IdiocyInAction
No bio...
User ID: 695
IdiocyInAction
1mo ago
Is the slippery slope really a fallacy?
Logically, it can be. A -> B does not imply B -> C. Depending on the context it can or can't be.
However, in the context where a fallacy is alleged, statements are often not really about logic. Saying "slippery slope fallacy" is often not merely a statement about incorrect logical inference, but rather an attempt to claim that second-order effects won't happen. Often they do end up happening.
IdiocyInAction
1mo ago
I mean define "decline" and Europe? Different countries peaked at different times. Europe in the 90s and 2000s didn't look like a decline story.
IdiocyInAction
1mo ago
The financial community is a money-weighted consensus vote of decision makers, not some boogyman. It’s not only that he could (he can do a lot of damaging things), but that he's been making Argentina-like rhetoric for about a year now and his other actions very much suggest that he might go down the LATAM path.
IdiocyInAction
1mo ago
I just finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I kind of liked it? I felt it's written in a very sincere and fearless way and it's nice that there isn't a "moral" to the whole thing. Unfortunately I think McCarthy sucks at writing SF so the apocalypse feels a bit contrived or unbelievable. Not that that is the point of the book whatsoever but it does detract a bit and require at least a bit of suspension of disbelief. The prose was very nice and lurid. I liked Blood Meridian a lot more, I felt that book actually changed me a bit.
I think he does a good job at portraying the evils of a post-apocalyptic world though. One semi-popular Reddit-tier opinion that often gets repeated is that video game writing is really bad compared to literary/book-writing. So what comes to mind here is comparing The Road with the first two Fallout games (the third onwards, while being fun as games, are utter slop on a writing level so I'll discount them. NV could be included). And if I look at the first Fallout game and at least some parts of the second and consider them as what life in a post-apocalypse would look like, I don't know if I would say The Road is that much of a more of a compelling story. Fallout (again, discounting the slop Bethesda written later entries) did a good enough rendition of things like slavery, cannibalism, crime, etc. Not as dark as The Road but video games generally can't be for various reasons. Not as personal maybe (with the whole father-son thing in the Road) but I think as an overall experience I wouldn't say that they stuck with me much less than McCarthy's work. Maybe you could say modern video games have shitty slop writing (and you'd be right to a large degree), but that's also true of most books. Maybe I'd also rate it different if I had a kid. There are definitely a lot of literary works that blow any game out of the water but that's comparing the greatest of the great of a medium that's more than 2000 years old with a 30-40 year old medium. I don't know, I feel like you can feel creative mastery in any medium and it's also quite rare in any medium.
I am also reading Roadside Picnic by the Strugastky brothers. I'm actually really enjoying it so far. The main character going from being a young man with all that entails, i.e. not caring as much about the future, not caring about engaging in daring adventures to becoming more settled as he has a wife and a child is quite relatable to me. I am not at the child part but life at the end of your 20s with a GF is very different to my early 20s. You mostly don't have to care as much when you're younger? It's very nicely written, the Zone is described in a very compelling way and the characters seem real. You notice it was written in the Soviet era but that's charming more than anything. Halfway through but it's very enjoyable. Can see why it had such a long tail as a literary work (the Stalker movie and later games).
IdiocyInAction
2mo ago
At the cost of the chilling effect of the government being able to correlate your posts better. Mind you they already can probably for the vast majority of unsophisticated users so who knows, maybe it doesn't matter.
IdiocyInAction
2mo ago
It may not be wrong but it's also a bit of a thought-terminating cliché. Anyone who you disagree with is a pernicious putinbot or whatever. It's people discovering the island of quokkas that was the open internet and then poisoning the commons for marginal geopolitical gains. I am not saying this is to be fought, just observing.
IdiocyInAction
2mo ago
What are Ukrainian women living in Poland meant to do, live out their lives as chaste old maids waiting for dead men?
Yeah, kind of? Have you seen what these people have to go through to defend their "homeland"? What does "country" even mean at that point.
IdiocyInAction
2mo ago
Are the men of the UK the most absolutely cucked human beings to ever exist on planet earth ever in the history of time? Is there another time in history where this would have even been remotely tolerated? You allowed a foreign rape-brigade to rape an entire generation of your children, and the response has been essentially nothing.
