I think there's some "sense" to be made from this, in that we're seeing multiple principles supported by the modern progressive left running into conflict with each other. One set of principles is that women should have full and complete autonomy to pursue whatever they want, and that any stigma, pressure, suggestion, or differential treatment whatsoever (even imagined) denies women complete autonomy. By their lights, if you treat a prostitute or porn star differently to a teacher or doctor (in settings where their professions aren't directly relevant) because of their professions, then you are denying those women complete autonomy. Furthermore, these people should actually be celebrated, which can be justified on multiple bases: equal treatment (we celebrate teachers, so why not prostitutes?), historical rebalancing (we've stigmatized prostitutes in the past, so we should celebrate them to make up for it), or personal bravery (we've stigmatized prostitutes, so any woman who takes it on in the face of that stigmatization is clearly stunning and brave and someone worthy of presenting as a role model).
The other set of principles is that straight male sexual desires are highly suspect at best and most likely evil and ought to be suppressed. This translates to celebrating porn stars while denigrating the people they serve.
07mk
5mo ago
Perhaps if you're comparing the derivative, but it seems that the actual value matters more than the direction. If Elon Musk loses a million dollars, he's still better off than me if I got a 2 million dollar windfall.
07mk
5mo ago
It is fascinating to me that this is enough of a commonly believed trope that an entire Netflix movie (and a sequel) was made whose entire premise is based on how tough it is to be a tall girl (who also happens to be conventionally attractive, though perhaps not Hollywood standards) in high school. I tried checking it out out of morbid curiosity once, and I can definitely not recommend it at all.
07mk
5mo ago
No, at least not people to the extent that the negative consequences I face from them would be considered "severe." It can be a bit difficult to guess at due to the fact that I've literally never met a single open Trump supporter among my IRL social circles, though I have a friend who's fairly right-wing and occasionally, hesitantly, shyly open about it, and the extent of negative consequences tends to be just ostracization rather than anything severe. In retrospect, I was being paranoid in a similar way as the people in 2016 who were saying death camps for gays would be around the corner if Trump got elected.
07mk
5mo ago
my mental model as a self-identified swing voter is that my vote or the votes of others like me could be the deciding factor in an otherwise-close race. My vote is worthwhile, because if everyone who felt that way voted together, it would actually merit attention from The Powers That Be.
I used to think somewhat like this, but I realized that whether or not I decided to vote, I wouldn't affect the behavior or votes of others like me. Others like me will make their decisions on whether/who to vote based on their own beliefs and values. Those beliefs and values will likely be similar to mine, and so their decisions will likely be similar to mine, but it's not as if me changing my mind now to vote would influence them to make similar decisions.
07mk
5mo ago
But you raise an interesting alternative hypothesis, which is that maybe women are the ones selecting "intellectually superior" men to date, and that's why they perceive all the men they date as "needing to feel intellectually superior," because they actually are.
This seems to be another version of a fairly common trope about the dating market, which is that most women tend to date men that most other women tend to date, and those men tend to have qualities that most women find attractive, which are qualities that also either tend to be or correlate with qualities that they say out loud that men shouldn't take on. The "men don't want to get married" cliche largely seems to stem from this, from my view; where I look, there's no shortage of single men who are eager to settle down and get married, but there's a dearth of women who would even give them a chance on a date. On the other hand, the men that are getting dates from women tend to be men who, whether intrinsically or due to the female attention they've gotten, are pushed towards deciding that playing the field would be more beneficial to their lives than settling down.
07mk
5mo ago
I came to similar conclusions as you a long time ago without much disillusionment about politics because of the simple math of voting: the only way that my vote matters in terms of who gets elected is if one of the elections in which I voted was decided by exactly 1 vote, after all the recounts and such, and the odds of that happening are so astronomically small that the very real guaranteed cost of taking the time and effort to go to a place to vote or to fill out a form and mail it in aren't worth it. However, I voted in the 2016 and 2020 US elections for 2 different reasons, which you might find compelling.
