coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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1d ago
Truly fascinating, I had no idea about any of this. Thanks for taking the time to write that up. I only learned about Homestuck when researching which online communities have the highest rate of transgender membership (it’s Homestuck by a considerable margin, then its fanfic and TTRPGs). This part was especially interesting:
I think a lot of the original tumblr discourse that created bespoke niche pride flags and polyamorous/asexual woke norms literally came from Homestuck fans. I don't mean this casually: for anyone who wasn't there at the time, Homestuck had a huge influence on the social justice circles that became modern queer leftlib politics.
Was it like the polar opposite incubation chamber as 4chan? 4chan incubated the far right in 2010-13, and Homestuck did something similar with the left? Was most of its community on tumblr / discord then?
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
Sure but I think this is just a co-factor that didn’t exist in the past. The pharaoh is a whole other identity co-inhabiting Yugi’s body. Goku becomes more masculine, but the Saiyans are a totally different race that Goku realizes he truly is; it’s over 9000% different than just being a normal human. Ash doesn’t evolve, that’s true, but the Pokémon have kind of human-ish personalities; people love to cosplay them.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
”magical identity transformation" is fundamentally normal for teenagers
I think there’s a qualitative difference between media where an identity is fulfilled and media where an identity is radically changed in essence. If you’re a boy born in 1920, what media are you reading where identity is changed in essence rather than fulfilled in development? You’re reading about a cowardly adventurer becoming brave, a soldier rising through the ranks, something of that sort. Or if you’re a boy playing WoW or Oblivion, you start as a grunt whose identity is achieved through an expected transformation. In 2020, you’re more likely to read about someone transforming into an animal, some cosmic being, being possessed by a different spirit, something of that sort. But I don’t know, maybe comic books are a counter example. But I think this is just one of the co-factors involved. If we shamed transgenderism and deleted all of their online spaces, IMO there would be a lot fewer cases; the notion of identity transformation would still be in the mind but it would be expressed by (maybe) shifting careers a lot, changing your name, changing religion, becoming Chinese, whatever else. Yesterday’s Lawrence of Arabia is today’s Lilith of Transbabea, but the Bedouin is more aesthetic IMO.
Per a survey of 7279 individuals, 52.1% of Homestuck fandom participants are transgender. I didn’t consider the possibility that it was because of sexuality representation, thanks for that info. I haven’t read it. Though the rate still seems extremely extreme extra high esp as few of the characters are transgender.
A lot of trans experience starts with anxiety over puberty, so it makes a lot of sense to me to connect this to soothing soft media.
Yeah, as a form of experiential avoidance / negative reinforcement. The vicarious escapism is extra reinforced given the default social stressors. The real trigger though IMO is the extreme validation and praise you find in LGBTc places, with so much color and art and tribalism and such; really just a night v day difference for an at-risk nerd.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
All three of these media franchises contain, as a central part of the protagonist’s path toward their desired social rewards, a magical identity transformation:
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Yugi learns that his true identity is an extraordinary Pharaoh, and that this real identity was lurking within his body and waiting to appear after some puzzling around
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Pokémon have their identities changed in a powerful and stunning way; Charmeleon, Butterfree, from egg to eggmazing
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Goku shifts into a Saiyan which changes his fundamental identity into something cosmically-important
What is unconsciously grafted into the adolescent’s understanding of the world is that such magical identity transformations are normal and extremely desirable. They are sensed as “reinforcing” in that they occur at key junctions where a character obtains something highly desirable, and where he is otherwise in a stressed or confused state. We can imagine an idea being unconsciously smuggled into the mind: “what if I have my own shocking identity transformation which results in the social rewards I have been pining for? Doesn’t everyone have one of these?”
Where effeminate anime comes in, is that across many anime franchises the female characters are the most “privileged” and anxiolytic within the cast, and usually the most beautiful to boot. Imagine you’re a youth who, as @Botond173 and @4bpp suggest, has a lot of stress related to their gender and social identity. Your favorite activity to reduce stress is to vicariously live another life (essentially inhabiting the body of a new person), and the person you are vicariously experiencing often has a magical identity transformation that drastically improves his life. What’s more, the most comforting / anxiolytic / socially-desired objects in the animeverse are women. Often these women, or girls, are overly-feminine. You’ve essentially been primed to vicariously inhabit another life as relaxation, you’ve been conditioned to associate the highly-feminine with the most comfort, and you’ve been conditioned to expect an identity change to fundamentally flip your life for the better. Now, maybe still, for a lot of people this doesn’t do anything. But let’s say you are wired a little differently, autism or etc. And then on top of this, there are communities that are now ready to shower you in superabundant social praise and validation for your identity transformation, and even the media seems to be on your side, and there are psychological tricks that this community employs purposefully or inadvertently (look at how colorful you will be now; so much novelty; you’re part of a tribe and get a flag and grievances and purpose and . . . ).
