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NullHypothesis


				

				

				
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NullHypothesis


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2023 October 25 16:39:01 UTC

					

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User ID: 2718

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I asked about this a month ago and got a response from one of the mods.

Typically I read all the comments by a particular user. Trolling stuff never gets out. If we have recently banned or perma banned users I have to be on the lookout for similarish commenting.

There are certain thresholds you have to hit before your posts and comments get auto-approved.

Spam and bots are not serious problems. But trolls and ban-evaders are major problems. The time delay of a moderator reading the comments and approving them helps lower the effectiveness of trolling, and makes bans actually costly (unlike on reddit, where they were trivially easy to dodge as long as you didn't piss off the admins).

We try to lean heavily towards approving new comments and posts. So all of your comments will eventually get approved.

And when I asked about reposting a question/topic from the previous week:

As a general rule, reposting from a previous week's thread is ok.

Intentionally reposting from something that is already in the thread is frowned upon.

The rule of thumb I use when modding: is there already a live discussion on this topic, if so, just join that. The deader the previous discussion the more ok it is to repost it and start it up again.

Careers don't make most women happy in the long term, which is why you can see a trend of highly competent and successful women leaving their extremely lucrative and successful careers by the time they reach their 30s. For example, when you look at lawyers, 30% of women with JDs are unemployed from the ages of 36-40 compared to just 4% of men.

There's a recent survey of women lawyers leaving their firms that indicated that 82% of women left due to lack of flexibility and work/life balance. The article on the survey tries to paint the picture that women aren't leaving for the commonly held belief to be stay-at-home moms, but it's clear the high-stress and workload jobs at the top law firms aren't making women happy, because if it made them happy, why would they quit? The men aren't quitting, in fact, they'll gladly work 60-80 hours a week because the men in these professions are highly conscientious competitive people who find their sense of worth from dominating their chosen area of competence and will put in those extra hours to beat the guys that don't. You don't see them complain about work/life balance because to them it's one aspect they can use to win against their competition. Jordan Peterson talks about women who quit their careers in this 11 minutes video and is worth watching if you want more reasons why women leave their careers. There are a lot of interesting tidbits in that video that I don't want to bother quoting right now.

Something to keep in mind is that a lot of guys also wouldn't be happy working 60-80 hours a week. That's why most men aren't CEOs, doctors, lawyers. But there are enough men with that drive, and those men outnumber women with that kind of disposition. Men also find fulfillment in providing for their families, which is why many men deliberately choose to work overtime if they can, to earn more money for their family. Women can show their love and support for their family, but they'd rather do it in the presence of their family rather than slave away at a job where they are away from their family.

What feminism has done is tell women that they don't need a man, they don't need to do traditionally female tasks, and they can go out there and work and compete just like men in all those highly respected and sought-after professions and fields. As a result, a bunch of women pursued extremely tough and competitive careers, only to find out that it didn't make them happy. Is it such a surprise that working a highly stressful, competitive job with a lot of responsibility is really, really tough and doesn't give you time to do much else? Most men wouldn't want to do those jobs, which is why most men don't do those jobs. Feminism took a slice of the male population, a slice that is highly irregular, and told women that they should all be just like these highly competitive conscientious men. And they'll be happy doing so.

Women in general would be much happier raising a family than working a highly stressful job. Women prefer to work and be with people, and properly raising a family ensures that you'll have people around you well into your deathbed. However, because feminism has pushed women to pursue a career and actively put disdain on traditional female roles, more and more women are delaying or ignoring the idea of being a mother. By the time these women realize that careers don't make them happy and that they might want children, it might be too late. And if they're lucky enough to still be able to have children, well they still have to find a suitable partner to be their husband. Women tend to date across or up the social ladder, so if you're a highly successful woman, your options become quite limited. And their success is to their detriment, as men don't care how much the woman makes, and men prefer younger women. Thus, we're seeing the rise of childless old women and as they get older they slowly lose their social connections and without having a family they become more and more isolated. As a result, we see more and more women get depressed as all they to show for their life is a career they don't care about and the bitter truth that feminism lied to them, as their now aging bodies are too old to have children.

Some women resort to freezing their eggs so that their age won't be a problem, but there are many issues related to egg freezing. If the frozen eggs no longer work, as it hasn't for so many women, then they truly have no option to bear children as by the time they do go ahead and use their eggs their bodies are too old to have children.

Other ideas may have factored into "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness" such as social media, the use of drugs and anti-depressants, the sexual liberation of women, dating and casual sex, marriage and divorce, and the decline of religion, but I'm not going to explore these ideas further right now.

Women have a net negative fiscal impact for most of their lives. See page 23, Figure 16 for a graphical breakdown. Basically, women cost the state more than they provide in taxes until the ages from 40-64, (where the net capital impact doesn't even reach 5000 in the positive at its peak). Across their lifetime this translates to a net cost to society from a fiscal perspective.

Couple of reasons:

  1. Welfare and social programs are tailored more toward women than men.
  2. Women earn less money overall. Feminists call it the wage gap, anyone who looks at the issue knows that for various reasons, women work less hours, tend to choose careers that are not as lucrative, are less likely to negotiate a higher pay, retire earlier, among many other factors.
  3. Women have lower workforce participation.

