MartianNight
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User ID: 1244
MartianNight
23d ago
Potentially related: Elon Musk just claimed xAI will start an AI game studio to make games great again!. Not sure if it's a serious announcement, but it came in response to another tweet by Dogecoin creator Billy Markus:
i don't understand how game developers and game journalism got so ideologically captured
gamers have always been trolls, anti-greedy corporations, anti-bs
gamers have always rejected dumb manipulative bs, and can tell when someone is an outsider poser
why lean into the bs?
MartianNight
23d ago
The problem with this logic is that it doesn't generalize. If you allow males into women's spaces so long as they pass well enough, who is going to be the judge of who passes well enough? What rule would you propose that allows Sarah McBride in but keeps Jessica Yaniv out?
You can have a “don't ask, don't tell” policy, which is mostly how things worked before the year 2000, but once the cat is out of the bag, you have to revert to some objective rule about who is or isn't allowed.
The whole point of the Congressional bathroom rule is to keep a passing transwoman who is not a threat to anyone out of the ladies' room in order to show Republican's disapproval of transgenderism.
I don't think that's the entire point. The point is also to keep men out of women's shelters and prisons, men out of women's sports and dressing rooms, and men out of women's spaces in general.
If Republicans cannot even keep men out of women's bathrooms in Washington DC, how can they expect to accomplish any of those other tasks? So even if the McBride issue is itself not important because McBride is likely harmless (with which I tend to agree), the case is important because it is at the fulcrum of a broader issue.
MartianNight
29d ago
They, at least figuratively and sometimes very literally, cut off the part of their body that makes them capable of being a sexual threat- they're no different than a 3 year old boy
Bizarre and patently false claim.
All evidence suggests trans-identified males have the same level of criminality as other males, i.e., much higher than females and much higher than 3 year old boys (the main source is a paper by Dhejne et al, though generally gender activists taboo this kind of research for showing undesirable results).
And besides, over 90% of trans-identified males opt to keep their penis and testicles. So unlike their female counterparts, trans males are almost always physically intact. They are very much capable of raping women and have done so on many occasions.
MartianNight
29d ago
"Can people who have official government documents that document them as women, involve non-consenting members of the public in their use of spaces for women?" To which the obvious answer is: yes.
My answer is no.
Males do not belong in women's spaces.
Whether those males identify as transgender is irrelevant, because my view is based on sex, not gender identity.
Whether those males have government-issued certificates recognizing their gender identity is also irrelevant, because my view is based on sex, not gender identity.
The only way government records could be relevant if they accurately record a person's sex, but governments of all developed countries have decided to stop doing that.
Just like my driver's license is valid whether you think I should have one or not.
Your government-issued driver's license mostly prevents that same government from putting you in jail for driving a car on the public road. Nobody else is compelled to accept it as proof that you are a competent driver.
In practice, driver's licenses are widely accepted as evidence of baseline driving competence, but that's because the government requires you to prove it before issuing your license. If anyone could get a license simply by self-declaration, even contradicting a professional's judgement, then the value of that license to determine driving ability would plummet.
MartianNight
29d ago
Why is this such an issue? Restrooms have stalls. I couldn't tell what gender was in one if I tried.
This is a fully-general argument against having women's bathrooms at all. Which is fine if you want to argue for unisex bathrooms, but it's not an argument for keeping bathrooms nominally segregated while letting males into the women's bathroom.
MartianNight
1mo ago
Okay but that was like 10,000 civilian deaths, a rounding error for a country of 40 million.
MartianNight
1mo ago
If it's like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, then it will result in mostly men dying, which affects birth rates much less.
MartianNight
1mo ago
Let's say the TFR stabilizes at 1 so that population halves every 30 years or so. Then it takes 90 years to return the world population to 1 billion, which is about what it was at the beginning of the industrial revolution. But the industrial revolution was very localized; it certainly didn't depend on millions of rice farmers in China existing. It started with 10 million people in Britain and spread to 100 million people in Europe.
So it takes like 300 years to get the world population back down to 10 million. Unlike the 10 million who lived in Britain in 1800, who were mostly illiterate farmers, people in the future will still have computers with the internet and Wikipedia, so they are much more capable of maintaining industrial society.
Of course if the population keeps shrinking the situation does become problematic at some point. But 300 years is a long time. Lots of things will change during that time. I would worry much more about the near future, for which we can make better predictions and over which we have much more control.
