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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
10hr ago
· Edited 9hr ago
... fwiw I posted my original comment and then went off and curled up in a ball shaking because it was a high stress experience for me posting it, but at least the response hasn't been a bunch of jeering so hey forcing myself to not be conflict avoidant has so far paid off.
Sorry to do something that may register as injecting more fresh conflict into a situation that is already stressful for you from the amount of conflict, but unfortunately by the nature of the thing there is almost no way to bring it up in a situation that is not like this. I think that women making remarks like this is actually a big irritant to mixed spaces (and tends to breed resentment even when people are socialised to be accommodating on the surface). As is often said, men's capacity for physical violence is mirrored by women's capacity for social violence (that is, the threat of exclusion, suspension of reciprocity, coordinated punishment...), and one of the ways in which the latter is exercised are such overt displays of discombobulated emotion (perhaps signalling something like "I feel endangered to the point I can no longer maintain the default façades of social interaction, this is an emergency, someone please help"), which trigger bystanders' defensive instincts and tend to override System-2 social rules about fairness and equality that are otherwise in place.
Once, almost half a lifetime ago now, I had a very long and emotional (but not hostile) argument with my then-SO where at one point out of frustration I punctuated a sentence by slamming my fist into the mattress I was leaning on (the arrangement was such that she was reclining on the bed, and I was sitting on the floor leaning against it with one arm, fairly close to her). I had zero violent intent towards her or the object that received the blow in doing that - it felt really more like a physiological reaction, no different from when you are a little kid and got hurt and can't stop crying - and there was little in the topic of the conversation that should suggest otherwise. Yet, when I did this, she froze and stared at me with the most genuine expression of fear I've ever seen from anyone in the flesh for a few seconds, to then dissolve into a frantic run-on sentence to the effect of "oh my god, I did not know you were like that, this is not okay" which was completely out of line with her usual composed character and in turn left me horrified and impotently trying to explain myself. We talked it out in the end; the relationship did not last anyway; but that day I learned one important lesson about how what an action means to me can be different from the effect it has on others.
It is quite likely that many men have an experience like this at some point in their lifetime, which teaches them to be judicious about even accidentally flaunting their capacity for physical violence, though often it is embarrassing and private and not a thing they will proudly talk about. I wish more women could have similar experiences about their capacity for social violence - as I see it, the casually dropped "and then I curled up in a ball shaking" is really the feminine counterpart to punching the drywall and leaving a hole. The latter can never not send the message that this could have been your face, and likewise the former can never not send the message that the sentence could have been extended with "...because of you, and let's see what the people around you have to say about that" (which often needn't even be said out loud).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
higher rates of Palestinian-related content but lower rates of Uyghur-related content versus similar social media apps, among others
Is there evidence that this is not because US-based social media actively suppresses pro-Palestinian content? As for the Uyghur content, that topic has always been minuscule (and felt thoroughly astroturfed during its moment in the limelight) so who knows what is going on there. Maybe the approximately two people still making Uyghur content avoid TikTok because it is Chinese all by themselves.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
· Edited 3d ago
This obviously doesn't mean that technical and formal mastery was irrelevant or unappreciated, but it was seen as a given for someone who pursued an artistic training since childhood and was considered inadequate to make a painting great without the added components of composition (which was tied to studies of mathematics and proportionality), ingenuity (where the term "genius" comes from, i.e. someone able to innovate and add), and especially subject matter - Botticelli being the eminent early example of someone who purposefully selected obscure and complex myths as subject matters because it proved he was a well-read intellectual and not a handyman.
Well, isn't that part the crux though? It's not that the "art scene" that only asks for craftsmanship is good, but that the "art scene" that does not ask for craftsmanship is bad. It's the same situation as with poetry and philosophy - technical requirements, whether it's the ability to paint well, to stick to a meter and rhyme in a way that tickles the unexpectedness sense, or to write out your argument formally, are useful because they filter out the uncommitted, the generally incompetent and those whose comparative advantage lies primarily in the social game of becoming respected in a subculture.
