Not even disagreeing, but realize that when you try to create 'clever' regulatory schemes like this you're up against the innovative power of every entrepreneur in that space.
Every single exploit or loophole that can be found will be used to the hilt, so you'll probably have to constantly adjust your regulations to add friction back into the system as market actors find ways to remove it. Kinds of like, I suppose, how Zyn has taken off with the decline in smoking and the general low-status of chewing tobacco. Or more directly, how vaping stepped in to replace smoking as well.
faceh
1mo ago
I'm sure I could find, with a bit of effort, stories of Sorority girls getting pulled into Social Justice causes and plunging down the rabbit hole, but my prior is that it would be a tiny fraction of them, which is already a small fraction of all students attending college, so yeah, my priors are that sorority girls will be less woke than average, and more likely to get married, which would further prevent a leftward shift.
So I'll work with the assumption that fewer than 10% of girls who join sororities will go woke, which is decent if you're sending your daughter off to college.
Indeed, if Greek life is effective at insulating students from the SJW pressure of university, that would be a factor in explaining why so many universities seem to be trying to bring them down or bring them to heel
faceh
1mo ago
I mean, that is what separates us from the animals, right?
Folsom Street Fair attendees doing it in the open vs. Eyes Wide Shut-style sex parties where most everyone has plausible deniability.
A friend of mine often points out that a fundamental sign of society degenerating is that most people now seem to lack 'discretion.' Virtually everyone is tempted to bad behavior on occasion. But it seemingly used to be that one would go to the local brothel, drug den, underground casino, whatever, to indulge if they ever did. It was shameful and they knew not to endorse it and certainly to keep it away from kids.
Now, well, almost all bets are off, the only people who keep things discreet are consciously choosing to do so.
faceh
1mo ago
Always the risk that the daughter ends up falling off the Sorority bandwagon and getting a degree in Women's studies and dying her hair some neon color, at which point the odds of even having grandchildren would tend to crater, but yeah, this seems on point as it basically casts Sororities as a way to mitigate that other risk in exchange for relatively small risks of, e.g. sexual assault.
But to consider it involuntary you have to basically remove all assumptions of agency from these young women. That they had no other college options, that they could only pick from the sororities that strictly enforce this social competition, and that they cannot slightly pull back once inside the competition to a level where they are comfortable.
So I'm absolutely not disagreeing with your point...
But this is literally the exact reason why a lot of "metoo" situations are not taken as seriously as others.
A girl going on a bad date and giving in and having 'involuntary' sex assumes "That they had no other dating options, that they could only pick from the men that strictly enforce this sexual competition, and that they cannot slightly pull back once inside the competition to a level where they are comfortable."
So I'd say that many ARE assuming limited agency on the part of women when thinking/arguing about both issues.
faceh
1mo ago
I mean, with Islam they also abstain from Pork despite that being an insanely popular dish in most countries that can afford bacon.
They've got the sort of equilibrium that I suspect is hard to achieve for most places.
I've also noted before how unlike most other immigrant groups, Arabs/Muslims DON'T seem to create any organized crime syndicates in their host countries in the way that, say Irish, Italian, Russian, or various South American immigrants did in the U.S..
Instead, they tend to form political units which, in their worst instantiation look like ISIS, but even in milder form look like Hezbollah or the Taliban.
So, STILL engaging in violence, but directed to a very different objective.
Good preliminary research. If tox screens rarely show date-rape drugs in the person's system (admittedly I don't know how reliable those tests are OR how long the drugs are detectable in the body) then yeah, update in favor of it being something else.
There are sketchy dudes slipping drugs into girls drinks somewhere. If it is as large of a concern as it is made out to be, then they might be the most effective, disciplined population of criminal out there.
Yep. Just as with the "razor blades in halloween candy" story, if it were a widespread issue then people would probably stop letting kids go trick-or-treating. If date rape drugs are used at every other frat party, eventually people will get wise and stop going.
Dammit.
Every time I want to take a break from motteposting, something interesting and topical rears up.
My initial reaction is "THANKS, I hate it." The social environment you're describing sounds like my personal nightmare. And the rules, to the extent they're legible, seem so ARBITRARY. Whether a given sorority picks Jaylynn or Bria or whatever seems to come down to where she parted her hair that day as much as any other qualifications. Barely better than pure random selection. Its filtering for social conformity, and that is pretty much it.