Are these women meaningfully their women at this point? Would you ruin your life for someone who considers you despicable? I am sure fathers (if present at all, this is all lower-class people) should have done more but the people in those gangs probably knew how to pick out the vulnerable ones. You can't kill chivalry and then expect no consequenes.
IdiocyInAction
2mo ago
People actually have less sex than ever and the younger generations of neurotic women probably dress less revealingly than they used to as it's become a status symbol to be in a relationship even if you try not to be appealing (I believe that is what a "Pick-Me" or whatever is)
The gradual death of the open internet and ideological capture and where this all leads
One interesting thing you get to do when you get older is to take stock of your predictions, observe trends over a longer timespan and see if your mental models were actually worth their salt.
When I was growing up, I was at the very tail end of the people who still grew up with what I'd like to call a relatively "open" internet. Open in the sense that there was no Reddit, no walled gardens, the iPhone was young, Facebook was beginning to be a thing when I was in school.
Internet norms were very libertarian in most "serious" places, much more male, much more autistic. People thought that we'd have this open space forever where there are no central authoritarian rulers, censorship was mocked as technically impossible even with the Great Chinese Firewall having been a thing, the Arab spring was heralded as a prototype of internet-enabled uprising against authoritarian rulers, the whole thing was very much end-of-history-like. Things like the EFF and Richard Stallmann were relevant, nerds cared about open source, etc.
Then it all came crashing down. People began to concentrate on social media, on sites like Reddit. Network effects did their thing and centralised power and moderation. Eternal September became truly eternal. The word "echo chamber" became a thing. Smartphones meant tech literacy was no longer a prerequisite. The whole thing became politicised, with Trump, Cambridge Analytica, etc. Now everyone is a Russian, Chinese, Israeli shill. Nobody ultimately cares about privacy, censorship, speech norms, etc. that much. Stallmann got cancelled, I think the EFF and the various open source orgs are now all either into AI grifting or grievance stuff. It's gone or going away. I won't look at wrongthink when I have secure-boot enabled TPM-secured age verification built into my OS and sending all my wrongthink to the government.
It was fun while it was closed up. I am sure none of this is novel.
But the interesting thing is the further direction of travel.
- Censorship is steadily moving further and further into the Overton window
Australia and Britain now have age-verification laws which require everyone to submit ID. I think some more authoritarian Asian countries (like South Korea) already have this for things like video games. It is also talked about to make things like VPNs illegal or harder to access in the UK (with the usual suspects pointing out that this puts the UK in company with countries like Russia and NK), the other non-US Anglosphere countries usually follow (seriously Australia/UK/Canada/NZ have a weird thing for paternalism). The sad thing is that this is bipartisan and nobody really opposes this. The evidence base for social media bans is actually quite thin so this will probably not even make the kids not miserable while entrenching ideological control
You can picture children being fed state-backed news from a young age now too, which I guess is Lindy in a way. Will probably entrench and accelerate existing biases and trends even further though. I don't expect "peak woke" to have been passed.
- Censorship is very unevenly applied
The big boogy-men of the Internet are incels, right wingers and Andrew Tate. Incel discourse is a personal bugbear of mine because it is completely detached from reality in the sense that even though even right-wingers come up with plenty of theories about supposed resentful incel violence, the people most likely to rape and murder women are actually the sex havers. But I digress.
So the governments come up with weird dystopian schemes of censoring and tracking this stuff while other kinds of probably actually harmful stuff (neurotic and mentally ill women amplifying their neuroses about men and society, viz. the "Angry Young Woman", race-grievance amplification, various untrue "tax the rich stuff" verging into blood libel and calls for assassinations) is left untouched, amplified or even supported. Moral panics are nothing new I suppose.
- LLMs are the ultimate frontier
I am a very heavy user of LLMs. I talk to them basically all day at work at this point. Not everyone does, there are still plenty of people who don't use LLMs but younger people use them more than others. I imagine usership heavily skews intellectually as well, as a lot of the general population hates interacting with textual media. I imagine that in the coming years the censors and nudgers will also try to get a front-row seat to this as well, so when you ask for certain things you not only get a Reddit Markov Chain but one where all the "wrong" opinions have been RLFH'd out.
In the future when everyone outsources their thought processes to LLMs that presents a level of ideological centralisation Stalin could have only dreamt of. Should Amanda Askell et al. get to decide how everyone thinks? Maybe not in my opinion, but who knows what'll this stuff do to the kids.