Poetry, nowadays, appears to be dominated by harpies writing free-form word vomit about their lived experience as a 1/16 Native American, and being very good at coordinating meanness towards anyone who suggests their poems may be trash or precious limited space in anthologies and events should be allocated to someone who is not of their tribe. If rhyme and meter still were table stakes for poetry, they would not be able to occupy the positions of power and taste-making that they do, because ability in rhyming and ability in coordinating meanness are not very correlated (and might even be anticorrelated because both take time to hone). I assume similar things are going on in art, though there whatever social games the monochromatic-canvas crowd engages in are less obviously entangled with SJ.
Picasso actually could draw when he had to, and therefore unsurprisingly was a good artist even when he drew weird cubist stuff. The golden age of art, indeed, seems to have been the period between the 17th and early 20th century, when craftsmanship was still required but no longer considered sufficient. (Some exceptions before that from good craftsmen that coincidentally also had interesting artistic visions, e.g. Bosch.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
Given the ongoing genocide of nearly 80 years, it seems pretty reasonable that the Palestinians would not want (...), too...?
You are trying to frame the two situations as fundamentally different, but it seems that your view of the difference boils down to whether you think the respective death-wishers are the "good guys". It's convenient for you that your current opinion of good and evil aligns with that of the US government, but the whole point of my hypothetical was, what if the US government's position changes?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
Being able to wound the enemy and then assuredly die is not deterrence.
If this were true, why would the animal world be full of animals that are mildly poisonous, taste bad, have spines etc.? Why do bees sting large animals that threaten the hive?
As long as your enemy's value function includes terms other than your destruction, any damage you can inflict upon them can be a deterrent. If Israel destroys Iran, having eaten one small nuke in the process would still leave it weaker vis-a-vis its other enemies going forward, and simply make it harder for it to thrive as a nation. These are all considerations that might, in some situations, change the balance and make Israel decide to leave Iran alone even if they would rather attack it otherwise.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
Well, the Ukrainians get pretty close to that wrt Russia ("Muscovites onto the gallows" was a popular slogan even before the war). Does that mean that if Trump goes full rapprochement with Putin, pro-Ukrainians would be up for denaturalization?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
What is the definition of an "enemy of the United States" though? Hamas is primarily an enemy of Israel, and though Israel and the US share a relationship that is as close as lips and teeth at the moment, "dump Israel and ally with Hamas instead" is a real political position that is represented by a non-trivial number of native actors in the American system. If against all odds those actors were to come into power and implement their agenda, should pro-Israelis be (retroactively) denaturalized? Would there be a way at all to get legally and irreversibly naturalised in a futureproof way without staunchly refusing to have an opinion on Israel/Palestine and perhaps also every other important geopolitical issue where the US may switch sides in the future, or perhaps at most enthusiastically participating in the current Two Minutes of Hate whatever the target?
(And then, what classes of enmity are we considering? For smaller-scope questions than foreign alliances, the government position may flip every four years. Can Democrats denaturalize "Latinos for Trump"?)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
· Edited 7d ago
2 or 3 from different users, explicit enough about what you claim to make up the "bailey" (including in particular language that is similar to your "scientifically correct means of organizing a society" quote), perhaps at +25 or more to back up your claim of being especially supported by this forum, with the responses and derisive responses to those posts you claim to exist below those posts.
Also, there should be at least something linking those posters to the "HBD" label, either explicitly or implicitly by way of some post where they display beliefs or preoccupations that are characteristic of that community (e.g. subpopulations of Nigeria). You can't just grab some old white supremacist off the metaphorical street and claim that he's actually representative of HBDers, as this would be pretty circular as a means to establish that your slander (that HBDers usually just amount to [garden-variety racial supremacists]; nobody is disputing that garden-variety racial supremacists exist) is not baseless.
