executive of a major arts or humanities nonprofit and the country home of an insurance executive and a veteran homemaker in local county life descended from the minor gentry will all be vastly different in nevertheless predictable ways.
In general, prints of old masters were for a long time considered somewhat trashy as a hangover from the Trumpian 80s, following which new money Essex types in the UK and white ethnics in the US decorating their homes in sort of gold leaf rococo or baroque pastiche complete with titanic gold-framed prints was considered the thing to distance oneself from if one wanted to be more respectably PMC (even if one was from, or only one generation removed from, the very same background) by the early-mid ‘90s. Today I think that’s changing, since 2018 or so when the Deano and McMansion types had for some years adopted a twisted version of 2000s beige Scandi minimalism the upper-middle class meta has clearly returned to full-on maximalism complete with a lot of (even in dreary London) very dark 19th century living rooms and antique shop clutter.
2rafa
9hr ago
Yes, the Amish would do fine if they were the only ones around
If you mean the only humans around in the world then maybe, sure. If you mean if they controlled solely their own territory absolutely - would they? The Amish don’t have an army or any real means of defending themselves while they live on some of the world’s best and highest yielding farmland. They aren’t welfare dependent in the way the ultra-orthodox are, but they are ultimately reliant on the United States’ power, military, borders and technological leadership. They live in a garden inside a nearly impenetrable geographic stronghold maintained by the United States.
There is a certain subtext to the incel thing, in general, which includes a lot of online rightists and people drawn to these movements but also obviously various other groups.
Once a young man knows he is actually attractive to women he mostly wants to play the field, at least for a while.
This is a big difference to young women and I think is something gender warriors on the ‘male’ side often don’t acknowledge. Most much maligned 20-25 year old women would, if a man who was attractive, charismatic, good to them, etc came along, be willing to marry him. If that moment of “I should have sowed my wild oats” comes for women it tends to happen much, much later, in an Eat Pray Love kind of way, after a divorce or bereavement in midlife or a husband who loses interest or something. The number of women in their early or mid 20s I know who were really all about maximizing the amount of casual sex they had with random men is miniscule.
By contrast, once a young man knows he’s attractive enough to sleep with a sizeable number of young women, he usually wants to do so and becomes unwilling to settle down until he’s ’done’ or feels pressure of age or expectation or really wants kids. The exceptions are high school relationships where he never plays the field, situations in which the man ‘settles down’ but cheats the whole time, men who fucked around a lot in high school and college and so have had their fill by their early twenties, and the very and genuinely religious. And, of course, extremely socially anxious men, but they’re not going to approach women anyway.
If a hot 23 year old man suddenly finds himself in a situation where he can (a) marry young to an attractive woman, and be monogamous for the rest of his life or (b) hook up with plenty of attractive women for 7-10 years, he is almost always going to pick option (b). This is also why I made the point last week that men who suddenly become hot in their late 20s or 30s (or 40s) are more likely to cheat because they suddenly find themselves invited to a party they’ve always wanted to attend but never got the invite to.
2rafa
1d ago
Fantasy/Sci Fi art is one of those things that was already commodified before AI, whatever you imagined, some Filipino or Colombian or Chinese hobbyist on DeviantArt had already drawn something pretty close even in the old days with a budget tablet and could do something specific for another $30.
2rafa
1d ago
Not at all. Chesa proves the hereditary principle. Bad egg parents created a bad egg son. This strengthens, rather than weakens, my argument, because the inverse is also true.
Then why not simply have Raven’s Progressive Matrices administered to every 10 year old in America and base every life path on that? The meritocrat defends the worst possible version of even his own idea.
2rafa
1d ago
Yeah, and in many ways this is a consequence of meritocracy, just another failed form of it. If we had the great-grandchildren of the people who ruled San Francisco and Chicago in 1930 in power now both places would likely be far better.
2rafa
1d ago
You don’t need this to keep the failsons out. If we admitted all willing children of doctors to medical school they’d still have to pass all the exams, go through gruelling residency, become qualified, and maintain their license in the face of clinical negligence claims or complaints if they existed. If you’re nepotism-d into a trader or asset manager role and you lose your clients’ money, people aren’t going to want to do business with you. Jaden Smith’s acting career is not currently thriving.
