dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
We were talking here the other day about role models. Conservative role models are easy to come up with, but progressive ones are hard. But then it dawned on me that Anthony Bourdain is a hands down perfect progressive role model.
Let me copy paste it from here https://www.themotte.org/post/900/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/194107?context=8#context
Anthony Bourdain. Humble beginnings doing "real" work as a cook and a chef at a string of New York City restaurants. Has a passion for French cuisine. Then struck out as a writer who published Kitchen Confidential, sharing this quaint but authentic view of a working class life with the world. All of these honorable professions go far among progressives. They are relatable, humble, involve zero obvious exploitation. True honest work.
I've seen this quote of his pop up at various art festivals:
“Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”
So cool.
From humble beginnings, he was signed to do two travel shows, No Reservations and then Parts Unknown, glorfying open-minded exploration and celebration of other cultures: their food, their traditions, their people, etc. Super romantic while still keeping an edgy down-to-Earth quality. Alludes to having lived a life of mild depravity but in a cute way. Seems like he could come up with an amazing wine pairing with seared sea scallops but you can also have a beer with him and shoot the shit. The worst thing you could ever do is suggest going to McDonalds.
He cannot possibly be a better progressive role model. He even struggled from mental illness! Showing that even hard working, successful and productive people who seem happy on the outside can suffer from depression and bring themselves to suicide.
Mild tangent: I can't shake the feeling that his romanticism, attempts at authenticity, never losing his edgy side belied a somewhat destructive live fast die young ethos and may have all been a big cry for help but progressives I've discussed this with don't believe there's any connection between the two at all whatsoever. He just caught mental illness the way anyone can catch flu.
dr_analog
razorboy
7mo ago
That seems like a pretty difficult thing to prove
I thought there are chat logs of him instructing Manning on what commands he should run to hack the US and exfiltrate secrets? That doesn't strike me as run-of-the-mill journalism at that point.
dr_analog
razorboy
7mo ago
Living in a modern Asian city (or New York) definitely has a lot more walking built-in and I absolutely believe you lost weight. But were you... Japanese guy thin?
dr_analog
razorboy
7mo ago
I thought the update (from more than the Huberman camp) is
- studies that show any benefits to even moderate alcohol consumption were p-hacked
- there aren't any health benefits at any amount
- but there probably isn't significant harm from a small amount, like a drink a week
dr_analog
razorboy
7mo ago
Have we really gone so far down the rabbit hole that the only moral lens we are allowed to look at things through is consent?
I mostly like Huberman but I think this is bad behavior. As per the article, I can't really imagine banging 5+ women and letting them each believe I'm exclusively with them (through either bald-faced lies or lies of omission) so that they feel safe being raw dogged.
dr_analog
razorboy
7mo ago
They couldn't point to any of his content that was really harmful. Either they didn't do any research, or he really is that whistle-clean.
There was also the complaint that he demonized alcohol, like this advice is so absurd that it's prima facie wrong and requires no further discussion. Even still, this is unfair as Huberman says in that same podcast he continues to enjoy drinking.
dr_analog
razorboy
7mo ago
Agreed. Sounds like we've settled on: a man of Huberman's status can't organize a harem for himself and have it consist of high-tier women. If you're of Huberman's grade, you have women eager to date you but you need to mislead them about your relationship status if you want your harem.
So... how much more status do you need to actually pull this off? Can Sergey Brin get away with it?
dr_analog
razorboy
7mo ago
Anyone have thoughts on the Huberman article run by NY Magazine? He apparently was dating 5+ women simultaneously, letting each of them believe he was only dating them, and therefore it would be safe to have unprotected sex.
My first reaction is: why did he need to lie about this? He lives in the polyamory capital of the world? Surely plenty of women would be down?
On further thought, I wonder if he didn't want to do the poly thing because you'd have to go through the process of electing a #1 girlfriend that you can swap fluids with, and then for girlfriends #2-5 you have to use condoms and that's no fun.
But on even more advanced thought, perhaps this is a signal that poly is actually pretty low status? If an adored sensitive smart hot famous-ish science-y guy can't even be honest about his sexual desires and find suitable partners, again, in the Bay Area (!), that suggests poly has a very, very long road to general acceptance.
dr_analog
razorboy
7mo ago
I keep coming back to the fact that Japan does actual fat shaming, on an institutional level even (employers fined if employee waist sizes are too big) and as a result doesn't suffer from high obesity.
