Spookykou
3mo ago
As a fat person, I am constantly ashamed of myself. Unfortunately, delicious food is the only thing that makes me feel better. Tragic.
Spookykou
5mo ago
Personally I do not really model governments as 'entities' that take action based on some sort of game theoretic rational self interest. Governments seem to be collections of people who are generally following their own individual incentives which can very easily lead to governments doing things that are not really in the interest of the government as a whole, if one was to think of it as an entity.
To the specific question, I think there was a very effective march through the institutions which caused woke/progressive ideas to reach fixation in the university system to such an extent that 90%+ of college graduates to come out of the last 15 years (give or take) are 'true believes' in as much as mid-wits can truly believe anything. One of those true beliefs is that crime is (almost?)totally down stream of societal oppression, and specifically that the criminal justice system is a sort of negative feedback loop that creates and then punishes criminals and that the cruel impositions of the criminal justice system upon the 'criminal class,' is an untenable injustice. I think once enough young professionals filter into the various DA offices of the world who hold these beliefs and similar you eventually get to a point where they are able to coordinate action and push through soft on crime practices based on the idea that contact with the criminal justice system is toxic.
Spookykou
5mo ago
I am a bit confused by the direction and nature of the relationships you are purposing here. It seems to me that you are saying there is a rise in 'selfishness' because governments 'lost trust', by favoring marginalized demographics. I would assume, based on this, that the increase in selfishness then, would be found in the, non-marginalized, non-favored, demographics, but my vague understanding of the spike in shoplifting is that this is not the case.
I think government action, or often inaction, is probably contributing to the rise in the overtness of these behaviors, but I am not sure the mechanism is any more complicated than, some people will act up if you remove the consequences from their actions.
Spookykou
5mo ago
I remember trying to read that post and finding it pretty impenetrable, which is also the most upvoted comment on the post. I will try to retreat back to the 'easy to read' component of 'well formatted' here to salvage my position.
Spookykou
5mo ago
Personally I find legal discussions to be the most 'valuable' I have no domain knowledge but they seem to consistently get a good back and forth and express opinions that just do not seem to exist outside of this place. Often I wonder if TheMotte could be a better lawyer for Trump than whoever he has hired based on the strength of their arguments. Trumps legal troubles as presented by 99.99% of the internet, he is clearly guilty and wrong and the case against him is iron clad, Trumps legal troubles as presented here, absurd novel legal theory that requires literal time travel to be a crime.
Just, love reading it.
Spookykou
5mo ago
I think it is unlikely that a fear of getting banned is very relevant to this issue. I think that people feel at least a mild incentive to upvotes a top level post where the poster clearly put in effort even if it is not particularly interesting, so most large, well formatted top level posts get at a minimum 20 upvotes and some engagement.
I think it is far more likely (I'm not projecting here honest) that people are worried about making a top level post that sits at 2 upvotes and gets no engagement, rather than a fear of being 'banned' or any other mod action. Honestly, if a modhat came along leaving the only comment saying you didn't try hard enough, ten people would suddenly come in out of nowhere to defend your post even if they would have never engaged with it otherwise.
Spookykou
5mo ago
That is hopelessly confounded.
It is certainly confounded enough that I did not mean to imply that I have some sort of formula that accurately describes the relationship, but are you contesting that the relationship exists at all, or do you think it is not big enough to meaningful inform how we think about the efficacy of therapy? My thought process here, in simple terms, would be that a person who is having a shitty time but does not exist in therapy culture, has a less shitty time than the same person in therapy culture. So, a study that finds that people who show up with depression get better after therapy, has the problem for me, that I do not know if that person would have had an equally bad condition in the counterfactual where they don't know what depression is. Imagine if the anorexia in South Korea story is correct, and previously Korean girls never got anorexia, and now a bunch are getting it. Someone coming along and telling me that therapy does better than a placebo at treating their anorexia with super high-powered top-tier most excellent and well replicated research, is still not offering me a particularly compelling defense, if I think therapy awareness campaigns 'caused' the anorexia in the first place. See also all the stories of, trauma counseling that traumatized someone.
I'm not trying to say that the myriad forms of mental illness have no basis in real human experiences and emotional states. I just think it's possible that therapy, and the (unavoidable?) downstream therapy culture, might actually be a bad way to structure a societal understanding and response to those feelings.
Is it a good thing that we have the option of paying money to talk to someone in private instead of running about with a machete?