Some caveats:

  1. Data is for New Zealand
  2. Women have not participated in the workforce for as long.
  3. Young women are starting to outearn young men . Mostly due to more women graduating from college than men in combination with the massive social campaigns/programs to get women into higher-paying fields. Whether these women will continue to outearn men as they age only time will tell.

My question is, why should these rich Western nations allow women and girls entry? What are the benefits of doing so? There has to be an upper limit and there is no reason why we should prioritize providing jobs/work for migrants especially when people in the country are already struggling to find jobs. I'm pretty sure it's typically illegal male migrants that work under minimum wage difficult blue-collar jobs, not women. And since these are women coming in, and this is a nationally approved program, there is no way that these women will be allowed to work at an under-minimum wage rate. The only argument I could see how this policy is a net positive for the country is that this can lead to an increase in the birth rate, but the children of the next generation are going to have the same opinions/beliefs that lead to the birth rate issue. So this is merely a band-aid solution with a whole list of other potential issues.

Let's not forget women are the ones who mostly voted for lax immigration policies that have led to the issues we see in these Western nations today. What's stopping these women from becoming a large enough group to influence other women to change this policy? After all these migrant women would likely want to bring their family over if they can.

A bit of a stretch for this point, so feel free to criticize this as I do not have strong evidence for this thought. This migration policy could potentially increase terrorist threats against Western countries. What happens to the males in the countries these women are leaving? As the gender ratios further shift to more males, resentment in these countries will rise. And unlike China, which is mostly caused by China's policies, the gender imbalance will be caused by a clear external party (Western nations). Someone with a vendetta against the western nations could channel the increasing tension amongst young men in these societies and point out how western nations are siphoning their women away and use this to increase conflicts and start terrorism against the Western countries.

Are we talking about regular papers published in journals, conferences and such and not some university internal reports?

Yes, published papers specifically. The exact method is explained in the method section of the source:

Data for this paper are drawn from Thomson Scientific’s Web of Science, which comprises the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), for the 1900–2007 period. Each journal was classified based on the taxonomy used by the U.S. National Science Foundation. For the Humanities, the NSF classification was completed using in-house classification results. NSF subject headings where grouped into four broad categories: natural sciences and engineering (NSE), medical fields (MED), social sciences (SS), and the humanities (HUM). Data for NSE and MED start in 1900, data for the SS start in 1956 and for HUM in 1975.

The matching of article citations was made using Thomson’s reference identifier provided with the data, as well as using the author, publication year, volume number and page numbers. Only citations received by articles, notes and review articles were included in the study and first author self-citations were excluded.

Also had excluded online data at the time:

The data reported in this paper do not take into account the “online availability” variable.

Note that this is data from studies published in the early 2000s, i haven't found a more recent analysis, but I find that things that studies/analyses that can put leftist doctrine and ideology into question don't get produced out of the universities and are quite rare. This leads me to assume that analysis would prove the numbers are even worse, as I imagine the Humanities sectors would be incentivized to disprove this statistic to justify their existence in the universities, and the fact that I could not find a detailed analytic reputation from within the last 16 years implies the truth of the scenario.

The quality of the majority of papers being produced is extremely questionable and the methodology has been in question. Back in 2018 three professors deliberately created 20 fake studies with the most outlandish claims, of which "seven of their articles had been accepted for publication by ostensibly serious peer-reviewed journals. Seven more were still going through various stages of the review process. Only six had been rejected." A similar stunt was performed in 1996, known as the Sokal Hoax. It is a fact that people can submit fake, bullshit papers into the humanities and have them published for the world to see. It's also a fact that nobody is reading these papers.

What was the content of these bullshit studies? Sokal submitted his paper proposing that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. According to the Atlantic article I linked above, one of the published papers from the more recent 2018 example argued that "western astrology" was sexist and imperialist, and that physics departments should study feminist astrology and practice interpretative dance. Another asked if “dogs suffer oppression based upon (perceived) gender?" Even another argued that "men who masturbate while thinking about a woman without her consent are perpetrators of sexual violence." These were the ones that got published into supposedly reputable journals that publish works from professors from distinguished universities like UCLA, Penn State, etc. (There is a section at the bottom of the Atlantic article that provides some criticism/counterargument to what Sokal and the three professors are trying to prove about the state of Academia, for those interested, go look at the article).

The question then is why is this allowed to happen in the humanities? There is the common explanation that one must publish or perish in order to have a successful academic career, which drives people to publish whatever they can to succeed in the Academia rat race.

Jordan Peterson provided another explanation on the humanities papers fiasco.

The question is, why do these papers get published since no one reads them and they have nothing to offer? And the answer to that is very straightforward. The journals are extremely expensive. Way more expensive than they should be. So just to buy a single paper online for the ordinary person is like $40 which is more than a hardcover book. That's just to download the pdf. And so the journal itself - libraries are full of them - are very expensive and the subscriptions are very expensive. And so what happens is the professors pressure the university libraries to buy the journals, and the library funds the publisher, and so the publishers will publish anything - Routledge is a good example of that much to my chagrin because they published my first book - but and they used to be a great publishing house but they'll publish damn near anything and the reason for that is that the libraries are forced to pay radially inflated prices for the publications that no one ever reads and so people write, to publish in journals that libraries have to purchase at inflated prices, to produce knowledge that no one will ever read and that's the little scandal that plagues the humanities. I think it characterizes the humanities more than plagues them.

