Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
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User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
Why? I've been confused by this. My neighborhoods have been plagued by an overpopulation of rabbits, deer and geese with at least the former two caused by what I presume is a complete absence of natural predators. I've often wished it were socially acceptable for me to trap and eat the rabbits that are wrecking my garden or the geese who poop all over my athletic fields and bike paths.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
But we have two people who think in sound bites trying to convince an audience of uneducated dolts to clap along.
Why would you try to infer anything about how either Harris or Trump think based on how they present in public? They're actively trying to say the things that will win them the election rather than what they actually think. And if sound bites play well with their constituencies, well...obviously that's what they're incentivized to optimize? Being responsive to what your voters want is a feature, not a bug. If you want politicians that behave better in public, convince a large enough fraction of the population to punish their candidate for vapid sound bites or idiotic name calling.
At least neo-reactionaries have ideas. I’m not fully on board, but they can generally tell you what kinds of things they want to do, why, and why this would work.
So do rationalists. So why do neither group win elections, particularly given that the latter is supposed to be 'systematized winning?'
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
Dropping a literal biblical plague of retards on your political opponents should be classified as a war crime. We need a new Hague.
I've been saying the same thing for years, but Anime Con keeps happening and nobody puts the organizers on trial for crimes against humanity.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
Read On Writing. The second half of the book is a nuts and bolts description of how to write better (mostly fiction, but broadly applicable). The first half is mostly biographical but still fascinating.
Classics like The Elements of Style are also useful; perhaps more so if you're trying to trim the fat from your prose. There was a similar book that got me through grad school, but I'm blanking on the name at the moment. This genre mostly taught a style that was dry and concise, optimized for conveying information with the least amount of text possible.
Write and share it with people whose opinions you trust for feedback.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
What follows was learned over a decade ago in microbiology class and may be out of date.
HIV exclusively infects cells of the immune system through a handful of receptors, none of which are expressed on the mucosa of the anus/vaginal tissue. As a consequence, it needs to penetrate multiple layers of mucus and epithelial tissue before it can reach a cell that it can productively (use to produce more viral particles) infect. Anal sex generates microtears in the mucosa much more readily than vaginal sex and provides more opportunities for the virus to reach the bloodstream/immune tissues. There was also some speculation about 'sensor' immune cells that reach into the epithelium that may also act as a route for infection, but I'm skeptical.
What shocked me in that class was just how rare transmission was; you can see the numbers in the table morgenland linked. Made me think that you have to be either extremely unlucky, extremely promiscuous or just stupid/desperate enough to share needles to get infected.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
On the negative side, we definitely select for unemployed and low time preference people who fail to take the necessary precautions to not become pregnant. On the positive side, we select for people who want to have children and are as such likely to treat them better and likely to prepare themselves better in general. We select to some degree against both hedonism and doomerism, since both inclinitations straightforwardly lead towards being childless, and instead in favor of certain kinds of optimistic long-termism, which includes in particular religiosity. We select somewhat against education in general, but also more specifically for pragmatic people that don't waste an endless amount of time getting stuck in dead-end endeavours (which includes certain educations) throughout their early adulthood. And so on.
Is any of this based on data?
Unless we force people to have kids against their will, easily accessible, reliable contraceptives will always mean a substantially reduced TFR until we have had time to select in favor of wanting kids directly.
Okay, based on your model, how rapidly do you think you can select for this trait and how low do you think the world population would drop prior to leveling out? Why would you expect selection for 'wanting children' to be more robust than 'too irresponsible to use contraception?'
And most of all, given that you blame the precipitous drop in TFR on cultural factors, why would you focus so much on genetics when cultural shifts can obviously happen much more rapidly? By the same token that:
First, I want to mention that almost all population projections I'm aware of completely ignore even the possibility of evolution and selection. Plenty of them are just simple regressions that implicitly assume a homogenous population. This is, of course, complete bunk.
Your prediction relies on constant cultural conditions lasting ten? Twenty? Who knows how many generations it would take to select for fertility in the presence of contraception, modulo the kind of actual genetic engineering that today remains deep, deep science fiction.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
Any amount of past casual sex is too much for wife material, unless you are a cuckold, which I personally am not. Of course you might say, "This is the most fucked up time period for male-female relations perhaps in human history, and I will accept a bit of cuckoldry in exchange for not being alone forever.", and I won't judge you too harshly for that, but that's still the bargain if your wife has any sort of a casual sex history. You're trading cuckoldry for companionship.