Maybe? It isn't easy for me to evaluate the counterfactual. I have no idea exactly how destructive a, the way to deal with bad emotions is to go a little wild and break stuff, society needs to be, the purge is (probably) too far, the way I dealt with stress as a kid (running around yelling), probably healthier than what we do now.
Spookykou
5mo ago
One wrinkle for me when trying to think about the efficacy of therapy is that the incidence of mental illness has skyrocketed in step with the wide spread adoption of therapy culture. This is supposed to be caused by increased awareness, but then you have things like Scott's Anorexia in South Korea story, that push me towards a different theory. Therapy culture is horrible, and therapy itself is mostly trash (which is why we can't make any meaningful improvements to the practice after over a hundred years), it only works in as much as it is the socially acceptably path to resolve such issues. I imagine if we could check, running amok would have been found to be an effective above placebo 'therapy' as well. Outside of a handful of mental illnesses with consistent cross cultural manifestations, everything else is either conversion disorder with people trying to fit their negative emotional states into a culturally understood framework, or increasingly, excuses for shitty behavior and to avoid accountability. The framework spawned by therapy culture in the west is particularly bad, mental health awareness is bad, stoicism is probably correct.
Spookykou
6mo ago
If it was just America vs EU I would have a simple theory that sounds right to me. American youth have always grown up in 'these' conditions, and so have antibodies and memes that allow them to ignore being mugged or having their bike stolen, in a way that the average European does not, because 'these' conditions, brought on by the refugee crisis, are a very recent change with only the youngest generation really growing up in it. The problem with this theory is the UK, but maybe the global internet means that the protective American memes are actually just protective English memes.
Spookykou
6mo ago
I don't think that only 'technical' contradiction, in which it is logically impossible for two ideas to comport, get to be called contradictions. I think it is very common and normal for people to use the word contradiction to describe an apparent disconnect or incongruity between two things, that need not be completly irreconcilable.
I am not sure if you thought that my argument was, the OP's example is not contradictory, but my example is, but I was not trying to make that argument. I used words like particularly, and compared to. Also, this "'Progressives seem to hold totally contradictory values'." bit was in quotes because it was intended to describe a vibe, that I felt was central to the OP. I just felt like the example the OP happened to be upset by was a kind of weak sauce example of this kind of contradiction.
Entirely from the correctness or incorrectness of the political views themselves, there's no real contradiction between "I support LGBT+/feminism/whatever" and
"I am against Israel's actions in Gaza.""I support Hamas".
So, in a very narrow technical sense, I support [Blank] and I support [Group that hates Blank and actively practices violence against Blank] are not logically impossible to hold within the same mind.
Still I am confident saying that not only would most people recognize the incongruity in those statements, if I could ask progressives about a different topic where they were not primed to view it as an attack or a gotcha, most of them would recognize the contradiction in such a statement as well. In fact, just go look at the never ending stream of "if you were really pro-life' memes/posts/articles for a live (and much worse) example.
Spookykou
6mo ago
I don't see how the example here represents some sort of unique turning point or even a particularly good example of the set of, 'Progressives seem to hold totally contradictory values'.
They have been holding 'LGBTQ+ for Hamas' rallies since October 8th.
Trump disrespected the troops by saying stuff that a 'properly cultured' blue-triber would never say, like calling POWs losers for getting caught.
The people at protests waving flags, still don't like Trump for being uncouth in those ways. Also, I would guess less than half of them even know what Beirut is. Still, even if they did know, they mostly wouldn't care. They are perfectly happy to hold both the idea that Trump says rude things to the troops and that is bad, and also the idea that the American military-industrial-complex is a global oppressor and any and all resistance to it is justified. This isn't even a particularly contradictory pair of ideas to hold compared to their beliefs around gender.
More generally, you are making a liberal complaint to a progressive. Liberals care about being principled and consistent, creating generalizable rules, and all that other great civilization building philosophy junk that got totally abandoned as the internet and government student loans expanded the marketplace of ideas to include midwits.
Spookykou
6mo ago
'People experiencing "internal struggles" and changing their minds, as a result of being attacked(shouted at, protested against, and criticized by their social groups), is good actually.' is what I was alluding to.
Compare.
Changing your mind over a serious or contentious issue as a result of a period of internal struggle is generally regarded as a positive development by most people, and they use terms like "personal growth" to describe it
and
Changing your mind over a serious or contentious issue as a result of a period of internal struggle --after being shouted at, protested against, and criticized by your social group-- is generally regarded as a positive development by most people, and they use terms like "personal growth" to describe it
I am, skeptical, that 'most people' would agree with the second formation.
Spookykou
6mo ago
You seem to have missed...the second sentence?