Re: the porn element mentioned by @Tanista, one of the ferishes that seem to be far more common among MtFs is “puppygirl” et al. This is essentially the fantasy that you are so socially-desirable that someone wants to command you around all day as a pet, while at the same time providing a comforting identity through the outsourcing of control over your life. I think this is similar to the anime etiology in that there is an identity change which comes with a huge shift in social esteem.
There is some relevant data for this theory, eg the HomeStuck fandom is 50% transgender (100x prevalence?) and the media franchise is essentially (1) I had a fundamental life-altering identity transformation through logging into a digital social ecosystem [sburb]; (2) the coolest and most beautiful and less stressful characters are all women.
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
That study didn’t separate the two. IMO anime and similar media plays a role in causing MTF, I have no idea what causes FTM though
coffee_enjoyer
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2d ago
An FYI re: Hickman’s claim: it doesn’t seem like income is a foolproof way of preventing transgenderism per a 2025 study. $50,000 to <$75,000 household income has about same odds as $200,000 or higher. Probably the best bet is to ban effeminate anime at home and give child a more exciting identity and “quest” to latch onto in adolescence. I looked and there doesn’t appear to be a relationship with religiosity in household either.
coffee_enjoyer
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3d ago
Apparently one of the deceased in Bucha was Oleksandr Rzhavskyy, an important pro-Russian politician who served in Ukraine’s parliament, and Russia may have recordings where he mentions to Russian troops the possibility that he will be brutalized by Ukrainians when Ukrainians retake the town. The Ukrainian position on his death is that he was shot by Russian troops for not paying a ransom (?????), which is the sort of plotline I’d write if worked at Activision.
coffee_enjoyer
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4d ago
France bans statistics
There are some clever ways to figure out the demographics, like looking at the names of newborns and calculating the name-origin frequencies; 30% of births in Paris have a Muslim or African name. If you combine this with a study on the likelihood of immigrants choosing a typical European name, you could probably arrive at a decent prediction of demographics among Parisians.
My first point is larger than that: atrocity propaganda is the norm in modern psyops. We should expect a lot of atrocity propaganda coming from both sides. It would be improbable for a modern war to occur without atrocity propaganda. Which again, I’m not mad about, but for a question like “is Russia a threat to Europe”, this should be treated seriously (at least here), not by reciting events that may be propaganda planted by three letter agencies and highly motivated neonazis battalions.
Russia put out a lot of propaganda that it was actually somehow Azov, days afterwards, with massive video, satellite and signal intelligence
Did you read that Russian MFA report? What part of it do you dispute or consider erroneous? You should address the specific evidence presented by the official government of the nation you’re accusing of an atrocity. It was published last month, not days afterward. Ukraine claims that those particular men were civilians. Ukraine etched their names upon a memorial. Russia provided evidence that they were members of an armed extremist neonazi battalion with a long history of killing civilians, an outfit condemned by the UN and who traffics in extremist literature. Who do we believe? Ukraine or Russia? Neither? Thank you for reminding me of Bucha by the way; had you not mentioned if I would have never found this report.
I do not believe Azov, who are not load bearing to any of this
Azov is the armed and extremist neonazi brigade from which Ukraine sources some of their key positions. They are highly influential in Ukraine. Some of the highest-ranked Ukrainian military personnel are former members of this neonazi battalion. Russia claims that Azov, this batallion decking themselves in swastikas, was in Bucha. This is very problematic if true. They attach photos of the men in uniforms, name them, and name the specific unit of Azov they were affiliated with. How can we determine who is telling the truth? If Azov was in Bucha, then no sane person should believe what is claimed about Bucha, given the long history of Azov’s crimes against civilians and extremist leanings.