First of all, I don't think I'm a very good liar, so I wanted to place myself in a situation that I wouldn't have to lie convincingly. Given that, I wanted to honestly be able to say that I voted for the first woman president of the United States merely for the historic reasons (whether or not I think the whole "first person of [x] in position [y]" should be historic, it is historic) which is why I voted in 2016. Didn't quite work out that way, but the chance of positive upside seemed worth the cost. In 2020, I voted for Biden, because I wanted to be able to honestly say that I helped to vote out Donald Trump from the White House, lest I face severe negative consequences from people who consider not voting against Trump to be a mortal sin. Of course, the exact mirror situation could happen with people considering not voting for Trump to be a mortal sin, but my own assessment of my risk was that Biden supporters were far more likely to enact such negative consequences on me than Trump supporters. I'm not sure I'll vote for Biden again this year rather than abstaining like I did in 2012, since the fervor to keep Biden in the White House while preventing Trump from getting back in, for some reason, doesn't feel as strong now as the fervor to knock Trump out of the White House in 2020 (I'm guessing that Covid & the riots of that year probably had a lot to do with it).
07mk
5mo ago
Just what kind of personality type does it take to seriously want to use a nuke in terrorism (is it some sort of extreme misanthrope, someone whose political convictions are second at best to the nihilistic urge of "kill 'em all"?)
I don't think either extreme misanthropy or nihilism are required or even particularly likely characteristics of a terrorist who would want to use nukes. Merely the conviction that life on Earth is just a very short term pit stop, where your behavior during it determines your placement in the eternity of afterlife would be enough to convince a perfectly regular, pro-social, well-adjusted member of society to believe that murdering 5-6 figure number of people is not only justified but obligated.
07mk
5mo ago
People that went from not exercising regularly, to exercising regularly: what motivated you to do that? What got you started?
For me, the motivation was just to be able to function without great discomfort, since I'd been overweight/obese for about 5ish years when I started losing weight. By BMI, I was right around the overweight/obese boundary (30), which was making simple acts like sitting on a chair without discomfort from fat rolls or walking up one flight of stairs very difficult and arduous. It was probably a bad decision given my weight at the time, but I started running, and as I ran more and more, I found that I enjoyed the experience of tracking my stats and pushing myself to get faster or keep up longer streaks or to go on longer runs and such. Being in my early-mid 20s helped my body tolerate the punishment, I think. As I discovered the fun of athletic activities, I pivoted to other ones, and I landed on ultimate Frisbee as a dependable go-to exercise that I partake in throughout most of the year.
As you allude to, I think this is the kind of thing that can only come from an internal motivation. But one thing that I think I took away from this experience is that finding a sport or other activity that you find fun or engaging is a big BIG help for making exercise stick. I don't run anymore, partly because of my knees, but mostly because I don't enjoy the actual moment-to-moment experience of running. The runner's high was pleasant, and the act of transforming my body both in terms of its physical composition and in terms of actions the body is capable of performing was fun, but at the end of the day, if I could get all those benefits without running, I would. I wouldn't say the same for ultimate Frisbee. For that, the activity is the benefit, and the exercise is a side-effect. Running for 30 minutes is a chore, but playing ultimate for 90 minutes is fun the whole time and burns more calories while also likely hitting a higher max HR. I've been able to manage my weight and general fitness level pretty well for the past decade or so without putting much effort at all into fitting regular exercise into my schedule - I just have fun playing a game that also happens to require me to exercise.
So I think, from a 3rd person perspective, to get someone else to pick up exercising, one path I would try to follow is to find some activity that they find fun that also enforces exercise. There are plenty of fairly low-level, low-commitment activities that can be tried out, including ultimate, but also other pickup sports like soccer or basketball, or biking or hiking or indoor rock climbing or even something like MMA or BJJ (though usually those take more commitment). I'd actually invite them to partake in these various activities with me, since 99.99% of the time, when the conversation goes "X is cool, you should try it," "Oh thanks for the recommendation, I'll give it a shot!" the 2nd person won't even remember what X is 30 seconds later, much less actually try it (that 99.99% probably drops to around 90% if you actually invite someone, but that's still a 1000-fold increase in success rate!). And if you have some social status in this environment, certainly attaching yourself to this activity will make them more likely to genuinely enjoy the activity in itself.