MartianNight
1mo ago
Two years ago, AOC didn't have pronouns on her Instagram profile, and when called out on it by rabid wokeists, she quickly apologized and put them in. It will be interesting to see if she will make a similar about-face here or if the pronouns are gone for good.
It's worth noting that she also changed her job title from “Representative” to “Congresswoman”, which could be viewed as either a return to sanity (it's okay to call women women again, rather than forcing gender-neutral terminology) or as a way of doubling down on her gender identity as a way to distinguish herself from the evil male majority. We'll see.
MartianNight
1mo ago
The O. J. Simpson case comes to mind. He was acquitted of murder in a criminal trial, but was successfully sued in civil court. Copying from Wikipedia:
In 1997, the jury unanimously found Simpson responsible for the deaths of Goldman and Brown. The Goldman family was awarded damages totaling $34 million ($64 million adjusted for inflation), but as of 2024 have received a small portion of that.
So if actually murdering two people only results in a $64 million fine, how in the hell is Alex Jones liable for $1,1 billion for spreading admittedly-hurtful conspiracy theories? He didn't do direct harm; he just said stupid and hurtful shit on the internet.
MartianNight
1mo ago
There is an AI track in the Meta Hacker Cup this year. I don't know exactly how it works, but it might be helpful to check which techniques the more successful participants used.
MartianNight
1mo ago
He also doesn't need to make any more appearances in front of large crowds until the inauguration, which will presumably be covered really well because it involves lots of important people besides Trump. I'm fairly certain he'll survive until January.
MartianNight
1mo ago
I'm not sure that's saying much, statistically.
The premise seems to be: for some store owners the expected amount of damages exceeds the cost of boarding up windows. Going with the implied assumption that damages occur only if Trump wins, the expected damages are the product of (probability Trump wins) × (probability angry Democrats smash in my windows) × (cost if they smash in my windows). (It's a little bit more complicated because there are also probability for smashing in windows, smashing in windows + looting products, smashing in windows + looting products + setting the store on fire, etc., but that's not really important for the argument.)
My point is that (probability Trump wins) is not super variable. It's almost certainly between 40% and 60%. But that means the expected damages can increase by only 50% from the absolute minimum. The expected damages and the costs of boarding up windows have to be really close for a difference in that probability to affect the decision to board up the windows. For most stores the decision is going to be the same whether the probability is 40% or 60%.
In short, while you could argue that there would be more stores boarding up the higher Trump's chance of victory is, the mere fact that some stores board up windows does not tell you much about Trump's odds. Most of those stores would be boarding up if Trump's chance of winning were 40% or even less, too.
MartianNight
1mo ago
I wonder if he got the idea from the Demon Core.
MartianNight
1mo ago
Freddie deBoer recently wrote about this, in Big Mommy is Not Coming to Save Us:
This is the “why has the media gone easy on Trump??” narrative, which has somehow flourished for almost a decade now despite the fact that Donald Trump has been covered more critically by our media than any other figure in my lifetime, seemingly to his advantage.
He proceeds to gives a ton of examples from the New York Times.
It’s incredible that so many people sincerely believe that the Times is a secretly pro-Trump publication, as they don’t even bother to pretend that their op/ed section is a space where actual pro-Trump sentiment is going to be shared, outside of a once-or-twice a year novelty piece.
[..]
If they go so easy on Trump, why can they not scare up a single authentically pro-Trump voice for the Opinion page? This recent NYT piece asks nine members of their editorial team to reflect on who they’re voting for and why. All nine are voting for Democrats. It’s a bunch of plugs for Harris or the Democrats generally and one weird endorsement of an environmentalist who stole his wardrobe from the Lumineers tour bus. They couldn’t even find a single staffer to endorse a Republican for appearance’s sake, to ward off the obvious criticism. Not one!
I'm sure there are people on both sides that claim their guy isn't treated fairly, and the other guy deserves more scrutiny. But I think this is a case where the Democrat voters are simply wrong.
MartianNight
1mo ago
Any art created using Photoshop was low status
I'm not a great art connaisseur, but it seems to me this is still the case? If I go to my local museum almost all work on display is created from real materials, and that includes modern and contemporary art.
You might say that musea favor physical art in general (you don't need to go outside to view digital art, after all), but they do still exhibit photos and even film snippets (e.g. on a projection screen), but these are invariably recorded in the real physical world, not purely digital creations. And especially with photos, photoshopping them seems to detract from their artistic value, not add to it.