In all your writing, this is the closest you give for a rationalization as to why marrying a woman with (if you'll forgive my paraphrasing, feel free to replace with terms of your choice) a 'high body count' is bad. And yet, your meaning of the word cuckold doesn't comport with any definition I've seen used before - you're suggesting that in a monogamous marriage where neither partner has slept with anyone else since the wedding, the man is nevertheless a cuckold if his wife had casual sex in college? You're just trying to use the shock/meme value of the word cuckold to smear a perfectly healthy marriage.
Seriously - what is your concern with the situation outlined above? STIs? The woman may have a child prior to the marriage? Okay, set those aside for the moment and let's explore cases where neither of those apply. Explain to me what is so wrong with a woman who has casual sex in college, settles down in her late 20s and has a family in her 30s without resorting to broader arguments about society and fertility.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
Tell me more about my interests, though. Maybe I’ll learn something.
If you stick around TheMotte long enough, you live to become the progressive. You filthy life-long democrat, you.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
I have a general impression that college admissions matter a great deal for degrees in parents basement studies, but that outside of a small number of top schools, not so much for job tracks.
I'd disagree on a few points:
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For anything involving research where you're specifically paired with a professor, there's a huge difference. I'd place it roughly on three tiers: i) you're learning cutting edge techniques, contributing to important research papers and networking with the best ii) you become familiar with basic techniques and look good to go to (i), or iii) you go to classes but your practical skills are absolute ass.
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The networking and prestige from the upper schools are huge when trying to start your own venture or climb beyond a certain point. All my friends/contacts from the big schools were able to raise 7-8 figures after graduating or finishing their postdocs. Even after most of their ventures fail, they can (accurately! They learned many things I don't know) sell themselves as having management experience and land high positions in VC/consulting/tech.
Even controlling for talent, the opportunities you get coming out of these schools compound and often make you a better employee/founder.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
A few months ago, in what I think is a now-deleted comment (I can find it on google but not their profile), WhiningCoil made the joke that perfect moderation had been achieved because nobody wanted to post in the culture war thread.
I'll echo that sentiment and say that perfect moderation has indeed been achieved, regardless of your definition of perfect moderation :)
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
Anything Grok can generate for you, you can generate yourself manually on your own computer (given a sufficiently beefy GPU) with zero guardrails since you can give it any text you want.
How beefy? I thought I was looking into trying to run alphafold or some of the other structural bio models a year or two ago and we were talking like 20k. Is it easier to run inference on the image generation models or was I just stupid?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
The subreddit is full of yuppies who live in Mount Vernon or Fed Hill or one of the 5 other safe clean neighborhoods in the city, who will insist up down and sideways that they actually like the city. The food is great! There's so much to do! It's vibrant! There's an art scene! Bullshit. All of it.
I've spent over a decade living in the northeast, bouncing around a few cities while making what most here would consider poverty wages until recently. I've never lived in Baltimore specifically, although I have spent a few years in multiple places with similar demographics and reputations. Maybe your experience is colored by your proximity to the courthouse or something, maybe it's a pre/post-COVID thing but...I've just never encountered things like that? I'd routinely go out every Friday and Saturday night and walk/bike a couple miles through the downtown area to get home at 2-3am completely hammered and nobody ever bothered me. Do you all go out of your way looking for trouble? Do things change when you're significantly older and look like an easy mark? I didn't think I was particularly intimidating, but who knows.
In the last ~2 years there has been a noticeable uptick in the number of homeless people (the opioid epidemic making itself felt?), but they were at first largely confined to the homeless encampment (our equivalent of SF's mission district I suppose). Once that got cleared, they all moved to congregate in a public space which honestly hasn't been any better. At some point, people will get sick of it and I imagine they'll clear it out more aggressively and institutionalize the homeless at a significant cost. In the meantime, my quality of life and lived experience haven't been affected in the slightest - never been mugged, never had anything broken into, never had my bike/car stolen, never been harassed or attacked. I've enjoyed all the cities I lived in and don't have any desire to move elsewhere.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
though in cases where greater policing seems clearly called for, I am also unimpressed with extant alternatives. So I probably just didn't say anything about that particular part of the unrest at the time; in general, this space has always been very bad at guessing my politics.