BUT, I did date a girl who was the "fun police" (i.e. the "Wellness and Safety Chair" or something similar) of a particular sorority who had the unenviable job of enforcing the moral code of the chapter, which meant snooping on girls' social media and bringing violations to the attention of the leadership. Now, this was NOT a large, popular school so the overall pressures were much lesser. And that's probably why the girls felt they could get away with a lot more. Alcohol and drunkenness, drug use, and such were pretty common issues that they posted on social media (normally a secondary account they made explicitly to post debauchery). And it was hard to bring them to heel because the sorority wasn't so critical to campus social life and status that getting kicked out would be a social death sentence. Also the Treasurer for the chapter embezzled a few thousand dollars of Sorority funds during her term so its not like the leaders were paragons of virtue either.
Of course, the things this girl and I got up to would also have posed issues to the moral code of the chapter, and I liked to remind her sometimes of the 'hypocricy,' but she was smart and discreet enough not to post anything publicly, and maintained her reputation quite clean, which I wasn't going to disrupt (like that one ex boyfriend the article mentions leaking nudes as revenge? Ugh).
Perhaps THAT is what these sororities try to filter for? Discretion? Like can you maintain public appearances and not hurt your sorority's social standing by, say, making your bad behavior obvious and obnoxious, can you conform well enough that nobody would single you out as a 'bad' girl or a goody two-shoes? Well you might be marriage material!
Because even a Frat bro is probably not going to wife up a girl who acquires the reputation of being a drunken, druggie slut, even if "Drunken druggie slut" is exactly his preference in women. He needs/wants a girl who will consider his social standing, as well, at his side if he's eventually going into politics or banking or some other important career where 'moral uprightness' is a critical variable. Maybe she really is that bad girl, but she isn't one to make it known, and so he can be confident she won't embarrass him with her behavior later.
And I shouldn't complain too much, Frats and Sororities at least offer some kind of Basic Life Script that make it more likely that somebody will make a few right decisions early in life that are more likely to pay off for them later. Rush for a good sorority, maintain your membership in good standing, hang out with Frat Bros and hopefully lock one down, and graduate with a MrS degree and you're probably golden! At least for a while.
We can admit that there's a toxic side to this where Frat guys use their dad's money and their connections to get away with actively criminal behavior because an arrest and criminal record might derail their life, but I would NOT admit that Frat Culture is the proximate cause of the behavior itself.
faceh
1mo ago
Why ban on commercial surrogacy or human cloning or CP or deepfakes doesn't result in breaking kneecaps, burning down, etc.
Well as I said:
correlating more or less with how badly people still want [banned thing].
Drugs and alcohol are an ur-example because the people that want them REALLLLLY want them. Similar with prostitution. Gambling too. I imagine legalized sports gambling has made it far harder for criminals to make a buck on it now.
It helps when the thing is legal overseas or is more readily produced overseas and can be transmitted electronically so there's no need for interpersonal violence at the consumer level.
Like, we had a brief change in the drug trade when crypto was still new and allowed Silk Road to exist, and money could be exchanged for drugs without the need for violent enforcement. But the state cracked down and so we slid over to the standard equilibrium.
They are not police states. There are no gangs or violence associated with drugs.
I've said it before, I am completely prepared to admit that Japanese people are less likely to be violent regardless of the policies they operate under.
See my point:
correlating more or less with how badly people still want [banned thing].
Japan doesn't have the huge drug-addled underbelly that the U.S. does, to my knowledge.
But they DO have Yakuza, who keep things orderly but, I emphasize, STILL rely on violence to enforce their business practices.
And allegedly the decline of the Yakuza is opening up space for more violent operations who are harder to police because they're less legible. Although as mentioned elsewhere, Japan is pretty close to being a police state.
So... my EXACT, PRECISE point still applies to Japan, even if less obviously so.
Similarly, some of the accounts of being 'roofied' I've heard from some girls end up sounding very much like they simply had a straight up panic/anxiety attack. "I had trouble breathing, my body froze up, my vision got blurry/dark, and I felt like I wanted to puke." These symptoms could be socially induced without drugs.
And ironically, if you hammer into girls' brains that they're at risk of being roofied, then they're simply more likely to interpet any symptoms they experience as that rather than more likely causes. Which, well, better safe than sorry.
Not to say it doesn't happen, but the scuzzy behavior I directly observed was usually a guy trying to keep a given girl isolated while her inhibitions are lowering, and keeping her plied with alcohol and fending off any good samaritan until he can 'close the deal' and escort her to his room or car or the nearest hotel.
Roofies might make that tactic easier but it actually directly depends on the guy who slipped it in her drink being the guy who actually has 'possession' of her when they kick in. I dunno if its honestly worth the risk for most guys, even assuming they can obtain the drugs.