You know, I think when the typical European thinks “threat to Europe”, they imagine Nazis. Doesn’t it seem like Ukraine is a threat to Europe, if they have neo-Nazis praising Hitler going wild with weapons? The commander of Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps of the Ukrainian Ground Forces has published screeds like “Ukrainian Racial Social-Nationalism in the Ideology of Patriot of Ukraine”. I’m starting to really question your motivations here, because your name (the golem) has a long history of being used by Nazis, and here you are defending a neonazi outfit. If you don’t mind answering a few questions about this:
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Do you deny that Azov is a neo-Nazi brigade with a long history of crimes against civilians?
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Do you deny that the Ukrainians select former Azov members for important positions in Ukraine? Biletsky as I mentioned, but also Serhii Velichko and Kostiantyn Nemichev, members of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine.
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Why should I trust a nation that permits, and selects for important promotions, members of an extremist neonazi brigade?
I believe the evidence provided in my reply to you, primarily the satellite footage
Okay, but follow this line of argument: (1) if Azov were in the homes, they would have used those homes as defense while civilians were nearby or in those homes; (2) Azov themselves may have killed civilians, as they have before; (3a) the placement of the deceased on a street are what we would expect if Russians made a base out of homes where civilians were killed by crossfire or Azov, because you don’t live next to a dead person for a week, you’d drag them away from you; (3b) it is profoundly improbable that all 2500 Russians in Bucha saw nothing wrong with leaving the civilians they supposedly killed in the middle of a street, especially when they had two weeks of little fighting. Not a single one of the 2500 soldiers in Bucha thought “hey, let’s hide this civilians we just killed”? (They had full control from March 5 to March 30).
Why do you even like the Russians here
I want Ukraine to stop self-harming themselves, and I want Europe to stop needless brother wars. You can focus on inter-nicene squabbles after you’ve kicked out the last Salafi and minimized the global threat posed by China. Otherwise it’s just ridiculous.
Your Meduza link shows that there are other allegations
If they fabricated a letter, why should I believe the other allegations?
your source that 3% of the respondents were muslim, in line with the lower bound i mentioned, but that 65% of residents express that religion is important and 36% of them Islam is the most important
I don’t see a source for 36% say Islam is the most important.
In a city of like 13 million
In a city or 13 million there are 12 to 24 mosques
Let’s consider it super carefully, starting with a few steps back.
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Atrocity propaganda is used by every country, in every conflict, since at least the 1800s. Atrocity propaganda is omnipresent even in the culture war. There is atrocity propaganda about racial violence in America, about residential schools in Canada, about antisemitic incidents, about gender relations. Benjamin Franklin used atrocity propaganda against the British, we used it with the Nayirah testimony in the Gulf War, there was an entire tome published in the 1920s detailing the 20+ atrocity hoaxes employed by the Allies in WW1. I believe Trump has recently said that the IRGC killed 70,000 of their own citizens (lol). In every conflict, the gullible masses have their reflexive opinion shaped by atrocity propaganda, because they always fall for it, every single time. So, at least outside of Reddit, this should factor into a serious person’s willingness to believe in an atrocity story, especially one occurring in as geopolitically-sensitive a conflict as Ukraine. Another way to put this: every serious power, and even unserious powers, will be employing atrocity propaganda, and so where are Ukraine’s attempts? Each incident has to be nitpicked in an especially nitpicky way because there is a motivated actor who really, really wants to fabricate an atrocity, and it’s his job to do this, and he probably has a higher IQ than us, and in fact it’s not one guy but a team of a dozen spending 60 hours weeks considering how to fabricate an atrocity. The normal assessment and skepticism of evidence simply doesn’t apply in wartime. We should assume he gets a holiday bonus and a free trip to Thailand if his fabrication is a success upon the normie heart. I’m not even against atrocity propaganda itself, I just think believing it is beneath this particular forum; gone are the days I would quibble with the redditor about Michael Brown or whoever (such conversations are worse than hopeless).
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The Bucha event was publicized at the height of diplomatic talks between Russia and Ukraine, literally just days after the March 28 Istanbul talks, and the failure of diplomacy was blamed on Bucha. “Bucha” bears phonetic similarity to a relevant viscerally negative-valence word, which makes it highly fitting for an atrocity propaganda campaign. There are few phonetic connotations more apt to associate with your event than “butcher” (he definitely earned that Thailand vacation). These two points should slightly raise your suspicions, because the paid team of motivated actors looking to establish a false atrocity are going to pounce on these opportunities. It’s literally the perfect time a place to stage something. Like, were you to plug all the information into some AtrocityPropagandaAI, it would likely choose Bucha out of all eligible options to stage something.
