Spookykou
11mo ago
I will admit I consider my self a 'skeptical utilitarian'(I made this term up, or, if I didn't, I am unfamiliar with the other usage) in that I have utilitarian leanings in terms of how to reason about morality but reject unpalatable extreme extrapolations thereof, on 'eulering' and 'epistemic learned helplessness' grounds. Still I have always found casual swipes at utilitarianism of the form, 'see, it actually leads to bad things' to be weak. Clearly the goal is to lead to good things, broadly, and if it seems to lead to a bad thing then that probably means you should try again and fully considerer the externalities, etc. I don't see a good reason why 'utility' can't be a proxy measure for human flourishing, and I would personally prefer a form of utilitarianism organized in just such a way.
Spookykou
11mo ago
I think it is probably true that doxxing poses more of a physical risk to women than men.
I think this can be read a few ways, I think your reading is something like, therefore the number of women physically assaulted after being doxxed would be higher than the number of men, and you don't think the stats would back that up.
A different reading, would be that a (specific) woman being physically assaulted after being doxxed is in more danger, because they are physically weaker than men.
It is possible this is also not borne out by the stats, but they would be different stats, like, how often do women survive a physically violent attack compared to men.
All of these stats are complicated though, because I doubt the whole of the difference would be because men are just 'randomly' more likely to be victims.
Spookykou
11mo ago
I don't see how the goal posts ever moved. The original claim was that woman are easier to victimize (because they are physically weaker than men), men being more likely to be victims in general does not seem to preclude that.
Spookykou
11mo ago
As a victim of MGM I have always found complaints about condoms to be wild, I can hardly tell the difference, so maybe you are onto something.
The sensitivity thing is also interesting as, to my mind, increased sensitivity would be strictly a bad thing as a man. If I could magically wish for more of it, I wouldn't. The physical pleasure from sex is pretty far from the top of the list of things I enjoy about sex. It seems to me that sensitivity would trade off directly with endurance. I really viscerally enjoy the sense of masculine prowess I get from absolutely destroying a woman for a prolonged session, but I am only really able to achieve that with mental and physical tricks to actively reduce my sensitivity.
Spookykou
11mo ago
I think traditionally doxxing happened/happens to small people in small online communities. I would agree that major celebrity doxxing probably has gender parity in terms of badness, however I can see the smaller scale version being worse for women (or bad in a way specific to women). I think it is reasonable to assume that doxxing of random private individuals would result in more stalking/sexual harassment adjacent behaviors, when directed at women, and might intentionally be directed at women to drive that kind of behavior in others, in a way that would generally not be true for men.
Spookykou
11mo ago
It's not perfect, but,
And the rockets' red glare The bombs bursting in air Gave proof through the night That our flag was still there
Slaps
Spookykou
11mo ago
The exception proves the rule (where proves means something closer to imply) is a useful linguistic short hand for understanding situations in which the existence of an exception implies the existence of a rule to which there is an exception.
First, I don't think your hypothetical is how this phrase is normally used. The parent example in this thread which is almost a perfect match for every example I have ever caught in the wild is literally, I think people be this way but some people are not, so maybe I am correct and people are actually this way. The added 'authority' of the aphorism is being grossly abused.
In your hypothetical, the exception still does not seem to 'prove' the rule. The rule in your hypothetical is, You can't turn in papers past the deadline. The exception is, some kid was allowed to turn in papers past the deadline. This exception explicitly disproves the rule. You can change the rule to include, without a very good reason, and then Tim at least serves as a data point about the kinds of good reasons that the rule would accept/reject. Still to me, the rule is clearly being 'proven' by the smuggled in NotTims who did not get an extension for their various lesser reasons. Basically your hypothetical is, most evidence seems to prove the rule, and while Tim is an exception, Tim is such an outlier he should not be considered as evidence against the general rule. To phrase that as, "He's the exception that proves the rule." seems both confused and wrong. At best he is the exception that fails to disprove the rule.
Spookykou
11mo ago
FWIW I found hanging out with kids to be surprisingly fun/less gross than it seemed at a distance.
It is hard to explain, but at least personally I am very clean and germophobic, while also being a stand off-ish introvert who finds most people to be boring. Still had a hell of a time playing with my little cousin and his snot covered Legos.
Spookykou
11mo ago
This is what happens when you get rid of male privilege, the boys just can't keep up, smh.
Spookykou
11mo ago
I assume HelmedHorror is listing the use cases for stock photos where they perceive the problem, not necessarily listing stock photos as a separate category that also has the problem. To the general question of Stock Photos, when I load up the Shutterstock home page, the Explore Popular and Handpicked visuals seems to have eight pictures with humans, and the only white man in the mix is Santa Claus (possible another man but he is too small to tell for sure).