Perhaps this space is very bad at guessing your politics because what you choose to reveal is inevitably right-coded, modulo my perspective being skewed towards top-level posts as I rarely dig that deeply into the comments.
Long story short--if I should have been making this point five years ago, why aren't you agreeing with me now? Or if you are agreeing with me now, why dwell on some past possible disagreement that may not have even occurred?
Would you agree that the majority of opinions on this site regarding BLM and the George Floyd riots were negative? And would you agree that the majority of opinions expressed on this site are positively disposed towards the UK riots? I perceive this as hypocrisy, as I agree with you that black Americans rioting over George Floyd are conceptually similar to white UK citizens rioting over the stabbings. How else can I point out this hypocrisy? I suppose I could make my own top-level post, but I'd inevitably be forced to link to specific examples, and drag you in regardless...
Perhaps it's disseminated hypocrisy, and everyone has internally consistent views, but then...why? I know your answer is that I'm just overly sensitive to right-wing viewpoints after years of coddling, but given that you received only mild pushback to your post (and the back-pushers were immediately dogpiled by multiple people), and I can't remember the last time anyone said anything remotely charitable about BLM (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), where are all these ideologically consistent people? And why do they censor themselves so strictly along partisan lines?
I neither agree nor disagree with you on the object-level. I'm sympathetic towards the people who protest and riot after this kind of violence, but I've also been convinced that the decrease in policing over the last several years has been worse for most of these communities. I just want ideological consistency.
Not at all!
In that case, I anticipate that the median person here would make the argument that the BLM protests were illegitimate because Floyd was a criminal drug addict who died of COVID and Fentanyl, whereas the UK rioters are justified. Do you disagree?
I am reminded of something said much, much longer ago than five years:
True Republicanism and rule by philosopher kings has never been tried.
That being said, I think my prediction of boomers and millennials dying off is much more likely to come true than a plot involving the kidnapping and brainwashing of a couple thousand Mediterranean slave-children. The argument isn't that the zoomers will be wise philosopher kings, but having been raised in an age of social media and ubiquitous cell phones, will be better adapted to the current environment than we are. In the same way that my generation is much better at using Facebook in a sane way than most Boomers.
Undoubtedly there will be some other future shock involving AI and VR that gen alpha will be better positioned to weather, but one problem at a time.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
I mean, I'm not trying to be deliberately obtuse. As I've already stated in this thread, I am myself pretty ambivalent about immigration, insofar as it (A) tends to benefit me, personally and (B) tends to economically benefit nations, on average. But when immigration yields a specific, horrific crime against the indigenous population and people get upset about that, telling them to weigh the overall positives against their negatives seems like a non-starter, argument-wise.
You could replace everything in this argument with the case of George Floyd. When policing yields a specific, horrific crime against black Americans and they get upset, telling them to weigh the overall positives of policing against their negatives seems like a non-starter, wouldn't you agree?
And yet, I don't recall you ever making that point five years ago. Perhaps you were just silent, perhaps I don't have Gattsuru's eidetic memory and you'll correct me, but I think it much more likely that you'll split hairs about how the UK rioters are morally justified while BLM was not now that the shoe is on the other foot.
I'm personally ambivalent. What you say is true, and the statistics people give about police brutality and immigration are also, presumably, true. It's not particularly surprising for people to react this way, but at the same time, western democracies need to find a way to adapt to the viral nature of the internet, social media and ubiquitous cell phone recordings without sliding into chaos or authoritarianism. Violent crime has decreased significantly since the 90s in the USA, but it certainly doesn't feel like it given the constant sensationalism in social media and news feeds. And yet, any centralized effort to block production or consumption of viral news is antithetical to our values. Millenials and boomers are probably screwed; maybe the zoomers will become sufficiently desensitized to snuff and viral videos that we'll return to equilibrium after people born before ~2005 die off.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
All it took was 9/11 and the plebs in middle America were lining up outside every army recruitment center.
And all it would take today is Donald Trump (Jr.) saying 'Fuck China boys, they stole your jobs, grab your rifles and let's go.' If the war starts during a democratic administration, on the other hand...
