SnapDragon
1d ago
I've made it a hard limit that the next GF has to be 'financially aware" if not thrifty. i.e. they actually consider the cost of things, consider repair vs. replace, and don't assume the most expensive option is always the best.
Seems reasonable. Though, try not to get a new GF that just has a slightly different set of horrible traits! "This time I'm putting my foot down, arson is a hard no." Nobody's perfect, but as long as you're willing to consider "alone" as a viable option, it really does let you be more selective.
Getting $500k in the hole is an outcome I'd truly want to avoid, though. I think I would pull the chute when the costs hit $100k.
Yeah, most people would (and should). I've made a lot of bad choices.
SnapDragon
1d ago
Indeed, Canada went whole hog on marijuana legalization, but sex work is still quite illegal (and thus dangerous). Straight-up prostitution is probably TOO transactional for me, but I don't outright reject the comparison.
Having a partner can also be very very expensive. I'm easily $500k+ in the hole from paying all my ex-girlfriend's costs, who refused to get a job for 15+ years. (I'm extremely low-status in the dating market. I finally got out of the relationship, so at least I'm alone and miserable rather than paying through the nose and miserable.)
What's funny is that I wouldn't even have minded a trophy-wife situation where I at least got decent sex out of the deal. I know suggesting that makes me the worst kind of misogynist. We're supposed to pretend that relationships aren't transactional. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/communication-2
SnapDragon
3d ago
Look, I'm experiencing qualia! Look, there was one, right there! Honest!!
SnapDragon
6d ago
For the record, I was enjoying reading both your and @DaseindustriesLtd's takes!
SnapDragon
7d ago
I'm still a little agnostic on alignment, but I agree that LLMs are decent evidence that it's easier than we thought. After all, the predicted comprehension gap was almost completely wrong. Let's never forget that Yud formally claimed that it was impossible to tell an AI how to pick up a strawberry without destroying the world. LLMs don't just understand strawberries, they understand us. If we ask an LLM for a paperclip factory, it's well aware that we don't want it to tile the universe with paperclips.
So, fine, maybe at some point it'll somehow mesa-optimally get trained into a fuck-those-guys-i'll-make-all-the-paperclips-i-want attitude. But this hardly seems like an inevitability.
My P(doom) isn't nothing, but IMO the most likely outcome is just the most boring one: superintelligence doesn't turn out to be cheap no matter what clever optimizations you (or a self-optimizing AI) come up with. If the logarithmic AI curve continues, maybe we'll end up with some models that are smarter than Einstein running in billion-dollar datacenters attached to fusion plants. And that's certainly enough to change the world in some scary unprecedented ways, but not enough for all of humanity to be crushed like ants.
SnapDragon
7d ago
It’s likely that they know less about the inner life of women than the average rugby player whose name is literally Chad.
Let alone the upside of having a penis. I was a speedrunner once. And while I certainly had no desire to be castrated, that sick voice in my head has certainly wondered, at times, whether it would have made me better off.
SnapDragon
7d ago
Do we really need like 3 top-level trans posts a week? And keep in mind this is coming from a horrible anti-trans bigot like me; I can only imagine how tiring this is for the other side. A biography of one random streamer doesn't seem postworthy. (When Asmongold or Hasan Piker goes trans, then you can @ me.)
SnapDragon
7d ago
I think I sounded more judgmental than I needed to be. This is very culture-dependent, obviously, so there's nothing "inherently" ridiculous about tattoos or piercings. And maybe all of your milieu think it's perfectly normal. Hell, in rationalist/autistic subcultures, even acting like a woman with a masculine build and voice might not stand out overmuch (though it gives me the willies). But the post I was replying to was talking about getting jobs with normies, and they will absolutely think these things are ridiculous.
(Also, like @5434a said, if you and your friend group are doing it just to reject norms and stand out, well, having more trouble getting a job/partner is the entirely-predictable cost you pay for "rejecting norms" and "standing out".)
SnapDragon
8d ago
If you don't pass, you will be judged for it, and will likely get less/worse jobs and worse dating prospects as a result.