I could see that something had to give when they started being attacked by what they viewed as their own side.
Unless, you didn't miss it, and "internal struggle" is a totally outta pocket euphemism?
Spookykou
6mo ago
I don't understand most of your comment, I am not a Less Wrong reader.
To try to explain what I said, imagine a person who says that men wearing pants is 'arbitrary'. I think that person is trying to communicate that men wearing pants is random, without underlying reason or cause. I think that person is wrong.
Spookykou
6mo ago
I can't stand Sanderson's work, for, well a lot of reasons, but one of the big ones is that he has really bought into the idea that culture is arbitrary and I am really bought into the idea that culture is contingent and so whenever he brings up some arbitrary cultural practice it brutally murders any interest I might have had in the setting. I can very easily imagine people who do not care about this at all, and hate Sanderson for totally different reasons.
Talking about writing being good or bad is really weird because people want and enjoy different things, and people are sucked out of a story for different reasons. You seem to be very fixated on the extent to which the story was well planned to function as a trilogy, where as that rates pretty low on the totem pole for me. I assume this is why you do not actually talk about the companions or world-building, when those are the two things @urquan brought up specifically as being their favorite parts (I agree with them). If I had to pick between a story that had perfect planning to create an overarching narrative structure for a trilogy, or a book with good characters, it is not even close. They are not even playing the same game. I would burn the narrative structure book just to read the good characters book for the handful of minutes that the fire burned.
Moving on,
And every. Single. Choice. in ME1's critical path amounts to 'Kill person X, or not.'
Mass Effect is a military sci-fi story about a judge dread spy, hunting down a rogue judge dread spy. I feel like within that milieu it is not necessarily an indication of bad writing if the most pivotal scenes are situations where the main character has to make life and death choices. I actually don't really see what ideals of good writing this is supposed to be violating even outside of the military sci-fi genre.
You are obviously correct that there was no plan(or at least not a good one), and that between poor planning, clumsy execution, and format related limitations, the overarching narrative structure as a whole is not good. However I think you go too far when you say this is all locked in by ME1. Kaiden or Ashley die, and it sticks with that. They absolutely could have de-emphasized Wrex's importance to the wider galaxy while simply keeping him as a companion, or not, this would not have been difficult. They could have totally cut the side mission with the Rachni if you killed the queen in ME1. The whole mission is a complete stand alone that takes like 30 minutes. The reasons the Mass Effect trilogy is so disappointing (at least for me) is that it could have easily been better.
Paragon and Renegade get way too much hate. My Tav is 99% head cannon, because even though I have seven responses to every question there is no consistent characterization to any of them. Sometimes I can joke, sometimes I can't, sometimes I can be a hero paladin, sometimes I am a craven coward shuddering in fear (thanks cutscene). It turns out something like 75%+ of people just want to play some variation of Paragon, in literally every single-player RPG, lean into that and you can make better stories.
I agree on ME3, I like it and I think it gets too much hate because of the ending.
but actually Andromeda
I feel like Andromeda has pretty glaring writing problems, the story constantly strains credulity because the world-building totally fails to support the narrative they wanted to tell. A quick breakdown.
There is no reason for you to be operating as a small team. There is no reason for you to ever even step foot on a planet outside of the Ancient Vaults, because your ability to manipulate vault technology is the only thing that is actually special about you. If you do step foot on a planet, there is no reason for you to do so without a shuttle to ferry you from place to place. There is no reason for 2/5ths of a 500,000 person colony mission where 80% of the population is still in cryo-sleep to terraform multiple planets, when they could and should be focusing their efforts on one for at least the next hundred years. The whole setup is horrible for a first person shooter single-player RPG. The vault tech stuff should all be long term research projects. Clearing out the Kett and securing objectives should all be large squad military actions. Honestly, the world-building and setup for Andromeda is wildly more compatible with a base builder game, you could make a reasonable Andromeda mod for Rim world and it might actually be good.
Spookykou
6mo ago
Yes, I had a longer response at first that included how much I enjoy TNG (the bridge crew) and how the Mass Effect crew of fun competent people who work together for a common goal is a refreshing and pleasant experience compared to everything else being 'serious' story telling, which just means everyone has to talk constantly about their trauma and hate each other, while being sarcastic and ironic.
