cae_jones
6mo ago
So typical that reading this comment made me go "wait, it's not like that in Europe?" For a country whose selling point has supposedly always been freedom, I had so little that, when that technically changed after high school, it was like one of those wild animals bred in captivity with no concept of how to live in the wild. The most freedom I got was on that one high school band trip to Universal Studios Orlando, in which I was the goody two-shoes stopping my 16-17 year-old companions from trying to order alcohol from a restaurant that seemed more than willing to believe that the tall guy in the group was actually 21.
... Wait, what freedoms do I have that Europeans lack? I guess I could get a weapon if I wanted?
cae_jones
6mo ago
American, fwiw, but elementary was without exaggeration the best period of my life and not a day goes by that I don't grieve its being in the ever-more-distant past. Most of the negative things I could say about the experience come from the benefit of hindsight, ex, I got away with far more than I should have, but conversely wasn't well included or socialized and was one weird hat away from being the class Luna Lovegood.
But, regarding peers, teachers, and family, and what roles they played? I am struggling to come up with a meaningful description. It wasn't until I was 11 that I actually picked up any grievances toward teachers (mostly just one cranky old math teacher who was probably just getting too old to put up with my bullcrap). The most stressful year was probably grade 4 (age 9), mostly because homework went from "I guess that counts as homework" to "when did finishing a chapter and several dozen math problems become a Herculean labor of focus?". Also I thinkt's the year my backpack ripped from all the books and papers I had to carry around.
7th-8th grades and high school ... weren't as miserable as college, but very little short of watching loved ones die has been as miserable as college, so not a high bar. Mostly, the majority of what made elementary great was replaced with having to listen to tryhard teenagers call everything gay / skanky, trying to actively resist the cultureshift resulting in getting sent off to summer camp, so I just gave up and avoided people for the rest of hs. I got into the state's math and science school for the last two years, and that was a huge improvement, though by then my sleep cycle was all out of whack and I had been able to half-ass everything to the point that I had like no study skills, so I kinda oscillated between successfully half-assing and getting destroyed until I somehow graduated on time (basically one of two non-terrible days that year), only for things to immediately get far worse thereafter.
SO basically, the polar opposite of what seems to be the norm, from the general vibes I've gotten from online discussions. Each phase was worse than its predecessor by quite a lot. It was usually because of a change in peer behavior most of all, but also me never having to learn how to try until I got to college, and discovered that absolutely nobody had the vocabulary to talk about soul-crushing akrasia or the neurological underpinnings and everyone just going on about choice and distraction and other irrelevant concepts. But mostly the alienation only started around age 12-13, kinda backed off a bit in high school, then came back with avengance when college began. Teachers were mostly fine. Parents were mostly fine. Peers were fine until they got to the age where they had to start signalling how mature they were by immaturely sexualizing absolutely everything, usually insultingly, like that would prove how totally not the thing they were saying they were.
I'm going to go imagine going back in time and yelling at 11-year-old me with all the hindsight-powered "how to be better" type wisdom I can unfairly foist onto an obnoxious 11-year-old again. 😔
cae_jones
6mo ago
I don't know anything anymore. One of the 19 year olds who stood next to me as the first tents were going up a few days ago, James, asked me what "encampment" meant. I thought he was joking, or at least asking what it meant in this specific context. No, actually. He, a sophomore at Penn, genuinely has never heard the word before. These are our best and brightest.
Was he ESL? Otherwise, wtf you don't even need to have heard the word if you're familiar with English. Camp with a prefix that means to be in or engage in, and the suffix ment makes it a noun. I've only ever heard the word in stories about protesters and combattants, and never heard the definition. I'm basing this on context clues and being fluent in English. Is there some nuance I've been missing this entire time?
Because, uh, it feels like the only way lacking that level of English comprehension should be possible while still becoming a Sophomore at any college that fancies itself prestigious is if the sophomore in question is ESL. I guess they could be there for athletics or similar?
cae_jones
7mo ago
I am at least down with giving the Sun something of a lipectemy (heliectemy?) to extend its life. Would prefer it never be completely dismantled, for sentimental reasons. Maybe convert it into a constellation of red dwarves.
cae_jones
7mo ago
Hot take: the unfalsifiable identity anchor thing is behind the evolution of Wokism to Transism. You can argue with citations about the forces of Whiteness™, but when trans ideology comes down to gender as a metaphysical / spiritual thing which someone experiences, rather than physical sex or physically detectable brain or hormonal abnormalities, it enters the realm of unfalsifiable identity anchor. Previous attempts at having Whiteness or The Patriarchy fill the role of unfalsifiable spiritual force are less personal, and more antagonistic, whereas Transism is about personal identity.
cae_jones
8mo ago
Anecdotally, when he gets into the neuroscience of how emotions and motivation and such work, what he has to offer tends to be helpful. I think he relates things to adiction so much in part because that's the specific area he originally focused his practice, and also because it's been studied heavily and appears to have some transferable lessons associated with it.
