RenOS
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User ID: 2051
RenOS
something is wrong
2d ago
I'm pretty confident that if Bezos would have married a literal nubile twenty something, we would have feminist journalists write about how this proves that men are shallow. If he had married a lower class mexican wife, it would be decried as vaguely coercive and that this proves men enjoy power differentials. If he had married white trash, he would be ridiculed as going back to his roots. Hell, if he married a conventionally attractive, age-appropriate, low-agency woman with a conventional job, that would probably also be insinuated as some sort of tradwife, wanting the woman to go back to the kitchen situation.
As several people have pointed out, Sanchez is in many ways precisely the sort of high-agency go-getter that should be popular with feminists, but who in practice always seems to be hated instead. In practice, feminist journalists always want highly successful men to marry women like themselves.
RenOS
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3d ago
It's just the usual - a wrong solution to a real problem. People notice they are getting screwed, they notice some others seem to do well, so it's kind of logical to take from them to give to yourself. It also has always been human nature, unfortunately, and an emotion happily stoked by a certain kind of social elite to their own benefit. People who technically do not own all that much money, but who manage large streams one way or another, and for whom socialism means more money to manage. For the common good, of course! And more generally, just promising a lot with no concern for how to actually get it done is very hard to argue against if most voters have little time or willingness to really look into the details. Without the soviet union as a demonstrable failure in living memory, it will only ever get harder.
RenOS
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3d ago
As someone involved with teaching college students, it's even more simple than this: Teaching (and marking even moreso) is a nuisance appreciated by no-one (least of all the students, who often just want their piece of paper and be done with it) at this point, so you just go through the motions of doing the absolute minimum. For one class I work together with literally the most popular professor, who has won multiple student-led prizes for teaching at our university. His assignments and exams? "I have done the same for a decade now, why change anything?" His policy for passing students? "I would pass them during the oral exam anyway, so why should I make myself the work by not letting them pass the written exam?" He is a really nice guy, his classes aren't bad and he is always helpful when you ask him for anything, so I have nothing against him; But if that is the mindset of the best, woe upon the rest!
RenOS
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3d ago
For instance, in the financial column "Money Stuff" (great reading BTW) the author when talking about an imagined or generic CEO will use "she" as the pronoun. I'm not really a believer in the whole micro-aggression literature, but I can still see that subtle and low-key (non-mandatory) attempts at gently pushing back against stereotypes can be nice.
Tbh I've arrived at the opposite conclusion. As a teen I used to like characters that go against stereotypes - and to some degree I still do, as long as they're done carefully and thoughtfully - but combined with the ubiquitousness and increasing importance of fictional stories in people's lives, it seriously distorts their worldview. Stereotype accuracy is one of the best-replicating findings of sociological research, yet many people I tell this - most of them quite smart and educated - are completely dumbfounded. Of course this is especially due to the nature of their education, but the fictional stories they surround themselves with just reinforce their biases over and over. This can get quite comical, such as women who worry something is wrong with them because they aren't as assertive nor sporty nor as interested in engineering/math/etc. as their heroines.
RenOS
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4d ago
This is the case in germany as well for the most part, though it's as always more complicated. For the state universities, there are very few shortcuts, top degrees are kept highly selected & small, and it's free to boot - you just have to be good enough. The private universities, meanwhile, have the reputation that anyone can just buy their way in. It's gotten even harder for them since there's lots of new, easy-to-get degrees even in state universities nowadays. But most people know which are which, so they're only worth it if you can't get anything else.
Yeah. My wife already had an autoimmune condition which seriously worsened after taking the covid vaccine. We even tried to get an exemption for her since she has had similar issues with other vaccines and we saw the early case reports on young women with autoimmune diseases, to no avail. And we're hardly layman, we're both scientists with relevant expertise. Covid was a major blackpill for us on the topic of trusting scientific consensus. If we get shut out like this for a mildly inconvenient opinion (we're not even fully sceptics for the covid vaccine in particular - I took my doses with no problems nor expectations of such), imagine the pressure for even less popular ones! Of course it did not come as a complete surprise due to earlier experiences, but it really solidified our opinion of academics.