Hard mode: No upper-caste Indian guys shopping around for frameworks to justify Indian caste society and their position in it.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7d ago
I think claims about general tendencies in this forum should at least be furnished with some examples of the beliefs you claim to be widespread, if you can't provide quantitative data. Otherwise, well, what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
(Even the most expansive bailey I recall seeing around here, implicitly or explicitly, on this topic amounts to "always assume group differences in outcomes are fully innate, and refuse to acknowledge the possibility of racism in legislation, jurisprudence or social engineering programming", which is still a far cry from anything that amounts to using racial background as a means of organising society (like Apartheid South Africa, Israel or like Progressive America?).)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8d ago
· Edited 8d ago
kidnapped the inhabitants' children for purposes of forced Russification
Does this narrative of cartoonish supervillainy, which so obviously maximises pushing Western buttons while having dubious practicality (for starters, the complete disinterest and dysfunctionality in the (post-)Soviet space as far as upbringing of orphans is concerned is a matter of lore), not trigger the slightest bit of skepticism?
As far as I can tell, the real core of this story is that children that were found orphaned in Russian-captured territory were put in the Russian orphanage system, which seems like a normal thing to do. Can you think of any example of a war of conquest (e.g. the Franco-German wars over Alsace-Lorraine) where the conqueror also surrendered orphaned children from territories it captured to the target country, and if not, would you consider those wars genocidal as well?
It's obvious that Ukraine's preference, if they must lose the territories, is to have all of the population transferred to the territories they control - that is, what they really want is for Russia to commit ethnic cleansing, and they are incentivised to frame any failure to do so as genocide. At some point, though, this framing just starts turning all these "war crimes" into a military necessity - if Russia per the implicit Ukrainian argument can't fulfill its war goal of removing Ukraine's ability to serve as a NATO outpost without either committing ethnic cleansing or genocide as defined by the Ukrainians, then how can they be persuaded to not choose at least one?
Putin has repeatedly said that his goals in invading Ukraine include (...) forced Russification of the inhabitants
Source? The search results I get with this claim usually link it with an intent to issue Russian passports to the inhabitants. Is making people of a conquered territory citizens of your country genocidal? This would, again, make a lot of other wars into genocides, such as the Franco-Prussian one or everything in the Yugoslavian wars including NATO's Kosovo (Ethnic Serbians on the territory of Kosovo were issued Kosovan passports), and also make Georgia's intent to assert its authority over South Ossetia and Abkhazia (which presumably involves issuing Georgian passports to all the people of other ethnicities who live there) look rather so. In fact, if this is the standard, Azerbaijan's capture of Nagorno-Karabakh is starting to look like the least genocidal of all the US-approved conquests, since they just expelled all of the inhabitants rather than villainously issuing them Azerbaijani citizenship.
(I am not even going to address the implicit assumption that all citizens/residents of Ukraine are of Ukrainian ethnicity, which presupposes that a genocide/assimilation happened there in the past)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9d ago
· Edited 9d ago
I think this is actually sort of analogous to women allegedly preferring "dad bods". I don't think any woman genuinely finds a dad bod more sexually thrilling in isolation, but for a woman self-conscious about her own weight the idea of a man that lives at the gym and eats a stricter diet than a supermodel just sounds intimidating and miserable. I think 4chan NEETs are not necessarily attracted to a NEET girl so much as they just imagine that she will be attainable and have low standards in men and make their own failure less humiliating.
