Goodguy
5hr ago
Hanania is not high status, but he's definitely higher status that the vast majority of Americans. Regarding his sex life, well, he's married with children. He has a wide social circle online. I wouldn't be surprised if he could easily get laid just through his online presence and personal brand, if he wanted to. I think looks don't really matter that much when a guy has status relative to others. He's also written some short getting laid advice before that has the ring of truth. I actually don't think he would have too much trouble getting laid even if he had no fame whatsoever. He doesn't have dating app looks, but he has confidence. Regarding his wealth, well, I don't think he's rich, but he successfully makes money by writing online leveraging the personal brand that he has built, and perhaps also through his political connections. Which is a pretty cool way to make money if you don't care too much about the moral implications of writing clickbait, for example (his long-form content is actually pretty interesting, but his Twitter posts are heavy on ragebait and trolling).
I don't even like the guy, despite finding some of his writing interesting. The ragebait annoys me and I have a sense that he doesn't have a very strong sense of right and wrong. But the fact is, he's managed to achieve quite a high level of status compared to most people, and he's no incel.
Goodguy
10hr ago
Stable people do not think in-animate objects or mathematical tools are "slightly conscious", it's a nutter view.
In the quote that I found, Sutskever is not saying that he thinks AI is conscious. He's saying he thinks it might be. And I don't think that's a nutter view.
In any case, I'm not sure that what "normal" or "stable" people think about consciousness really matters. The average person doesn't even really understand the differences between subjective experience, self-awareness, having a self-concept, and intelligence. Even large numbers of highly technically skilled people don't understand these differences, even though they're not really hard to understand... a bright 10 year old could understand them. And then there are the leagues of otherwise intelligent software developers on Hacker News, for example, who don't understand what the "hard problem of consciousness" or why it might be a problem.
But even if the "I know it when I see it" view corresponds to reality, it seems to me that this is not a good argument against AI being conscious, since a large though minority number of people feel that AI is conscious when they interact with it.
Goodguy
10hr ago
The loss of the American City he largely blames on the Great Migration and the associated crime waves.
I imagine that it was a significant factor, but I don't know if largely blaming it is justified. My understanding is that suburbanization was already moving fast in the 1950s, when US violent crime rates were quite low. And the rate of suburbanization did not accelerate much in the 1960s and 1970s compared to the 1950s, even though violent crime rates began moving up sharply in the 1960s.
It would be interesting to find detailed data on suburbanization by year to compare to violent crime rates by year.
Goodguy
18hr ago
Was claiming that Neural Nets were conscious in 2022, mentally stable is not the group I would put him in.
Do you mean when he said "it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious"? I wouldn't call that insane. There's no way to scientifically establish whether or not anything is conscious.
The "slightly conscious" phrase could be construed as being wrong, since the reality is that consciousness is binary: subjective experience is either there or it's not there. But maybe by "slightly", Sutskever just meant that AI is conscious but only for short stretches of time. In which case, I wouldn't say there's anything clearly wrong with the statement.
Socialism is just the natural voting choice of a society in which almost all adults are allowed to vote. The thing that really has to be explained is why not all major political parties in mass franchise democracies are socialist. And this can be explained: other factors such as pride, ethnic tensions, pro-capitalism propaganda, etc. can override the desire for socialist redistribution. So can intellectual arguments about how socialism fails, but let's face it, only a tiny minority of the population are familiar with them so they don't really play that much of a role except perhaps when rewritten by capitalism-loving think tanks to appeal to a mass audience.
Another thing that can override the natural popularity of socialism is a widely held notion that the economy is doing well, that a rising tide is lifting all boats. I think we probably had something like that in the 1950s. We don't have that now. I'll leave aside arguments over whether the economy is really doing well or not. The important thing when it comes to the current argument is that large numbers of people are upset with how it's doing.
In recent years in the US, one of the major reasons for the low popularity of socialism has been just the plain off-putting nature of many people who are vocally into socialism, plus the fact that many of them are anti-white racists and/or are into ideas like "defund the police". But it stands to reason that as soon as socialists manage to actually get their act together and stop seeming like insane weirdoes, the popularity of socialism rises. Especially given the progress of AI that increasingly is capable of doing more and more people's jobs.