All of your examples seem to be fairly old (5+ years?) memes, which technically started their life as stock-photos but are probably non-central examples of stock-photos, in as much as they are still used today.
Spookykou
1yr ago
The idea that homesteaders/preppers/the Amish might do better in a collapse of the modern world seems reasonable to me. We keep ant farms and shit, maybe the Amish long standing commitments to being low tech make them a safer prospective pet population. I also never understood why turning everything in the light cone into paperclips was so much more plausible than just all the easily available metal or other variations on the, AI with orthogonal values fucks up the world but doesn't actually make it uninhabitable.
Spookykou
1yr ago
I coulda sworn a big thing with the bell curve was that it was basically respectable when it came out, and it took a few years before the 'pointing out statistics is racist' idea fully took hold on the left. I remember some big name black journalist who, in a retrospective, talked about how he found it personally disgusting that other people at the Atlantic(maybe?) wanted to have dispassionate scientific discussion about those ideas, and he had to nod and smile along, etc. I would model the change as, in the 90's, racism is bad, but statistics are not racist, into, those types of statistics are actually racist, into, maybe but those statistics seem correct and frankly I don't care anymore if you call me racist.
Spookykou
1yr ago
Obviously one side of this is just that the alt-right contains multitudes.
Beyond that I do think there is a shift where up until 2016ish the grey tribe still basically agreed with the blue tribe in terms of end goals/reality, but mostly was breaking off/frustrated by SJW/WOKE cultural stuff. They did not want trad wives, where totally convinced that racism was wrong and evil, would consider themselves true LGBT allies, and where broadly in favor of hedonistic modernity. It seems to me that there has specifically been a shift in this group, where, as they became more contrarian and more ostracized by society for not getting with the program they gradually started to question a lot of these core assumption. The liberal framework that 99% of grey tribe people grew up with, that reality had a liberal bias, is mostly gone now and a lot of what we are seeing is the breakdown of that veneer of scientific authority. Ultimately, people change, and to me the online-alt-right looks like a reaction to excesses on the part of the left more than anything.
Spookykou
1yr ago
I read the above comment as pointing in the other direction. That people with 'urban' political views are more likely to move to the city and less likely to move away.
Spookykou
1yr ago
My experience teaching dumb-seeming people is just tons and tons of password guessing with no fundamental understanding of what they were doing or why. I was constantly confronted with what I started to call 'magical-thinking' where I would notice that students had no underlying grasp on or seeming belief in a consistent reality governed by legible rules. They were just memorizing strings of characters that they were told produce certain other characters. The learning plateau is so short for these people I doubt education beyond basic reading and arithmetic has much real value. Anything they don't use for a month will be lost.
I suspect that there are IQ thresholds for 'cognitive milestones' in the same way that a new born is incapable of object permanence, the two big ones that have stood out to me are reading comprehension and algebra. Again, in a school environment these people can pass a class that is ostensibly testing this skill, but my single biggest frustration as an educator was noticing how good students are at guessing passwords. I also saw this as a student, I am not as highly educated as the average motte users, I took classes at a community college and three different middle-tier state schools all of which are full of students who can pass these classes(and plenty who can't), but try digging into what they read even a little bit outside of the script that they memorized for class and they have no idea what is going on. I suspect that smart people in general overestimate the cognitive toolkit that average and below average people are working with and underestimate the ability of such people to fake it.
Spookykou
1yr ago
I think things like clean air and water, cfc ban, lead, seat belts, and social security are all examples of governments being able to do exactly what I think they can do/want them to do, so I don't feel much need to argue about the platonic ideals of various organizational structures which imply that my preferences are impossible. They are possible, we live in a world where they are being satisfied to an extent, and I just want more.
Spookykou
1yr ago
This assumes that all attempts are equally serious and reflect similar levels of mental anguish. It is also possible that some attempts are less serious and driven by different emotional states. For example, maybe some people are desperate for attention/support/accommodations from the people around them, and understand that an attempted suicide will give them those things. Obviously there are other reasons women might prefer softer options, while still being 'equally depressed', but its not a given that that is what is happening when looking at attempt numbers.
Spookykou
1yr ago
The first argument that I find convincing against the standard libertarian positions is that most people are actually really stupid and a paternalistic government that treats them like children generally creates better outcomes(this is the real secret to Singapore). Take a normal Algebra or English class at a middle of the pack state school, most of the people in the room are still just guessing passwords. I am skeptical that anyone under 110 IQ can actually understand Algebra or get anything from text beyond the explicit meaning of the words without heavy priming. I would put the bottom 60% of Americans in approximately the same bucket as thirteen year-olds and think a kind government should make more choices for them, not less.