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The town had many Azov members deployed, and in fact, some of the “civilians” Ukraine claims were killed in Bucha were Azov soldiers! Now, that Ukraine lies shouldn’t be surprising, and it doesn’t disprove that a real atrocity occurred. But we have to remember what Azov is. It’s a group that has many convictions for killing civilians: 1, 2, 3. We have cases of the SBU + Azov threatening and killing civilians in UN reports (Volodymyr Lobach). There are cases reported by the UN of Azov raping the mentally handicapped. From the testimony of Marianna Vyshemirskaya we know that Azov has used active hospitals as cover. This is not a good group, and it’s the group that (1) was in Bucha, (2) died in Bucha, (3) is highly influential in the upper strata of the Ukrainian military. This is who you trust? Why?
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Out of the 150 streets in Bucha, the central claim involves a satellite image of Yablonska Street, one of the two streets with the heaviest fighting between Azov / Ukrainian forces and Russians. Ukrainians have been known to place their soldiers in domestic houses with civilians in adjacent dwellings
You believe a neonazi battalion with a long track record of killing civilians and putting other civilians in harm’s way. But it would be a trivial challenge for them to stage this event. A satellite image can be altered or its date misapplied, but even more importantly, civilians placed on the street is what you would expect if Russian forces were fighting Azov hiding in homes with civilians in it. (If these buildings were your base, you would not keep a dead civilian beside you for a week, you would place the deceased away from the building, ie the street). Something like 2,000 settlements were taken by Russians and subsequently recaptured and the supposed evidence of atrocities is less than the evidence of Azov atrocities. In the era of smartphones!
Muslim population
Wikipedia says 3% in Moscow (see the table entry for Moscow), and my other link says 3% from a rigorous June 2026 poll. Do you have better evidence?
Chechen rape hoax
The numbers I’m finding are that Moscow is 3% Muslim. Eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Russia ; https://social.hse.ru/socialogia/duxovenstvo
comparable with Paris
The one currently on fire, as I write this reply to you, because Muslims are setting a handful of beautiful buildings on fire? I mean, to be fair to the “ummah”, I don’t think a Kazakh or Uzbek is going to set anything on fire even though they’re Muslim, which is where Russia’s migrants come from. But France seems to have a terrible batch and the neo-European neo-“value” of letting them riot is not-based and not-trad. It’s very anti-European and demoralizing. Its very unaesthetic As is what Spain is doing with their migrant “regularization”, saying this as someone with blood from Spain and not the Slavs.
Russia's elite is wildly corrupt
This is no longer a tenable objection given Trump the past couple years, Germany’s spy chief being arrested…
We also have many war crime incidents in the war
Nothing approaching the horror of bombing 100 schoolchildren or morally-defending the starvation of 1,000,000 children by a Eurovision contestant. And I remain skeptical of Bucha because a militant Neo-Nazi batallion decked out in swastikas is probably not the most trustworthy org in the world, yet it’s where Ukraine sources some of their top officials from.
the Russian soldier raped by Kadyrov's troops
Meduza says that was fabricated, do you have a better source?
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
https://youtube.com/watch?v=CEWCuyAn0JA
The first person Project Zomboid mod looks so good
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
America has also invaded Europe, Europe has also invaded Europe, America has even invaded America before. How many wars were fought between European powers between 1600 and 1900? 80? How many wars were fought where the nobles on opposing sides treated each other with honor befitting Europeans? How many Europeans today admire Napoleon and what did he do and how was he treated after his first defeat? I mean, if we’re talking about defending Europe, we should consider what that means: the norms, the arts, the virtues, the blood? Or, like, gay marriage and foreigners and the wholecloth invention of the sanctity of democracy?
influence operations across Europe
Have you read about America’s influence operation in Ukraine? America being a rival power 9000km away and (checks map) definitely not in Europe?
coffee_enjoyer
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5d ago
Russia is not a threat to Europe, in fact a hypothetical conservative influence from Russia upon Europe is one of the few things that could save it from an impending migrant-driven extinction. The idea that Russia is a threat to Europe is (funny enough) something America has wanted Europeans to believe for decades, because a German-Russian bloc could threaten our global hegemony per STRATFOR. Our propaganda may have gotten out of control and now our Frankenstein believes the invention more than its creator. Imagining a German taking off his headset after a long day of playing CS2 with Russian teammates, walking past a German Christmas market playing Tchaikovsky, picking up a Kabab from the local Muslim-owned restaurant operated by Salafis who want to ban music, then returning home to complain about the Russian threat to Europe… I don’t know, I don’t get it. Europe is out of gas right now because the Jewish lobby in America pressured our President into a war in Iran. Are European Jews more European than actual Christian Europeans creating good classical art? It boggles me. A friend of mine is an opera singer in Germany, there are all sorts of Slavs in the arts, not so many Salafis though yet you’ve made the latter citizens.