There is also stuff like Damien Hirst's spot paintings most of which are just colored circles painted on a white canvas. You could almost auto-generate them. Hirst doesn't even paint them himself; he has nameless employees that do it for him. So the artistic merit of these paintings seems to be in the idea. Yet is there any doubt that if Hirst had released these paintings as a collection of PNG files, nobody would have been impressed?
I can only conclude that digital art still very much doesn't “count”, and I expect that AI-generated “art” (which in its current form is not very original) will remain similarly low-status.
MartianNight
2mo ago
Survey questions like this are implicitly about belief, whether you spell it out or not. Of course the answers aren't always truthful, for a variety of reasons, but I don't think you can make the answers more reliable simply by inserting “do you believe”, and conversely, they aren't less reliable when that was only implied.
Try it yourself. Answer the following questions:
- How old are you?
- How old do you believe you are?
Or:
- What did you have for breakfast?
- What do you believe you had for breakfast?
Or:
- Are you open-minded?
- Do you believe you are open-minded?
Or:
- Do you frequently argue with strangers on the internet?
- Do you believe you frequently argue with strangers on the internet?
Seriously, answer these. Was there any question pair where the second answer differed from the first? And if not for you, why would you think that inserting “do you believe” changes anyone else's answer?
MartianNight
2mo ago
The actual report (not really a “paper”): https://philpapers.org/archive/PRITIO-26.pdf
MartianNight
2mo ago
I don't think it's about technology. Even Putin called his Ukraine war a “special military operation” and it was pretty much a classical war involving large numbers of boots on the ground invading enemy territory.
MartianNight
2mo ago
I agree with your specific point that both sides misrepresented the true cost of the loan, and I agree with you that it's annoying how often people who should know better make these kinds of poorly-informed and/or bad-faith arguments, to the point that it's barely worth reading most media due to the low quality of the arguments.
However, I disagree with your conclusion that in this case, Weidel/the AfD is more correct than Klingebiel/the normies. You summarize Weidel's claim in your conclusion:
The defining feature of the midwit meme is that the caveman is closer to the truth than the midwit. This is the case here. “Germany spends a significant amount of money on the Indian metro, while our own bridges collapse.” is a true statement and the midwittery of the state media only serves to move you away from this conclusion.
But the statement is only “true” in a trivial sense that these two things happened together: a bridge collapsed and a loan was issued to India. But the statement implies something completely different: bridges in Germany are collapsing because the German government spends money on foreign aid instead of proper infrastructure maintenance.
That's a statement like: “Kids in Africa are starving while 40% of Americans are obese!” This is a 100% true statement, and it's salient because it implies that kids in Africa are starving because selfish Americans are stealing the food from their mouths. But if you have just a tiny bit of knowledge about topics like economy, supply chains, argriculture and world politics, you know that these facts are not really causally linked, which is supported by historical data which shows that as obesity rates in America increased, the number of starving kids in Africa decreased. It would be more accurate to say: the more Americans eat, the fewer African kids starve! Paradoxical but true.
Similarly, German bridges collapsing is not obviously correlated with, let alone caused by, German foreign aid spending. If you want to make that argument (even implicitly, as Weidel does here), then you need to back it up with arguments, which she doesn't, and you don't either. I think there are a lot of reasons to assume this is not the case.
For one, it's not true that the two expenses are mutually exclusive. Money spent on foreign aid does not come directly out of the infrastructure maintenance budget, or vice versa. Of course it's true that the German government cannot spend an unlimited amount of money, so every additional euro spent must be either removed somewhere else, or raised through taxes or something, but that's a very thin connection. The German government spends billions on thousands of different things, and raises money in hundreds of ways. You might as well say: “The German government spends hundreds of million of euros on forestry, while bridges collapse!” but this isn't quite as salient, is it?
So realistically, these two expenses have to be judged on their merits individually. Is the amount of money spent on foreign aid too high? It's not obvious from the facts. Others have already pointed out the benefits of some foreign aid spending, including international goodwill and kickbacks in the form of industry orders which boost the German economy.