- The US being a holdout or not?
This stuff is particularly pernicious in the non-US anglosphere. I think the EU is also thinking about OS/device-level censorship but in Germany a court struck down the social media ban idea for kids for now (with the argument being something like "kids are people", which is very Kantian and German-idealist in a way). I think California or something tried to force the Linux kernel to put this stuff in and right-wingers will jump on this just as left-wingers would, with different bugbears (porn for right-wingers, wrongthink for left-wingers). Not sure if the US will be a holdout or not. At least speech norms are a thing.
As someone who skews Libertarian, this is all a great disappointment, especially because I like being able to argue with smart people, even if they have viewpoints many consider despicable. I personally mostly just want to be left alone and not have goons sent to people's houses because of wrongthink. Do they still make the kids read Orwell? But I guess not only has the experiment of giving everyone a seat at the table to talk to each other failed spectacularly, it has also manifested a vector of ideological state control hitherto unparalleled that governments are now starting to seriously use. Who knows, maybe complaining about having to pay 50+% of my paycheck to Boomer UBI will be criminalised in 20 years. At least the Chinese are honest about this stuff and don't pretend to be into free speech.
IdiocyInAction
2mo ago
Well in my mind society deemed women mature when they fulfilled their gender tole which was mostly wife, mother, etc.
Also why spinster lacks a male equivalent
IdiocyInAction
2mo ago
"Spinster". However current western society expects, for better or for worse, almost nothing from women (one could argue, in a "the purpose of a system is what it does” sense, that it exists primarily for the whims of women) so the term is outdated.
IdiocyInAction
2mo ago
That depends on the society. There have been plenty of social contracts and there are plenty of social contracts that have absolutely no problem placing obligations on women.
IdiocyInAction
2mo ago
Fairness being something only autistic people want is something someone came up with here but it's not really correct in the sense that only autistic people care about fairness; autistic people merely care more about mechanical rules rather than things like inclusivity or reciprocity, but people still deeply care about their notions of what their deserts should be, that they get a decent deal. The entire edifice of western thought and society is built upon some idea of (Christian) fairness. Fairness is so important to people that income inequality, etc. is the biggest topic du jour. All this stuff is about fairness. The entire idea of bodily autonomy you cite is downstream of that.
The ultimate question is, to paraphrase a book title, whose justice, whose notion of fairness? Or if we forgo fairness entirely, then what? What virtues, what values is your post-fairness society based on? It used to be Christian-adjacent virtues, but I guess now it's post-Christian "woke" virtues like racial equity (is that not fairness?) and "bodily autonomy".
A very common bias or tendency I see among ideologues of different stripes is that they implicitly carry a value system and expect everyone to abide by it and just not care about "what's in it for me". But people do care about that. You have to think about what your value system actually is, what it's based on, what are its precepts. Otherwise people will defect, your system will lose alignment, bad actors will fill the vacuum.
If we go with a value system of "nature is unfair", then we move past our corpse of Christian morality straight into "the weak suffer what they must, the strong take what they can". Which is a value system you see and which exists, like as Judge Holden articulates in Blood Meridian or more broadly a sort of law of the jungle. Or maybe you have some sort of gynocracy in mind. Or maybe you think AI will save us all. We shall see. But it's not a value system which would tend to place women's suffering or bodily autonomy very highly at all.
Things don't happen until they do. If a war happens then your value system of women's bodily autonomy being the prime concern of society might collide with weak armies and men fleeing (as they did in Syria, Ukraine, etc.) and the barbarians raping all your women (or worse, like what happened to German women after WW2). Then nature will truly assert itself. That is also a value system not based on fairness.
I guess you might just say your value system includes noble male self-sacrifice in return for nothing. Again, you might find it a bit hard to get buy-in for that.
IdiocyInAction
3mo ago
Women report significant and markedly lower sex drives and also far more variance in sex drive than men over their lifetimes. This is pretty robust. Also women's sex drives are more reactive than men's.
IdiocyInAction
3mo ago
At least in Europe, mass migration on the scale that it's a noticeable and negative thing for most people is actually shockingly recent. And if you dig into when it hit various countries, there absolutely was backlash, pre-2010s included. German guest workers were promised to be temporary. Asian migration to Australia was promised to be modest. The US had such backlash that until 1965ish there was a law on the books to basically freeze their demographics.