Failsons reveal themselves in the natural course of life. And, of course, if they’re really failsons they’re unlikely to be motivated enough to complete medical or law school or even an undergraduate degree (or even high school) anyway, so the whole point is moot.
2rafa
1d ago
I love the ‘Tower’ (DLC) ending to Cyberpunk 2077. (Spoilers etc)
I don’t think Cyberpunk 2077 is a particularly great game. I don’t think it’s a bad game, especially now, and there are aspects of the world (especially the now functioning metro system) that are immersive, and the fashion is fun and I like that they put effort into it (although I would have preferred the ability to dye clothes) but the combat and stealth are fine, the story is quite linear in an often frustrating way (versus a linear game that doesn’t create the expectation of player choice), there’s a lot of dull busywork, the animations outside of some motion-captured key cutscenes are surprisingly bad for AAA, and I think large parts of the open world lack the detail of a true marquee Rockstar production or even, really, a premier Ubisoft open world. By that I mean things like props, clutter, pedestrian detail (not just density), building detail, interior detail which is often weirdly bad etc.
The writing is also often bad. Not in the terminally annoying Baldur’s Gate 3 way but in the sense that a lot of the second-to-second dialogue, despite some great VA, is just a bit cringe, stilted, unrealistic, clumsy and generally doesn’t feel real. My theory for why the writing is so much worse than The Witcher 2/3 is that those games were predominantly written in Polish and then translated by professional fiction translators who actually understand good writing because they mainly do novels, movies etc. So they approach the game the same way. Cyberpunk, though was written by a combination of English-speaking video game writers (not a group who, by and large, should be allowed any involvement in published writing of any kind) and Polish writers writing in their second (or third) language - so the game has a lot of weird dialogue that makes clear it wasn’t written by Americans or native English speakers even though it’s set in the US. Weird vibe.
Still, with all those caveats, I love this ‘new’ ending to the game. After a hundred hours in first person, you die, come back to life after two years, all your friends forget about you, you lose all your power and can never get it back, and you get beaten up by some nobody thugs. Then, in something that is at the same time cheesy and kitsch and bold and wonderful, your character says their final line of dialogue and then the game switches - do the first time - to third-person as your character literally walks away from you, the player, out of the screen and into the world, and becomes another faceless NPC in the crowd, stilted walking animation, bad pedestrian collision AI, the whole thing. They disappear into the crowd. And then it ends.
Even a couple of years later I can’t get this out of my head. It may be one of my favorite game endings of all time. It’s perfectly congruent with the setting and theme of the story. It feels like the thing that should happen. It’s shot - maybe unintentionally - beautifully, because it’s not a high quality cutscene but instead literally you becoming a third-person NPC, zooming out of your own head and then watching yourself walk away. It is the dumbest, funniest, and therefore most Cyberpunk ending. No, you don’t cede your body to a rockstar or corporation. You don’t die in a blaze of glory robbing the space casino. You don’t flame out and enjoy a short retirement in the desert. You just go back to being a nobody, so the whole thing was pointless.
Great game developers seem to spend, I would guess, a lot of time thinking about how they introduce the player to a playable character. Far fewer seem to spend as much time thinking about how the player leaves a character. Most games have no finality in this sense, you leave your character and it feels like the story isn’t over, that you’ve left a party that’s still going on, even if the protagonist dies or something in the narrative but especially if they don’t. Cyberpunk has a finality with this ending - we join V’s story, and we decouple ourselves from it, vividly and silently. Whatever they do next isn’t - as in most RPGs - something for the head canon, or ending slideshow, of fanfiction. The story is simply over. I like that.
2rafa
1d ago
True in a romantic way, but in real life I think the difference is less than is suggested by Mishima.
To be a man was to forge ever upward toward the peak of manhood, there to die amid the white snows of that peak.
To be a man is mostly to be born, work, marry, have children, and die, old and frail and weak, unless you are either unlucky and die young at the hand of fate or kill yourself, like the author. Gay men have the most romantic notion of masculinity because they both worship it and can play act an extended adolescence that lasts through to middle age, when many of them wither or sink into deep depression.