Is the amount of money spent on infrastructure maintenance too low, then? According to a spokesperson, the bridge did not collapse because there was no money budgeted for inspection or maintenance:
According to spokesperson of Dresden's Road and Civil Engineering Office, Simone Pruefer, the bridge was frequently inspected. "What I can say is that the bridge has been constantly inspected and examined in accordance with the guidelines as required. We were all very surprised by this incident and are now devoting a great deal of attention to investigating the cause".
The part of the bridge that collapsed was scheduled to undergo renovation next year, while other parts only reopened in March after months of construction. The entire bridge was last renovated in 1996.
It's easy to conclude, with hindsight, that of course this bridge should have been maintained better, otherwise it wouldn't have collapsed. But just like the optimal amount of insurance fraud is nonzero, the optimal amount of bridges collapsing annually is nonzero. This is exactly the kind of rational argument that in particular the AfD-caveman does not understand!
All in all, I don't find this story all that convincing as a case study on why people should distrust the normie media. That doesn't mean I like the normie media, but I think if you're a caveman, you are better off listening to the midwits, who are more likely to be directionally correct and less likely to be spectacularly wrong. Of course, we should all be listening to geniuses instead. The problem is that if you're a caveman, it's very difficult to distinguish genius from midwit from fellow caveman.
MartianNight
3mo ago
You could just say “biological sex”, “medical sex”, “natural sex” or “real sex”.
Even “sex of a person at birth” is preferable to “sex assigned at birth”, in that it acknowledge that sex is a property of a person, rather than being assigned to that person.
MartianNight
3mo ago
Yes, “sex assignment” was used to describe cases where the biological sex was indeterminate, and thus some judgment must be made because biological sex was unclear. But “sex assigned at birth” to describe a person's natural unambiguous biological sex was unheard of until recently.
In 1995, absolutely no person wrote “Abraham Lincoln was assigned male at birth”. As in: I claim nobody on the planet has written that combination of words throughout that entire decade. Do you disagree?
Meanwhile, I could easily imagine that line being written today, and rather than being considered weird, it would be considered quite woke.
This might seem petty, but 99% of the transgender debate is about the meaning of words, so I have to object to your usage of the phrase “sex assigned at birth”:
When Giggle used visual inspection as a proxy, they defined “sex” as sex-assigned-at-birth.
They most certainly do not, because radical feminists like the ones behind Giggle do not believe in ”sex assigned at birth” at all. Rather, they believe in biological sex, as a property of the real human body a person inhabits, and as it exists before medical interventions are taken to turn healthy boys and girls into transsexuals.
Google confirms that sex assigned at birth as a term did not exist before 2014. It is a neologism invented by transgender activists to downplay or outright deny the existence of biological sex.
The term is nonsensical because sex is never assigned, it is simply observed, not just at birth but on many occasions through a person's life, the first time often long before birth, as part of ultrasound screening. In the overwhelming majority of cases sex is determined at conception, based on whether the sperm that fertilizes the egg cell carries a Y chromosome or not.
What commonly happens at birth is that a doctor or midwife performs a visual inspection of a newborn baby, makes a diagnosis, and records the observed sex on a birth certificate. But that's the map, not the territory, and sometimes the assessment is wrong (as in the case of intersex males born without visible external genitalia), and sometimes it is not recorded at all (increasingly, western countries allow omitting the observed sex from the birth certificate).
Of course, the absence or incorrectness of government records has no bearing on reality. Humans have a biological sex whether that sex is recorded or not, and this is what the Giggle moderators try to assess, imperfectly, using photos and other metadata as proxies. They certainly don't believe in a nonsense concept that human sex is assigned at birth.
MartianNight
3mo ago
It's worth mentioning that Yaniv lost that case only because of his blatant racism against Asian immigrants, not because the court took a principled position supporting the right of female workers to refuse service to males.
(If the court has to dedicate four pages of the conclusion to the “racial animus” of the plaintiff, that's usually not a good sign.)
This fragment sums up the position of the court:
I agree generally with Ms. Yaniv that a person who customarily offers women the service of waxing their arms or legs cannot discriminate between cisgender and transgender women absent a bona fide reasonable justification. [..] However, the Represented Respondents have persuaded me to dismiss these complaints on the basis that they have been filed for improper motives or in bad faith.
OK. So how many members of the public must complain before she is deemed nonpassing? Is it like a percentage of a quorum? What percentage of what quorum? Is a single complaint sufficient? In that case, how is the rule different from banning transgenders entirely, just with the caveat that you won't face penalties if you don't get caught, which is essentially how all misdemeanors work?
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