Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
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User ID: 836
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
1yr ago
Well, suit yourself, but the point that a beer absolutely can be a class marker still stands. The relevant part of the SSC post:
The people who are actually into this sort of thing sketch out a bunch of speculative tribes and subtribes, but to make it easier, let me stick with two and a half.
The Red Tribe is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage, owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting “USA IS NUMBER ONE!!!”, and listening to country music.
The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to “everything except country”.
(There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time)
I think these “tribes” will turn out to be even stronger categories than politics. Harvard might skew 80-20 in terms of Democrats vs. Republicans, 90-10 in terms of liberals vs. conservatives, but maybe 99-1 in terms of Blues vs. Reds.
It’s the many, many differences between these tribes that explain the strength of the filter bubble – which have I mentioned segregates people at a strength of 1/10^45? Even in something as seemingly politically uncharged as going to California Pizza Kitchen or Sushi House for dinner, I’m restricting myself to the set of people who like cute artisanal pizzas or sophsticated foreign foods, which are classically Blue Tribe characteristics.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
1yr ago
It is not reasonable to assume gay men are more likely to sexually harass straight men than that straight men are likely to sexually harass each other.
This strikes me as prima facie so implausible that I am genuinely curious what your basis is for believing it. You are claiming that men who are not sexually attracted to other men are more likely to give them unwanted sexual attention than men who are sexually attracted to other men? Perhaps you meant on a raw numbers level, there are more male-on-male sexual assaults committed by straight men than gay men, which is plausible given how many more straight than gay men there are. But as a proportion relative to population, why on earth would we expect men who are sexually interested in X to be less likely to aggressively angle for sexual contact with X than men who are not sexually interested in X? It would be like expecting gay men to be more likely than straight men to sexually assault women.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
1yr ago
As a practical matter, if you are going to participate in discussion in what is still essentially the free-floating descendant of the comments section of Scott Alexander's blog, it is probably worth being familiar with the classics just to be up to speed with what people are talking about. But in this particular context, (a) I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup is a fun read, and (b) it talks about exactly the sort of way in which what beer you drink can be a class or "tribe" marker.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
1yr ago
(An "effendi" is a lord, or a master, in Arabic, or so I'm told)
Prince of the moonbeams, son of the Sun, the light of a thousand stars...
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
2yr ago
I suppose they're treating 'which genes make you smart anyway' as similarly hazardous research. I can't blame them.
I can. If society makes policy on the supposition that all groups have the same inborn potential to develop their cognitive ability (or worse, the supposition that all groups have the same average cognitive ability, IQ test results be damned), then someone must be to blame for the unequal societal outcomes between groups, and modern-day witch-hunters will cause more and more damage to society, inflicting ever worse punishments on the successful, and, as their actions continue to fail to equalize societal outcomes, they can be expected to get ever more confused and angry at how powerful and well-hidden the witchcraft must be, until we reach truly civilization-crashing levels of war on competence. Egalitarian ideology in a non-egalitarian reality is dangerous, and we would do better to be willing to face the truth, whatever it turn out to be.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
2yr ago
My girlfriend and I probably jaywalked
No you didn't. Another thing you may come to appreciate about British life: people are free to make their own informed decisions about when it is or isn't safe to cross the road.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
2yr ago
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
2yr ago
seaponies
Oh come on. 'Kelpie' was already a perfectly cromulent word.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
2yr ago
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
2yr ago
samurai swords are expensive and if you use it, someone needs to wipe the blood off or it's going to mess up the steel.
I mean, the ultimate in stoic badassery would be that you use your last minutes of consciousness to wipe the sword clean yourself.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
2yr ago
In general, yes, but I would have thought that the stereotypical BLM supporter (or at least the average black BLM supporter) would already regard the police as the lowlifes, or at least, would place approximately zero trust in them, and ... while it might be too much to say that they hold black criminals to be figure of trust exactly, the group's behaviour certainly seems to reflect what one would expect if one believed that black criminals were more worthy of honor and protection than their victims.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
2yr ago
No amount of 'well, it's very rare' will mollify a person angry about that.
