ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
2mo ago
A bit of column A, a bit of column B, and some caveats, but yeah, that's a fair paraphrase.
If you're asking me to make the media blitz and astroturfed social media campaign somehow palatable or something that's worth rationally participating in, well, that's a big ask. The thing that pushes me most towards Trump is seeing that and thinking "Trump losing will make those people happy."
ThenElection
2mo ago
As someone now leaning Kamala (despite having some nasty things to say about her earlier), she isn't embarrassing in the same way Biden was (or Trump, to a lesser extent, is). When she does something goofy, it's more endearing than terrifying.
I'm unhappy with both candidates' "policy platforms," but in the end neither will be enacted to a meaningful extent. Kamala's also more allied with my geography and employers, so I might receive more benefits from federal largesse.
Does that count as enthusiasm? Hah. My vote doesn't matter anyway.
ThenElection
2mo ago
Prosecuting fraud will encourage even more scientific groupthink. The only results that will ever get much scrutiny for fraud are those that seem exceptional; someone manufacturing data that supports whatever the consensus is on Topic may hypothetically be subject to prosecution, but they'll rarely be prosecuted. Publish something questioning it, though, and you'll have lots of enemies digging through your work to find something that could be construed as fraud to get rid of you permanently.
You might say, just don't commit fraud, and you'll be safe. But that's not even true: if you're a PI, you rely on lots of different people. And it's often impossible for someone external to know who is responsible and who is passing a buck. And even when there isn't fraud, a simple mistake can be construed as fraud if your enemies are sufficiently motivated.
ThenElection
2mo ago
I'd dispute even first among equals. Claude Sonnet 3.5 is nearly always my go-to nowadays, falling back to GPT-4o when it's overloaded. (I will sometimes try the same prompt across all of Gemini/ChatGPT/Claude just to make sure they don't catch anything Claude would miss, and DeepSeek for code, but I've yet to be surprised.)
That said, I'd be surprised if Gemini and ChatGPT haven't caught up to/surpassed where Claude is today by end of year. But it's hard to imagine any of them building an enduring lead unless one has something up their sleeve.
ThenElection
3mo ago
I'll be stealing that analogy; it is much stronger and more relatable (and has probably been actually realized at some point!) than the violinist.
Clearly it isn't a racial problem, because HongKong has shown itself to be capable of amazing art, especially movies. Chinese-Americans also seem to be doing decently in the contemporary art scene. But mainland china is a creative desert. I won't bury the lede, Communism kills creativity.
For Hong Kong, I'd go out of my way to point out that it went beyond mere capability for amazing art. For two decades or so (pre and shortly after the handover), it hit far above its weight, arguably being the most culturally productive place in the world per capita, in film. Not just wuxia and martial arts: In the Mood for Love is a movie that is both genuinely loved and widely acclaimed in the global film community as one of the greatest movies of all time.
I'm not sure it's communism per se that did it. Mainland China was starting to produce some films of note (cf Zhang Yimou's oeuvre), but the industry was stillborn. I think it's more about living in liminal zones, in space and time. Conflicts arise, and the future can play out in multiple different ways. Choice and agency matter. Genuine art can exist only in those zones. Otherwise, it's just remixes of what has been that serve to reinforce existing structures and patterns.
ThenElection
3mo ago
Why do something that's new and very hard to implement when you can just raise income taxes, which already have an infrastructure set up and aren't as tricky to get non-market valuations on?
I don't actually think it's a conscious attempt to separate Musk from his companies, but it's also clearly not just a way to raise revenues, since existing channels could work at least as well and likely better.
ThenElection
3mo ago
It would probably usually end up being the loan principal. Maybe since it'd be a bigger loan, the rate would be a touch higher.
ThenElection
3mo ago
It would incentivize different things. A flat tax on imputed human capital appreciation would encourage people to either not get a degree or to go for careers that pay a lot. Education for a percentage of future earnings would encourage people to go for low paying careers with a good work life balance.
