faceh
1d ago
Yes, and dating an obvious foreigner seems like a universal way to rebel against the overculture/go "fuck you, dad."
faceh
1d ago
You'll find girls doing the kickboxing workouts for cardio. You'll find far fewer that do the version where they're actually getting kicked and punched.
My gym also holds special females-only BJJ classes, which doesn't get ANY pushback from any parties whatsoever about lack of inclusivity because it is better for everyone involved.
As for Akido, I have particular feelings about it as anything other than fun techniques to train.
Black men, due to higher muscularity, higher extroversion, and other “traits”, are viewed as the most masculine of the races.
...balanced out, mind you, by higher rates of obesity, lower educational attainment (manosphere takes it as a given that women won't seriously date someone who doesn't have equal or greater credentials than she), more of them in prison (i.e. out of the dating pool) and of course less wealth in general.
And this is only to lead into my point about "Passport Bros" as a class. The literal main thing they have going for them in the foreign dating market is the ability to offer a quick path to American Citizenship.
That's it. Beyond anything else, they are a golden ticket to getting established in the States.
So for black males in particular, who would struggle otherwise with competing for a high quality mate, they are on an much more equal playing field when the only question is how quickly they can transplant the new lady to the states and marry her so she can move along towards citizenship.
Now, I don't think this explains the full phenomenon, but I've seen enough foreign wives using marriage to an American male as a fulcrum to gaining citizenship (and, if the husband is particularly old, getting access to his wealth when he dies) that I have no illusions about what ACTUALLY attracts foreign women to American males.
faceh
2d ago
I wouldn't bet on that.
If they can play the "exploiting vulnerable minorities" and "objectification of women" angles they can attack from that side if they want.
Or they can start pushing the "healthy at any size" and "trans women are women!" angle to force said clubs to accept... less enticing employees.
Now, prostitution will continue to exist in spite of any and all attempts to thwart it, but I do think they can make it impossible for such 'third spaces' to exist easily.
The Dojo has the unavoidable barrier to entry of physical fitness, and I've yet to see anyone who can undermine any martial arts/combat system other than by producing a better system (i.e. how BJJ took over MMA for a long time).
Interesting point.
I've argued elsewhere that martial arts gyms/dojos are pretty much the last bastion of healthy male masculinity that hasn't been invaded by woke culture. Because end of the day, there is simply no amount of social maneuvering that will make up for the strength differential between men and women, and you can't 'fake' martial arts skills without willing participants, which makes entryism nigh-impossible.
But yeah, despite pressure from both sides of the political spectrum, strip clubs and various other sex-adjacent spaces where men can pay to skip the formalities and just get to the T&A do a pretty good job filtering as well.
Implicitly, the females in these spaces are there to look pretty and be quiet (unless it is part of the tease) and this is 'enforced' when they rely on earning tips.
Lefties have given some cover to these places too, by being 'sex-positive,' 'pro-slut,' and 'anti-christian' to the extent they like that dens of vice piss off a certain segment of the right, and (probably) provide a wedge to bring in LGBT matters.
But yeah, the fact that guys can use these places to form reliable partnerships and create networks that aren't so legible while filtering out guys who have hangups that might turn into liabilities later makes them useful.
I would definitely say I prefer the Dojo as the healthy alternative, but if it works and persists across decades, hard to say its doing something 'wrong.'
faceh
3d ago
I made some money on a prediction market by betting the film would receive decent reviews. Every previous entry had received good reviews, and the trailer for this one looked good.
Maybe I'll actually bother to watch them.
faceh
3d ago
Well, the biological explanation (mostly feeding into 1, but can also feed into 2 or 3) is an enlarged amygdala in the brain. Which can be genetic, a result of intense trauma, and potentially other environmental factors. Or a mix of those.
So this simply means that any signals coming into the brain get fed into the amygdala, the amygdala analyzes any possible threats in those signals, and inevitably finds and amplifies those signals, then sounds the alert to every other part of the brain, which then acts as though the threat is real whether there is such a threat or not.
