MartianNight
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User ID: 1244
MartianNight
4d 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
4d 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
6d 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
6d 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
10d 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
15d 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
15d 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
16d ago
I wonder if he got the idea from the Demon Core.
MartianNight
20d 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
29d 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
1mo 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
1mo ago
The actual report (not really a “paper”): https://philpapers.org/archive/PRITIO-26.pdf
MartianNight
1mo 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
1mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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.
MartianNight
2mo ago
It's really obvious when you're not a native English speaker. In most languages the word for (biological) “sex” doesn't mean fucking, the same word for sex is used for grammatical gender, and there isn't a word for “gender” (these languages are now importing “gender” as a loanword to refer to the foreign concept of gender identity as distinct from biological sex, which has absolutely no basis in the native language).
Similar with the idea that male and female refer to sex while man and woman are something else (which genderists are walking back now that that battle has been won). In most Germanic languages the words male and female are literally man-like and woman-like with no implicit distinction between sex and gender identity.
MartianNight
2mo ago
There is a lot to be said for that. After all, feminists (both liberal and radical) have relentlessly attacked male-only spaces to the point where they have all but disappeared, so abolishing female-only spaces too seems only fair. I do have some other views though.
One is that if you abolish female-only spaces entirely, then they should be accessible by all males, not just the ones that happen to identify as women. Instead of allowing transwomen into women's bathrooms, make bathrooms unisex. Instead of allowing transwomen to compete against women in the olympics, abolish the women's division. Instead of allowing transwomen into women-only train compartments, abolish women-only train compartments. And so on. Currently we are not seeing any such principled attack on women's spaces. Instead, it's all about letting males in provided that they identify as women, which is not the same as abolishing female-only spaces, it's just redefining what “female” means.
The other view is that maybe feminists are just wrong. Maybe it's good for society to have both male-only and female-only spaces. I think a lot of boys would benefit from male-only spaces and not in ways that are detrimental to women. And obviously women benefit from female-only spaces too: when it comes to sexual harassment etc. the most common configuration involves a male perpetrator and a female victim. Rather than accept the naive liberal feminist frame that the sexes are indistinguishable, we could embrace the idea that the sexes are equal but different, and support sex-segregated spaces for both.
Radical feminists are particularly hypocritical on this topic, in that they defend female spaces, but attack male spaces. I don't see why I should accept their frame entirely, even though I agree with their view on sex as being defined biologically.
I wrote a little more about that here. tl;dr: I think those are temporary aberrations that will not survive in the long run.
In the long run those men will have to justify themselves, but note that it will not require removing testicles. The idea that women cannot have penises and testicles and testosterone levels over 10 times the 99th percentile of cis-women is hateful bigotry spread by far-right domestic terrorists, after all. Instead, these proud transwomen must defend their gender identity in woke terms, with an oppression narrative, and of course plenty of political virtual signaling. A pre-op transsexual with a beard that would make Santa Claus envious, but who supports Kamala Harris, has more claim to the female sex than a post-op right wing chud like Blaire White.
I think the key phrase here is “so far”. I think long-term, two things will happen.
One is that direct legal benefits based on self-declared gender-identity will be gradually abolished. I live in a country where the age of retirement used to be lower for women than for men (which was always dubious considering the higher life expectancy of women, but whatever). In recent years, two things have happened: the law was changed to allow people to declare their own sex, and the age of retirement for women was raised to the level of men, removing the obvious direct benefit of changing your legal sex for financial benefit. This makes a lot of sense: if you allow people to choose their legal sex they are just going to pick the most beneficial one, so you might as well make the benefits equal.
I know other countries are behind the curve. They stupidly believed the lie that nobody would change their sex just for practical reasons. They will find out soon enough that human opportunism knows no bounds, and they'll eventually abolish sex-based privileges too. (The alternative, abolishing unconditional gender self-identification, is no longer politically viable in the west.)
The second thing that will happen is that gender identification will be adjudicated by the public. We have already seen that with race: Shaun King gets to claim to be black, but Rachel Dolezal is vilified for the same thing. Buffy Sainte-Marie gets to claim to be Native American, but Elizabeth Warren is ridiculed for it. All of this is decided on the whim of the public.
We've seen this also with the Olympics: Imane Khelif gets to claim to be a woman because Russians claim she is male, and we currently hate Russians, so if they say A we will say B. It doesn't follow that an obvious male like Muhammed Ali (if he were still alive) could just hop into the ring and knock out some women; he needs to earn that right by having a sob story of being raised as a poor African girl who had to collect garbage to pay for school, and if someone hateable like Donald Trump says it's not fair to allow Muhammed Ali to beat up women, that would help his case a lot. Then Muhammed Ali gets to beat up women. But he needs to put in the work. Notably: he doesn't have to actually look or act female. The idea that females look or act in any way different from male is bigoted sexism. Instead, Ali has to demonstrate conviction that he believes he's female despite not looking or acting like it in any way whatsoever.