I am somewhat suspect of complaints about 'quality' with writing, just across the board, but also specifically when talking about 'romance' from the male perspective. I think it is mostly an isolated demand type phenomenon. Pull up straight male dating sims and visual novels(tons of games where you are a normal guy trying to get a girlfriend), and most people will say the whole genre falls within the porn to ham-fisted range, but if you look at popular LGBT visual novels and dating sims the writing is basically indistinguishable(and nobody complains). I think that feminists have been very effective at spreading memes about the Problematic Male Fantasy in a very asymmetrical way such that straight male wish-fulfillment is the only kind of fantasy that is quickly and easily recognized as bad. I even think there is a real extent to which some men have been conditioned into finding their own innate preferences icky, or at the very least I know of one case where this is true (myself).
I am not sure exactly what kind of story you are looking for, a male version of Colleen Hoover, Your Lie in April, When Harry Met Sally (the video game)? I am also not sure what 'sensitive storytelling' means. My previously mentioned skepticism around a lot of 'literary critique' is because I think the human impulse to describe personal subjective preference as an objective and legible standard is way too strong(obviously I am not guilty of it though).
Spookykou
6mo ago
A brief defense of Mass Effect, and why I wish more games like Mass Effect would get made.
I grew up a nerd(reading Piers Anthony, playing Samurai Swords, D&D, MTG, etc) who was socially adept enough to pass as a non-nerd. I dressed well, hung out with the cool kids, went to parties, did drugs and had sex. It was all good fun. Sometimes I would also hang out with my nerd friends and go do nerd things. I remember one time going to a Con, dressed well, hair on point, and seeing people walking around in dragon T-shirts and cargo shorts, poorly made cosplay, and the occasional Naruto-headband. As I watched the pockmarked, sweaty nerds, a deep pit opened up inside me. I was jealous. My fashionable sneakers and my tight fitting jeans were all lies, DAMNED LIES. I wanted to be like them, and I was just too scared to admit it, too scared to wear a dragon T-shirt. Well, not anymore.
I enjoy power fantasy. Yes, it is kind of cringy and lame and low-brow, but ima live my truth.
I want to be a kick ass hero who saves the galaxy and fucks hot alien chicks.
Spookykou
6mo ago
I feel like there are a few core concepts to liberalism that are very old and very consistent and the disconnect here is that most modern progressives don't realize that they have almost totally abandoned the ideological framework that they were raised in, so they still hold onto the word liberal despite abandoning the ideology.
It seems sort of amusingly illiberal, to rewrite history so that liberal is just the word that the left uses to describe itself and so liberals who are no longer in-line with the modern left, despite being totally in-line with liberalism, must be conservatives.
The reality is the modern left is not liberal for any coherent understanding of the term, this is not even ship of Theseus territory, it is an almost total abandonment of liberalism as an ideology. The principled liberals who used to be on the left were all collectively shocked(or shocked later when they finally noticed) as the rug got pulled out from under them and their massive wide spread cultural support vanished over night in the face of woke. As I vaguely gestured to above, I think this is mostly a politics as fashion thing, and all the people who would have smashed the like and re-tweet buttons on "I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it," on a hypothetical 1995 twitter, ended up smashing the like and re-tweet buttons on "Freezepeach" on the real 2015 twitter.
A great place to watch this in the wild is, if you have the temperament for it, any Destiny content. Destiny is basically a liberal, and when he talks to progressives he will make liberal arguments, and you can see the sort of confusion and cognitive dissonance, as they try to square a sort of vague background respect for an under-specified liberalism, with their totally illiberal current positions and thinking.
Spookykou
7mo ago
I am not sure I buy it.
It seems to me that almost every government that was able to pass pro-abortion laws did so directly in the face of this accusation and under the exact same framing you outlined above. That is, they thought abortion was 'wrong' in some sense but the lesser of two evils and advocated for it specifically by presenting it as a rational trade off against other interests.
The recent spread of euthanasia laws seem to have also come about under similar circumstances.
I think the, abortion is a necessary evil, framing was pretty much universal until relatively recently when the ever ratcheting up US centric culture war got to the point that pro-abortion advocacy was specifically calling for no questions asked, no shame or stigma attached, infinite access to abortion, in response to conservative states trying to limit access. If by real world you mean, current moment, then I agree in the abstract that it would be hard to pass national abortion laws as restrictive as the median EU member state (and said as such), but I suspect this has almost nothing to do with the rhetorical tactic of accusing people of supporting murder.
I guess a lot of this hinges on what you mean by 'calling it murder', but the impression I get is that people are very good at and comfortable using euphemisms for murder.
Spookykou
7mo ago
While I am generally in favor of consequentialist reasoning and am I fan of utilitarianism as a way to think about morality, I am pretty far from having rigorously mathed out my various moral/ethical beliefs.