Is there some 5head strategy move I am not seeing here
I think he wants to starve out Iranians with a long embargo. This helps prolong the duration of the ridiculous war in Iran.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
I didn’t find it that funny, no. He seemed nervous, off tempo. I thought it was funny when he said that the spandex was the color of bait, though.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
I'm more concerned with how you're coming up with your objections and less concerned about the objections themselves. In general, psychological effects are linear, you get close to wanting to induce Berkson's bias just to seem more right, you move the goal posts by demanding the data be new enough by your ad hoc standard. I could give you data after 1980 and reasoning like this, you'd be sure to ignore it and demand the data be from last year and so on. It's not a very productive or rational way to approach data, basically. I'm worried it's almost entirely motivated reasoning.
A lot of accusations here. Well, I happen to have read before that the Harvard Lampoon has a sizable nepotistic network in comedy, which is a fact, and that’s why I mention that the data should be tailored for the period in which the Internet democratized comedy. “Downey's most lasting contribution, he opened an employment pipeline, hiring and referring countless Lampoon alumni who now fill writers' rooms at shows from Curb Your Enthusiasm to Silicon Valley” […] “Once you’re there, it suddenly seems easier to get ahead. You do have an advantage. It’s just that you get some kind of contact and some sense that someone like you went there and did it. You are helped by knowing and being helped by other Lampoon people.” And then if I’m not mistaken the Lampoon movie series recruited from a Lampoon network. How will this new information update your confidence, because the accusations seem like you were quite confident?
This is a valid argument because the social network afforded by Harvard connections has nothing to do with g factor or the school itself, it’s just a random benefit that will boost the prominence of these IvyPlus grads even if their boost is undeserved. SNL has often been criticized for riding on its reputation, for instance. Few of the SNL Harvard crowd would make it as a stand-up comic, I’d wager, because… they’re not that funny. Laughs being the sole criteria of humor. These are defenses to the hypothesis because you introduced data; it’s all very reasonable.
off the top of my head, your points themselves are wrong. To begin with, the Ivy league does not have a monopoly on intelligence. Someone below pointed out Adam Sandler attended NYU ... which has an average SAT of 1520. Not any Ivy
Ah, but NYU had a 65% acceptance rate in 1990. Perhaps an 80% acceptance rate in 1984 when he applied? I can’t find the data. This is another point of evidence that, for whatever reason, the best comedians do not attend IvyPlus, though as your data found, 70% of top lawyers or so have.
laոgսages, wհicհ favօrs film actօrs օver verbal, US-օոly staոd-սp. It alsօ accսmսlates witհ age. Sհaոe Gillis illսstrates tհe bias. He is tհe mօst-viewed cօmediaո bօrո after 1980 օո Eոglisհ Wikipedia (789,000 views iո 60 days), yet հis article exists iո օոly ոiոe laոgսages, sօ հe fell belօw tհe օrigiոal sample’s cսtօff
Isn’t this a good argument against the method you’re using? He’s a highly prolific comic, highly relevant, but would be excluded because he’s not in other languages. Sports are different because sportsmen compete across nations.
Ivy-Plսs alսmոi amօոg tհe mօst-viewed receոt cօmediaոs iոclսde Cօliո Jօst, Jeոոy Slate, Allisօո Williams, aոd Wհitոey Cսmmiոgs
The inclusion of the latter three surely disprove the legitimacy of this methodology. Colin Jost makes sense; Slate and Williams are just actresses who happen to be in the comedy section for some reason. I guess I’m wondering why your criteria has two famous actresses that I am supposed to believe should be considered comedians. Maybe they did comedy, but they’re known for a ton of regular media. I know Allison Williams from Girls, for instance.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
Maybe, but no shortage enter journalism or an academic track, which are not very profitable at all. Being a good standup comic earns more social rewards than being a consultant: no shortage of women or parties, meeting famous people, being locally renowned.
