Felagund
12hr ago
What life advice do you have?
(Yes, this is a very generic question. Make it as narrow or broad as you like. It does not at all need to be tailored to me.)
Felagund
12hr ago
If you know people well enough that you think that you've found something that fits what they like, and that they would buy, but they don't know about, that's good too. But that can be tricky to do.
Felagund
21hr ago
I find it interesting that you put flat earth in a different category than a fusion-powered sun.
Anyway, I think there are clearly at least some voluntary components to religions, which are plainly choices. Religious people do also talk about having struggling with doubts.
But yeah, Christians do literally think that God died and was resurrected 2000 years ago. Doesn't mean that that's always going to be fully internalized, of course, but we do think that. If you asked a Christian "Was there someone 2000 years ago named Jesus, who was crucified?" "Did Jesus rise from the dead?" "Was Jesus God?" I think you'll generally get some pretty sincere yeses, especially if you ask the questions in that order.
Felagund
21hr ago
Presumably some teachers think wearing Goth clothing leads to some things they disapprove of (Satan worship, depression, arson, whatever) but they would still be rightly reprimanded if they called home about these things.
I guess I don't really see a problem with informing parents of that either.
If parents want to impose some special conditions under which their students are watched, that's something for private and not public school, which should cater to the general public as decided by the government's education department.
I imagine the relevant component to you isn't the government's education department? That is, if they decided that the guideline was that parents should be informed, it seems like you'd be disappointed, not happy that they're catering to the will of the general public.
Felagund
21hr ago
What would a "relatively neutral" presentation look like to you? How positive would things be posed as?
Felagund
2d ago
Maybe see if you can find out from Trace what the old questions were?
I'd be interested in knowing religious composition, and whether the person is a convert to that tradition.
If someone would consider themselves a rationalist, rat-adjacent, rat-adjacent-adjacent, etc.—how many degrees people are out.
Whether/how many people on here they've met.
What other social media people use.
What their social security and credit card numbers are.
Find a list of questions, and then instruct people to answer a bunch of questions in a section with the answer they think most likely to be the most popular option (so, a Keynesian beauty contest), or, if you prefer, choose a prolific user, and have people try to answer what that person would answer. But people would want to see their results for that one, might be tricky.
What's one old user they wish were began frequenting this place again or were unbanned.
Number of siblings (and where in order). Number of children.
Felagund
3d ago
He likes data, and is good at stats. Here's his substack: https://www.cremieux.xyz
Felagund
4d ago
In practice, though, disparate impact is often used not only for concealed racism, but for any policies that does not produce the desired ratios, where desired means "at least as many nonwhites as the population that we're drawing from." But that can mean that simple hiring based on competence means that people can fall below the definitely-not-quotas, and so they would be legally vulnerable.
In theory, it's a nice feature to capture concealed racism. In practice, it's a generic cudgel that can be used to punish ordinary behavior, should you get out of line. And legally (assuming we're talking about Title VI here), it's a complete fabrication, and is used to make people break the text of the law itself.
Felagund
8d ago
Thank you!
Given that you have more experience than most, then, what do your opinions look like on trans-related issues?
Felagund
8d ago
Everyone who brings up the suicide discourse to score a point is contributing to the problem. We know that suicide, like many other things, spreads socially; that's why newspapers try not to cover suicides too much. But for some reason, we decide to convince teenagers that the proper way to spite people who won't give them the gender treatment that they want is by suicide. No wonder suicide rates are astronomical.
Felagund
8d ago
Oh, woah, I hadn't realized that you were ex-trans. Have you given a description of what things were like for you somewhere? Your life history? (If so, where? If not, I'd be interested.)
Felagund
8d ago
"I believe that the vast vast majority of doctors providing gender affirming care through therapy, puberty blockers, and in very rare cases surgery, are doing so with the best interests of the child in mind, which was not the case for castrati historically as I understand it."
While I'm sure that a great many of the people in the process have good intentions, I do not think that they are often acting with good judgment. In your example, killing is murder unless you kill the right person in the right context. But it does not merely suffice that you think that what you're doing is the right situation ("they really had it coming"), but that it actually be that.
I don't really have a good sense of what things were like for castrati. I think they (or at least, those who were successful) were not infrequently of fairly high social status, but I'm not at all sure of that.
Felagund
8d ago
How sane is bluesky? Because I imagine interacting with far-out people wouldn't be great for depolarization. I'd think the best place would be moderate lefties, perhaps?
Felagund
8d ago
Yeah, I imagine there's some level of selection in who you end up interacting with.
Regarding 1: I don't know that I'm convinced by this. Suppose someone is the candidate of the "End Democracy Party." Someone who is pro-democracy could understandably be disappointed with their election. Of course, that would still be the democratic result, so their complaint is really with the populace that they have, that it is not a suitable one to attempt to maintain a democracy in.
Similarly, one could be disappointed with a decrease in the effectiveness in democratic governance. I think this was closer to what they were complaining about: that this indicates the need to win the "stupid vote," pointing to tangible harms wrought by people finding the wrong things appealing. "Democracy makes us listen to and appeal to the people with the bad opinions" is a valid critique of democracy, and so saying that that seems to be more the case than they once thought is an entirely reasonable sentiment.
2 is false. Vaccine skepticism in general has definitely risen since 2020 (the people putting in place mandates should really have considered the second order effects).
I'll in large part grant 3, though.
Felagund
8d ago
Why is Tetanus less relevant in the first world? Are we less likely to get dirty cuts?
Felagund
10d ago
Sure, I definitely think that people were manipulating the public in this way, and that there's a decently high chance that that could have been the difference.
Felagund
10d ago
I assume the question here has an intended answer (there wasn't much fraud).
Anyway, asking anyone who does think the 2020 election was stolen, do you have any examples of things that seem like obvious problems or evidence of substantial fraud? I'm currently inclined to think that there wasn't anything of that sort, but a lot of people seem really firmly convinced, so I'd be interested in seeing the evidence.
Felagund
14d ago
But surely corroboration from across the mediterranean should be treated as evidence?
Felagund
14d ago
I'm inclined to believe the Carthaginian infant sacrifice stories, as we see it complained about in the bible, and Tyre and Sidon etc. were right by Israel.
Felagund
21d ago
Yes. He was unmodded on reddit. (I was never on reddit myself) He was banned here a couple months ago for deficits in etiquette, despite being warned. (And I think I remember something about him not accepting that people can recognize racial differences in the aggregate without being white nationalists.) It was something of a shame, in my book, since having additional perspectives is nice.
If you want an easy explanation of why they should be told, I know pro-trans activism likes to talk about elevated rates of suicide among people with gender dysphoria/trans people (even though suicide is a social contagion, and we elsewhere try to avoid doing that, but whatever). Do you not think that parents should know that their child is in a group with a vastly higher suicide rate?
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