I don't even think that socialism is a good way to run a pre-AI society in the long term, although I think that it might be the only viable way to run a post-AI society. I'm familiar with and agree with the major arguments against socialism: it stagnates economic and technical progress, eventually leading to worse outcomes across the board including for the working class, and it tends to result in authoritarianism and often mass murder. I'm pretty far from being someone who is sympathetic to socialism.
And even despite all that, I would still happily vote for a socialist or at least a social democrat party IF I could believe that voting for them would result in better economic conditions for me and wouldn't just result in having the local police force defunded. I have my own material prosperity to think about. The possibility that socialism might overall make things worse for the working class 10-20 years down the road compared to if we stayed with a more capitalist model... eh... I don't know, the reality is that I want to ensure my material well being now and try make sure that AI progress doesn't turn my current economic class into a luxury that the rich only have incentive to keep around out of altruism.
Any anti-socialism arguments that are likely to actually work on me would have to appeal to my selfishness. Indeed, socialists themselves would be able to appeal much better to me if they did a better job of appealing to my selfishness.
Trump's socialist-leaning qualities do that for many people (I'll put aside the question of the degree to which his socialism is just a con). It's somewhat socialist-leaning economics without the stereotypical blue-haired people, the vegan communes, and the "white people bad". Also without the boring mundane day-in-day-out activities of labor union organizing, which is probably the other main thing that people were identifying with socialist-leaning politics until recently. The "dirtbag left" is another, much more culturally leftist variant, of the same thing. Basically, socialism in the US reached a stage of irrelevance at some point that it actually had to be rescued from the people who were calling themselves socialists. Now that it kind of, to a limited extent, has been, it's understandably on the rise.
Goodguy
8d ago
I wonder how life extension plays into these arguments.
If I was a very rich person who had spent some time thinking about AI risk, I might start to think something like this:
"Hmm... let's say there's a 10% chance that ASI would destroy the human species...
On the other hand, extremely advanced AI being developed soon is probably the best chance that I have for revolutionary life extension technology to be invented soon enough for it to make a difference for me..."
Goodguy
26d ago
Even if they made some correct predictions, this argument might still just be cherry picking. Surely social conservatives have also made many wrong predictions. And the time when people who were social conservatives by modern standards controlled nearly all human societies was not a utopia, or even close to one. Personally, I see little reason to think that that time was actually better than our current time, even if you control for technological progress. Of course that partly is a matter of preference.
Goodguy
26d ago
Chesterton's fence is a very useful concept. However, sometimes the fence actually isn't useful. To me that's the point of Chesterton's fence - you have to actually figure out whether the fence is useful or not, not just reflexively accept or reject tradition.
To me, much of social conservatism seems like the kind of norms that are well suited for communities that deal with a lot of material scarcity and threats from nature. Think what the typical farming village was like until some point in the 20th century. For example, in such communities the economic and family-uniting value of sexual relationships is more important than the pleasure value or the becoming-a-better-person value (getting to know oneself and others better, spiritual growth, etc.). Hence the told-a-million-times story of "my parents want me to marry the safe and economically pragmatic person A but I want to marry the more exciting person B". Another example is the emphasis on the socially uniting quality of shared religious belief and practice.
Now, when I say this, I'm not thereby rejecting all of social conservatism. I'm just saying that it evolved in certain material conditions, and is a good adaptation for those conditions, and it may not necessarily be a good fit for the modern developed world. It is quite possible that it is simply a local maximum for certain conditions and it is possible for society to actually move to a higher maximum.
As for slut shaming, there are other alternatives besides just "slut shaming" and "disease and illegitimate children". The prevalence of STDs, abortions, and single motherhood among some ethnic groups is a real phenomenon, but in large part the question of what to do about that phenomenon boils down to the question of "to what extent should people be free to make stupid choices?". And this is a very real and broad topic. Good arguments can be made for various positions.
Goodguy
1mo ago
People can use words however they want to, of course, but my personal definition of "invasion" requires top-down coordination, and the numbers are pretty irrelevant. So to me, the D-Day landings were an invasion not because tens of thousands of people landed on the French coast, but because the whole thing was coordinated top-down.
I don't know if there was top-down coordination in Ceuta, I'm just riffing on the topic of the word "invasion".