coffee_enjoyer
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6d ago
the “6% rate of top comedians come from Ivys” is way smaller than should be expected were you to control for the selection effect of the Ivy’s (eg family wealth, health, drive) and the incidental benefits of an Ivy education (vastly enhanced social connections and opportunities). You should probably also exclude the bottom 20% in intelligence; of course the dumbest people can’t be comedians, so the negative correlation with g would only be found after a certain threshold; it’s rather a negative correlation with high g. Then you’d have to check if any of these comedians were legacy admits, which is an exclusionary criteria case. Maybe a more important argument against this data: we have to look at comedians born after, say, 1980, as it’s the Internet that has made comedy meritocratic. Your wikidata dataset premising your argument includes comedians born in 1940. But surely the world of comedy was not as meritocratic in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, when your connections with wealthy producers you went to school with had an outsize impact. In the internet age we can actually see who is funniest, they rise to the top of algorithms that are more difficult to game then 1 or 2 late night talk shows dictating the entiret of prominence.
The pօpսlatiօո is peօple with a giveո օccսpatiօո, US citizeոship, aոd birth years 1940–1995. Prօmiոeոce is measսred by the ոսmber օf Wikipedia laոgսage editiօոs
Is this an accurate measure of prominence?
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
Roystgnr is right, I misread the rankings. But yeah, it doesn’t make sense that a top comedian would attend a school at this ranking when comedy is so meritocratic, unless the ability comes from something unrelated to g
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
John Mulaney is double legacy Georgetown University alum, so we can’t really measure his IQ / credential. Westchester is one of the lowest ranking universities in America. Your link mentions Seinfeld, one of the all-time greats, and he went to a CUNY ranked #158 of us college. Our version of Mitchell and Webb is Key & Peele and they both went to pretty middling schools.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
Wait, but it’s trivially easy to demonstrate that it is true that comedy is orthogonal to both g and the academic accreditation filter process. If comedy tracked with either one, then we should expect virtually all the best comedians to be from elite institutions, because there are many hundreds of people graduating from elite institutions with a high IQ who are interested in comedy every year. The best mathematicians and the best lawyers nigh universally come from the best elite institutions. That’s what we should expect: the top 10 come from top institutions. But right now, and for decades, seldom do the best comedians come from such institutions. You had to go all the way back to look at Monty Python and this is complicated by the British class system. American comedy is more meritocratic, so where are all the Ivy-educated high IQ comedians? The high IQ and the Ivy graduate would both outperform Shane Gillis on a verbal iq test. So why is Shane the comedian du jour and not those ranked above him in either g or accreditation? Harvard Lampoon alone poops out 120 super-elites per decade, who are ahead of Shane in IQ, accreditation, training, and support. So… where are they?
I’d actually go further than “orthogonal”. Per the available evidence, comedy is negatively associated with possessing high g or strong academic success.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
It’s a live podcast + popular YouTube channel. Amateur comedians do one minute of standup and Tony Hinchcliffe critiques them afterward. The critique afterward is often the funniest part. I’ve seen it criticized for jokes on race / gender, but also for being aligned with the Joe Roganverse.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
Fruits as in
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control
among other passages. You must not be familiar with these passages.
Where is the grounding for what is good
If you’d read the New Testament, you would know how Jesus articulates good conduct in life. There is love for neighbor, there are actionable material consequences we should expect to flow from this love (Matthew 25:41-46), there’s the sharing of resources and the disavowal of worthless status pursuits and consumerism, etc. There’s peace and joy. Actually, the New Testament speaks very pragmatically about these things. The Kingdom is about righteousness and peace and joy.
It’s clear you have a variety of superstitions. But consider: did God really want the Greeks to lose all of their original lands to Turks? What if Orthodoxy had been a better religion which promoted a better society with more cooperation / etc? Did God want the Orthodox Church in Russia to nearly go extinct in the 20th century, or were they instead just incompetent Christians who failed their own people by allowing them to be entranced by communist ideology and failing to defend themselves? How much does yapping about theology actually do any good? Superstition will not actually save a religion with crumbling infrastructure. The religion will just die. You can be self-satisfied that you cling to a certain criteria of theological assertions which few Christians in history outside monasteries ever cared about (folk / popular Christianity ≠ theologian’s Christianity). But the religion will still perish.