Scary thing, is that this means that if you say something positive to them, they'll immediately assume you're lying and look for any angle that could be used against them. If you say something negative, they'll take this as a direct 'attack' and (over)react accordingly. And if you say something neutral, they'll immediately take the worst interpretation and (over)react accordingly.
And you don't say anything they'll assume you're thinking the worst thing about them.
This is how their brain works on a literal physical level, so when I encounter someone who fits this profile I immediately model them as a ball of neuroses and paralyzing anxiety and self-esteem issues, which tends to trigger a pity response. This disarms any anger I may have, and I usually then take pains to distance myself from this person since there's little I can do to calm them down when they are cognitively wired to feel threatened by almost every single stimulus they encounter.
faceh
3d ago
What @Felagund said, and historically the killing of a given politician DOESN'T immediately result in the particular outcome you desire occurring.
So unless the outcome you want is literally "X politician is dead" then no rational person would carry out such an assassination in hopes of achieving their end goals.
faceh
5d ago
Who will actually risk the possible consequences, often due to Trump himself turning on them?
I'm not so sure.
faceh
7d ago
I think being present for your child's birth is one of those things that is important because you really don't want them to later learn you were willingly working rather than waiting to meet them as the earliest possible moment.
If I WERE to do that, I'm sticking at least half of whatever purse I win into a trust to provide for that kid's care by way of apology.
faceh
7d ago
One of Trump's big actual problems was a simple lack of anyone who was loyal to him or who he would show loyalty to, outside his own family.
I would consider this a personal failing of his.
On the other hand, if Trump put out a general call to his supporters to apply for Federal Government positions and he would expedite their hiring, he'd get probably tens of thousands of people responding.
I wouldn't expect 'competent, respectable' people to answer the call, but still.
faceh
7d ago
This has been my position on Trump 2, and why I'd have preferred Desantis.
Trump could come in on day 1 and intentionally fire every single person in Fedgov that he has authority to fire, and those layoffs would be slow-walked so they'd take weeks to actually take effect, lawsuits would fly, deadlines would be pushed constantly further and further back, in some cases they'd just ignore the order entirely, and feet would be shuffling this whole time to wait out his 4 year term. Inevitably, some of those workers would be "unfired" when it turns out there's nobody else immediately available to do their particular job.
If Trump can't bring in competent staffers to implement his plans, and he doesn't have a well of 'replacement' workers to step up and actually give the old ones the boot, 4 years is almost certainly not enough to significantly cut down the Federal Bureaucracy.
All that said, Javier Milei seems to have successfully made huge swaths of the Argentenian bureaucracy go AFUERA (correct me if I'm missing something) so there is a model for pulling it off.
Remember when Trump ordered the relocation of the Department of Agriculture Headquarters? It apparently worked almost as well as he intended! Shocker!
faceh
10d ago
Yes, and the Augur 2.0 solution was to add in an option for people to bet on whether a market was invalid in the market itself.
faceh
13d ago
Yes, there's certainly an argument that a well-fed and generally fit European female has less to fear from many of the individual males of certain populations on a sheer physical prowess angle, compared to most grown bears. If she can run faster and further that's all she really needs.
I can understand why that argument ("those men can't rape you, they're too small/weak") wouldn't be comforting in this context, though.
faceh
13d ago
No, but it was a good example of people not being aware of how human perception works, and thus jumping right to "these people have to be lying to me" rather than "there's something weird about that dress."
faceh
13d ago
The genes that foster safety in groups and willingness to cooperate will outpace the genes that might make a man rape/assault someone.
Right, but in this situation, as stated in the question, there are no groups to cooperate with or intervene, the male's behavior is based solely on whatever he himself chooses to do in the absence of any observers, and thus no immediate social consequences.
I am going to argue that in the ancestral environment, if a random male happens across a random female, both complete strangers to the other, in the middle of the woods, nobody else around, rape WAS probably a common outcome. And this would eventually lead to general norms that women shouldn't travel anywhere alone.
I have seen decent evidence that many males of certain cultures are willing to engage in violence against females even in the full view of other people. Can't say what that percentage is with precision, but I'd have to assume a higher percentage would willingly engage in violence if there were no observers.