Why is whatever this boils down to as a notion of attraction less legitimate than the "in isolation" notion, though? People choose partners on complex criteria, which tend to include some reflexive components like "can I convince myself that the other person in fact desires me" and "how will society judge us as a pair". This is not just a strategic cope to make up for an organic preference that can not be realised - as I see it, for most people, the realisation where you see a happy future for yourself with another is attraction, butterflies and everything! (No judgement intended about respectability - the happy-future fantasy could be anything from "we'll fuck like rabbits in a public toilet" to "we will grow old discussing philosophy until one of us closes their eyes, never to complete their final thought")
I don't see why attraction based on this compound metric should be written off as less legitimate than attraction based on what the man might choose to beat his meat to while completely derealised at the tail end of a gooning all-nighter, or the woman's equally derealised fantasies after drifting off to trashy romance novel la-la land. In fact there seems to be a certain kind of essentialism that bitter people in all sorts of domains converge upon, where some very specific and often even irrelevant metric is elevated to Ground Biological Truth and everything else is ultimately seen as fakery and pretense - "he might say he likes me but Science says that he ultimately would prefer someone with balloon tits and a hourglass figure. We don't make the rules", or "she might claim to like nice guys but Science says that women only really get off on rape and dominance, she may deny it but I'm sure it will come out eventually", or "I might seemingly be performing about as well as everyone else, but Science says that people of my sex/ethnicity are not good at my research area". Every such belief conveniently has the nature of those delusional parasite infections which compel the patient to scratch at them until they actually bleed and get infected.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
12d ago
I'm not familiar enough with the US anymore to know if what you say about reds (not) wielding injunctions is accurate, but one could imagine the theoretical possibility playing a role even if reds never did it, if, for example, we posit that blues had a more accurate picture of what the different jurisdictions could do and therefore avoided taking executive steps they know would be stopped by injunction.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
12d ago
Trump v. CASA, Inc.
So after this decision, what is actually the intended recourse for classes of individuals if the federal government subjects them to putative unconstitutional action (possibly even gish-gallopping different actions to achieve the same unconstitutional outcome)? I can see how the previous arrangement created an asymmetry in favour of case-and-jurisdiction shoppers, but the new one seems like it might equally create an asymmetry in favour of executive obsessions.
I understand that you are happy to see what you saw as an important weapon in your enemy's toolkit denied, but well, the enemy is best presumed to be crafty. If you were a progressive operative, could you imagine a way this decision could be turned against conservatives once you control the executive again?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
13d ago
· Edited 13d ago
I think the reality of the situation is that we still do not understand, outside of some special basic cases, in the slightest how genes correspond to phenotypes, beyond a sort of general sense that should make it clear to us that we do not even have the vocabulary and abstractions to describe such an understanding if it were handed down to us by divine inspiration. I'd expect the simplest nontrivial gene-IQ relationships to look something like "the presence of sequence A slightly reduces the frequency sequence B is transcribed into proteins in neurons when they contain between x and y concentration of transcripts of sequence C, so in individuals whose genetic makeup causes the concentration to converge to that band in their frontal lobe, they get slightly thicker myelin sheaths in that part of their brain, which might make you more smart except if it also happens in the temporal lobe in which case you just turn out schizo". Do we have analysis techniques that would pick this sort of thing up? My impression is that expecting our current ones to do so is comparable to trying to debug slowdowns in complex distributed systems by big-data search for correlations between system performance and the frequency (possibly joint) of individual words in source code.
To introduce a juicier culture war angle, the confusion about the discrepancy, i.e. the expectation that techniques like GWAS would pick up the heritability we expect from twin studies, seems to be motivated by the usual prior that surely the top-of-the-line techniques that the community of experts in a given area are excited about must at least be somewhat good (see also expectation that architects have good taste in architecture, artists have good taste in art, or social justice researchers can correctly identify and redress injustice in society). If you expect geneticists to not be meaningfully competent at genetics in absolute terms, then "geneticists could not find the mechanism of heritability that we are fairly certain exists" is an unsurprising outcome.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14d ago
In what way is a beehive "male-created"?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14d ago
That seems like the wrong metaphor, given that a Queen Bee will primarily be attended to by a full hive of female worker bees (that the males don't even get to stay in).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14d ago
Why can't you accept that people might find the excel spreadsheet posting interesting even if they are uninterested in her Onlyfans presence/career choices? The wider community has plenty of $.02-a-word substackers who maintain an audience peddling more boring theories backed by less data on more boring and commonplace topics, and those don't seem to inspire this sort of permanent rent-free mental residency that compels people to start raging about her in a thread about someone else whose only commonalities are blogging and being on Onlyfans. This is as if dozens of people complained about Jake from Putanumonit under every discussing of an article about dating by someone in fintech.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14d ago
· Edited 14d ago
After watching the video and some others on the same channel, it seems mostly interesting as a really extreme example of the art of generating gravitas by speaking slowly and pausing a lot. Somehow, he manages to get you to slow down your mental clock to match the pace of his speech, rather than getting bored or distracted.