It seems like Jordan Peterson is arguing the humanities in the universities have either set up or taken advantage of a system that allows financial gain for the professors in the humanities so there is no incentive to publish good studies. It's possible the money generated from this system can be used to justify the existence of these humanities departments to the university. But essentially Jordan Peterson is saying the humanities are a scam.

Why waste time going to college if you already have a business making 200K a year? Especially since that business is in the digital marketing space, nothing you learn in college is going to help with that. Yes, I'm aware of the possibility that the TikTok user just made up the scenario for clicks and views. I also know people value a degree and that there may be family/social pressure to attend college.

Too many students tie their sense of worth to what college they get admitted to. As others have said, a 1460 SAT score, especially nowadays, isn't something you'd expect SHOULD get you into an Ivy League or even the next-tier down colleges. It's impressive, but not good enough. There are plenty of good schools the next tier down that still have extremely high brand recognition and provide a good education.

There's certainly something to be said about the networking access you get and brand recognition if you go to a school like Harvard, but a lot of these students go from being the top or smartest kid in their town/school to being mediocre or below average. This is a huge blow to their ego and while it certainly is a humbling and valuable lesson a lot of these students end up switching from a difficult STEM track to something more manageable such as liberal arts. I think this is a net loss to humanity, while I can acknowledge there is some value to the liberal arts the world needs more doctors/scientists/engineers instead of another person writing papers nobody cares about. 82 percent of papers in humanities don't get a single citation 5 years after they are published. (I was unable to find a source with more recent data, but my gut feeling is that the work coming out of the humanities now is even worse on average than they were 20 years ago).

You can see this happen on a statistical level with students admitted via affirmative action. A decently smart black kid who's always wanted to be a scientist gets into Harvard, falls into the bottom 10% of students, and since he's human gets discouraged and switches majors to something else instead, where he has a much easier time because the coursework is not as difficult. The black community lost a future scientist or doctor to affirmative action. If that kid went to some state university instead, he may have graduated top of his class and proceeded to produce valuable work for humanity as a scientist or engineer.

Maclolm Gladwell makes a similar argument in his book David and Goliath. He points out how the top third of students, no matter the university, around 45-55% get a STEM degree, while the bottom third only 15-20% get a STEM degree. The top third of students at a place like Hartwick is equivalent in average SAT scores to the bottom third of students at a place like Harvard. It's the bottom third of Harvard students switching majors, even though they are likely as smart or smarter as the top third of students at Hartwick. In addition, Gladwell argues that it's better to be a big fish in a small pond, and points out how the top students at mid-tier universities publish papers at a higher rate than middle-tier students at elite universities. In terms of their SAT scores and academics, they are equivalent and Harvard should have a superior education, so you should expect the middle-tier Harvard students to perform better, but in reality, it's the opposite. Essentially, the relative position in their local environment mattered more than the absolute position nationwide. (Here is a link to an 8-minute video where he also talks about this idea)

That being said, for the individual, it's still probably better for their career to go to a school like Harvard and be a middle-tier or bottom-tier student than be a top student at some state university. It's a net loss for humanity on average, but a huge opportunity for the individual. If you can get past the ego loss and instead grow as a person just accepting that you're mediocre amongst the geniuses you'll gain a lot from an Ivy League environment.

It's just a matter of personal preference. I find the carbonation increases the flavor experience and clearly a lot of other people do as well. Maybe you just have a more sensitive mouth/throat than other people which causes you to find carbonation more painful. I don't think most people would say carbonation is painful and it could just be your body not being suited for it. It's like how some people when eating Hershey's chocolate find it tastes like bile while others don't.

I find your point more understandable if you were talking about spicy food, some people love extremely spicy food. Spicy food causes pain/discomfort to a lot of people during and after eating. Do you find some people's preference for spicy food just as puzzling?

I think some people just don't want to be helped and can't be helped, and thus shouldn't be helped at all since it's just draining resources and enabling their drug-induced behavior. Forcible institutionalization would probably be the cheapest and fastest solution but like you said people would be against that. But I can't help but think of what San Francisco did to clean up the streets when Xi Jinping was coming to visit, clearly if there is a will then there is a way. I would argue the policies of cities like Los Angeles or San Francisco enable a growing homeless population.

There is certainly an argument that it could be cheaper to provide a clean and safe place to let these people get their drug fix since that would lessen other crimes and means the city no longer needs to spend money on fixing the other issues (as they would no longer occur) but I haven't looked into those studies and my gut feeling is that even if the economics are true there are plenty of counter-arguments beyond just the economics.

I was thinking of individual cities rather than cities in general since if Chicago decides to push out all homeless for example, San Francisco would not have changed their policies. On the city level, you don't get to decide to policy of another city.

I find that posts that get popular and rise to the top tend to have a change in the majority opinion.

My thought is there is a small group of negative, constantly online individuals who just want to ruin someone's day. These people will be the first to comment because they're always online looking for new posts.