Something like the formula you outline seems at least directionally similar, but insufficient. I tend to value women over men, children over adults (for reasons not fully captured in age), good people over bad people, etc. While I endeavor to formulate principals and consistency in my thinking around issues of morality, I often feel like the complexities of reality are such that I do not trust my ability to construct a formula that would properly capture the shape of my preferences.
Spookykou
7mo ago
One thing that bothers me in the abortion debate is that I personally see a lot of granularity within the worth of a human life. If I imagine a hypothetical where I have to pick between saving two eighty-year old men or one eight-year old boy, I will save the boy every time. More over, I would honestly think less of the two men if they advocated for their own lives while understanding the full situation. I do not see any incongruity with my moral intuitions as outlined above, and the moral intuition that it would be wrong to kill one of those eighty year old men. Similarly, I think a fertilized egg is a human life in a very straightforward and technical sense such that I think it is wrong to kill it, but I would not pick to save a fertilized egg over saving the eight year old boy, either(I also wouldn't pick it over the eighty-year old man). As such I generally find most of the extreme claims about the implications of treating a fertilized egg as a life overblown. I am fine with having a category of thing where I think it is wrong to kill it but which I do not think our entire society must upend itself in an effort to protect. Especially not when that protection would be against what would commonly be understood as the 'natural order' of things.
We currently think of full humans as being ... full humans, and yet 100% of them die. How much of our humanitarian efforts are dedicated to immortality research? I think your hypothetical reflects more than anything a poor understanding of how humans actually behave and the kinds of moral intuitions people are mostly running on. I would propose that a huge number of people would see nothing incongruous in holding a funeral for a miscarriage while simultaneously not donating 50% of their income to R&D on how to reduce the number of fertilized eggs that fail to attach.
Ultimately I find health of the mother concerns to be valid, but I can understand why some would worry about the category being stretched too far. Beyond that, I think abortion is very popular and the best case real world policy I could hope for would be something like, safe, legal, and rare.
And of course, I am a hypocrite who purchased a morning after pill for my girlfriend one time after a broken condom, such is life.
Spookykou
7mo ago
Oh, I didn't really get that it was supposed to be writing consultancy specifically. I feel like the two main complaints about woke in video games that I read here on TheMotte are with ugly female character models, and then random woke signaling (trans characters, pride flags), specifically that it can be hard to have anti-woke mods that remove such things because the mod hosting sites are all ideologically captured.
Still I think that woke ideas can and do make the 'writing' in video games worse in a number of ways.
One example might be illustrated by comparing Mass Effect and BG3, both being games that do not have 'great' writing in the general sense, but I think woke impulses make BG3 a worse story in specific ways. Mshep is far and away the most common play through, and Garrus (who can't be romanced by Mshep) might be the most popular video game companions of all time. Meanwhile people had to make mods for BG3 to turn off the entire approval gain function because it is literally impossible to be friends with any of your companions, they are all romantic interests who tend to get very sexual and often physical with you from the very first approval cutscene. This does not mean that any given scene has worse writing, or that the overall plot is worse, and yet, I think the story as a whole is weaker because of the inability for your character to have deeper friendships.
Then there are the generic ways that woke writing is bad, as it often does things that are just broadly considered bad writing. Being preachy, making the subtext text, and breaking suspension of disbelief by importing modern (American) issues into settings and situations where they do not organically fit the story.
There is a sense in which all video game writing is bad so woke isn't the thing stopping video games from being literary masterpieces, but I am not sure how relevant that is compared with the general complaint that woke makes things worse.
This seems wrong, the difference between the average restaurant in Plano Texas from then to now is staggering, and not just in terms of quality, but variety of cuisine as well. This might be controversial, but I think the expected quality you would get from a high-end restaurant in 1990 is what you can expect from basically any restaurant today(controlling for location). Cooking knowledge seems to have really been spread through the information age, and a base line expectation of quality ingredients also spread through the country during this time window. Do you remember when people used to advertise that they used arabica coffee beans, before it just became the standard? Dominos pizza is a particular stark example, and that change happened in 2010, in part because they had fallen behind, because all the other pizza places had been upping their game for years. I think the idea that, because on the surface you could go to a Wendy's and get a burger and fries in 1990 and in 2024, the 'superpalatability' of the food has not changed, is wrong (Wendy's is another place that seriously improved and is constantly tweaking and improving, a few years ago they drastically improved their fries).
I will agree that it is not super cleanly defined, but in general I think the availability of good food has improved pretty significantly since the 90s.
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