FWIW, I attribute the amount of stuff I've been getting done over the past two years largely to what I've learned from like two or three of Dr. K's videos. However, it's clear from some videos that this is not as straightforward for everyone in his audience. Charitably, I'd hope the coaching program is both to get a more personalized assist going for those who need it, and to make up for the psychiatry practice he loses by spending so much time on Twitch. More pessimistically, the coaching program reminds me way too much of PUAs and things like that Sales Mentor thing that I just found a mail in my spam folder from that admits they got in trouble with the FTC. But he's way, way less pushy about the coaching ads than those types, so I'm holding out for the charitable version.
cae_jones
9mo ago
<Pedantry> Actually, blind people can feel the heat from the sun, and use it to navigate. A better example would be the moon, stars, or planets.</pedantry>
cae_jones
10mo ago
Anecdotally, I've started therapy and been discharged a few times. First time, college counselor kept asking me if I was suicidal in a way that started to seem like she was encouraging it, then when this led to no changes after several sessions, said to just stop coming. (The South Park script for this one basically writes itself.). The most recent happened because the medication seemed to be working and the therapy side of things was just kinda coasting.
Basically, college counselors suck. Male therapists are more likely to try to problem-solve, if you can find one who wasn't trained specifically not to problem-solve (Dr. K of Healthy Gamer has videos on this, but he puts out so many videos it's a pain to dig up one in particular when commenting from my phone). And a therapist/psychiatrist team is better than either separately. Also, Dr. K's recommendations are better than any therapist I've ever dealt with (the only one that came close, I lost because of losing my insurance for a few months).
cae_jones
10mo ago
For me, the idea of theAlt Right kinda blurred together with NRX via the SSC comments section and the various articles playing 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon with various Rationalists and various flavors of White Supremacism / Nationalism / HBD / whatever. The key difference was established by Richard Spencer doing the Nazi salutes toward Trump, whereas NRX tended to treat Nazis as merely the flavor of totalitarian Leftism that lost the war. So the alt right I guess felt like it was discount Reaction meant to appeal to people less likely to read Moldbug and more likely to hang out on 4chan.
Maybe my memory is faulty, but I remember all this being established before Hillery Clinton and Richard Spencer elevated it to national attention. I distinctly remember posting on Facebook after the Unite the Right incident that I was surprised to learn there were apparently actual Neonazi slogans and styles involved, because of the Boy Who Cried Wolf effect getting me use to "Nazi" basically meaning "someone I hate", and having associated the Alt Right more with the kind of talk from SSC commenters than Richard Spencer.
cae_jones
10mo ago
There's a way to get into your Google profile and view what it thinks of you, and make changes if you wish. I don't remember how, exactly; the last time I tried, I got so annoyed that it thought I only graduated high school that I nearly added my education history, before remembering that I don't actually care for Google knowing everything about me. I think it's something something accounts.google.com, but, it's also Google, so there's probably some encantation that will convince the search box to send you there.
cae_jones
11mo ago
OK, but, Revelation says repeatedly that returned Jesus has a twoedged sword protruding from his mouth (and in the scene with the steed, he also has a rod of iron). So ... what must one do to get this super Saiyan Jesus a mouth-sword?
cae_jones
11mo ago
Re: Kwanzaa, I finally met someone who celebrates it instead of Christmas last year. Otherwise, my only exposure was Nickelodeon ads for the Rugrats Kwanzaa special (which I somehow never managed to catch), and TFS throwing in a mention into one of their holiday videos.
Speaking of Rugrats, that's also the majority of my education on Hanukkah. Never did get the origin of the potato pancakes thing, since potatos are not a crop I'd generally associate with Iron Age Israel. Something to do with a prohibition on leavened bread?
But the Rugrats Hanukkah special did make Hanukkah out to be a bigger deal than Passover, which in hindsight is kinda clearly coming from the present, given that the Passover special focused primarily on the Exodus story, while the Hanukkah special spent more time on the characters, while the backstory got like two short scenes. (But Grandpa Boris's narration on the finale was oddly intense and sincere for a NickToon, IIRC.)
Oh, and in college one year, a Jewish student taught his friend group how to play Dreidel, and we also watched the original Godzilla Vs Mothra, so that was fun I guess.
cae_jones
11mo ago
Fair. I do think there is a preferable middleground between Communism and law of the Jungle, but finding it without painting the planet red has proven challenging.
cae_jones
11mo ago
[citation needed]
I did just learn that it only takes one sentence and a slight amount of context to make me utterly despise a total stranger, so that's ... worrying.
... You're the "you hate it because it's true" type, aren't you?
I hate it because it's evil. True things can be evil, in which case, reallity and we fight until something changes. Reallity has a rather stronger W/L ratio than hunans in general, much less this particular human, and yet, somehow, I'm still not surrendering.