True, I suppose, but if cops get away with murdering black people less often than black people get away with murdering black people, it at least allows you to point out the skewed priorities (where 'get away with' includes the perpetrators never being identified because the witnesses all refuse to cooperate with the police).
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
2yr ago
I don't care if that thing succeeds or fails, so long as I don't have to pay for it or live in it.
Is that you, Antidem?
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
2yr ago
The premise of BLM is not that what happened to George Floyd was a personal tragedy for him but a rare, highly-unrepresentative stroke of bad luck, requiring a calm local investigation into what went wrong. The premise of BLM is that cops are routinely targetting black men for death, requiring nationwide [protesting/rioting and arson] to persuade the authorities to rein in the police violence ... and, implicitly, that the racial disparity in rates of deaths-by-cop cannot be accounted for by a comparable disparity in the rates of the kind of behavior that tends to draw the potentially-lethal attention of the cops.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
2yr ago
HBD doesn't imply that black Americans couldn't do better overall.
No, but it does imply that they can't do as well as higher achieving groups, on average. And if the aim of Progressives is full uplift, to get them to the same level of life outcomes as everyone else, the value of spreading knowledge of HBD, conditional on HBD being true, is that you get people to stop burning money and resources on an unattainable goal.
(Well, unattainable without some serious eugenics programs, but Progressives are not likely to be fond of that plan)
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
2yr ago
I almost married a black chick, even though I believe in hbd.
I was never in that situation exactly, but I would have no objection to marrying a black girl as long as she was smart (and, y'know, hot etc.) ... but I worry about how that conversation would go if you were ever called upon to explain your beliefs to her. Did your almost-wife know about your HBD position - or indeed, was she already HBD-pilled?
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
2yr ago
You have people who are 130Iq on this site arguing that the US going from 100IQ to 95IQ is a CATASTROPHE. But what about the gap between 100 and 130?
To be fair, if there were a country with an average IQ of 130, for them it would be a catastrophe to be reduced to an average of 100. It's possible that, for a fixed percentage of 130 IQ people a country might have (assuming it's a low percentage), having a population average of 100 is still going to get you a significantly better standard of living than a population average of 95, even if the gap between 100 and 130 is much larger.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
2yr ago
I think the fair response here is to ask your friend something along the lines of 'exactly what percentage of white people would be ideal for this city?'. And if you're feeling trollish, ask if they would apply the same percentage to, say, Tokyo or Kinshasa. Would be interesting to hear what the response is - at best you'd get them to articulate their reasoning.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
2yr ago
Huh. It had previously never occurred to me that the reason for the Irish and Indian flags looking kind of similar was anything but coincidence.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
2yr ago
a German dialect where instead of "größer als" they'd say "größer von"
In English there are relatively few grammatical differences between the American and British standard dialects, but 'different than' vs. 'different from' strikes me as a perfect analog here.
Though both of those have a whole country where they are part of the local standard.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
2yr ago
Exceptions to the rules are more common than the rules themselves, and at some point attempting to teach a systemic set of exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions becomes impossible.
Zompist: hold my beer.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
2yr ago
Maybe so, but even then, it is still centring the groups with worse average social outcomes, and downplaying the ones who are more successful than whites.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
2yr ago
BIPOC
... pointedly doesn't lump together all the non-white people. 'Black and Indigenous People of Color' (where 'indigenous' can be taken to include people with a substantial Native American ancestry component, thus sweeping up most Latinos who aren't Conquistador-Americans) excludes Asians of both the South Asian and the East Asian persuasion. It's implicitly a catch-all term for 'non-white people who have worse average social outcomes than white people', a PC alternative for what used to be called 'non-Asian minorities'.
Seppukurious
Not an hero we need right now
2yr ago
Suppose you are a billionaire and want to decrease the amount of racism in the world; what decent options do you have?
Monkey's paw curls up one finger: If you could exterminate the human species, there would be no racism anymore. A nasty enough bio-engineered pandemic could maybe do it; or you could get to work on that paperclip maximizer.
If it's obvious and simplistic, do you concede the point about it being possible for a beer to be a class marker? Because your denial of that was upstream of this whole exchange.
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