07mk
6mo ago
Surely we can develop better norms for [social stuff]
Regardless of the specific issue, I'm rather skeptical of this possibility. Perhaps we could imagine better norms which, if people followed them, would create a better society or a society that at least suffers less from this one particular problem, but that's just a creative writing exercise. Whether we could develop better norms in the sense of actually directing norms and enforcing them in society in general in such a way that they solve the problems they're intended to solve without introducing worse problems (or negating the solution in some other way) is a different question.
07mk
6mo ago
"every movement bends the truth, it doesn't make social justice bad just because we lie, too" or "so what if the woke encourages nosy busybodies and wokescolds? The conservatives do it, too". I've never known how to argue back other than just insisting that they should be better than stooping to low techniques then making excuses.
This looks similar to arguments I've had with myself as someone who used to be "woke" before the term was popularized ("social justice warrior" was the common term back then), and hashing out the argument was one of the many factors that got me to abandon the ideology.
On lies, it took very little thinking to recognize that lying is a habit that one can get into that's very difficult to turn on and off at will, especially since it's often difficult even to recognize when one is lying. This goes even more for lies that one tells oneself, which is by far the most common kind of lie and the most difficult lie to avoid telling even under the best circumstances and with the purest of intentions. It's also difficult to recognize which ideology is better than others if your beliefs are based on lies; as such, if I want what's best for the world rather than merely my team winning, then that means choosing the best ideology on the basis of an honest assessment of the facts and truth. But if I make it a habit to lie to others for the sake of convenience, then it'd be easy for me to unintentionally lie to myself for the sake of convenience, e.g. I could lie to myself that this ideology that happens to be popular among my peers and happens to give me social status for overtly supporting also happens to be the best or most correct ideology - what a convenient universe for me this is, that these characteristics happen to coincide in this one ideology! It also raises questions about how I was won over to the ideology, and whether those were based on lies that other follower of the ideology decided was convenient to tell to me for the sake of recruiting another follower - questions that can only be answered by taking a brutally honest look at the actual underlying reality, and that brutal honesty only comes about by making honesty a habit, which obviously includes doing so towards one's ideological opponents.
Unfortunately, I don't see this as being possible when a third party is involved, because the ideology is so hardened against external (and internal as well) scrutiny that only scrutiny that comes from an internal desire to get things right can survive long enough to actually have any effect. I think there are right wing parallels, such as some Christians dismissing some arguments as literally satanic, or Islam allowing for dishonesty towards non-Muslims as a way to win them over, but these are explicitly faith-based religions where the followers openly acknowledge that the reason they chose their team is faith. This is contrast to modern progressive idpol, whose followers claim to genuinely believe that they figured out the correct (or, at least more correct than the others) ideology through non-faith-based means. Genuinely believing this while also intentionally corrupting one's ability to discern lies from truth - and more generally abiding by the intentional corrupting of this ability in the followers of this ideology - seems like cognitive dissonance. Which, again, just doesn't seem possible to penetrate as a third party. Without the genuine will to actually figure out what the best ideology is for the world, most people will be happy enough to lie to themselves that the ideology they like also happens to be the one that is the best one for the world. Again, not lying to oneself that way is hard enough even under the best circumstances and with the purest of intentions.
07mk
6mo ago
Entropy means disorder, randomness, chaos, and the like, so "low entropy" would refer to something that is well ordered or well structured. I think most people would interpret that in this context as something that has less "noise" compared to the "signal," since "noise" could be considered to add entropy, due to adding content without adding meaning.
07mk
6mo ago
We're probably at least a year away from something that meets all those requirements, if not forever (the "free" part is the big one there). I don't think we even have free AI image generators yet that can generate 1920x1080 individual images that doesn't involve installing Stable Diffusion locally.
07mk
7mo ago
On my Android phone, I can long-press any app notification, which changes that notification to a menu of options on how to treat that kind of notification, as well as a button to go into the settings to control all notifications for that particular app. Perhaps you have an older version of Android?