The same is true if you cover yourself with tattoos, or get a billion piercings and blue half-shaved hair. The reason this happens isn't because you're trans, it's because you look ridiculous. It used to be trivially understood that, in polite society, you should put some effort into making yourself presentable. It's doing trans people a disservice to pretend that this norm shouldn't apply to them (when it always will - it's human nature).
SnapDragon
11d ago
Yeah, all 39 of them. Is that what's supposed to carry the company?
In technology, the gap between "0" and "39" is a hell of a lot larger than the gap between "39" and "tens of thousands"...
SnapDragon
11d ago
Isn’t that what Heaven is suppose to be? Ruled by a dictator but nice things?
A dictator who also occasionally sends people to Eternal Tortureland.
SnapDragon
12d ago
You're making a logical error. @magicalkittycat isn't saying this as a fact; it's being used to show that "therefore other life is likely" does not necessarily follow from "therefore life can exist". It's a disproof of a simple fallacious argument.
SnapDragon
16d ago
Wow. This has shades of Trump's speech where he explicitly said he "condemned totally" the neo-Nazis ... only to have journalists spread the meme that he called them "very fine people". Normally he's very sloppy in his speech, but even in cases where he's uncharacteristically precise, he'll get widely misquoted anyway. So where's the incentive for him to clean up his language?
SnapDragon
18d ago
Yeah, my circle of friends is certainly similar. But consider that we probably don't generally hang out with the median voter. :)
SnapDragon
18d ago
No party's "flank" is ever "secure". If you move leftward, you're inevitably going to lose some people to the other side. That's just the nature of aggregating millions of different opinions. Now, I agree that the Democrats seem to believe what you just said, and that's why we ended up with Trump twice.
SnapDragon
18d ago
Some people want to kick Chevalier out of the party, bless their hearts. This wouldn't work even if it were feasable. Democrats need votes from leftists to be competative nationally. A party at war with its own base cannot stand.
Disagree. All either party, donkey or elephant, actually needs to do to win elections is to be normal enough to win the center. The far left and far right are both small minorities, and they'll probably hold their noses and vote for their party anyway to prevent the "nazis"/"commies" from winning. (See: Christians voting for Trump.)
Unfortunately, you appear to be right when it comes to winning nominations. It's a really broken system - it's gotten so bad that the incredibly strong incentive of winning elections isn't enough to keep the parties sane.
SnapDragon
24d ago
Where does that happen? Let's look at Wikipedia specifically. The articles for Caitlyn Jenner and Elliot Page have their former names right there in the first sentence.
So, I hate to do this because (unlike @rae) I just think you're just being disingenuous, but this should be a place where people admit fault. This is a simple, verifiable fact, and you're right and I was wrong. I overreached when talking about "deadnaming". The leftist spaces I'm in still treat it as akin to putting people in ovens, but it looks like Wikipedia does actually acknowledge that a person called Ellen Page existed once. It's very very VERY grudging - if you visit the pages for any movies Ellen Page was in, her credit is buried at the literal bottom of each one in a tiny note. (It's almost comedic, frankly.) For Juno, her breakout film, the note literally just reads "credited as Ellen Page", as if the producers typoed her name. But the text does exist. And describing reality, however shoddily and unwillingly, is still better than I gave them credit for. Mea culpa.
If that's your concern, talk about that instead of claiming that all trans people are perverts, rapists, misogynists, etc., and none of them should be treated as their preferred gender.
Where the hell did THAT come from?
SnapDragon
25d ago
FWIW I don't think anyone should be allowed to transition in the same sense I believe nobody should be allowed to get an amputation of a healthy functional limb. There is a basic principle that physicians shouldn't facilitate self-harm by mentally ill people. Physicians are licensed and regulated by the State and it's reasonable (in my opinion) for the state to impose restrictions on the kinds of medical procedures physicians can do.
Realistically, though, this is always going to be a subjective judgement call. If you go to the extremes on this, then tattoos or even ear piercing should be illegal! Cutting off an arm is clearly a much worse (and more irreversible) level of harm than surgery on your genitals. Yes, the latter squicks me out, but given my libertarian leanings, I want the government to have a really compelling, almost-universally-accepted reason to outright ban something. Which amputation satisfies, but transition surgery does not.