I think I will stipulate that the number has to be <50%, but 3% is probably the absolute lower bound.
I still remember the blue/gold dress discourse.
Plenty of women go abroad alone to dangerous countries like India. Sure there are some examples of women getting raped/killed there, but plenty more aren't.
If the questions specifies that they're in the woods, this presents a situation where the male in question can reasonably expect not to be observed by a third party.
THAT much, I will grant, is reason for concern for the woman.
I would not say 20% of men across the world would choose to assault/rape/attack a lone female. And even actual criminals don't commit crimes all the time.
I'm not quite willing to say 20% of men would not, purely on the evolutionary argument that assault and rape were a common element of our ancestral environment.
Really, my concern is that I don't know to what extent all men, everywhere on the planet, are actually socially trained against any sort of violence against women... and have enough to lose that they care about that social training. I could see it being higher than 20% who would in theory be dangerous to an unaccompanied female. But the error bars on that estimate are large.
But I can say for damn sure that a tiny handful of bears is trained not to be violent towards humans in general, but some are more naturally inclined towards it than others.
If I, as a male, want to be a bit cheeky, I can actually agree that a random bear is less dangerous to an American woman than a random male.
Statistically speaking, if the male is chosen COMPLETELY at random from all living males, then the odds are more likely you're getting a middle aged guy from Asia (esp. China), India, or Africa. I really have no direct frame of reference for what I expect such males to do in this situation, but the stereotypes are concerning.
Cursory Google search shows there are about 200,000 brown bears in the world, and around 800,000 black bears. Then presumably negligible numbers of Pandas, Koalas, and Polar bears, along with more exotic types.
So odds are that the randomly chosen bear is a relatively less dangerous black bear vs. the "will attack you instantly" brown bear.
So playing the odds, I might say yeah, a given woman is better off with a randomly selected bear in most cases, vs. a randomly selected male human.
But if we restrict the question to American males, and we specify that the bear WILL be one of the more dangerous varieties, I think the answer is clear.
faceh
13d ago
One possible solution is that you have people pay to have questions answered, and as part of that payment, they pay people to act as oracles who have good reputations.
Yeah, this was part of how Augur's system worked. Reward people who end up on the 'right' side of a final resolution question consistently AND anyone who is answering the question has to stake some portion of their reputation on the outcome they're judging. Eventually 'bad actors' (who are either malicious or are too stupid to reliably interpret contracts) lose out and the correct/consistent oracles accumulate more wealth so they can have more influence over future resolutions.
It helped settle into an equilibrium where it was usually not worthwhile to try to exploit an apparent ambiguity, while knowing that wealthier oracles will ignore said ambiguity and you'll lose money directly by trying to challenge them.
I've been blown away by how bad otherwise intelligent people are at writing and interpreting resolution criteria.
Yep. There are plenty of bright line rules for resolving ambiguity in legal contracts, and it can be permissible to pull in outside evidence to interpret them, but you have to think about the ENTIRE document in a systematic way, you can't just glance it over and interpret it based on vibes.
And glancing at things and going with your gut is how so, so many humans operate.
The problem is there's always a tradeoff when you try to get as precise as possible with your wording, in that it both makes it harder for laypeople to easily understand what the terms say (and less likely to read it all) and, paradoxically, can open up a greater attack surface because there's more places where ambiguities can arise.
This is where I imagine LLMs would have a role, if they are given a set of 'rules' by which all contracts are to be interpreted, and they can explain the contracts they read to laypeople, and everyone agrees that the AI's interpretation is final, then you at least make it more challenging to play games with the wording.
A lot of markets become mainly bets on how the creator will decide to resolve it rather than on what the question is purportedly about.
Yes. I've seen problems arise even with fairly 'objective' markets because even if you can measure a given phenomenon with precision, people might still mistrust the sensor doing the measuring. The market asks "what will be the high temperature in Miami on [date]" and we have to consider whose thermometer? Is it calibrated correctly? Are there any conditions that might throw it into an unexpected/error state?