Women have more ‘innate value’ than men, given their society, class, other demographics etc, yes. But the ‘given’ is doing a great deal there. A poor man on welfare in a very rich country like Switzerland or Denmark has far more ‘value’ (in the sense of a system looking out for him, providing for him, a safety net, the ability to coast through life) than an average woman in most of the world, for example.
“You will never be more than you are” is interesting. I don’t think that’s true literally, but even if it was I think this kind of deep life satisfaction, an identity as someone who has made something of themselves, is much more psychological, internal than it is external. There are people who achieve middling success who believe they have climbed mountains, and those who have done the same who consider themselves abject failures. The difference is in the head, not beyond it.
2rafa
1d ago
And then you have all of these magnificently qualified Hong Kongers who go to Stanford or Berkeley or Caltech or Columbia who come back to Hong Kong and work mid level back office jobs, at least in my experience, which I always find crazy. Maybe the good jobs all go to HKU or indeed Tsinghua grads but even a lot of them seem to end up in the middle leagues. Is it elite overproduction gone crazy?
2rafa
1d ago
The San Francisco situation is different. Not only because most of America isn’t like it, and because the truly wealthiest areas of San Francisco have it but less so than eg the tenderloin or whatever, but because we know why San Francisco has its permissive attitude towards the homeless and public squalor. It’s not a mystery. It is, in fact, the core conflict at the heart of the existence of this forum itself. If you ask a progressive San Franciscan elite why they let junkies piss and shit on the street they will tell you. If you ask an Indian elite why they will shrug, maybe mumble something about ‘village people’.
2rafa
2d ago
The answer is that Indians are, for all their many positive traits, not a martial people, and have largely given up on exercising any real control of their domestic underclass. Indian elites live in their pristine multimillion dollar apartments in Mumbai skyscrapers while the street outside (literally right outside) is squalid, covered in garbage and has a random cow or three walking around it - and this really is the state of the most expensive neighborhoods there, it’s not an exaggeration as you probably know. What can you do with that? It’s unclear if it can be fixed. No other major civilization has this issue to the same extent.
At some point, defenders of this form of meritocracy must ask themselves:
Is the occasional smart ‘poor’ kid [actually a middle class kid with tiger parents] who tries really hard getting an “elite” job really worth ruining the lives of tens of millions of children?
Why did you, the child of a doctor, have to work so hard to get the same job your father had and so would for fundamental genetic and cultural reasons likely also perform well at? Why did I have to work so hard to get into the same business as my father? And despite this, half the doctors I know come from medical families and half the people I work with also have or had a parent or both in finance. What a waste of everyone’s time.
This also has nothing to do with, as is sometimes mooted, the risk of socialism or the movement for workers rights (a product of 1890-1950, whereas popular PMC meritocracy is a product largely of 1985-present). The working classes cared about well paid jobs, working conditions, being able to buy a decent home, not about whether their kids could become investment bankers or ambassadors. If you speak to them today they still don’t really care about the latter, so it’s not even to placate them as some have suggested.
If I had to explain it, I’d say I think it’s about highly paid people wanting to justify to themselves that they got there fair and square. They are willing to hurt their own children for this, to feel like they operate in a “fair” system, or have helped create one. To me this has always felt particularly evil, and I use that word rarely.
2rafa
2d ago
The difference is that the Indian government isn’t powerful enough to make the decisions the Chinese government has either made or didn’t need to (because communism effectively reset property rules and forcibly collectivized smallholders).
India can’t modernize until it deals with agricultural subsidies and inefficient farming which essentially leave vast sections of rural India under a form of quasi-feudal quasi-socialist economic relations. Even Modi wasn’t powerful enough to slightly change this, revolts forced him to back down when he tried.
2rafa
2d ago
In my experience with ADHD medicine/stimulants (both adderall and lisdexamfetamine) there was a terrifying drop off in efficacy / tolerance level increase after a very short time.
