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4bpp

Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs

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joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC

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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs

				
				
				

				

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					follows 2 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
At its core, I would say, it's just political low openness, that is, the belief that for the polity, things that are new or different from what it is accustomed to are a priori bad. Low/high openness in individual humans is understood well enough, and likewise does not care for the particular provenance or authenticity of a habit: an adult could discover chicken tenders at age 30, gradually slide into eating them exclusively and decide at 40 that trying new foods over the tried and reliable tendies is just not enjoyable or worth it. It doesn't have to be this extreme: a tendiemaxxer friend of mine can be convinced to try most things, but you have to spend half a day making the case why it's a good idea, eat some of it in front of him and show that you are not experiencing any side effects you hid from him, and then he'll start with tiny bites and wait for a bit to meditate on how he feels about it (and then in the end complain that you should have just let him stick with his usual diet).


Contra this, liberalism in essence is "did you see that Chinese bull penis hangover soup on youtube shorts too? We should try that some day, aren't you curious", applied to society. A baseline attitude of "this is different, how exciting" vs. "this is different, I feel uncomfortable".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, same(ish) - I have not been featured in the news (nor is it likely to happen anytime soon given that I am in unfashionable theoretical CS), but then on the other hand I count some actual historians among my relatives so I have some inside view of that sausage factory. I think the main difference to me is that the thing you describe as a nadir does not feel particularly bad to me, on its own. The educator part of the job has always felt fundamentally adversarial to me - even well-selected students will at any point in time use 95% of their galaxy brains (or, well, of whatever fraction of those they are willing to invest in your course at all) only to engage in mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they are perfect just as they are, and to convince you that they learned and applied what you wanted them to without them actually having done those things. (The sheer inventiveness I've seen in schemes to circumvent automated plagiarism detectors in programming assignments that could be done with a fraction of the effort, or to hide transparently false lemmas in the bowels of a Rube Goldberg proof of a three-liner that was covered in class!)


To teach these students - not an anonymous public, and not on a topic of any political valence, but people you know and a subset of whom you hope to elevate to colleagues some day! - requires constant subterfuge and deception to get past the ego defenses of their monkey brains. That you would do all that and more when actually just talking to normies seems absolutely par for the course for me. It's not like I'm not bothered by the politically motivated deception cases @RenOS was hinting at, but there I see the problem somewhere else. It is only really bad if, before deciding to deceive the public, these scientists have already deceived themselves, or otherwise transgressed against the mental discipline that a scientist needs for science as a whole to function in the long run. (Many cases of this don't even involve politics, cf. every case of trash stats replication crisis just-so story zingers. I blame the general culture in US academia where idealism about science qua science is seen as cringe and unbefitting of a successful working adult.) If it were as he says, and these people indeed merely advanced their agenda when talking to the general public but treated evidence fairly while engaging in the scientific process, I would perhaps find them tasteless as politicians, but not compromised as scientists.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As someone with a hobby for trying to theory-of-mind others' fetishes, I would imagine that there is some element of taking observation/judgement to detract from the enjoyability of the act, or feel oppressive in a way that doesn't let you fully indulge sexually - some sort of anti-exhibitionism (except not necessarily concerned with the gaze of third parties as much as with that of your target?), and closely related to the time stop trope (the thing where the protagonist can freeze his time for everyone but himself and have his way with the bodies of other people in everyday situations, the targets being none the wiser).


If you were to feel crushingly self-conscious about how the person you are performing any sexual act with perceives you, it would make sense that any act where that possibility is not removed would be strictly inferior.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Both for you and @Corvos, the thing is that scientists (this is in fact more true in the "hard sciences" than in History) don't generally think of theories in terms of "true" or "false" (or even "likely to be (...)"), but rather just as better/worse/incomparable, or often even just "more powerful" or "less powerful", models for generating predictions. A newer theory may be "more powerful" in that it generates more accurate predictions more often (but really, it will usually be the case that the newer theory does better than the older one in a few more contexts and worse than the older one in slightly fewer - "incomparable"), but also more finicky, in that it's harder to understand and apply correctly, and therefore inferior for a particular situation. Physicists will boldly use Newtonian physics to calculate the behaviour of slow heavy objects on Earth, and not mention anything about newer theories to any 6th graders they are tasked with teaching, without feeling like they are lying to anyone.