If the posts get popular enough then the normie Reddit opinion takes over and overshadows those initial negative comments.

Some examples can be found if you browse any old popular AITA posts. A lot of times the OP will post an edit addressing initial comments, but those comments are usually the opposite of the majority of highly upvoted opinions.

This should be obvious but which subreddit you are also impacts your experience. As biased as Reddit it is still diverse in its bias and the type of people on each subreddit, especially the smaller niche ones.

Isn't this just a case of straw-manning?

They're oversimplifying the proposal that it's a road to a person's house and then arguing over the straw man they set up.

Also, it's possible that the road doesn't end up at someone's house, it could end up at a publicly owned location, or a private factory, or a business. In the case it goes into empty wilderness, there would probably some justification such as developing something there in the future. I think it's a valid question to ask why something is being done, the issue with your example is that the question is straw-manning the proposal by framing it in an uncharitable manner which allows the opponents to ignore other benefits.

I feel like another example might be better to get to the heart of your question about the specific type of argument you're looking to identify.

Jakhammer's preference reveals more about the negative state of the perpetually homeless people than it does about the migrants.

The migration issue has a clear and simple solution - increase border security and stop incentivizing people to come to the United States. Homelessness to me is not as clear what to be done with. I believe cities in the past that effectively dealt with homeless people simply moved those homeless people to another place. It solves the problem on the city scale, but it is still a nationwide problem. There are policies that enable homelessness in these cities so stopping them would certainly help, but I don't think doing just that will solve the homeless issue.

Yup, which really puts into question the values and philosophies that guide these breadtubers. Fascinating how people view the world through such a lens!

To steelman Innuendo Studio's) point, I think there is an agreed-upon base assumption about basic human decency and respect when operating in the world and that it's safe to assume that normal people will not invoke such a power. So nobody would for no reason just pull a gun at someone or tell them their family member was run over by a a car. Or that the other side has the option to do the same to you. But in the case of trigger warnings, some people can and will abuse such powers if there are enough people on their side that make it socially acceptable. You can invoke their trigger, but they can't invoke such a response in you.

However, I have not met a single person who would knowingly expose a person their their stated traumas/triggers, even amongst the anti-trigger warning crowd. At best some edgy internet trolls, but they do whatever they can to rile other people up. Innuendo Studio makes a pretty uncharitable depiction of the opposing side.

Yup, I routinely use translation tools that give me access to certain hobbies of mine (Untranslated Japanese and Korean games and web novels). I've even communicated with people on Japanese Discord servers. Praise to technology!

I think the issue is that there are people with the mindset that such solutions have to be built or provided, rather than hoping that market solutions will resolve these problems. And rarely is it the case that they will make the effort to build those solutions themselves, they'd rather mandate other people use their time and resources to fix problems they see in the world.

maybe someone could write a bot that uses AI to review the item and add some reasonable (low-hundreds) list of triggers as metadata, and then the consumer can set their pertinent triggers and automatically receive a warning that they want, whereas everyone else is unaffected.

This is probably the ideal solution for trigger warnings for people who may want trigger warnings. (And for those, if they exist, that may benefit from trigger warnings).

I wonder if this solution is adequate for the activist type that might argue on the point of trigger warnings though. I'm sure most reasonable people would be perfectly happy with such a solution, but something tells me there is a small vocal group of activist types that would not be satisfied with such a solution and would rather force putting trigger warnings in front of media. Couple of reasons they might come up with:

  1. Not everyone has the ability to use such a tool.
  2. People with trauma should not be forced to use a tool that normal people don't have to use.
  3. Not everyone would know about such a tool. But if we put trigger warnings in front of media, then everyone will 100% have the opportunity to make an informed choice about if they want to continue to watch the media. Or the very least be able to mentally prepare themself for when they encounter it.
  4. By even having this conversation we've fallen for the alt-right trap, that we've accepted the premise that "some people do and should take extra precautions just to exist in the world alongside the rest of us."

I don't think I'm making up a caricature or a strawman here. If you watch the video, near the end of this video Innuendo Studios make the following statements:

"If you are a person with triggers it means other people can provoke a panic response in you against your will. The severity of the response is frankly immaterial. The point is, they have power over you. And if you're going to operate in this world as equals, you need their word that this power will not be invoked."

He also summarized the viewpoint of the Didoer as follows: "Yes I do have power over you... and you should just let me have it."

Would people who view the world in such power dynamics be satisfied with the proposed solution? Actually, your solution might be a really good test to see if the other person genuinely wants to help people who have traumas/PTSD or if they're just ideologically motivated.

I watched the video, and I agree with your conclusion. Yes, person B is obviously correct. Not every media and aspect of life is accessible to everyone

Some examples of problems where life is unfair and it would be absurd to try to make things fair.

  1. People who don't speak English will have varying levels of difficulty engaging in communication with English speakers. Should everyone learn that other person's language just so they can function normally in English-speaking society? (Or have translations made for every language, etc.)
  2. Deaf people can't enjoy music. That being said, songs with heavy bass components do allow deaf people to enjoy music based on rhythms caused by vibrations. Do all music now need to have a heavy bass component to it?
  3. A guy born without arms wants to play basketball in the NBA. Should the NBA change the rules of basketball so that people without arms can play just as competitively as people with arms?
  4. Some people have PTSD when looking at the color red. Should we remove all red things from society just to accommodate these people? Or put warnings indicating that something red is in the vicinity?