I would also argue that the idea that restrictions = nazism and racism post 1945 was used in the west to push it heavily. Also, usually populist parties that actually stopped migration also bundled rather odious populist policies and/or nationalist stuff with the whole thing. Why that is can be discussed at another time.
IdiocyInAction
3mo ago
First of all, having no or very controlled family reunification and discerning permanent residency and citizenship does not preclude getting geniuses. Singapore, which, if it weren't well run, would be a much worse place to migrate to than the US, manages to attract very good people just fine.
Secondly, while I admire what Jensen Huang built to an extent, it's not trivially true that in his absence there wouldn't be an equal or marginally worse Nvidia equivalent. Indeed, many GPU manufacturers exist and it does not follow that a more restrictionist US would not be at the technological frontier.
Thirdly, this is ultimately a values question. You seem to find having "Asian Grinders" as a good thing. Many White Americans pre mass-migration, if told that their kids would have to compete in school and participate in the habits and mores of "Asian grinders", would have recoiled in horror. Not that they got a say anyway, no western country in history ever voted for mass migration.
Also, take Australia. Australia gets far more Asian grinders than the US ever did, indeed, it has some of the most elite immigration in the world measured by your system. And yet, it has stagnated against the US in the last decade in GDP terms and is facing heavy anti-immigrant backlash.
Immigrants actually have a pretty pro western selection effect overall. Some of the proudest most patriotic free market loving freedom desiring American dream appreciating people I know are immigrants.
If you look at actual polling you'll see that Asians are extremely happy to jump on the whole anti-white anti-western culture bus and that they often bring things like speech norms from their places of origin.
Here's Ronald Reagan saying this same thing.
Immigration in his time was from very different places than it is now.
Ultimately it gets down to whether nations should be economic zones or actual coherent nations.
If you only believe in short-term GDPmaxxing (which is a valid position I suppose), sure. View people as fungible, import the best according to some metrics.
The truth about the US immigration system is that most green cards are family-based and that cultures and people are not fungible. Even if Chinese people and Indians increase your GDP they also change your culture, make use of family reunification (which can often negate economic advantages), bring grievances from the old world with them and often promote ideologies that go against the host population (white people). Not to mention that things like IQ =/= social trust, "western" morality, etc.
People have pointed out that Asians are importing things like Childhood-destroying striverism (see the whole Vivek thing), Caste-like dynamics, etc.
I am not nearly as reactionary as a lot of posters here but I do not believe in the fungibility of people. I think the US was smart to consider demographics in immigration policy, not just due to economic reasons, but much more because of cultural cohesion. Just like places like Singapore or the UAE (to a lesser extent) do. That doesn’t mean "no Asians" but maybe being very discerning about to whom you grant permanent residency to is not a bad idea. And it's not like you could just move to India or China either.
IdiocyInAction
3mo ago
I am not necessarily a "believer" in the strong sense, but I guess I believe in a weaker sense that genetic differences can cause some group differences in intelligence. The extent and magnitude of that is debatable. I guess I simply don't believe group differences can be ruled out a priori and I also don't see why they should be especially unlikely. They are definitely not the sole explanatory variable but they seem to be a pretty good one for some cases.
I think for Indians the party line among strong proponents is that India is genetically very diverse and most immigrants are from higher-functioning sub populations. Hispanics are a mix, between blacks and whites and Arabs I don’t know what the party line is.
IdiocyInAction
3mo ago
IIRC Aspergers and the like are uncorrelated. Smart people are generally functional.
Do they make her a good wife? Doctors often have to move and she might care more about her patients than you. I can see this with other girlboss office jobs though. (Full disclosure: I am a guy dating one. I do love her but the job comes with a lot of negatives for relationships and well, the money angle isn't compelling for me for various reasons. A lot of my GFs female colleagues are single, none of the male ones are).
IdiocyInAction
3mo ago
After a certain age you also get adverse selection (on both sexes). Can concur with the bossbitch thing. Some women try hard to cultivate disagreeability which while maybe adaptive in their careers make her a pretty bad partner (especially if paired with being neurotic, which women are on average more than men). For men this kind of works (though only to a point, I'm not fully aligned with the manosphere people here) but for women it's generally quite off-putting.