The psychology here is really more akin to if you ask an engineer for the best plane, no further instructions provided, and get a modern Airbus rather than an SR-71 Blackbird. The engineer might even in his professional context feel strongly that the SR-71 and YF-12 constituted the pinnacle of aviation engineering, and argue passionately about the particular design tradeoffs between the two, but he will not for a moment feel like he deceived you or betrayed his professional oaths by furnishing you with neither; they are simply not planes that it is reasonable for you to deploy or fly, and it is exceedingly unlikely that they will be actually better suited for your use case, whatever it is, than the boring reliable airliner that can even occasionally survive Indonesian airport infrastructure. Now, if you are a plane buff, have a cold war spy mission to run or happen to be an activist who spends every waking hour malding about the mothballing of the Concorde, you would probably feel a terrible sense of betrayal about this, but as someone who is not, would you think the engineer deserves condemnation?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think this is standard science explainer practice, for reasons that can be completely orthogonal to the political, that has the propensity to sound bad to laypeople who have an incorrect model of how the scientist's notion of "truth" works. I will, with apologies, admit that I have the sketch of a post to the effect of "newsflash: physicists and even mathematicians 'lie' to you in the exact same way all of the time" in mind but do not have the energy or time to produce it.


Instead, for a different argument that is more related to the political dimension of this specific issue, I think that his way of explaining it just stems from a broader sense of distrust that the engaged lay public insists in every public-facing academic entirely through its own fault. If you do quantum computing, it is almost impossible to even mention superposition unless you want to wind up being quoted in a procession of powerpoints about the possibilities of doing multiple computations simultaneously forever; and if you do neurobiology, even as much as acknowledging that something quantum might have something to do with chemistry including chemistry that happens in the brain will forever be used as ammunition by "due to their quantum souls capable of seeing every outcome simultaneously, humans will never be replaced by machines" type people even if you started your popsci career hoping to get the public acquainted with the mechanistic understanding of the brain. This doesn't have to happen to you or someone you know many times for you to start seeing the public as the epistemic enemy, and conclude that the best thing you can do is feeding them information selectively so that they arrive at the least wrong conclusion rather than feeding them information freely so that they motivatedly reason themselves into something much worse (here, probably, any acknowledgement of controversy would just put "Sparta bros" into "300 is a valid scientific theory" mode). Of course this sucks for those of your readers who can actually hold differentiated views and deal with uncertainty, but they can always read the literature. Besides, the ones who protest the loudest tend to turn out to be exactly those motivated reasoners upon cursory inspection all too often. (Similar to the fun "spot the Scientologist" game whenever public-facing criticism of psychiatry is involved.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This sounds like a very clever argument that casually sweeps away material reality in favour of the world of memes, quite like, gosh indeed, what a stereotypical leftist college kid may deploy.


Non-violence, as you frame it, wielded by the socially powerful may indeed feel like an "I win" card, impossible to oppose with truth or any but the most tailored notion of beauty, and hence like a fundamentally unfair "defect" option in the domain of discourse. This is all very terrible, if you think or can pretend that the domain of discourse is all there is; but those who still have to interact with the physical world may recognise that even though being verbally/morally/metaphorically beaten, pissed on, shot and having the cost of the bullet billed to your relatives may feel every bit as humiliating as having those things done to you literally, only the latter actually leaves you dead and your mother robbed of her last $5. If the price of not accepting moral defeat by an overwhelming moral power is pulling physical defeat back into the Overton window, not everyone may conclude that moral defeat is so bad an option.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I know very similar things have been said in parallel responses a number of times already, but really, you have answered your own question in the last paragraph. The world is a terrible place! This story is outrageous, but so is the life story of every single one of a million of starving orphans in the Third World, any random child of a single mother having a severe case of Münchhausen syndrome by proxy, or lone elderly person caught up in one of those Floridan elderly care scams where the local judge and state-appointed legal guardians are in cahoots, or anyone working in a Bangladeshi sweatshop. It turns out we don't actually care for all these horrible fates if they don't directly intersect with ours, and we surely wouldn't even have the capacity to if we actually tried.