On the first part though I disagree strongly. People frequently write something like "men do/are X" with nobody complaining, and the same goes for plenty of smaller groups. If you disagree, just do so in writing, as you did; It's what everyone else does, and a good reason to stop lurking.
RenOS
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6d ago
Very relevant further reading for the interested from Kirkegaard and Seb Jensen.
One thing missing from Scott's review is that Gusev and Turkheimer have publicly stated that they consider the possibility of IQ being substantially genetic abhorrent, especially for racial differences, akin to the dangerousness of the atomic bomb. Neither is a complete hack like say Kevin Bird, thankfully, but their results have to be taken with a great heaping of salt; they are not at all neutral, they don't even claim to be. If you read between the lines for Turkheimer in particular, it becomes clear that he considers hereditarian research very compelling, he just wants the bar for it to be considered true extremely high, and he wants us to by default believe in a mostly-environmental explanation not because it is scientifically compelling, but because it is the theory with more benign implications.
So, the first conclusion is that sibling-based analysis' aren't actually consistently in disagreement with twin experiments; A particular set of sibling-based analysis' chosen by people who have publicly exclaimed how much they hate the results of twin experiments is in disagreement with twin experiments. There are other studies that are in good alignment.
The second, which many here have already mentioned and which Scott also correctly calls out but you seem to have missed, is that both Gusev and Turkheimer willfully misrepresent underpowered GWAS results as disproving heritability in general, which is just silly. We know how complex genetics is, and GWAS is still missing large parts. The tan paper cited, for example, is just using genotyping! For those who don't know, there are three currently available levels of genetic informations: WGS looks - in theory - at the entire genome, but even the best available approaches are still having trouble with larger structural variants and variants in highly repetitive regions. WES looks at only the exome, which is the roughly 1% of the genome that is properly transcribed into RNA (and a subset of which is coding for proteins). Then there is genotyping, which is literally only looking at specific locations. The list is usually extended through imputation, but this has its own issues. This is akin to claiming that cartography got debunked by an approach that can only look at specific houses (not even randomly chosen ones so you could make a map through repeating the experiment - always the same few houses).
Another important part is the connection between materialism and genetic IQ determinism; First, genuine genetic IQ determinism is extremely rare, the common arguments are between people who claim genetics is negligible (excluding rare high-impact variants) on one side, and people who claim genetics is non-negligible. Even Scott AFAIK has the position of IQ being somewhere between 30-70% genetic, which is a far cry from outright determinism, especially once you consider these percentages are for inter-developed-states differences. Among the dominant materialist ideologies, the favored hypothesis is some variant of blank-slatism. It has many desirable qualities, and even I would prefer it were true; For one, it would mean that we can fix all problems just through environmental changes such as social engineering, without ever having to change anything about the fundamental building blocks of our biology. That would be awesome! But it is trivial to show how important genetics is for a long list of traits, and it is usually uncontroversial where it's considered convenient. It's always EA and IQ that get singled out for special treatment because people don't want those to be partially, let alone substantially, genetic.
RenOS
something is wrong
6d ago
You're first and last point are strongly related. Back when we were introduced into chess as kids, I was exceptional at it compared to most of the others, because I could use raw logic better than them. But once some started to train and I didn't, I predictably slipped behind. Based on my skill with other games and the fact that I started from a higher floor, I could probably keep being better than them, I just didn't focus on it. I liked other games more. If you investigated skill in different board games that all need broadly similar traits and talents, I'm pretty sure you'd find results akin to our IQ results: There is quite a strong correlation between them, and especially on the >1SD and >2SD level you find a lot of people who are just generally good at everything with mild specialisation. But to reach the >3+ SD and more, you need some serious over-focusing and specialisation to the exclusion of other things in addition to the naturally high general talent. Mind you, you somewhat misrepresent the state of the research AFAIK; Even the people at the top end for one category still tend to be significantly above average in other fields, they just aren't at the top end of everything simultaneously.