So now the question is somewhat less about climate conditions and more about the quirks of the measurement system.
In theory you could solve this by attaching a reputation market to the system, so that a given resolution source can have their 'trustworthiness' rating impacted if enough people suspect they're fudging numbers or intentionally writing ambiguous questions/resolution criteria.
But that's just yet another system that is susceptible to gaming.
Augur had a seemingly solid system for avoiding this, but probably couldn't handle the volume, being dependent on Ethereum.
I am literally a practicing attorney and I have had my mind blown at some of the rules-lawyering/munchkin behavior that has come out of the space.
Ironically this perhaps goes to show why sports betting is so popular, because sports rules are uniformly understood, well-defined, and the bets are set on easily determinable outcomes like "Who won" and "what was the score", outcomes which are rarely ever walked back after the fact.
I speculate that we'll see some kind of AI-based solution arise and different markets will become popular with different segments of the population based on the quirks of how, say, Kalshi's AI resolves questions vs. Polymarket's vs. Manifold's.
In this case prediction markets might not actually 'solve' the issue of people having different reality bubbles, but at least there'll be some competition.
faceh
15d ago
in practice you don't need 99.9, you need better than alternatives in at least some cases.
Agreed. And thus I strongly support prediction markets as a concept for making personal decisions, hedging risks, and predicting important events.
Just noticing that centralized prediction markets are yet another sort of institution that can be captured and/or sabotaged if they become important to guiding/controlling society.
Would really hope we have robust competition between them to ensure no player ever becomes fully dominant in the space.
faceh
16d ago
The final issue is that if it is common and good then it will alter the very things it is trying to predict. Does predicting it make it true when we trust predictions at a 99.9% confidence ratio? Is there then a rebound effect where they become worthless and you need a meta meta meta meta meta prediction market to determine the accuracy of the prediction market you're trusting to verify the accuracy of prediction market that you're using to make the initial prediction?
Nah, I think the issue that precedes and largely supercedes this is the oracle question. Do people trust that whatever entity is reporting the final results is doing so accurately and isn't fudging numbers to give an edge to its allies or to cover up some other outcome that TBTB are trying to disguise?
Do we trust that ambiguous results will be resolved in good faith and correctly more often than not?
Who do we actually rely on to be the final arbiter of 'truth' such that these markets can continue to settle reliably where there's incentive to capture such institutions to divert them from the purpose of accurate reporting.
In other words I personally doubt we'll ever reach 99.9% confidence in prediction markets if only because we can't reach that confidence in the platforming hosting the markets or the entities producing the results which are deemed as 'truth,' and I don't believe these are easily tractable issues.
faceh
17d ago
Indeed, I read the exact arguments on lesswrong and elsewhere that humans would dive headlong into AGI because the military incentives to build one, and to build it before the other guys, was irresistible.
Countries throwing billions of dollars at reckless research because they don't want to be conquered is EXACTLY what doomerists warn of.
Not me.
A guy who became an Akido master and taught akido professionally ultimately shut down his Dojo when he realized that the actual techniques he was teaching would not be effective for his students if they ever had to use it against an aggressive opponent and that the philosophical elements of it were mostly used to distract from this problem.
This was a big deal in that he was a well-known personality in the Akido scene at the time, and he (intentionally) got his ass kicked by an MMA fighter to test his over a decade of experience in Akido. Learns quickly that going for wrist control against a striking opponent doesn't work well, most throws won't work if the opponent resists, and his defense is thwarted easily.
He's gone on to makes a TON of videos where he examines different styles and really tries to test them for their efficacy and see if he can make them work under stress, and honestly assess whether there's any useful knowledge there. Akido really does not measure up, in his estimation.
My general opinion is that Akido is pretty much ballroom dancing with malicious intent. Beautiful to watch, but depends on a willing, coordinated partner to perform as intended.
The lack of strikes, lack of ground game, and general lack of any techniques that damage an opponent suggest, to me, that nobody should use this as their preferred self-defense method.
Although I could be convinced otherwise.
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