Also as a higher earner myself I always felt like having a high earning partner raises expectations rather than providing any security. Some people would call me insecure for thinking this but I've not yet met a woman who contradicts this idea (I'm sure they are out there but most women want to be provided for).
IdiocyInAction
3mo ago
Intelligence and autism are probably anticorrelated.
I think you have to either be talking to a pretty high decoupler or approach this stuff in a sensitive and safe way. One reliable, evidence-backed thing is that women score about 0.5 SD or similar higher on neuroticism (OCEAN trait) than men - meaning the average woman has a bit of a more sensitive trigger for threats. Someone talking about this stuff can both trigger insecurities (bad for higher neuroticism) and also, as mentioned, make you look like someone who generally has a bit of zero-sum mindset.
Also female dating is and has never been grounded in cultivation of resources and positive traits. I find a lot of women get this wrong and are surprised in a kind of female nice-guy-ism, like I read about a female doctor that expected to be a hot commodity but was then surprised most men cared about looks, agreeableness, etc. over her career and that all her hard work didn't make her good prospect. So it might be hard for women to empathise with what this means to be a man (a common trope for men is that non-parental love is always conditional). As a man this stuff sounds like acknowledgment of a tough (shared) reality, as a woman you might sound like someone who sees things as being an eternal competition and who can't care/love unconditionally which looks bad even for a platonic friend.
Government run grocery stores and slopulism
I am not an American and don't live in NYC, but I've recently been thinking about the news of there being government run grocery stores in NYC. In my mind, NYC is in at least one way a heart of capitalism in the world, so this at least has some symbolic significance. On a more serious note, I find it interesting what the idea that government-run grocery stores would fix anything reveals about its thinkers.
If you speak to most people, even very intelligent ones, they tend to have narrative-driven models of reality. For example, if you go on Reddit, talk to a co-worker or whatever about health insurance companies or grocery stores, they'll often make these entities responsible for high prices for groceries or healthcare, claiming greed, manipulation and dishonesty in some fashion.
While it is absolutely true that these entities operate out of greed and not e.g. compassion, if one looks at the claims, they are often weak at best. Both grocery stores and health insurance companies have rather low margins (typically 1-3% of net margin for grocery stores, 2-5% for health insurers) in most places. The idea that the only thing preventing us from a post-scarcity, food and healthcare-too-cheap-to-meter society are somehow corporations made up of morally abhorrent people seems to quite attractive to a lot of people.
While both grocery stores and health insurance companies do have plenty of issues, my personal view is that they act in as kind of stand-ins for people's rage; between choosing to believe that either:
a. Healthcare is an enormously and ever-more expensive thing in most of the world, with 15-20% of GDP (!) going to healthcare in the US and usually >10% in most developed nations, because people's expectations of healthcare service are ever-rising and people believe that healthcare is a "human right" and the fact that it's such an expensive thing and requires a lot of staff (health services are the number 1 employer in a lot of US states now) means that when you need healthcare, it'll cost you a lot and insurance premiums reflect that. Similarly with grocery stores; food is actually cheaper than ever as measured by % of people's income being spent on it
b. There are evil people colluding to drive up the prices of essential goods
most people choose b.)
Even most smart people! I have some very sharp colleagues who are economically extremely illiterate and I work in quantitative finance, a field where one would hope people understand things about supply and demand.
And this extends to the right as well! Most populists-right movements have been exerting more, not less, command upon the economy; even Mottizens veer into this, seeing working in finance as parasitising upon society rather than allocating where goods and services ought to go.
I think this sort of feel-good, narrative-driven politics is ultimately an issue simply because reality is not narrative-driven; the progression to the modern world has broadly shown that in a lot of cases, reality is random, cruel, senseless, not governed by human-compatible narratively satisfying laws. There isn't necessarily a cabal; a lot of things are driven by emergent phenomena.
However, the "grocery stores are not evil camp" tends to have shitty marketing (perhaps due to not thinking in terms of attractive narratives itself too much) and loses to people like Zoran Mamdani. Indeed, that is broadly the story of populism and demagoguery, which seems to recently have gained a lot of ground in a lot of places in the world. Maybe the internet and especially things like TikTok makes small soundbites do better these days.
More options
Context Copy link