The second argument is zero sum positional status games, we would all be better off if society could collectively agree that all jobs get two months paid leave(or whatever) and don't allow any 'sane individuals' to trade that away for higher pay, because they all will, even though the marginal value of an extra dollar is trash, because humans.
Spookykou
1yr ago
My favorite verbal signal while hesitating to kiss a girl was "you better not ask to kiss me", which spurred me to rather successful action.
Spookykou
1yr ago
Just want to second the use of "quotes" to emphasize words with heavy connotation or specific contextual meaning, this (along with parathesis for snippets of slightly tangential information or ideas) are writing habits I picked up from commenting on SSC, probably copying some smarter/cooler person I read there (the / thing is another one).
Spookykou
1yr ago
Upon further reflection, I believe the term I'm looking for is 'inhuman.' To me, those three buildings feel inhuman, ugly, and unnatural. They seem like the creations of a lotus eater who began with a peculiar shape, and then attempted to transform that design into a functional building after the fact, rather than starting with human-friendly, functional spaces and adding aesthetic elements later to enhance their beauty.
These buildings remind me of high-fashion that seldom leaves the runway, worn perhaps only by the designers themselves, or the avant-garde in gastronomy featuring frozen bubbles of crab purée crowned with sea water-infused foam. The objective there isn't to create good clothes or delicious food, rather to create 'art', and in doing so, the primary purpose, and an ineffable authenticity is lost.
When you couple this with the degradation of fine art more generally, I think everything comes together. Modern architects, it seems, are crafting ugly art installations that begrudgingly take on the role of 'buildings' out of necessity.
Spookykou
1yr ago
I don't like most of the Pritzger winners, I went and looked at each of your links, and everyone except Santiago(whose building all look like different shots of the same building, lots of curves, I hate them all as well) has at least one 'concrete box' building. Sure, maybe it is actually a glass and steel box, and it is on it's side, or a glass and steel trapezoid, but personally, 'concrete box' is not a literally description. I would bet that the average person who complains about 'modern architecture', and 'brutalism', and 'concrete boxes', would also hate everything in Rem Koolhaas's portfolio, even if none of them are technically any of those things. Could you please tell me an acceptable short hand so that I can complain about these things without someone complaining that I am using the wrong terms of art. It is not as simple as all new buildings, the campus in the AIA link is mostly fine, although there are modern(though probably not technically) elements that I think strictly detract from the design. Is there a word or phrase that I can use to properly express my distaste for most (maybe all) architectural trends that have emerged over the last 50-100 years?
Spookykou
1yr ago
You would expect to see little to no reduction in fatalities from this kind of proposal, the point is to stop the Uvalde, "kid goes to a store, legally buys a gun, kills a bunch of children." Which is the most inflammatory possible news story that provides the most ammunition for gun-control advocates, even if it is a rounding error in terms of total gun deaths.
I should have known better than to comment on this topic here, I am not very rigorous or deep in my metaphysical beliefs.
Let me try and clarify my internal view, and if you have the time, you can explain what I am doing wrong.
So, I view my own morality and the morality of my society through a largely consequentialist lens, understanding that my ability to fully understand consequences decays rapidly with time, and is never perfect. I view morality as a changing thing that adapts and morphs with new technology, both social and physical. I find the 'concept' of 'utilitarianism' a useful jumping off point for thinking about morality. Obviously this interacts with my own biases, I am not really sure what it would even mean for a person to think about something and not have that problem honestly. I do not view 'utilitarianism' as a solved, or solvable problem, rather as a never ending corrective process.
For example, I am not currently vegan or vegetarian, but I also do not like animal suffering, and I think a lot about this disconnect. Ideally I would like a world that allows me to enjoy all the perks of animal husbandry while reducing as much animal suffering as possible. I think the effort of trying to reduce the amount of suffering in factory farming, reflects a 'utilitarian' effort, but that does not mean I would agree with any particular reality those intuitions suggest. If for example, reducing animal suffering, made it impossible for a lot of people to afford meat or eggs, then that also seems bad, and is another part of the problem to keep working on or striving for solutions to.
My biases manifest in a number of ways, for example, I lean towards observational data in terms of what a better or worse world would look like, so for example, if a particular religion espoused the idea that animals enjoy animal husbandry and or they can only go to heaven if eaten by humans, I would not factor that into my considerations. I also tend to think suffering is bad and happiness and a fulfilment/satisfaction are good, etc.
I guess I view 'morality' as a system or framework that I use to try and evaluate my own actions and the actions of others. I am reliant on the persuasiveness of my arguments in favor of my preferred outcomes to drive other people (and sometimes myself) to respect or adopt a 'morality' similar to my ideals.
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