Yes, I realize these are absurd examples, but absurdities often put premises and assumptions into question.

Innuendo Studios doesn't touch on his premises and assumptions - that the scale of a problem that affects someone is worth addressing. Or how much time/effort should be spent solving these problems. He barely touches on the idea of what level of inconvenience should be acceptable to accommodate certain groups of people.

Also, notice the framing of the premise "some people do and should take extra precautions just to exist in the world alongside the rest of us" which puts the idea that person B thinks those people should not exist if they don't take those extra precautions.

Speaking of trigger warnings, I can think of a few (admittedly not well thought out) reasons why I may not want trigger warnings that are different from the strawman he used at the start of his video.

  1. Every time spent looking at the trigger warning is time spent wasted.
  2. My experience of that movie/show may actually be worsened because that trigger warning may spoil key elements of the plot for me
  3. The list of things that can trigger someone is infinite. Who decides what should or shouldn't be a trigger warning? Rape/Suicide might be something you could get a lot of people to agree on, but there are people who have PTSD or fear of a lot of other things - spiders, heights, trypophobia, the color red. The more you add the more time I waste looking at the list of trigger warnings.
  4. There are impacts this kind of thinking/fostering has beyond just the realm of movies. The movement that is pushing trigger warnings in movies is pushing it to other mediums, including classes in universities and schools. Rather than teach people to deal with their issues, trigger warnings support a culture that makes them avoid issues altogether at the of inconveniencing everyone else who doesn't have issues with the trigger. Slippery slope fallacy? Maybe, I haven't thought this through thoroughly but there is a culture of protecting people by having them avoid sensitive/controversial topics/ideas and trigger warnings play into into that culture.
  5. Whether trigger warnings work or not is in question, and some studies are showing that trigger warnings do not work or may do more harm than good.

Also ironic this guy talks about power in his video when trying to enforce societal changes such as implementing trigger warnings (and some people even go so far as to try to make it mandatory) is in itself a display of using power on people by enforcing changes that they don't want imposed on them. Rules for thee, not for me I suppose.

I'm assuming the numbers are birth rates per 1000 people

Doesn't the data provide some evidence for Botond's point though? Black and Hispanic teen birth rates were raising the average to 30-50% above the white birth rate. It also doesn't break down the white population any further, so while his hunch about the "presence of large numbers of Scots-Irish with low impulse control" isn't proven, it isn't disproven either.

We'd have to consider what would have been an acceptable rate for the birth rate to not be an "embarrassingly high" number for the early 2000s. Birth rates for teens have been on the overall decline since 1955 except for a bump from 1986 to 1991 and minor bump from 2005 to 2007. (The source for their data is the same source you linked). I don't know exactly what the early 2000s conservatives were arguing regarding the birth rate being too high for teens, since it has been declining. My guess is they were considering mostly the black and Hispanic population, considering it's 2-3x the white teen birth rate. Their numbers in 1991 seem to put them close to the national average rate in 1955, and the numbers from 2002 to 1965. Since the overall rate has been declining for decades, the rate would be only embarrassingly high if it was much higher compared to other modern first-world nations, or if they were talking about a specific group. We'd also have to consider if they were thinking about specific areas of the United States, like cities versus rural areas or specific states.

These stats are 15-19, which is probably dominated by young married couples

What Botond didn't mention but probably meant was that the concern in the early 2000s was more about out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancy than just teenage pregnancy. If you look at the source I linked earlier it shows that by the early 2000s, more than 75% of births for teenagers were to unmarried mothers, and that the percentage is even higher the younger the age of the mother. That number has only gone up since then. That being said, the total number of births to unmarried mothers has declined even if the percentage of births that are to unmarried mothers has increased.

You can't just say 0.4% increase in the population is easily manageable. If the current European welfare/support structure can currently only support 500,000 in excess, a 2 million increase is a 1,500,000 overload of what the system can support. Let's not forget there will still be migrants coming in from other places while this is going on.

As an example New York City, as of August 13, has had an increase of 58500 migrants come into their care system. That's 0.75% of the population of New York City, but New York has a ton of money and resources put into a support/welfare structure. Yet that increase is overstraining the New York support system, to the point where local residents are now frustrated with the incoming migrants taking away city resources that should have gone to them, and the city is offering tickets out of New York City to the migrants now.

There is also the question of how likely are the people of Gaza to be absorbed peacefully into Western society and culture? The low age and the fact that this is a more equal gender split is an interesting point you brought up, but it's also a fact that nearby Arab/Muslim countries like Egypt don't want to accept Gazan refugees. The countries containing the people who have the most in common with Gazans and have greater proportions of people that are in agreement with Gazan's wants and desires don't want to take them in.

Then there is the issue of the people who don't want to leave Gaza. What percentage of the people in Gaza actually want to seek aslyum and leave compared to wanting to stay and create a Palestinian state? Hamas's open stated goal is the complete destruction of Israel and a large portion of the Gazans (58%) have a positive or very positive view of Hamas. Are we going to just force these people to be absorbed into the west as well?