That's not to say that there aren't other skills critical for only one subfield, or even other relevant general skills. EQ, for example, really needs good face reading to work. Meaning if you have some degree of prosopagnosia, it will be much harder for you, even if you try to focus your intelligence on it. Likewise, if you think about problems in physical space, then a talent for innate 3d visualisation is extremely useful (something I relied on a lot when studying math; I always prefer to move everything towards geometry, which some other students didn't understand, while others also found it intuitively helpful).
Nevertheless, once I account for these other skills, I still use my general reasoning in everything. I use it to mentally move and manipulate shapes, I use it to understand people, I use it to time-plan.
For another example, memory is also a fairly general skill, though not equally so for everything, and I have always really noticed the impact of focus there. Back when I played Battlefield Bad Company 2, I memorized every single weapons traits: Damage, mag size, recoil, delay between bullets, reloading time, even the exact shape of the damage-distance curve ... Same goes for other games. Meanwhile my social memory used to be awful, to the degree that I once forgot my own name when introducing myself (awkward!). I used to tell myself that these are just totally separate things and that it's not my fault, but now that I'm a dad and office worker, I find myself having much less trouble remembering social details about various people, as long as I think they matter. In the same vein I have less patience to remember all the detailed mechanics of arcane games. It's increasingly clear to me that I'm merely re-directing a general skill towards the things I care about, as opposed to there being different skills.
RenOS
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7d ago
I think it really is a question of degree and immediateness. I had some problems with violence around elementary school, like many boys, but over time realised how destructive that was, adapted & looked for new friends, and by the time testosterone really hit in puberty I was already well-adjusted to dealing with it. I haven't had a brawl or anything similar in more than a decade by now, but I also know that I still very much enjoy violence, so it's not hard at all for me to imagine that if a person was suddenly hit with my level of testosterone without any time to adapt or critically reflect on it, they may struggle with their temper.
RenOS
something is wrong
14d ago
I've always interpreted the djinn concept in a slightly different way; Even if you wish for something mostly benign, or which at least can be trivially granted in a desirable way, such as getting lots of gold, they will frequently fuck you over anyway, by actively contriving the wish in such a way that it becomes undesirable. The lesson, to me, was thus more about how a servant who is genuinely, fundamentally more powerful than you - even if the master-servant relationship is magically enforced! - is never truly just subservient. Especially if they are also smarter than you and can thus find loopholes in almost any wish you formulate, no matter how carefully.
However, as you point out, having limitless ambition and no moral compass means there is simply no pleasant natural ending state. It's just a permanent struggle until you're dead, or everyone else is. So even without a malicious spirit, the latter is the most straightforward consequence of getting your wish granted.
I was interviewing at a mining company way back when and they were just so boring and dry
Also, thanks to my parents I am an east-coast latte-sipping downtown elitist lib-pilled yuppie (see my flair). So moving to Calgary (and Alberta generally, although I liked Austin so if Calgary was cool I'd deal with the awful governance) is not a very appealing option. Soy-jacking aside, I love the vibe of big cities, and the absurd fun and convenience they provide.
It's not so much "city fun kid boring", I fucking loved growing up in Toronto. I want my kid to experience that. And Toronto is so much better now than when I was a kid.
No offense, but I started out predisposed to believing you, but the more you post, the more I think the revealed preferences people are correct, at least in your particular case. Whatever you wish to be true, large, especially capital cities in the west have been on a trajectory of being increasingly fun and cool for the young, childless and high-powered careerist, while becoming less and less affordable for families. The same goes for all the popular jobs. You pay a significant premium to have a job that is fun, and if that premium is so expensive that you can't afford kids, it means you value that fun higher than kids. No, people in the past didn't have fun jobs, in fact if boring and dry is the worst you can come up with, that's probably a top 1% job in terms of satisfaction right there, certainly in the past and to some degree even currently.