Whether accurate or not, the pitch of the toxoplasma stories is that their contents, and our allocating a share of mind-space to having a stance on them, will have a real material impact on our lives. What is the pitch for caring about the Pelicot case, over caring about any of the other myriad of outrageous tragedies including the ones I listed above?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, and yet none of the other countries with more broad-based usage of public transport physically segregate minority riders. If you want to argue that the US is unique because segregated seating became a civil rights issue and this resulted in an overcorrection preventing more justified action against minorities on public transport, then it seems as fair to say that "Rosa Parks made public transport a last resort option" as it is to go one step up the causal chain and say "segregation made public transport a last resort option".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, that's the speculative part of the proposal. Nobody doubts government childcare facilities are garbage right now, but I would like to see how far we could go with a moonshot to make it not so. It's not hard to justify considering we are essentially looking at an epidemic of people unwilling to put up with the work of childrearing in the form that is expected.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, the set of people who don't mind using it would be drawn from both people who otherwise would raise their own children and those who would otherwise go childless. The latter will compete with you on those terms regardless (modulo the one-time competitive advantage from the cash injection), and you shouldn't forget the downside of letting  birthrate decline continue as usual, which is that the entire pyramid scheme of big society may collapse. Surely you can't be completely indifferent towards the prospect of being left to your own devices in old age with no medical insurance or pension (any savings might at that point be confiscated or devalued by inflation, and for good measure they might also legally restrict the right of any children you raised personally to preferentially support you rather than slaving away for the entire cohort of geriatric millennials). Reducing the probability of this scenario at least a little winds up on the other side of the scale.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Surely singles are not the category we are talking about? Like many I know, I'm in the category of "long-term partner, no children". Either way, why do you think it doesn't pass the smell test? I think electronic entertainment is the most obvious reason why the idea that people in the 60s/80s had at least as much fun is the one that doesn't pass the smell test: when given the choice, people overwhelmingly choose games, modern videos and slop over just about any [activity that was available in the '80s].


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It occurs to me that to Americans this might still not read as upper-middle class. They would be looking for something like villas with large gardens and 3m tall hedgerows blocking outside views in a car-only neighbourhood, and certainly no parks, stations, big roads or hospitals anywhere in ear- or eyeshot. Perhaps more similar to a nouveau riche dacha settlement, in Russian terms.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think it's borderline, but insofar as the idea is to signal to the Russian upper brass that they are not even safe in their apartment blocks, it meets dictionary definitions such as Merriam-Webster's "the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 8, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sir, this is a Wendy's culture war forum. You are not talking to people who are rejecting you from quant jobs, though if I were the hiring manager for one, I would reject you just on the basis of these posts. Not being so thin-skinned that you would fly off the handle over a tortured  misinterpretation of a word is also a job requirement.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 8, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Cool, the answer to that is the usual one: if your competitors are leaving money on the ground by acting suboptimally, prove them wrong by outperforming them. Polymarket and several cryptocurrency trading platforms have open APIs, you can go and write code to  fleece the foreign swots with your superior ability right away if HFT is your thing.


(Honestly, though, to me it just sounds like you farmed good scores on easy tests and are very good at finding excuses for avoiding the hard ones that satisfy yourself.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If the person who shot him had no experience with firearms, it's entirely plausible. Hit a non-lethal spot the first time because you are nervous, and two more times because you underestimated recoil and now your hands are hurt and shaking.


What do you figure was the point in the 2024 case? I think I gave a reasonable enough list of benefits. High-ranking military being scared to leave their house without a bodyguard degrades military performance: people make worse decisions under stress, and more competent candidates may not want such a job.


But maybe it was actually done by a Japanese high schooler with a magic notebook - I've been reading a lot of manga lately...


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
At least as of right now, the official-line-adjacent Telegram channels I know about (anna_news, sashakots, rybar) are not really giving this any priority over their daily war reporting noise, and I'm not seeing any traces of an "IRL action movie hero" framing. They are just talking about how those perpetrators that were caught admitted to being paid money by the Ukrainian secret services and the like.


Even if you think a false flag is conceivable, why would it be more likely than that the Ukrainians indeed did it? This wouldn't be the first time, unless you claim that all the assassinations of prominent Russian figures until now, including the ones that they openly took credit for, were actually false flags, and the benefits for their side are obvious without mental gymnastics (eliminating useful individuals, encumbering Russian processes with friction and fear, signalling Russian weakness to internal doubters and external supporters). It seems like you want this to be a false flag, contra LW principles.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The most realistic path is mass cloning and artificial wombs, I think.




If my understanding that the real obstacle to people having children is the hedonistic opportunity cost of raising children is correct, I think there is room for a lower-tech solution: state-run nurseries/orphanages that are actually optimised for quality rather than to dump undesirables without making everyone feel too guilty about it, and a flat cash benefit on the order of 4 of the mother's yearly salaries for delivering a child to them. You could even give the biological parents dibs on adoption in the event they later change their mind.