A lot of men don't put any effort into their appearance at all, so putting in effort should at least make you average. A lot of men are overweight or obese, are you really claiming they are more physically attractive than you?

Have you gone through the effort of getting a toned body, skincare, hair care, self-grooming, etc? If your face is really physically unattractive even after doing all that, plastic surgery is an option.

It's probably time to define what the criteria for evil is, or what even evil means to you. Honestly sounds like the argument needs to depend on what is evil, not if pedophilia is evil. If you can define evil in a clear and explicit manner, then whether pedophilia is evil can be matched against that definition/criteria.

I haven't seen anyone actually say pedophilia is good, so it's obvious nobody here is in favor of it. If you can get people to agree on the definition of evil, then whether or not pedophilia is evil should be self-evident. Otherwise, I think the argument is moot since it seems to me people are using different criteria for evil throughout the conversation.

No. The desire to commit evil acts is evil.

This is a starting point for a definition, but it's tautological and weak without defining evil itself.

I don't have any experience in retail management, so I'm not sure I can give any real, tangible advice here. When in doubt, I look at the job description and try to match specific tasks/keywords from the job requisition posting.

I would personally add any tasks you did that had a tangible, positive benefit effect to the company you previously have worked at as long as that contribution is related to the role. I imagine that if I was hiring for retail management, those improvements are things that could make you standout over someone that just lists the tasks and responsibilities they had on their resume. You don't have to put the entire story in the resume just a single bullet point indicating what you did. You tell the story during the interview stage, usually the interviewer will use the resume as a starting point of discussion. You have at least an entire page for a resume, you can definitely add keywords and examples of your successes. A skills section is an easy way to dump in keywords if you need to fill up your resume. That advice is probably more relevant in tech industry, where you can list a bunch of programming languages (e.g. Python, C++, JavaScript), not sure how relevant this is to retail management. Depending on the company, they may have stuff like "Excel" and "PowerPoint" as keyword filters, those are stuff you can dump into a skills section.

Don't be humble in your resume, make yourself look as outstanding as you can. Your competition is most likely embellishing and even lying about their accomplishments on their resumes, you only hurt yourself being humble and honest. There are a lot of people getting to the interview stage who shouldn't even have gotten their because they're lying about their skills an experience, but at least they're getting to the interview stage, while it sounds like you aren't even getting there. As long as you get to the interview stage and haven't made any obvious, egregious lies that should greatly increase your chances of getting the job.

The best way to get your resume improved is to just post it online for people to improve. There are plenty of places online where people will critique and improve each others' resume.

Also it sounds like you have a college degree, if your school had any sort of alumni network you should leverage that. It's so much easier getting an interview if someone can vouch for you, or at least bring up your name. A lot of companies have referral bonuses for hiring so people are incentivized to try to refer someone, so even someone you never met personally is incentivized to help you if you reach out via some kind of alumni network.

I wonder if voting patterns would be better if votes were limited per household instead of on the individual. Before women had the right to vote, it's possible that votes effectively were treated as single household units. Even if you can't vote, you can certainly talk to your husband about your thoughts. Societies might have achieved better outcomes if their votes had to be discussed, which would likely lead to a more informed, thought-out vote. Now you can just vote without talking with your partner, plenty of men voted for Trump in secret from their wives. At this point though I don't think society will ever take away the ability to vote from people.

I think men in general lack a place to form their political thoughts and opinions. The education system leans heavily left in most states in America and if you get to colleges or universities, good luck finding any conservative viewpoints. Not like men are going to colleges nowadays, at least compared to the number of women going to college.

Young men are seeking some sort of viewpoint outside the socially mandated one, which is why people like Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and Joe Rogan gain popularity, and also why they they are vilified. I think it really speaks to just how little social organizations provide a place for young men. Normally you'd have a father figure in your life, but so many kids are growing up in single-parent households, which are usually single mothers rather than fathers. A woman might be able to raise a boy, but on average can she provide the same lessons and values a father can to his son? There are statistics showing that kids from fatherless homes are more likely to be incarcerated, but not the same for kids from motherless homes. (Note that most sources referenced are quite old, I didn't have much time to look for more recent stats or statistics. Seems difficult to find much on this topic.) So dissenting men have to independently come up with their own political views, or they get it online in niche spaces. You rarely, if ever, see a manifesto written by a woman, but there are plenty of examples of manifestos written by young men before their final acts of horror. In general, I think your average woman has an easier time in life for most things than your average man, so women don't need to get radicalized.

Remember the meme about men thinking constantly about the roman empire? So many women could not fathom why their partners would be thinking about the Roman Empire. Sure, those guys may just be thinking about an idealized view of the Roman Empire, but it's also an undeniable fact that the Romans have had a huge influence on Western culture, government, society, and values. I wonder how many women unironically believe their boyfriend literally have no thoughts in their mind but sex, food, and sports. This is just another example of the notion that there are differences in behavior and interests between men and women.