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
This is how we get hundred billion dollar black holes, massive financial crises, wars that go nowhere based on pure fantasy and defiance of reality, 20 years of barking up the wrong tree on Alzheimers research due to fraud...
Where did you read that take? It's not clear to me whether you mean Marc Tessier-Lavigne or Sylvain Lesne, but in both cases it's a huge overstatement. Both were peripheral to the main story of beta-amyloid plaques which originated before either author, had strong evidence in favor of it, and (I would argue) have strong evidence in favor of the plaque hypothesis being false at this point. But the enormous research and clinical efforts on beta-amyloid plaques would have happened even in the absence of either fraud.
I'll note that of the people in the field I've spoken with, most still believe in the plaque hypothesis and think we just aren't treating patients early enough or some other excuse.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
So far as the "Read Another Book" meme goes, Harry Potter is to millenials as 1984 is to boomers.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
But you weren't comparing LoTT to the New York Times or the Washington Post, were you?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
Good. There should be consequences for advocating for political violence. It has ever been thus, and some social consequences are better than being (literally) tarred and feathered.
This isn't even a problem as far as free speech is concerned. The Gestapo didn't kick down her door and drag her off to a reeducation camp, a private corporation fired her because it thought her opinion beyond the pale. Free speech doesn't guarantee that you can say whatever you want to whoever you want without consequence.
As an aside, this is hilarious considering that less than a week ago people (@Jiro et al.) were still pulling the LoTT is a powerless private citizen compared to the checks notes cathedral juggernaut that is Social Text. At some point the fig leaf of 'punching up' just isn't going to work anymore when LoTT is getting people fired like that.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
You allow more crime, you get more crime, including against the politicians that allowed it.
So...is it also true that if you encourage more gun ownership, you get more shootings, including against the politicians that enable it?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
Then please enlighten me
I'm skeptical of my ability to do so, and loath to try.
But firstly, I'll note that we were discussing:
Berkeley polyamory cult doing drugs in a shitted out bus in somebody’s yard.
The link between this and open-air drug markets is tenuous to non-existent (was he buying his drugs at one of your markets...?) at least as far as I'm aware of the story of David Depape, though I can see how discussing drug markets rather than sticking to the example the OP gave is much more convenient for you. As far as Democratic policies go, do you want the cops to round up and jail polyamorists for life? Anyone who uses something harder than marijuana? People living in old buses? And that failing to do so means that when David Depape reads a bunch of conspiracy theories about the Jews and pizzagate on facebook, well, the Pelosis just had it coming? As well blame Republicans for not being willing to censor obvious disinformation that sent him off the deep end, both positions are equally stupid.
Not even mentioning the fact that Democratic politicians are elected on these 'soft on crime' platforms, and are presumably executing the will of the majority - particularly in the aftermath of Floyd. It's not clear to me why they should be murdered by drug addicts because their constituencies support 'soft on crime' policies.
But whatever, you don't want to talk about that, right? You want to score points. So no, I don't support 'open-air drug markets,' you are correct, but also nobody has a pro-drug market position. I assume you mean people are 'soft on crime' or against prosecution of drug offenses, and the mess in SF/Philly is the byproduct. But the tradeoff of cracking down on crime will be more citizens incarcerated and paying those costs, more fatherless households, more Rodney Kings and George Floyds (and associated riots) which you may not care about or even see as a good thing, but most of your fellow citizens disagree with.
It's clear the pendulum has swung too far in one direction and a correction is coming/already here. But America is not Singapore, and (this is conjecture on my part) I believe that most Americans value freedom and liberty such that they're willing to allow some level of crime and homelessness. Pushing your argument to the extreme means that any politician that isn't pro-social-panopticon deserves to be murdered by the criminals for their soft-on-crime policies.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
Oh, you can't tell which I'm talking about because they're equivalent?
Yeah, pretty much.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
Ah, thank you for the correction.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
My righteous policy of AR-15s for self-defense versus your policy of open air drug markets that permanently break people's brains is a Straussian conjugation if I've ever heard one.
Your description of both 'policies' or platforms is massively lacking in nuance and accuracy, and in both cases ignores the tradeoffs involved. Pretending that gun ownership is an unalloyed good while being soft-on-crime is an unalloyed ill is just silly.
What, do you live in Istanbul or something? Why does your neighborhood have so many feral cats?
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