And now I need to find a way to express why I said it's evil. While I generally prefer equality to status hierarchies, I'm not so sure I find hierarchies in general evil. So somewhere between amoral hierarchies and dick-up-your-ass, the problem manifests.
cae_jones
11mo ago
Hyperbolic use of "literally" when the context doesn't make it obvious leaves me feeling like I must correct the record, lest someone take it exactly as literally as written.
When I was 12, 13, and 3/4 of 14, I:
- Had gone through puberty.
- Had gone through (pathetic and nearly useless) sex ed.
- Had never encountered, searched for, or meaningfully considered searching for porn.
- To the extent that I had any awareness of shame/pride cultures surrounding sexuality, it was less about signalling experience, and more about signalling heterosexuality, under threat of being called gay. I hated this and refused to participate as expected, and thus perished my social life (what little there was, anyway).
- Was annoyed by how much my peers (many of whom seemed to get to puberty 2 or 3 years later than me) took to making everything about sex.
- Did not masturbate. TBH, I misunderstood what the word meant, and thought it was specifically referring to autofelatio. (Yes, the physical functionality was there. First nocturnal emission was around 2.5-3 months after 12th birthday. I remember when, event-wise, but not the precise date.)
- Actually obtaining sex or sexual release was not actually on my mind much? I'm not sure if I can clerify this one without getting more detailed than I'd like.
- To be clear, no, my lack of masturbating at this time did not fall into the exceptions listed in the OP. I wasn't "resisting"; it just straight-up wasn't something in possibility space, so far as "things to do when bored and alone" were concerned.
I can see how that "have I mentioned I'm heterosexual today, and that y're totally a gay skank?" culture seems explanation enough for why middle school boys would over-report sexual experience, "literally all of them"? Did I misinterpret this?
cae_jones
11mo ago
I'm having a hard time deciding what a reasonable ban duration for drunkposting on a holiday should be. I keep defaulting to 1 day, but that only functions like throwing someone in the drunktank until they're sober, and that only works if you catch them in time. OTOH, more than 3d feels excessive, unless there's an existing pattern. But in this case, 4d would keep them in the drunktank until the next thread... Ugh, it's good I'm not a mod.
cae_jones
11mo ago
Would it be reasonable to summarize as "Deontology is consequentialism in advance"? It seems like the point is that, come time for decision-making, rationalizing a suboptimal decision is easier than you'd expect, so it's better to have the decision already set. The downside being that genuinely out-of-context problems might return garbage when put through Deontological checks, but it's also easy to convince yourself something is an OOCP when it isn't, too...
cae_jones
11mo ago
As I recall, you rather dislike HPMoR, but this discussion reminds me of the one time it did make an argument in favor of deontology. ... in chapter 108, and I'm not sure if we have spoiler tags, here?
It's much easier to make a convincing-sounding argument to violate a rule, than to find a genuinely good and acceptable reason to violate the rule. Even profoundly intelligent people are vulnerable to deception, biases, temptations, etc, and that makes deontological injunctions a valid defense against those failure modes.
In my experience, the downside is that, when breaking a rule fails to have any noticeable negative consequences, it becomes easier to break the rule in the future. One might argue that this is a sign that said rule wasn't worth having in the first place, to which I must point out that the way the brain associates actions with outcomes can only predict so far ahead on incomplete information. See also: the crack and opioid epidemics, small lies that turn into a house of cards you're forced to live in, how the whole free love and hookup culture things turned out...
cae_jones
1yr ago
I had no idea it was changing. I got up somewhere between 1 and 2, hopped on my computer at what I thought was 2:00AM, then the next I checked the time, it was nearly 2:00AM again. No notifications or anything; it was all done so quietly, I had to check the default calendar to confirm it was for DST.
Had I slept through the first 1:00AM entirely, I'd probably have completely failed to notice anything until someone said something.
cae_jones
1yr ago
This. When 9/11 happened, it was abundantly clear to me that the hijackers were villains, fullstop. But it bothered me more when the Bush administration used every excuse in the book afterward to justify invading not one, but two countries, though neither seemed to hold up under scrutiny. Evil people doing evil is bad and tragic, but not that weird. The alleged good-guys turning into trigger-happy invaders, though, is almost like betrayal.
Please notice that I have not expressed any opinions on Israel Vs Palestine, here. Just citing an example of the explanation for disproportionate judgment.
cae_jones
1yr ago
Did I miss a comment somewhere, or is that article about removing a scene of two gay men forceably abducting a teenager,? That, ah, seems a bit more than horny gay guys mistaking straight guy for gay. I think the child abduction and presumed rape is the immoral part?
Apologies if I missed some comment somewhere that zooms out to what you said instead.
The first guess that comes to mind is that height is plainly visible, and IQ is not.
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