There is also the claim that women just adopt the political viewpoints of their partners, people point to personal anecdotes of girls that completely changed from being conservative type girl to full-on socialists or vice versa. I'm not sure how true this is as a general observation, and I'm sure you can find equivalent examples for men.

The results are quite horrifying. That particular lie has killed ~10,000 black Americans over the last three years

Did you link the right source here? That thread is regarding public perception of police killing of unarmed black men, and doesn't say anything about an increase in black Americans dying over the last three years. Assuming you did link the right thread, I think you're trying to make the following claim:

  1. The media has made the public believe that police are committing unjustified acts of violence against the black community at a significantly higher rate than it actually is.
  2. This led to the dropping support of police and increased support of movements such as "Defund the police".
  3. The decrease in police led to an increase in crime, which includes murder of black Americans.

My bias is inclined to agree with this train of thought, point three is probably the hardest to actually argue successfully but I'm not currently interested in playing devil's advocate for a counter perspective for this particular point of discussion. If you're claiming something else, well please clarify.

On an object level, standards exist to be enforced. If the standards don't result in enforcement, they're worthless.

Sure, but you're claiming that the existence of journalistic standards is harmful, and while your view here is interesting I don't see how it shows that the existence of standards is harmful. Earlier you mentioned that journalistic standards are being used as a shield to give the illusion of legitimacy to the media, that's a claim where I can see your point, but the existence of standards in and of itself is not harmful.

Good people don't need rules, bad people won't obey them.

Maybe I'm taking the term "standard" more loosely than you are here, but even "good" people need standards. You later mention your own values, you're setting standards for yourself by having a set of values. If it was so obvious in life what the correct course of action was it would be self-evident to everyone they should do 100% of the time. But it is often we are operating with incomplete information, having a set of standards helps us decide what and how we should approach and value things. Much of the things we take for granted as moral goods or values are the result of thousands of years of advancement in society and civilization. And people with good intentions end up doing harmful things all the time. Why would we teach our young morals and manners if what is good doesn't need any standards?

No. The way I know they're doing a bad job is by comparing their observed actions to their stated goals, and by comparing the results of those actions to my own values.

That's a good way of analyzing how something fits relative to your morals and values, but it doesn't actually invalidate what I say. Since we've been speaking about journalistic standards but haven't really defined what it is, I'll refer to the standards defined by the Society of Professional Journalists. I'm sure you can just go down that list and recall recent news stories that don't fit these standards.

You don't have to agree with any of these journalistic standards, but what specific journalistic standard are you opposed to here? To me, the failure to adhere to journalistic standards is an easy way to tell how legacy media is failing to do what they publicly claim they want to do. You seem to be against the existence of these standards and refuse to even consider them, but looking through the list I actually don't find any that is clearly objectionable.

You are approaching the issue as though the existence and maintenance of a powerful, influential media should simply be assumed to be an immutable feature of the universe. It is not.

I am not and I don't know why you think I think this. You made a snarky comment in response to my concern that people are getting their political strangers from unqualified strangers on the internet. I could've just listed a bunch of other ways you can gather information, but I didn't know why you might think political streamers are a better source of information and frankly speaking, you came off to me as extremely pompous, hence why I didn't directly answer your question. I appreciate your more detailed follow-up since I could see more about your views and thoughts on the legacy media. I don't see how my disagreement that traditional news sources are a better source of news than political streamers makes me think "the existence and maintenance of a powerful, influential media should simply be assumed to be an immutable feature of the universe."

We can in fact create an environment where their behavior is sufficiently disincentivized that their class ceases to exist as a coherent entity.

Okay, interesting. Do you have any evidence this has been achieved before? How would this be accomplished? How would you prevent the next dominant power from just doing the same thing? If you have any links to anything that would flesh out this possibility I'd be interested in reading more.

The large majority of all media output addressing any question of consequence is some manner of bullshit. That is to say, most pieces addressing questions or issues consumers care significantly about are designed to deceive those consumers about that issue in some significant way.

Please provide a number estimate, even if it's something as vague as a range estimate such as 40 - 80%. It's easy to say large majority or most and feel confident in your beliefs because you can recall many examples, but that's just the issue of the chinese cardiologist. Hard numbers are more important, if we look at the source you linked earlier a possible reason for why so many people can think the number is as high as 10,000 is because they think a lot of unarmed black men are shot. That's just a general feeling they have so they will most likely come to an incorrect conclusion.

I think your estimation is likely quite high. Further, it does not help if I make nineteen completely factual statements along with one lie, if some of those factual statements are used to support the lie and the others are irrelevant to the topic at hand.

I'm looking at the news media as a whole and you seem to be considering it from just political/cultural news. Traditional news media does more than propaganda. It reports on weather, sports, local events, culture, business, etc. Most of this stuff are boring, daily information that you won't remember. Sure, they might still be pushing an agenda even through these channels, but it's not like this information is not useful either.

Also, I'm not arguing that 95% of the facts in one particular news story are true and therefore make up for the 1 lie in that story. Hopefully my comment above clarifies what exactly that 95% estimate is referring to. This is not an excuse for traditional news media, I just think it's important to strive to be accurate about the facts that form your beliefs.