To make it a truer analogy to the proposal, probably different degrees should have different human capital gains. So educational programs that increase human capital more would incur more tax.
ThenElection
3mo ago
This got me to thinking: why not have a unrealized capital gains tax on human capital? If you get a degree of any sort, 44% of the assessed increase in human capital is due in taxes. Net present value of a bachelor's degree is somewhere between a quarter and a half million dollars
ThenElection
3mo ago
You convincingly establish that the policy is really, spectacularly dumb.
You don't establish how it being really, spectacularly dumb would prevent it from happening.
ThenElection
3mo ago
Descriptively, I agree that a man who can't pay for dates would be much better served by getting to the point where he can pay for dates than by other areas to put effort in.
As to what should be, I'm neutral. A point I would make is that trad and modern male gender roles aren't a rejection of each other: they're largely the same, at least in terms of what women find attractive for a suitable partner. Here, it's the man pays. Even feminists have taken to justifying the norm with references to the pay gap/cost of makeup/dating risk.
What incels see is that the male gender role has the same responsibilities put on it as before, but with a weakened social basis for men to fulfill it. The hollowing out of the middle class, the fetishization of bureaucratic over productive roles, various cultural norms.
And, without the ability to achieve enough masculinity to attract a mate, they give up altogether and turn into passive, pathetic creatures. Who won't be leading a revolution or even stochastic violence higher than noise level.
ThenElection
3mo ago
The effect isn't primarily through direct government suppression. Maybe one or two people with nasty rhetoric will be punished, but it's about generating a news story "look at how evil incels are," not any real likelihood that they'll act. You'll probably have a government unit dedicated to convincing young, stupid men to say they'll commit outrageous violence, just for the sake of making sure that story percolates through media on a regular basis.
Its effect will primarily be to reenforce among women that men complaining about, well, anything are icky and low status (note that "dangerous" is not one of those adjectives). A guy complaining about his inability to pay for dates is really just an entitled incel, so he deserves to be excluded from society. And he certainly doesn't deserve to have his complaints treated as a systemic issue, because we live in a perfect utopian world where anything bad that happens is men's own fault.
Men will then self-censor and retreat from a losing battlefield, at best working until they become a good cog in the system or (more likely) turning in on themselves and self-soothing with video games and porn, until eventually hanging themselves.
Incels won't be a threat to the system, because men who are plausible leaders will never be actual incels, and no one will take the massive status hit that comes with taking up any incel-adjacent positions. Instead, incels will just end up being a drag on the system, supported by the dole and their parents' retirement funds. It's also a self-correcting problem: the more men that drop out, the easier it is for the remaining men. The negative feedback loop ensures the system is stable.
ThenElection
3mo ago
The Cultural Revolution was a bit more complicated. Mao had been powerful in the 1950s, but the disaster of the Great Leap Forward had led to him being sidelined, in favor of leaders (Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi) who were focused on nonrevolutionary governance like making sure that people had food to eat and that there was a functioning military, which he felt was inappropriate. He was more of a figurehead than someone anyone trusted with real responsibilities or power.
Still an authority figure, but it was more of a revolutionary coup than a consolidation of existing power.
ThenElection
3mo ago
It was not uncommon for swords to be banned in urban areas or when walking around in public. Sometimes broader attempts were made: the Qin dynasty (ever the innovator in methods of social control) mass confiscated weapons more generally and only allowed agents of the state to own arms. That was comparatively rare, even in China: if you have hordes of barbarians always testing the reach and authority of your state, you need peasants to be able to defend themselves.
ThenElection
3mo ago
As someone who used ozempic for aesthetic weight loss... It's pretty insane. Cured my nicotine habit and brought my borderline alcoholism to maybe one-drink-a-week.
It also killed my libido. I've not heard much about that as a side effect, but a model where it works by just shutting down pleasure circuits seems to be consistent with it as a side effect.
Also helped my anxiety and spouts with depression, though. I expect it'll be really hard to disentangle all these effects.