07mk
7mo ago
I see this accusation thrown at rationalists a lot, and I'm honestly not sure what to think about it. As someone who's mostly ambivalent to the whole rationalist movement/identity but one who spend a lot of time interacting with them on Scott Alexander-related forums, I've rarely seen rationalists imply any sort of greater value on individuals for their IQ. They're often accused of being high IQ people bitter at not being worshiped like the gods they deserve to be merely for their high IQ, but, again, I've rarely ever seen them do or state anything that even remotely implies this sort of belief. I feel like this most likely reflects a sort of intelligence fetishism on the part of the critic, who sees rationalists talk about IQ and intelligence and how useful they are in certain (well, to be fair, many, MANY) contexts and can't separate that idea of usefulness from some sort of inherent superiority.
07mk
7mo ago
If these "radicals," as you call them, stuck to Bene Gesserit-style multi-millennia plans involving eugenics in order to manipulate the genetic causes of the individual/cultural preferences, I think this aspect of the culture wars would be significantly less contentious.
07mk
7mo ago
Once again it's only a conspiracy theory when outsiders notice what the insiders celebrate. Even that dev who was recently making excuses about how face modeling is hard snuck in an "and actually it's good to challenge cis hetero beauty standards and we're doing it deliberately" towards the end.
I find this apparent feigning ignorance endlessly frustrating. The writers and academics who call themselves "progressive" are very open about their desire and willingness to manipulate the populace into believing things they want them to believe by putting in certain tropes into the fiction they write. This is justified on the basis of their stated belief that all fiction manipulates the audience, and so it's better to do it with conscious intent for causes they consider socially just instead of doing so unconsciously while merely focusing on creating an entertaining/meaningful work of fiction which they contend inevitably reinforces the status quo which they find bigoted and intolerable. It's not always possible to nail down this as the cause of any given individual case of uglification, but given the prevalence of these types of people in fiction production and the ubiquity of this narrative, I don't think benefit of the doubt is at all justified, and it's perfectly reasonable to default to the presumption that any specific case was due to ideological intent until proven otherwise.
And if we were to follow the same standards by which such people deem fictional works as "white supremacist" or "patriarchal" or "heteronormative" or whatever, there would be no question that we could conclude that these were caused by ideological motives: as long as someone can write a convincing-sounding essay connecting some work of fiction with these concepts they consider bigoted, it doesn't matter what the creators were thinking or intending, these works are ideological and for a bad ideology. If the creators had nothing but pure entertainment-focused intent or even if they were actively trying to send a message of equality, then that just means that they fell prey to their implicit/unconscious biases which proves just how entrenched white supremacy/patriarchy/etc. really is. But double standards are also justified on the basis of relative power and such (which themselves are justified by someone writing a convincing-sounding essay).
You see this more broadly with people claiming not to know what "woke" or "critical race theory" mean. It's a kind of dishonest bit of self deception that fools no one other than themselves. I just wish they would loudly and proudly stand up for what they believe in, proclaim that they are trying to manipulate the populace for the purpose of a better, more socially just world, and let the chips fall where they may. I find Scott Adams to be... a very silly person not worth paying attention to, but when he said that he was hypnotizing people, including through the very same message of informing them of this hypnotism, because his hypnotism would work even if the audience was consciously aware of what he was doing, I could at least respect that more than this shell game of implausible deniability many writers and activists on the left like to play of openly claiming a desire to manipulate the audience and then acting shocked and appalled that others would accuse them of making creative choices meant to manipulate the audience.
07mk
7mo ago
Surely these things aren't mutually exclusive, but rather in concordance with each other, right? Which is to say,
they understand enough to know the art is “prestigious” so they trick themselves into liking it whilst looking down on bourgeois taste
is the mechanism by which they arrive at their genuine, honestly held aesthetic preferences such that
They don't think it's ugly. They actually prefer it.
...
To them uglyness isn't ugly. It's genuinely mindnumbingly beautiful.