The current media establishment likewise propagates such contentless responses ("racist", "sexist", "bigot", "homophobe", etc, etc), but in addition generates the omnipresent, apparently sourceless consensus of common "knowledge", which is significantly worse.

I'm not in disagreement that traditional news media has propagated these ideas, but incorrect common "knowledge" is also propagated through social media and newer media channels. For a generation that grows up on the internet, you'd think they'd be skeptical and more resilient to lies, but no, Gen Z is fall for online scams more than boomers. (Going off-topic, since I don't think anyone has done this analysis on the data from that survey to see if the reason is solely due to Gen Z being online more than boomers or if Gen Z actually is more likely to fall victim to online scams per hour spent compared to boomers.) If we refer back to that survey you linked above, I'd say that the narrative of police killing many unarmed black people was heavily propagated through social media, and many leftist political streamers like Hasan were in support of that narrative.

I hope you don't say people got their views from traditional media channels and were just repeating it, if you do, I'd like you to actually support that claim. To provide some counter-examples, the slogan for defund the police got popular via twitter from the Black Vision Collective. Leftist academic types routinely publish their views online directly. Activist-type people also seem to coordinate and recruit strictly online through social media. As our society moves more and more online, to a more and more centralized internet, we're certainly recreating the "omnipresent, apparently sourceless consensus of common knowledge". There may be more individual creators, but if they're all pushing the same views/perspectives, largely in part to the algorithms that control what people consume, well then the effect is pretty much the same.

If we can destroy the current media establishment, preventing Piker and his ilk from taking their place seems like a cakewalk by comparison.

Would you consider big tech to be part of the current media establishment? I'd say they operate under different principles from traditional news media and are a much more powerful force in today's environment. Legacy media is a dying dinosaur anyway, big tech is the bigger threat here, given big tech has more power and influence over younger people. We've shifted from talking about traditional media to current media, I assume you include big tech with the current media establishment, or at least be working with them when convenient.

I reiterate that I prefer amatuer, isolated liars to professional, coordinated liars, and cannot fathom why anyone else would prefer otherwise. Here's an example of a lie the New York Times is currently telling. Nothing Piker ever has done or ever is likely to do is as bad as that single article, in terms of its actual effect on my life and wellbeing.

See my point above about news media as a whole as a source of information beyond just politics. If you consider this from any individual person's perspective, the New York Times is a far superior source of news to Hasan Piker. What you do with that information is up to the individual. You're more concerned about how people behave. In that case, you might as well fight against democracy as a government system itself, for as long as humans are varied in intelligence and interest/ability in the pursuit of truth, people will be susceptible to being manipulated or lied to. Of course, nothing Hasan has done yet compares to the New York Times has done, his reach is smaller. My point is that the Hasans of the world are growing in power and influence. He's a socialist, supports defending the police, supports the trans agenda, he probably supports and peddles a whole list of political agendas you would probably not be in support of. If you swapped the reach the two had, Hasan's viewpoints would also lead to outcomes that would have actual effects on your life and well-being.

The matter of whether or not the New York Times has a greater influence than Hasan is not what I'm arguing, that should be obvious. I'm talking about which is a better source of information for news, and as I am more in disagreement with Hasan's politics than the New York Times's politics, I'd rather people get their information from the New York Times than from Hasan Piker. If you look at both sources with skepticism, the New York Times becomes an even better source of news compared to Hasan Piker. This is in context to the hypothetical scenario where those were literally the only two options, there are obviously way more sources of information and people would be better off getting information elsewhere. Somehow I don't feel like we're talking on the same page here.

If you don't want extremists, all you need to do is ensure that your reasonable, moderate centrism delivers the results it promises. If it had not failed to do that, we extremists would not be winning to the degree we are.

Care to explain what extremist political position you're a part of since you consider yourself an extremist? Most conservatives would probably agree with a lot of what you have said thus far, and I wouldn't consider them extremists.

If you don't actually consider yourself an extremist and are only writing like this assuming my politics, can you stop doing that? We may have more in common than you think.

Frankly I've noticed I can't predict at all how people will react to things here, or what the basis is for people liking or disliking a post.

There doesn't seem to be any rules or guidelines on upvoting/downvoting, so it would depend on the individual's own whims. I would think you should aim to upvote comments that add to the discussion, even if you disagree with what is said.

I think your observation is generally correct, people seem to in general upvote comments/posts that bash immigrants or is anti-trans, or anti-establishment, or anti-woke. Conversely, anything that can be seen as a defense to those things seems more likely to get downvoted, even if those are good comments with sound logical arguments and good sources. I think if you frame it in a way that it makes it sound like you don't personally endorse that line of thinking, but that this is how people that might defend it might think that way, you're less likely to get downvoted.

Ultimately the only way to know for sure is to get a direct answer from the people that are upvoting/downvoting in the specific pattern you are observing.

What kind of job/industry are you looking in?

The entire point of the resume is to get an interview, and many companies filter resumes through programs that parse for specific keywords/skills. So you'd have to tailor your resume for a specific industry.

You can put whatever you want on your resume, by the way, I wouldn't put outright lies such as saying you worked at Facebook but you can certainly embellish any projects/tasks you did. Just be prepared to talk about it if you get asked once you get to the interview stage.