(And yes, he does come across as wise and witty, but a lot of people could probably muster this level of wit if they actually could take that long to decide what to say without losing their audience. The ability to keep the listener suspended seems to be key.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14d ago
I feel like "emotional labor" is among the most toxic memes to come out of feminism, in the actual near-Lovecraftian sense that it insinuates itself into your world model and begs you to cleave reality at that particular joint to your permanent detriment as a human being. I'm not even in the target group, but every time I get even a little frustrated dealing with someone else's mental state (like, say, listening to a friend complain about how they were avoiding their advisor even though they and I had gone through the "I'm having [unfounded anxiety] and rationally I just need to psyche myself up to send that email already" conversation path many times already) the idea floats up and wants me to start keeping score.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14d ago
Matter of fact, it has been my fetish ever since that one time I dated a math grad student with impostor syndrome.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14d ago
The term has been floating around in the self-help literature sphere, and even made it onto Wiktionary (which claims that it's chiefly used in "philosophy"). I would assume that it was introduced by people who didn't want their poetic self-help goals tarnished by association with the more prosaic readings of "meaningful" (like not of insignificant scale or impact, not nonsensical, etc.): if you say you are striving for meaningfulness, some are bound to read it as a win-friends-and-influence-people sort of thing.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14d ago
Have you actually encountered these women who approach relationships by being boss bitches with unchecked neuroticism yourself, or are you reciting a culture war catechism or something you have seen others claim on the internet? I have been through and seen plenty of failure modes of relationships, but nothing like "the woman refuses to be nice, warm, loving or create a positive atmosphere for the sake of political LARPing" has been among them.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
17d ago
Thanks for always posting these stories! I'm curious how the pro-Palestine monoculture you describe comes to be in the UK - is this stance already the predominant one in their media? Here in Germany, every mainstream outlet is solidly pro-Israel, and since COVID at the latest media skepticism has become right-coded. As a result, we get some wild right-side-of-history positions like "we should let Israel do its thing and take in all the Palestinians as refugees here", along with vegan housecat fantasies that Israel and Palestine could get along if Bibi just were replaced by a proper left-wing leader.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
17d ago
I always thought of it as a corollary of motte-and-bailey (arranged something like that old "their barbarous wastes" two-castle picture) - [I get to keep] my bailey > my motte > the opponent[ gets to keep hi]s motte > the opponent's bailey.
Huh, colour me surprised, this is really not quite who I headcanoned you as. I have this one German friend who is a pretty brilliant mathematician, but has surely the rock bottom lowest agreeableness of all people I have encountered, and improbably hails from a family of Bavarian alpha farmers (the sort that has owned a farmstead covering a hill overlooking some tiny village in the general area of Regensburg for generations, used to employ the local teens as farmhands and sponsors the local Schützengemeinschaft). His interactions with his father (witnessed when they were on the phone and also once the father came to help him move) always amounted to 30-minute screaming matches in straight dialect (about anything ranging from "clean your room and get a real job" to "your car is trash and you were never there for the family"), while to me the father would basically only communicate in grunts and pregnant glances that say "thanks for putting up with my loser son". Maybe I went too far free-associating on your handle, but I imagined those would be approximately your people :p
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