I mean, you see this talk about manipulating, say, straight men into genuinely, honestly believing that fat women and transwomen are beautiful and sexy by putting them on magazine covers or pushing them to watch porn featuring such people. If one believes that such manipulation of one's genuine, honestly held aesthetic preferences are possible, it's not unexpected that they themselves have undergone such intentional transformations of their own genuine, honestly held aesthetic preferences in order to better conform to what they believe is socially just or whatever.
07mk
7mo ago
The number one de facto policy this would change is that proportionate representation by race in jobs that are heavily IQ dependent wouldn't be the goal which, if our society fails to reach, gets deemed White supremacist. Instead, greater emphasis would be placed on removing any extraneous barriers for all individuals from all races, including unfair discrimination, and may the chips fall where they may in terms of the racial proportions.
07mk
7mo ago
And statistically speaking, CICO is not likely to result in success.
I don't know that this is a conclusion we can draw based on our observation that most overweight people in the west have failed at losing weight, though. First of all, because even though CICO is widely known, there's still also an incredible amount of other misinformation about stuff like "healthy foods" and various diets. There's also the fact that many people receive this very type of message along the lines of "CICO is trivially true from a physics standpoint, but the hard part is actually keeping to it due to self control and hunger" and as such, when they do diet, they pursue strategies for tricking themselves through other diets instead of literally just counting calories in and calories out.
All this means that the overall population of "overweight people who try to lose weight" does not necessarily look like the population of "overweight people who try to follow a CICO protocol for weight loss." I'd actually wager that overweight people who follow a CICO diet strategy while having a genuine belief in CICO and their ability to succeed by using it have higher success rates than overweight people who follow the strategy while being terrified by the prospect of failure due to their inability to control themselves in the face of hunger pangs. And as such, spreading the message that CICO is trivially true but ineffective actually harms people's ability to lose weight.
In any case, this particular comment was about manipulating the commenter's wife to following CICO via mechanisms other than just telling her CICO (i.e. the commenter getting ripped). This seems likely to fail for plenty of reasons, but those are different issues to whether or not [following as a diet strategy] CICO is likely to result in success.
07mk
7mo ago
Secondly was this essay by Uri Berliner, their longtime senior business editor, creator of the popular "Planet Money" podcast, and one of the very few white males/not-super-liberals still in a position of authority at NPR. I really recommend this essay. He lays it out how, sure, NPR was always left-leaning, but it had intelligence and integrity. It's changed.
Not having read this essay, one thing that really stands out to me about the headline and the URL is how it frames NPR as the active party that "lost America's trust." This is in stark contrast to 99% of the recent mainstream narrative about people coming to view journalists and journalism outlets with mistrust and even disdain, which is more along the lines of, "Why do these dumb ignorant fucks not trust what we publish, when we're doing everything right? Clearly they must be getting manipulated by disinformation merchants who just know so well how to appeal to their tiny little minds." Back when journalists being less trusted by the public was becoming an issue during the Trump administration, I recall thinking that this should be a time for introspection for journalists, for them to question why they - literal professional writers and speakers - were just so bad at communicating that they were losing out not just to a politician but a politician of the dishonesty level of Trump. Such introspection has been rare indeed, and it's both nice to see it here and unsurprising that this guy was penalized for performing it.
For my own part, I grew up listening to NPR and I used to love it. The voices, the production value, the journalism, all of it was high-quality. It really stood out in the world of FM radio, where everything else is staticky, ad-filled garbage, and tends to play the same basic pop-classic rock-rap top 40 garbage over and over. In the world before podcasts and sattelite Radio, NPR was the only halfway intellectual content on the radio. Now it just feels like a podcast from some random student activists who have been triggered by Trump to the point that they're on the verge of a psychotic breakdown. I seriously can't stand listening to it anymore, it's just amazing how deranged and annoying it's become.