SnapDragon
25d ago
I think A better analogy would be if people with serious skin conditions were given access to special resources, for example more convenient parking spaces during the summer months so that they wouldn't have to spend as much time walking outdoors. And if a person with perfectly healthy skin was permitted to identify as having a skin condition and take advantage of this special access. And if anyone who complained about the situation (or who didn't go along with pretending that the person had a skin condition) were ostracized.
Indeed. Another real-world analogy would be "service animals" vs "pets". Nobody disputes that there are people who genuinely need the help of animals to get by (even if your definition is narrow enough to only include guide dogs). But a sensible policy of allowing exemptions for them very quickly escalated to an extreme level of abuse.
SnapDragon
25d ago
Note that I said "rewriting history and Wikipedia". There is absolutely compulsion involved here. In the happy event that the Wikimedia Foundation decided tomorrow that they would like to return to the ideal of a crowd-sourced encyclopedia, and unlocked all the trans-adjacent pages to allow mainstream views, they would be attacked and sued. And anyone else who publishes information that includes "deadnames" is declared as anti-trans and will, in some countries, be in serious trouble. (Not the US - yet - but not for lack of trying! I'm grateful that the US has the strongest free-speech protections in the world.)
This is 100% Orwellian. "We have always been at war with Eastasia." "Elliot Page has always been a man."
SnapDragon
25d ago
What we're all is trying to drill into you is that the absurd things we describe are not strawmen. They are official policy and actual law in many places.
Guess I’m as bad as a TERF then. If you make no attempt to present as a woman before going to the woman’s bathroom or locker room, obviously you might make people uncomfortable and they wouldn’t be out of bounds in asking you to leave.
Yes! This makes you as bad as a TERF! Your common sense here is - and I want to emphasize that this is not hyperbole or exaggeration - against the law in California. You cannot ask a man not to use the women's shower, as this constitutes discrimination against their self-declared gender. The relevant law is the Unruh Civil Rights Act, which includes "gender identity and gender expression" as protected categories.
Here is one attempt to fix this with legislation. The site Trans Legislation Tracker declares that this is an anti-trans bill. Their own hostile summary includes this: "The Legislature finds and declares [...] Gender identity is fluid, and there is no ability for a commercial enterprise to determine if an individual's claim of a gender identity is sincere or is a pretext to obtain access to the opposite sex's intimate spaces." Which is absolutely correct! Just the acknowledgement that bad actors exist is treated as anti-trans!
You need to get your head out of the sand. Trans-aligned politics is absolutely bonkers. The vast majority of us allegedly "anti-trans" folks aren't being bigots; we're just trying to restore a measure of normalcy.
SnapDragon
25d ago
If you can tell that someone's biological sex is partially or entirely mismatched to their gender, you should keep that to yourself unless they bring it up first, just as you would if they had an embarrassing skin condition or a missing limb.
Again, that's perfectly reasonable up to the point where they make false claims to access resources they shouldn't have access to. The analogy fails because people with embarassing skin conditions or missing limbs don't generally claim to have flawless complexions or complete bodies.
Also, the euphemistic "should" in "should keep that to yourself" is playing the part of a motte. I have no problem with the idea that it's just as impolite to point out that a transwoman looks ridiculous as it is to call attention to somebody's missing arm (although I would hope the transwoman had someone in their life who was honest with them). The actual bailey is "you MUST keep that to yourself, or you are a declared Enemy and we will publicly advocate for doxxing you, getting you fired, and (in the UK, at least) jailing you".
SnapDragon
25d ago
This stance does not, incidentally, actually determine whether people should be banned from transition. Not least, transition is sufficiently difficult to define as to make that hard.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but OP was addressing imaginary people who say "no one should be allowed to transition". It doesn't sound like you fit that mould. Of course, the pro-trans media will throw people who don't want kids to transition, or who don't want to be forced to pay for others transitioning, into that category. But that's politics for you; and you shouldn't do their work for them by self-identifying as such.
I mean, we don't live in the best or the worst of all worlds. There are some genuinely beautiful, selfless relationships out there. But not everyone gets one. My cynicism applies only to me and my future prospects (or lack thereof).
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