Goodguy
1mo ago
What makes you think that it is likely to end the government? The sudden migration from yesterday has already been largely reversed (or at least, that is what the popular narrative currently is), and I'm not sure that Spanish voters really care that much about migration to begin with.
Goodguy
1mo ago
The idea of a conspiracy is unnecessary to explain is happening. An ideology can spread and control politicians' actions without there being a conspiracy to spread it.
To me it seems that the ideology that is responsible for how Europe has been reacting to immigration is not fundamentally an ideology that seeks the replacement of native Europeans. Its main immigration-related goal is not replacement, it is to treat migrants very altruistically, even if that imposes some costs on the natives. I imagine that the number of European politicians who genuinely want to eliminate the native European population and replace it with Africans and Middle Easterners is very small.
"except the WEIRD" is going too far, but does have truth to it. The West has unusually strong norms about conscientiousness. Luckily for us, these norms contribute to evolutionary success in enough ways that their continued existence seems likely.
Even among the WEIRD, an overwhelming majority would take the "be a nuisance" path as soon as the stakes were high enough.
Goodguy
1mo ago
Israel and Jewish lobbying has a lot to do with the US' actions towards Iran, but saying "Israel bringing the American Empire to the brink in order to take care of its rival Iran" is going too far, I think.
The US foreign policy establishment has strong motives to hate Iran even without Jews/Israel in the picture. They are probably still butt-hurt about what happened in 1979. The CIA and the US military both had people killed in Hezbollah actions in the 1980s. Institutions hold grudges. Iran is also the last major blocker to these institutions' domination of the Middle East.
Goodguy
1mo ago
Every Pronoun Person also hates capitalism and billionaires.
I think that's mostly true. However, it doesn't go the other way. Not every leftist who hates capitalism and billionaires is a social activism leftist of the "modern woke" variety.
Goodguy
1mo ago
I think the story of CHAZ shows that Democratic cities will not, indeed, let leftist activists get away with whatever they want to. Which is what you claimed in your previous post ("operate unfettered").
I agree that Seattle allowed them to get away with too much in that case.
You tell me how we should differentiate between the hard lefties and the moderates when the hard lefties get to operate unfettered where-ever the moderate lefties have power.
This seems untrue to me:
- ChatGPT says that 24 people received prison time in connection to the Kenosha riots, and not all were federal charges.
- You can't expect to throw a brick through the front window of a bank in San Francisco next to a cop and just walk away.
- The NYPD arrested more than 70 anti-ICE protestors at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building on September 18, 2025.
- If you murder a rich person in Boston because you are a communist, the cops are actually going to try to arrest you.
- CHOP/CHAZ in Seattle was shot down by police after 3 weeks, not allowed to continue.
Etcetera.
Goodguy
1mo ago
If you've got 10 people seated around a table, and a Nazi violent dirtbag leftist sits down, and nobody gets up, you've got 11 Nazis violent dirtbag leftists.
This is not true whether we're talking about Nazis or about violent leftists.
The simple truth is that activists can forcefully occupy territory in downtown Madison, a jurisdiction controlled entirely by the left from the city council all the way up to the governor, because sending in the national guard to break it up is not politically feasible.
There are leftist activists in all parts of the US. However, leftist territory occupations that are permitted by the local leftist authorities are extremely rare. And the overwhelming majority of the time, leftist violence is met with police reaction.
Goodguy
1mo ago
Claiming that "the left" mobilizes itself in defense of such people is misleading.
It's not the left as a whole, it is particular subsets of the left.
Goodguy
1mo ago
If Vance wants to actively investigate the Epstein case, doesn't he have the political power to do just that?
Apparently Vance said: "[Epstein] clearly had connections to the upper, the highest levels of American intelligence. He clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence".
Does the Vice President of the United States really not have the power to discover and communicate concrete specifics about something like this?
Goodguy
2mo ago
A few thoughts I had after reading over your posts in this thread:
- I think the idea that it will be much easier in college is probably correct. The increased numbers alone are a great thing.
- I can't think of a reason for you not to try dating apps. Your height and fitness alone might mean that you would do well. And the women who would be attracted to you based on such superficial factors aren't necessarily stupid, though I'm sure that some of them will be.
- I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't benefit you to be open to the idea of dating women who are older than your peer group.