coffee_enjoyer
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7d ago
Shane Gillis and the Limits of Credentialism
Comedy and the Limits of IQ Essentialism
Shane Gillis is being criticized for an SNL monologue joke about women wearing unseemly attire at the gym — this alone is totally uninteresting cw fodder — but the question of credentials got my attention. A number of the women offended at his joke have invoked their credentials to explain why Shane Gillis is obviously not a good comedian. A uniquely qualified student of comedy invokes her prestigious internship with a smirk to inform you that she knows about comedy. A graduate of comedy writing believes that her classes permit her to speak with haughty authority on comedy. A former working comic explains from a “craft perspective” why Shane Gillis’ joke didn’t work. Of course, none of these people have even vaguely approached the level of popularity of the critiqued comedian. For the sake of argument, let’s suppose that the foremost credentialed comedy expert in the world has made such a criticism: Harvard undergrad in writing, Princeton PhD in comedy studies, highly published in the highest-impact comedy studies journal. How seriously should we weigh the view of the credentialed against the comedian?
I am tempted to say that the credentialed should have zero weight added to their opinion due to their credentials alone. The only credential in comedy is whether you know how to make people laugh. It would be epistemically arrogant to think that “comedic authority” could ever be bestowed upon a person by way of credential when we barely know the origin and social purpose of comedy to begin with. I recently came across a cool study and overview of one set of theories on humor published last month (the intriguing bits in bold so you can skip through):
The Contents and Function of Humor Among Hunter-Gatherers
Adopting a view of humor as an evolved response to benign violations, I argue that four comic themes characterize most humor across cultures: pain and misfortune, sex and obscenity, the foreign, and the sacred. I propose that each of these themes are ultimately grounded in our evolved psychology as universal pressure points that humor can tap into. I review 745 descriptions of humor in the ethnographic record of the ten hunter-gatherer societies in the Probability Sample Files (PSF) within the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) World Cultures database, finding support for my account. I discuss the relevance of these findings for our understanding of the evolution and function of humor, arguing that humor evolved to signal and reinforce interpersonal trust and affiliation through reciprocal play with benign violations of socially charged norms and boundaries.
the benign violation theory stipulates that the violations required for humor must have a negative valence, hence mild physical mishaps like slipping on a banana peel are considered humorous while purely positive incongruities (e.g., strokes of luck like winning the lottery) are not. For something to be humorous, it must be incongruous not with our expectations of how things usually are but rather with our normative sense of how they “ought” to be. In other words, it must be appraised as wrong, bad, or threatening.
Secondly, the benign violation theory stipulates that for such violations to elicit humor as opposed to purely negative emotions, they must ultimately be appraised as benignly non-worrisome (i.e., normal, harmless, or okay). This explains why mild physical mishaps are funny while serious violations like being diagnosed with cancer are not. For something to be humorous according to the benign violation theory, two appraisals must then co-exist: a benign appraisal and a violation appraisal. By specifying that the violations required for humor must have a negative valence and including the condition of benignity, the benign violation theory builds on the incongruity theory to more accurately differentiate what is humorous from what is not
While humor is often posited as uniquely human, social play is an activity engaged in by most mammals, with an evolutionary antecedent of human laughter manifested in the laughlike panting that accompanies the “play face” of many other great apes (van Hooff, 1972; Gervais & Wilson, 2005; Winkler & Bryant, 2021). In play, animals typically benignly violate each other’s physical boundaries through play fighting, wrestling, chasing, and the like (Aldis, 1975). Play signals like the play face here ensure that violations are understood as benign, preventing misunderstandings from escalating the play fighting into actual violence (Pellis & Pellis, 1996).
testing function, allowing individuals to assess the quality of their social relationships (Winkler & Cartmill, 2026). By imposing a mild cost on a target in the form of a benign provocation while closely monitoring the target’s response, the teasing great ape can glean information about how much the target values the relationship. Reciprocal teasing banter in humans has been proposed to fulfill a similar, elaborated function: By benignly provoking each other without either party taking offense, the participants are in effect saying, “We are close enough that we can say anything about each other” (Terrion & Ashforth, 2002:72). Starting with small provocations and gradually ratcheting up the offensiveness of teases can thus be a way to build a bond of trust.
The fact that teasing, the variety of humor that is not unique to humans, is the most common subtheme among hunter-gatherers, accounting for a majority of humor descriptions, suggests that it may have been the original form of humor. It is also the variety of humor that most resembles the rough-and-tumble play from which humor likely evolved, with the physical violations of play giving way to the more abstract interpersonal violations of teasing. Just as teasing may serve a bond-testing function in other great apes (Winkler & Cartmill, 2026), reciprocal teasing in humans can take on a more elaborate, ritualized form of the same function, with two parties teasing each other as a mutually recognized signal of the strength of their relationship (Haugh & Bousfield, 2012). Not taking offence to a teasing provocation (i.e., appreciating it as benign) requires and thereby signals interpersonal trust.