So that brings us back to the father who changes his legal sex to be able to see his kids. Is the court going to take pity on him? Again, it depends. Can he spin a convincing yarn about how as a kid he kept untying his nappies which proves conclusively he always had a preference for wearing skirts from a young age and is therefore female at heart, and that his marriage failed only because as a lesbian unfortunately born in a male body he was resented by his heterosexual wife, the evil TERF shrew, who poisoned the children's minds by reading them Harry Potter at bedtime, and now, to add insult to injury, wants to take hisher kids away from their fathermother? If so, the court will take pity on him and grant him custody. But again, he needs to sell the bit to them. He cannot expect to get female privilege just because he filled out a government form online which anyone can do.
MartianNight
2mo ago
That doesn't work, because the right to discriminate based on sex to protect women is grandfathered into law, while discrimination based on anything else is not, so if you declare your restroom uterus-only, then you will be sued for illegal discrimination based on medical status.
And if you didn't get sued, there would be no way to adjudicate cases, because you can hardly inspect each person personally, and the government isn't going to put uterus-possession on government issued ids as they used to do with biological sex.
And even if you somehow managed to overcome those challenges, everyone who has any power in society would agree that only bigoted nazi scum worse than a trillion Hitlers could even conceive of such a vile concept as a uterus-only restroom, which clearly have no purpose but to oppress poor innocent transwomen who just want to pee, so that absolutely no government or corporate institution would create them, nor would any private person who likes having a job, friends, family, or just being able to walk the street without angry antifa gang members throwing tomato sauce over their head.
The upshot is that approximately 0% of restrooms in the Western world will be uterus-only, so they might as well not exist for all practical purposes. If there is any hope for preserving female-only spaces (in public) then it must be by re-asserting that the legal protections for women are for members of the female sex, and not anyone who identifies as a woman. There really is no other way out.
1:
Quillette published an article about the verdict, too:
https://quillette.com/2024/08/27/tickle-vs-giggle/
2:
The verdict didn't surprise me because I'm already working from the sad assumption that in the woke West, biological sex is no longer recognized as real by anyone in a position of power. What was once a woman is now a “uterus-haver”, a “pregnant person” or a “chest feeder”, but such people have no collective rights. Those collective rights now belong to those who merely identify as women, even if they have penises and testicles, which means that there is no longer any legal basis for having female-only spaces, online or offline.
What confuses and angers me is that the judge will not even explain that state of affairs in clear terms, instead insisting that this was a case of discrimination based on gender identity. But that's literally impossible! Giggle is an app for women, and Tickle identifies as a woman, so whatever discrimination Tickle faced cannot have been based on gender identity (and it wasn't: it was based on biological sex).
That's also clear from the paragraph here:
The same evidence did, however, support the conclusion that indirect gender identity discrimination did take place. The indirect discrimination case has succeeded because Ms Tickle was excluded from the use of the Giggle App because she did not look sufficiently female, according to the respondents.
Again, the decision was based on the fact that Tickle did not look biologically female, not that they looked insufficiently woman-identifying. In fact, Tickle looks exactly like a male who identifies as a woman. So the Giggle moderators, correctly, clocked her as a male and banned her for that reason. That is sex-based discrimination, which may or may not be illegal, but definitely not gender-identity discrimination.
So de facto the situation in Australia is as follows:
- You are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of biological sex.
- You are allowed to discriminate based on gender identity, but only if the disadvantaged party is the one that identifies as a man.
I don't agree that this should be the law, but this is what it is in practice. Then why can't the judge explicitly say so? Is he that stupid? Or is banning discrimination based on biological sex while claiming you are banning discrimination based on self-identification some elite power play that I'm too unsophisticated to understand?
3:
As for normie men increasingly identifying as female for the benefits:
More importantly, and/or ammusingly, normie men are deciding all that male privilege just ain't worth it, or perhaps the Spaniards are just more cheeky than average.
I suspect that a lot of these benefits in practice are only afforded to biological females and to males who make enough effort to signal that they are serious about their gender identity.
The normie dad who changes his legal sex in hopes of getting custody of his children will be sussed out as faking it and will not get the benefits associated with women and real transwomen.
This all reminds me of an old but good article by The Last Psychiatrist, The Nature of the Grift, where (in section IV) he explains that to get asylum because you are persecuted as a homosexual, it's not sufficient to declare yourself homosexual, you have to play the part too. Officially there is no rule on how gay you must act to be considered homosexual, and in practice many people fake such a claim, but it's still a requirement that you fake it convincingly.
Okay but that was like 10,000 civilian deaths, a rounding error for a country of 40 million.
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