ThenElection
3mo ago
Should an entire ethnic group be held responsible for the actions of some of its members, many of whom are not even members of the present generation?
I would guess that most people here would say "of course not." Concepts like race guilt and blood guilt are noxious. (I'd actually be interested in hearing from someone who believes in them earnestly).
It's almost always brought up, though, in response to claims that white people bear collective race guilt for their ancestors winning against indigenous people. And that's kind of a pretty weird standard: why should race guilt only start applying once the crimes that impart us with race guilt have stopped?
Honestly, it's sort of dehumanizing to historical Native Americans. It reduces them to little fairy children dancing in the forest, totally innocent of all sin until the evil Whites came and ruined their utopia. They become dumb creatures lacking all agency, only existing to function as symbols in internecine white conflict.
ThenElection
3mo ago
Is that (mutual funds, ETFs, or individual stocks) under $10,000; or mutual funds, ETFs, or (individual stocks under $10,000)?
ThenElection
3mo ago
Normies just don't think about trans stuff, and they don't want to think about trans stuff. Intentionally bringing up trans stuff is annoying, which is why it's bad for Trump. Normies would also be annoyed by someone making a big fuss to get tampons put in boys' bathroom, but so long as they don't have to encounter it, they are happy.
Analogously, suppose it were the case that right wingers were really into anime tentacle porn. This would disgust normies, and they wouldn't like it. However, if the Harris campaign continuously brought it up, those feelings of disgust would bounce back to the Harris campaign.
ThenElection
3mo ago
What would this even look like?
Plus, why interrupt your opponent when they're making a mistake? China doesn't need the US to fall into civil war. It just needs us to let our military slowly lose its edge, our industrial supply chains wither on the vine, and our people lose interest in contesting Taiwan. All of those trend lines except the last are pretty much baked into the cake for the next decade, and probably having domestic issues displace foreign issues in American public opinion is the easiest way to get the last (and much easier than nurturing a domestic fifth column).
ThenElection
3mo ago
Internal system that is actually pretty solid (in the sense that ✅🤡💩 etc. carry a pretty meaningful signal). Why the emojis then? My suspicion is that the team who trained it doesn't want it being used the way we want to use it (or, rather, the way our PM and our users want it to be used), which is the only thing that makes sense to me.
The overarching issue is wanting to shove LLMs into everything. Tokens corresponding to emojis aren't really any worse than tokens corresponding to floats, but people would take the float tokens and treat them much more seriously than they warrant.
ThenElection
3mo ago
I usually think a lot of the red pill rhetoric about social shit tests is nonsense, but stuff like this makes me think they might have a genuine point. "Give out really bad advice that someone with zero social skills might take seriously, and then you increase the chances that they'll take it and reveal their lack of social skills in a way that makes women more able to avoid them."
ThenElection
3mo ago
Hilariously, I did pretty much exactly what she suggests in college (kept tampons in my dorm room, so if a female friend needed one, I'm at the ready!) The one time the opportunity came up, it played out exactly as you'd expect, weirding out not just her but everyone in the room.
There really are guys who buy advice like that. Usually someone a bit on the spectrum who listens to what people say they want and takes it literally. All the "friend-zoning" advice is right up that alley. I don't know why "get fit, put on muscle, and exhibit extroversion and dominance in social situations" is so hated as advice, even though it provides about 200% of the value of the aggregate dating advice given and would solve 99% of guys' issues.
ThenElection
3mo ago
If she can successfully manage not to interact with any voters for 2 months, that's a huge win on her part. If I were her campaign manager, I'd be telling her to do exactly that (making it until election day would be even better). Go have fancy dinners with donors, talk to friendly and allied interviewers, maybe take a month long vacation at the beach, and let the media and TikTok do all the heavy lifting. It's a pretty solid strategy.
Everything also costs lives if you do it right. We just try to balance the net costs and benefits of things and try as best we can to figure out which option gets us in the green.
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