Attempting humor by violating any norm ascribed social weight, not just interpersonal ones, requires and thereby signals trust that the recipient will interpret it as benign instead of malign. If the recipient responds by appraising it as benign and laughing, that signals reciprocal trust. For instance, Gusinde notes that Ona men, when by themselves away from women and children, engage in “coarse jokes and offensive remarks about women” that they never otherwise permit themselves (1931:1652). A bond is thereby forged through mutual complicity in transgression. Relatedly, Wiessner (2014) found that the vast majority of humor among Ju/‘Hoansi occurs at times of day when people are segregated by gender and age, allowing people to joke freely without overstepping the rules of respect organized along these lines.
Jokes reinforcing ingroup bonds at the expense of outgroups are not restricted to gender but also extend to foreigners, invoking the theme of the foreign. Such outgroups include other local bands or tribes with differing norms, such as the Blackfoot mocking the custom of eating dogs among the Cree (McClintock, 1968:238), or surrounding societies, such as the Mbuti mocking the rituals and institutions of their surrounding Bantu villagers (Turnbull, 1965a:294). Foreign ethnographers studying the surveyed societies commonly describe themselves becoming the butt of humor on account of their “naïvete and ineptitude” in native affairs (Dunning, 1959:ix) or their awkward grasp of the native language (Gusinde, 1931:104). The ethnographer may turn this to their advantage by playing along, becoming a participant in the humor rather than merely a subject of it, thereby engaging the natives in an unofficial reciprocal joking relationship (e.g., Cipriani, 1966:21).
humor may also be used to get away with deviating from otherwise reigning standards of behavior by couching one’s violations in humor. Most commonly, ethnographers describe humor being used as a non-comital way of violating social mores or interpersonal boundaries to indicate or fulfill sexual desire. The risk of rejection is minimized if an advance is coated in benign humorousness since it can always be brushed aside as just a joke, capitalizing on the affiliative signal of humor. Landes (1937), for instance, notes that Ojibwa men teasingly refer to their female joking relatives as “my debtor,” implying that they have sexual rights to them (p. 45). Among the Ona, “tender teasing” is similarly said to be the beginning of any love affair (Gusinde, 1931:445). Multiple observers report being bashfully taken aback when finding themselves on the receiving end of raunchy overtures from natives couched in humor, including Pryde (1972:89) among the Copper Inuit and Turnbull (1962) among the Mbuti. Turnbull, for instance, recounts how a woman marks her interest in him through a double entendre based on his nickname “the long one” (p. 141). (lol)
There are many branches of discourse to swing off from here. Did Shane’s norm violation go too far in the eyes of some women, thereby evoking their ire? Did some women misinterpret of Shane’s monologue, though filled with abundantly placating self-deprecation? Or perhaps it was clipped and they didn’t see the full monologue? Is there reduced social trust and affiliation between the genders? Has the dating crisis gotten so bad that a woman wearing lingerie underwear at the gym approaches the untouchably sacred? Was Shane’s humor better off in the company of only other dudes? Are women just not very funny (this is no laughing matter)?
There’s something else worth exploring here. If the above theories are true, then comedy seems tied to social intelligence, at least within the “competitive” comedy circuit. Humor is an accurate signal of a person’s ability to “socially read the room”, to know where others stand on trust / affiliation / values / sensitivities. This is interesting because comedic skill seems to be unattached to IQ. The most popular comedians are not at all the smartest, in fact many do poorly in school, like Gillis / Louis CK / Theo Von. There is no actual “Harvard undergrad in writing, Princeton PhD in comedy studies” comedian, and I don’t think this is from a lack of trying as it’s the perfect job for a trustfund kid and provides an extremely glamorous social life. I wonder if this is evidence for a social intelligence not adequately predicted by g factor?
And maybe one more thing worth considering. If comedy is the measure of affiliation and trust, then the oft-criticized KillTony (I mean criticized by left media) is actually a wonderful vehicle for national unity. Having men, women, foreigners etc all criticizing each other in offensive ways to laughter is the exact utility of humor you’d want if your interest was to increase affiliation and trust between citizens of different backgrounds.
The Ohio boomer Republican may be more likely to side with the mom in this scenario
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