(By not paying the same amount of upfront cash to parents who raise their own children, you (1) save money and (2) implicitly brainwash people into thinking children are valuable. Someone is willing to pay you 200k for one! Will you take the money like a poor person, or have one and keep it to broadcast to the world that you are so well-off that you don't need it?)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What sense would that make? Russians (the ones that can be reached by staged terrorist attacks on a general, at least) don't seem to need further motivation to continue prosecuting the war; fence-sitters will surely not become more inclined to stay on the fence with further evidence that internal control is weak; everyone who is against them, meanwhile, will be cheering on the attempt and consider it absolutely justified and further proof of Ukrainian pluck and skill. Any general norms against dirty tricks played on enemy leadership were long kicked to the curb by Americans and Israelis.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In my eyes there is a simple explanation for dropping birth rates, which all these reports fastidiously ignore: adult life without children has continuously gotten more fun, while adult life with children has at best remained about the same, and the millennial generation is the one for which the enjoyableness of the former has finally conclusively overtaken the latter. We are in fact the first generation in the West to have completely shed the taboo on adults engaging in frivolous play outside of a handful of sanctioned categories that can be seen as healthy or the like, which I am occasionally reminded of when my mother asks me on the phone what I have been up to and I slip up and mention some game I tried whereupon she inevitably switches to a tone of anger and disgust and reminds me of my age.


If you want people to have children again, you either need to find a way to feed adults with children comparable amounts of dopamine to what is available to those without, or ban the whole spectrum of international pleasure travel (outside of boring package holidays priced so you can afford them once a year), escape rooms, hip restaurants, Tiktok trends and Steam accounts for the over-25.


I do think that there are small things that could be done on the margin that are related to the above while not being quite as drastic, but these still would require sacrifices from a people very used to having its cake and eating it too: most significantly, removing most of the relatively novel legislation that is purported to enhance the safety of children but gets in the way of the parents' dopamine acquisition, such as mandatory child seats in cars, legally required supervision, or liability for harm done to or by unsupervised children. It should be permissible once again to put five year olds on the laps of their 12 year old siblings in the back of your car, and let them roam the streets freely when the parents want a break from them, as was the case for me growing up; and if they climb a tree and fall down, or get injured in a car crash, that ought to be considered tragic but not intrinsically treated as someone's legal fault.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My sense is that Bulgarian Gypsies comprise a very strange genetic and cultural soup, and having multiple fake names with some of them being Turkic is not at all out of the ordinary. Consult Wikipedia for the language, and maybe one of the two sources of Skibidi Toilet for vibes.


Wikipedia does not mention Albanian, but in reality they have a quite significant presence there too (some estimates say up to 5%?), so it would not be surprising to see some vocabulary backwash. In a way, there is some curious convergence between their ways and those of another famous class of rootless cosmopolitans, though of course they wind up on different ends of the social hierarchy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My point is just that "mandatory medical procedure" does not code "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State" to a greater degree than other things which are very common, so unless all these other things are also signs of fascist dictatorship, to whatever extent "mandatory medical procedure" signals fascist dictatorship at least does not factor through any similarity between it and "Everything in the State(...)".


The connection to Trump is downstream from the discussion that preceded it: @birb_cromble was trying to argue that Trump is not closer to fascism than his American predecessors on the basis that Biden before him imposed mandatory medical procedures, which he presumably sees as a very fascist thing to do (more fascist than any of @guy's examples). I argue contra this in the direction that mandatory medical procedures are not actually all that fascist, and hence @guy's examples about Trump can't be flatly dismissed with something to the effect of "Biden was very fascist so none of this should even rise to the point of consideration".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, but it's a stretch to go from a medical procedure being mandated under threat of losing your job to that motto. There are many procedures that match the motto better than mandatory vaccination, while being very common - like, for example, state railways, public schooling with civics classes, and mandatory ID.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean, I'm aware (and I think most others who have what I would consider this reading are) how centrally it featured in the agenda of Hitler and other core Nazis from the beginning. The "natural consequence" argument is not "they seized power first and then serendipitously decided to kill the Jews", but "someone seizing this much power and agency is bound to produce a pile of corpses one way or another".


This amounts to an almost fully general cynicism against action and ambition - the assumption is that the world frustrates and obstructs you if you want to achieve anything significant, and if you are the sort of person whose reaction to being obstructed is "we should find a way to root out the obstructionists" rather than to give up, then you will likely eventually mass-murder someone while trying to immanentize your ideals, simply because even Little Timmy probably believes in something that, if taken seriously, would require murdering millions and all that is stopping him is that he is quick to give up. This is of course pretty antithetical to the Yankee ethos, so it would not catch on in "Optimate/Vaishya" (or what those Moldbug terms were) America.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The old tension between the "the salient thing about the Nazis is that they killed Jews" and "the salient thing about the Nazis is that they seized power and brutally eliminated all dissent, the Jew-killing just came later as a natural consequence" views? Americans are often programmed to favour the former, but I don't think the latter is so rare or unreasonable. This is especially so because I am European, but perhaps some American lefties are in the same memespace now. In our eyes, the Nazis would still have had the Nazi essence even if they hypothetically had left the Jews alone. Comparing to such hypothetical versions of the SS and Gestapo is still hyperbolic, but not in the way or to the extent you say.