This should put the disease model of obesity to bed, unless we believe the Japanese, who love 7-11s and convenience perhaps even more than Westerners do, are somehow genetically immune or their food is still so much more pure.
dr_analog
razorboy
8mo ago
So.
Is there any good evidence that organic produce has health benefits or that conventional produce is health detrimental?
We've been doing thie for... 20+ years now?
I should make this a top-post. But for now: Anthony Bourdain. Humble beginnings doing "real" work as a cook and a chef at a string of New York City restaurants. Has a passion for French cuisine. Then struck out as a writer who published Kitchen Confidential, sharing this quaint but authentic view of a working class life with the world. All of these honorable professions go far among progressives. They are relatable, humble, involve zero obvious exploitation. True honest work.
I've seen this quote of his pop up at various art festivals:
“Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”
From humble beginnings, he was signed to do two travel shows, No Reservations and then Parts Unknown, glorfying open-minded exploration and celebration of other cultures: their food, their traditions, their people, etc. Super romantic while still keeping an edgy down-to-Earth quality. Alludes to having lived a life of mild depravity but in a cute way. Seems like he could come up with an amazing wine pairing with seared sea scallops but you can also have a beer with him and shoot the shit. The worst thing you could ever do is suggest going to McDonalds.
He cannot possibly be a better progressive role model. He even struggled from mental illness! Showing that even hard working, successful and productive people who seem happy on the outside can suffer from depression and bring themselves to suicide.
Mild tangent: I can't shake the feeling that his romanticism, attempts at authenticity, never losing his edgy side belied a somewhat destructive live fast die young ethos and may have all been a big cry for help but progressives I've discussed this with don't believe there's any connection between the two at all whatsoever. He just caught mental illness the way anyone can catch flu.
I can think of a lot of progressive musicians or artists who I admired but none of them seemed like they had a life I could ever achieve. Or necessarily ones I'd want to achieve. So, probably not fair to say they're role models. At least for me.
I do wonder if progressives think these role models are actually a lot more legitimate because they could imagine themselves getting great at guitar and being world famous musicians and touching people through beautiful music or whatever. Whereas those conservative role models are such conformist boring trad-squares.
EDIT: actually, Anthony Bourdain. I'm sure a lot of progressives consider him a role model, though in the wake of his suicide all of his romantic world-spanning zeal seems like a desperate cry for help slash running from his demons or whatever.
EDIT2: thinking further, I'm really amazed by what a perfect progressive role model Anthony Bourdain is. Holy shit.
dr_analog
razorboy
8mo ago
After experiencing some shocking data mangling, I noticed this part of SQLite3's documentation and it made me run screaming
A column with NUMERIC affinity may contain values using all five storage classes. When text data is inserted into a NUMERIC column, the storage class of the text is converted to INTEGER or REAL (in order of preference) if the text is a well-formed integer or real literal, respectively. If the TEXT value is a well-formed integer literal that is too large to fit in a 64-bit signed integer, it is converted to REAL. For conversions between TEXT and REAL storage classes, only the first 15 significant decimal digits of the number are preserved. If the TEXT value is not a well-formed integer or real literal, then the value is stored as TEXT. For the purposes of this paragraph, hexadecimal integer literals are not considered well-formed and are stored as TEXT. (This is done for historical compatibility with versions of SQLite prior to version 3.8.6 2014-08-15 where hexadecimal integer literals were first introduced into SQLite.) If a floating point value that can be represented exactly as an integer is inserted into a column with NUMERIC affinity, the value is converted into an integer. No attempt is made to convert NULL or BLOB values.
dr_analog
razorboy
8mo ago
I guess I was hoping to see a definition of "conservative role model" that didn't automatically imply religious.
Seems like the ghist of it is
- happy embracing fatherhood
- devoted/providing husband
- works hard
- successful at work
- proud of work
dr_analog
razorboy
8mo ago
Mm, I'll take your word for it. I'm pretty unimpressed by SQLite :P
I haven't much experience with scout and church leaders though I also was a teenage admirer of John Carmack. I realize I knew very little about him until I listened to his four hour Lex interview
What makes him a good young role model? Even in a space like video games he can make a mark and be successful
- deeply throwing himself into his work; stories about how Michael Abrash would leave him at the office on Friday and come back on Monday and see that John had been there the whole weekend hacking away trying to optimize Quake
- shamelessly learning from every source possible (he mentioned consuming programming magazines and even reading ads for educational value)
- was not credentialed but he didn't let that stop him
- was actually kind of a young cyber-criminal (black hat hacker) but that didn't define his future
- doesn't let his obsession with nerdiness have him eschew physical fitness: he's also a fit and in-shape BJJ practitioner
- still ate pizza his whole life, every day, from Domino's
- presumably still found a happy healthy relationship with a woman and is a father that provides for his family and also spends time with them?