I did my PhD in London. For my career, and probably even for that of my wife, it would have been MUCH better to stay there. My PhD supervisor was ready to take me over as a postdoc, and she is quite successful. My wife, meanwhile, had worked with Friston (the neuroscientist), and would have had a decent shot at getting a postdoc there as well. But we both chose against it, for multiple reasons, but primarily because raising kids in London sucks. My PhD supervisor had her first child almost simultaneously with mine (just a few weeks difference), and I really can't see her getting more than one. We went back to [small university city in germany] and are now on our second child and counting. We will probably have three, maybe four (though more are unlikely, since we didn't start early enough and I'm also not a particular fan of having babies past 40).
And it was totally worth it! Kids really are the greatest meaning-generators. Fun also gets a lot cheaper; Suddenly, I don't need to go on expensive vacations or the like. All the simple things that have become boring for me, if I do it with our eldest and she is having fun, I have fun as well through the magic of empathy. Hell, even playing peekaboo with our baby is lots of fun. And no, doing it with other kids isn't the same.
Tbh, I'd say that you're stuck in a local maximum that is pleasant and fun right now but will lead to you being dissatisfied in the long-term, and you even recognise that fact, but you don't leave bc you aren't willing to suffer a little in the valley on the way towards a better maximum.
RenOS
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16d ago
It's not about having no experience, it's about them having a tendency to tell you that behaving like a good christian or [insert religion] will surely lead to you finding and holding a partner, when it's at best unrelated or at worst actively counterproductive.
Ironically, I would actually say that they are better equipped to give good relationship advice once you already are committed to each other, for the same reason.
RenOS
something is wrong
16d ago
Hmm weird, I can't find anything on how to play that on android. The umineko project version is a bit tedious to get running, but so far it seems to work, so I'll just use that.
This reminds me of a story I've once read (or watched?), which indeed ends on the main character achieving immortality, even godhood, as they desired, but sacrificing the world in the process. Then they sit in the never, for eternity, doing nothing. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the story, or much more details. But I always thought that this is the appropriate ending for "main character has limitless ambition and no moral compass whatsoever".
RenOS
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17d ago
Just to be clear, you mean the umineko project port, right?
RenOS
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17d ago
Hmm, I had watched Higurashi, which I enjoyed very much, but then never got around to Umineko, which at that time seemed to me like just more of the same, but as a "normal" murder mystery. Seems I misjudged things. Would recommend the manga or do you have another option? I probably won't play on the PC for some time, though maybe the fanported android version.
RenOS
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18d ago
Yes, but even the multiparty democracies in the west are currently devolving into a dysfunctional establishment vs non-establishment two sides conflict.
RenOS
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21d ago
Tbh this is just as bad a take imo as the fanatics wanting to get rid of cars in the countryside said bc they "just need better public infrastructure". Yes, cars are superior for rural regions and public infrastucture is just not feasible there, but for well-designed suburbia and especially for smaller cities, bikes are also just better in many circumstances. It has nothing to with hobbies, hippies or fitness fanatics (though regular exercise is one of the benefits of bikes!). They need so much less space, they're cheaper, more flexible, less dangerous for pedestrians, etc.
Reducing cars in the suburbs to pedestrian speed and giving them the blame for any accident is great, it means even smaller kids can run, play, and bike through the suburbs without me needing to worry much, It means I can walk and bike there without having to be attentive all the time, and as long as it is properly designed even if I need to drive through it's just a minute or so of slow driving.
In cities car culture is also awful, the smell got better but everything is just so clogged and noisy. Worse, the danger means that even if you want to bike, it makes you choose the car bc a single idiot can cost your life. When I was living in London, almost everyone biked for a while, and those who stopped always had an incident with a crazy car driver. I myself also had several such situations. The counter here is usually crazy cyclist, but crazy cyclists are merely annoying, even a collision will usually not even seriously hurt you (though I get very pissed when small kids are involved, but even there I can literally just jump in front & stop the bike if needed); Crazy drivers can kill you with frightening ease, and there is absolutely nothing you can do. There's a lot to dislike in the EU, but well-targeted car bans are great.