- You seem to be looking for a deep long-term relationship with a very smart and intellectually curious woman. I would advise being open to having at least a bit of experience with women who don't fall into that category, even if it's nothing more than flirting. I like intelligence in a woman, but it's not the only factor. Kindness and just plain being fun to interact with are also very important for me in a long-term kind of thing. Also: the better you get at interacting with and flirting with women in general, the easier it will be for you to get a romantic connection with the kind of woman you're mainly interested in. Given that you seem to be seeking a serious relationship, I also wouldn't advise you to spend many years becoming a pick-up artist or something, since given your desire that would probably be a waste of time. But generally speaking, getting better at interacting with women in general can only be a good thing for you.
Goodguy
2mo ago
I feel like I want to underline the "probably" in what you wrote by giving an example of an exception: my first girlfriend was a very smart philosophy major whose personality, while not being exceptionally feminine, was also not masculine or tomboyish, and she didn't show any signs of neurodivergence.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Yeah, many people might not realize that Clav did the DIY stuff because of limited medical options and the fact that he used to have no money, not because he has anything against the idea of going to professionals.
Goodguy
2mo ago
I always thought people like Clavicular are bad because they teach their (often young and impressionable) viewers to lead a lifestyle that is fundamentally unhealthy whilst avoiding things that would actually be good for them.
That's another big reason why people think he is bad. I just didn't mention it.
Part of the explanation is this: Clavicular explicitly says that he does looksmaxxing to gain social and sexual status. Trans advocates, on the other hand, usually say that trans people transition to feel more comfortable with themselves, because they have intense dysphoria, etc.
Putting aside the question of whether the trans advocates' claim is accurate or not, cause that's a different topic... still, part of what is happening here is just that people tend to respond more positively to the "I am doing this because I am suffering psychologically" presentation than to the "I am doing this to for sex and money" presentation.
Of course, the reality is that Clavicular's story is that he too, as he freely admits, was suffering psychologically when he was younger. Suffering psychologically from being a nobody, from not getting girls. Not only that, but he is still suffering psychologically, as he freely admits, because his underlying personality is still that of a socially anxious introvert. He uses psychotropic drugs and the motivation of getting money to get himself to constantly go out and make influencer content.
But male desires for sex, money, and social status are widely seen as being somehow inherently wrong and disgusting. Not just on the left, but even by many people on the right. People tend to associate these pretty natural and understandable desires with the worst examples of what happens when psychologically disturbed people pursue them: rapists, social climbing sociopaths, sleazy business sharks, and so on.
A man wanting to become a woman, on the other hand, does not activate these associations. Becoming a woman might conceivably get a particularly sexually unsuccessful man more sex than he would have had otherwise, but becoming a woman is popularly conceived (whether accurately or not) as something that would make the sex that the person gives to others less dominant and aggressive. Becoming a woman is also not popularly thought of as something that would give the man more social status. Yes, there are cases of trans activists using trans issues as a way to status climb, but it is popularly understood that men on average have more social status than women and that most of the world's most powerful people are men. In reality, the average young woman probably has more social status than the average young man, but that might be a point that is too subtle for the average observer to grasp.
Another point is that: Yes, Clavicular in a sense is doing gender-affirming medical treatments just like some trans people do gender-affirming medical treatments. But he is going beyond gender-affirming treatments and doing gender-maxxing. So the trans equivalent to Clav isn't just a man who does some relatively light gender-affirming treatments to reduce the presentation of masculinity. It's a man who tries to turn himself into a female bimbo stereotype, with fake lashes, large fake breasts, and so on.
Personally, I find nothing wrong with that, whether it's the trans person doing it or Clavicular doing it. But I think that many people are weirded out by the monomaniacal maximalism and "trying to turn yourself into a superficial stereotype" aspects of it, similar as to how many people are weirded out by extreme bodybuilders.
I think his Twitter posts are heavy on ragebait and trolling, but to me his long-form content still seems pretty sincere, though not entirely sincere. I think he's willing to do whatever kind of marketing it takes to maximize his personal brand. And the Twitter content is basically that. Which can be looked at in two ways, I guess. On the one hand, I understand the hustle and the "do what you gotta do to get attention" attitude, on the other hand it's sleazy and questionably moral.
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