I used to listen to NPR a ton as a kid in my parents' car and also in my young adulthood which was 10+ years ago now. The rare times I drive these days, I still put on NPR, but I honestly can't stand it either, and I'm not sure if it's because I changed or because NPR changed. On Reddit's /r/stupidpol (subreddit for leftists who consider identity politics to be stupid), I read someone say they play a game whenever putting on NPR to see how many minutes it is before there's some mention of a racial or sex/gender-related angle to whatever story they're covering, and they almost never go past 5 minutes; ever since starting to play the game myself, I actually rarely go past 1 minute these days. Could just be coincidence given, again, I rarely listen to any radio anymore these days, but I suspect it's not.
At least, the few times I tune into Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, it's still mostly enjoyable. The kind of self-satisfied smug "obviously the mainstream progressive Democrat narrative is the correct one" attitude can be kind of annoying, but it honestly doesn't seem any worse than when I was a kid - I've just become more aware of the biases I used to have - and I still find Paula Poundstone hilarious.
07mk
7mo ago
Overall I'd say, "game writing was never good." Most classic games barely even had writing, either because it was pointless for an arcade-action game, or because there just wasn't enough memory or disk space then to handle a lot of text. Japanese games had an especially tough time with text.
And, aside from technical issues, a lot of games just don't need a lot of writing, and made a design decision not to include it. They tell the story in other ways. Famously John Carmack decided to put only the bare minimum of story into Doom because “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie, he said. “It's expected to be there, but it's not important.". It's only in more recent years that it's just expected that every game must have some sort of story, with full-time writers cranking out the content.
I think this actually explains why game writing in the past was good compared to now; having barely any writing because they didn't need a lot of writing can be very good writing, if it serves it purpose exactly as needed. To build on Carmack's analogy, a film whose entire script is: "Did you order the pizza with extra sausage?" "Yes, but I'm afraid I don't have any money. How ever will I pay you?" or the like has much better writing than something like Rise of Skywalker. The writing in the former doesn't need to be any longer or deeper than that in order to accomplish its goals, and trying to accomplish more with the writing would likely be counterproductive. With the greater production values and focus on narrative in many modern AAA games, writers have a lot more degrees of freedom, which means more room for error and also more rope to hang themselves with. That's even without considering the overt attempts at injecting ideological messaging that has plagued much of modern writing, in games and other media, which was much less common in older games, in a large part just due to older games not having as much writing.
07mk
7mo ago
Ban on all tipping, punishable by death-by-torture on any chief executive of any company that implements any sort of tipping system. Customers gain the right to perform summary executions on any service provider who suggests any tips. Naturally, this would also mean no alternative minimum wage for people in previously tipping jobs.
Nationalize TurboTax and other similar services, to auto-file all taxes for everyone, with taxpayers having the option to check and change if they wish.
Ban on all viewpoint-based moderation, by 1st Amendment standards, of any forum beyond a certain size.
07mk
7mo ago
Oh yeah, for manufactured pop bands, of which Kpop is perhaps the perfected version, I feel like they're appreciated more for their performance abilities than for their song recordings. So fans might insist on actual human dancers and singers (I don't know how much lip sync is common in these performances; do fans insist they actually sing into the mics while also doing complicated/strenuous dance moves in concerts?), even if they don't care about the AI writing the songs or even "performing" the music. Virtual concert performances like the Crypton Future Media Vocaloids might gain traction, but I also imagine they'd have to be some rare major figure like a Hatsune Miku or perhaps some popular Vtuber (whether human or AI-controlled) for fans to actually want to come out to watch such things.
But with AI songwriting, that's the kind of thing that real human songwriters could employ and just lie about pretty easily, to get the best of both worlds. If Taylor Swift used ChatGPT extensively to write her lyrics or used Suno and reverse-engineered its melodies for her own melodies and just lied about it, no one would ever know, and fans would get the enjoyment of genuinely believing that they're hearing songs that came pouring out of Swift's heart or whatever.
There's also plenty of straight porn where the only parts of the male's body that's ever visible on screen are parts that are normally not visible except in extremely private/intimate settings. Even if someone paid maximal attention to the male in the porn, there simply isn't enough information in the video for the viewer to identify the male in non-intimate settings. And even in those, our brains are very well developed for distinguishing between and identifying individuals based on things like the shape of their face and, AFAIK, not very well developed for doing so based on things like the shape of their penis.
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