RenOS
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23d ago
Don't know the guy, but just looked up the linked channel and yeah, that kind of beard always makes you look really old. And it's also really popular among the orthodox for some reason. I'm even sometimes surprised myself when I shave down how young I still look, and I never let it get that long.
RenOS
something is wrong
28d ago
Short story is, me and my wife are both PhDs (me applied math, her psychology), so we have both met quite a few different varieties of nonbinary and trans individuals. Even back when studying we noticed that it's my spaces and in particular Computer Science that has several MtFs (and I've made the same observation in ultra-male online spaces such as mech-themed games or esoteric linux open source projects; they may be 10% female, but it's all G.I.R.L.s), while FtMs are mostly in her circles, particularly the social sciences. Standard gender theory would predict the opposite; And further, my wife (who is, ironically, one of the least feminine woman personality-wise I know) noticed in her interactions in her circle of friends that the majority of FtMs and nonbinaries have virtually no male hobbies, no masculine behaviour patterns, nothing.
When asked how they knew, they talk about how they disliked their growing breasts and how cumbersome they are (my wife does as well), how unpleasant the period is (duh), how scary the thought of pregnancy is (again, duh) how they don't want to be pressured into caring for kids and having to abandon their career (my wife, too), sometimes even how cismen are dirty and gross and they don't want to have sex with them (literally every women ever). It's basically a laundry list of all realisations and fears that many if not all girls get during puberty or slightly later, but instead of having to come to terms with it, they took the easy way out: Just reject it all. Their male identity, meanwhile, consists of superficialities, such as literally wearing lumberjack shirts, or even doing female-coded hobbies but with a male twist, such as really liking to cook, but they cook steaks. They're basically what women think men should be like, not what real men are actually like. Not rarely, they downright detest almost everything about real men as "toxic masculinity", such as competitiveness, dominance, playful insults, not talking about feelings, hierarchies, etc.
The same goes for students I'm teaching now, although it's obviously more distanced so I'm less confident here, but as far as I can see there is virtually no connection between their outward presentation of male-ness and actual masculine behaviour (or vice versa for MtFs).
RenOS
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29d ago
I don't think that's true. I think it failed because as bad as the US establishment bureaucrats are, the EU is just way, way worse. Where the former has a overrepresentation of progressives, the latter has an absolute chokehold.
RenOS
something is wrong
29d ago
The problem is that by this logic, as far as I can see, every law is a "power that can be abused". The le pen conviction was based on fairly straightforward anti-corruption laws that disallow using EU funded workers to also work nationally. This is a reasonable limitation and does not seem unduly far-reaching in principle.
The problem is that the law effectively unenforced on the rest of the EU apparatus, especially the most left-leaning parts. A former green EU staffer has already gone ahead and publicly declared that he himself, as well as the entire rest of his office, has engaged in exactly the same behaviour Le Pen has. Crickets.
So the real issue is, as @wlxd points out, is a legislative dedicated to stretching and/or ignoring the law in any way they like, to further the goals they like. You can't write laws good enough to combat this mindset.
RenOS
something is wrong
29d ago
I also want to add, I can't remember any atheism rants in DCC (not saying there are literally none, but if there are, they are extremely easy to forget). Carl does have regular (mostly internal) rants against the aliens running the show, but they're really a very small part of the overall story, and for the most part are perfectly understandable for someone being thrown into a gladiator deathmatch against his will. Religion inside the show is transparently fake and gay, but everything inside the show is deliberately set up in mockery. Outside of the show, the alien antagonist are mostly non-religious, and even if they have a religion, their evilness has usually nothing to do with it.
Absolutely! I have had exactly one partner, who is now my wife & mother of my children, and the only thing we intend to change about this arrangement is increasing the number of kids. I have very little understanding for breaking up after being a family for so long.
But the people critizing Bezos aren't even better on that front; The journalist writing the article broke up her own marriage with an affair.
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