- mentions stuff about taking vacations to hotel rooms next to an airport just so he can get away and concentrate on his work undisturbed
- oh also bought himself Ferraris to play with after he became wealthy why not
Okay he seems pretty awesome. Someone kids could look up to.
Does this stuff make him a conservative male role model though?
dr_analog
razorboy
8mo ago
And conservative communities have little difficulty producing positive role models for boys. Which seems like an obvious drawback- leftist communities need to astroturf someone into a role that is already filled elsewhere.
Asked with genuine and humble curiosity, what are some positive conservative role models for boys?
dr_analog
razorboy
8mo ago
I've had a reasonable amount of hands on time with Claude Opus, and I would rate it as indistinguishable from GPT-4 in terms of usefulness, or at least I can't tell any obvious disparities after tens of thousands of tokens of conversation.
So, if I'm only going to pay for one, ChatGPT4 or Opus, is it worth switching from ChatGPT4?
dr_analog
razorboy
8mo ago
Wait. I guess we're not disagreeing here that much. I looked over your grandparent post again because I thought you were expressing more confusion about why dealers aren't being rational economic agents but it seems like you're not. Whoops.
Thanks for humoring me!
dr_analog
razorboy
8mo ago
I believe you're substantially overestimating how smart street dealers are. They might want repeat business but they probably don't understand how to get it and also give up immediately if posed with even a slight challenge because they run out of brain juice. Measuring and mixing a potent drug like fentanyl into your supply of meth (or whatever) seems easy to manage to us, but given people with (e.g.) 80 IQ can't even microwave food I wouldn't trust street dealers to do this well at all.
dr_analog
razorboy
8mo ago
Right. The state legislature did touch it in this case! They rolled parts of it back and re-criminalized drugs.
Initiative petitions are often a clown-show, but on the other hand, they're a good vehicle for testing risky policy that career politicians might never put their name on. If it's a huge disaster the career politicians can step in and take credit for rolling it back.
This seems good, actually!
Drug dealers don't generally want to kill their customers as a general class. Some, specific customers, like ones that are extorting drugs from the dealer at knifepoint, sure, but as a general class no. Dead people don't buy more drugs, and drug dealers want to sell drugs.
No offense but have you met many drug dealers? Like everyone has their cool guy that hooks them up with the best LSD imaginable like it's some sacrament but that is not the norm at all. My Ayn Rand view of them was shattered when I bought drugs on the street a few times. They often don't know what they're selling, in the concentrations that they're selling. They don't particularly care about repeat business. They don't care if they kill you. They're also generally too dumb to even think about testing their stuff or weigh things. If they are smart enough to weight things they're probably not going to buy the $300 milligram scale when the whippet shop sells some that advertises milligram precision for $20. They may be addicts themselves. They are not rational economic actors.
Drug dealing doesn't primarily attract smart entrepreneurial people who to make a fortune. It attracts rather unsmart, not well people who have very few other options for making money.
dr_analog
razorboy
8mo ago
Sure, but, what do with this information? Have the state manufacture pure fentanyl and dose junkies up in safe use sites?
dr_analog
razorboy
8mo ago
It's cute we can still laugh at the "A|B testing" ravaging our cities like this is all a Sim City game and we can load after the aliens destroyed the map.
It is cute but I think it's actually good to run experiments? Don't we bemoan vetocracies and general unwillingness by politicians to take risks? Initiative petitions (referendums) appear to be a good outlet for some direct democracy.
We do get some good outcomes from time to time and the fact that we rolled back so quickly is a credit.
If you asked this question two years ago I'm sure the sentiment would have been that the West Oregon leftists that dominate state political power would never roll back such a pro-drug law that was wrapped in racial justice.
Wow.
You've really cut to the heart of what I was fumbling at here https://www.themotte.org/post/933/what-caused-the-suicide-of-anthony/202738?context=8#context
Progressive types see him as a hero. Purely virtuous, a man to aspire to. Implying his suicide could have anything to do with his spectacle is the closest one could come to commiting a sin.
The irony. It's too much.
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