This was around Covid and there was some kind of shortage, so I got prescribed 40s of Elvanse (lisdex) and told to halve them. That was incredible for like 2 weeks. Then I had to take the whole pill. After another 3 weeks, even that stated to fade. That’s around when I quit. From time to time when I need to do long, uninterrupted, boring work I take one, and it works well, but I never do it more than three days in a row for the reason above.
Do they really work for you daily, years on end?
2rafa
3d ago
Well of course it’s a form of anarcho tyranny. For the smart, high potential kid of someone like yourself, beating up another kid might mean missed grades, bad recommendations, getting booted out of semi-mandatory extracurriculars for elite college admissions, and a dimming of their prospects. For the stupid, disruptive, aggressive kid, none of that stuff matters, and no real consequences follow.
2rafa
3d ago
What do you think the consequences of your kid beating the shit out of the “special needs neurodivergent” kid in their class are gonna be?
I forgot where your comment with your prompt was but it still didn’t identify you even using your exact prompt and the slightly edited version of your text.
I’ve tested some more and I’m pretty confident it isn’t performing stylometry, really. It justifies its choice after the fact with stabs at it (although these are essentially just so stories, there aren’t any obvious Indian-isms in your comment for example, ball-ache or whatever isn’t a term only Indians use) but what it’s actually doing is working with venue, subject matter and theme.
That is to say that if you take a long email chain you write to a medical colleague about some patient (well, I assume you use AI, but if we pretend you didn’t) or a medical journal article you wrote and paste it into Claude with no obvious LW references, it’s not going to stylometrically identify you. I had ChatGPT excise (but not rewrite, so what is left is purely your own writing) LW terminology like FOOM and lightcone and all references to the motte, rationalism, being a doctor, psychiatry, India and Indian-ness, xianxia/cultivation novels and other key tell special interests and then fed the substantial output into Claude and it had no idea who you were beyond someone who seems well read and is probably posting on an online discussion forum.
I think we probably still have a year or two, maybe longer, until it can say “this guy always misspells the word “they’re”, uses the Oxford comma, uses British English for colour but -ize for those word endings, has an average sentence length of x and enjoys using semicolons before “it follows”, it must be @name”. We’ll get there, though.
2rafa
3d ago
The First Amendment as it is today is a product of the mid-late 20th century and, ironically given its current ideological stance, the ACLU. For the vast majority of American history it was never interpreted as preventing individual states from banning various kinds of speech, including under very broad definitions of obscenity. The current interpretation arguably only exists because of liberalism. A muscular court would roll it back and return most speech legislation to the states, but it is what it is for now.
Or, framed slightly differently, SCOTUS interprets the second amendment as permitting states to broadly regulate citizen ownership and use of firearms as they see fit, much like they now do with, say, abortion. The intention was always that Texas and Idaho might have vastly more permissive firearms legislation than California and New Jersey.
SCOTUS recognizes that the equilibrium where the public and elected representatives and elected governments in many of the richest and most populous (blue) states are prevented from legislating their own domestic in-state firearms policy (which does not relate to core federal government spheres like defense, border control, foreign policy, interstate commerce or central banking) against their will is unstable and will, at some point, result in the court being packed and the US’ brief experiment in comparatively greater freedoms reverting to the current European/Canadian/Australian model, not just when it comes to gun ownership but in every other case too.
The same motivation to accommodate local political sentiment, for example, is what struck down mandatory gerrymandering of black-majority districts in some southern states that was forced upon them, and what struck down Roe.
2rafa
4d ago
Opus. Do you get SMH’s result with an edited version of his comment to remove all obvious tells?
2rafa
4d ago
Interesting! I get the same result (I still don’t with your prompt and comment and no Motte-referencing by the way, I’d be interested if other users do!) but it does know it’s The Motte.
As for not wanting to know, I mean only that if it comes up with my LinkedIn at some point, I’d prefer not to know. Naturally, I offer everyone else on the board the same courtesy.
I think it can work in those late georgian / regency terraces with high ceilings on the first or raised ground floor. And, with enough care taken, in very modern apartment buildings with a nice contrast if they have floor to ceiling glass windows (some people consider this trashy, I will accept their judgment).
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