EDIT: Now, I can maybe see it be a known tactic for a group of guys to cover for each other and maybe prey on women by spiking drinks and letting one of their members take the score, but as @wemptronics mentions below, this starts to imply a much larger 'conspiracy of silence.' Like, who is the Jeffrey Epstein of Rohypnol supply for frats?
And as you say yeah, they're a pretty convenient excuse for a sexual encounter you later regret, that can't be easily countered by the other party.
faceh
1mo ago
Yup.
The Prohibition impact isn't really the problem. The first order effect of prohibition is to decrease availability of [banned thing]. The long term effect is to decrease legal availability of [banned thing].
The second order effect is to push the markets for [banned thing] underground, correlating more or less with how badly people still want [banned thing].
And the third order effect, or one of them: when merchants of [banned thing] can't use normal conflict resolution/contract enforcement methods, they have to invoke base violence in order to operate. Wars over turf, breaking kneecaps to collect on debts, burning down establishments that don't pay protection, killing snitches, those all become necessary to the business. And then it eventually becomes organized and systemic.
They can't use the court systems and the state-sanctioned violence, so unless you have a full-on police state, this stuff will spill over into civilian life.
So yeah, flipping a switch on and off between "banned" and "legal" will show some effect, but leave the switch on "banned" long enough and you'll ultimately see a system evolve which perpetuates violence. THEN maybe you can assess whether the additional violence is worth the actual harm reduction achieved by the ban.
It seems unfortunate that for many things there isn't a stable equilibrium of "Legally permitted but socially verboten" where a given activity or product is not banned, but the social judgment that comes from engaging in it is so severe that it necessarily remains hidden on the fringes of society, so there's 'friction' involved in accessing it, and most 'right-thinking' people avoid it because they don't want to risk the social consequences, even if they're curious.
I can distinctly remember two:
One was back in Covid days somebody pointed out that evolutionary pressures would make it almost certain that mutations of a virus would trend towards making it less deadly, which somewhat alleviated my fears of Covid running rampant and becoming more deadly as it spread.
The other was someone arguing that we currently have the capability of tracking any incoming asteroids or other celestial objects that are large enough to pose a danger to earth, and as long as we're actively looking we should notice one in with enough time, in theory, to intervene/deflect it, which led me to slightly downgrade "asteroid strike' on my list of existential risks.
One that the jury is still out on is whether LLMs/AI will end up hurting lawyer employment and salaries by supplanting entry-level attorney jobs, or if it will instead bolster lawyer employment by enabling contracts and other transactional documents to become MUCH more complex.
I have had my mind changed or adjusted by arguments I read here over the years.
The quality of arguments seems about the same or even better in some ways, but there are not as many people just casually commenting on a given phenomena without staking out an actual position on the issue itself, around here.
faceh
1mo ago
I think people have gotten more entrenched in their positions over time, and there are fewer semi-neutral interlopers who engage with actual 'curiosity.'
So the people who are left are basically fighting from positions they are VERY familiar with and thus can defend well, but there's going to be less movement of actual beliefs overall. I suspect.
Like, most of my contributions to the above report are me expressing at length positions I've worked myself into over a period of years, and feel very confident in. I am still very open to being challenged and changing my mind, but it seems less likely to happen. So I get a bit punchier in hopes of spurring someone to bring some stronger arguments against me.
Partially may be due to evaporative cooling, but I'm not sure if I'm even correct on the trend.
faceh
1mo ago
I agree. It feels like the debates have gotten a little punchier recently, which is a good thing although maybe also a sign of something else.
faceh
1mo ago
Yeah.
My preference for a high trust society isn't because I want all systems to be designed naively so that they only work if everyone does things the specific way and break as soon as people start doing things to exploit the system.
Its more like I want everyone to have a shared goal of keeping systems intact AND in generally improving them over time, rather than breaking them for immediate personal gain.
Phone phreakers weren't causing much damage (that I'm aware of), and the personal gain was minimal.
faceh
1mo ago
Yes, and if YOU have to scan everything, rather than a cashier, that is also a labor-saving device... for the store that doesn't have to pay the cashier.
They're adding in an extra step for YOU, the customer to undertake mostly for the store's convenience. And they expect you to be honest while you do it, while still implementing anti-theft measures.
If you want an alternative, Sam's Club does Scan and Go where you can use your phone to scan your stuff as you shop, pay online, then mosy on past the checkout counter to the friendly staffer at the door who briefly checks if you've paid for all the items you said you bought.
Yes, we live in an era where every single person has a bar-code reader in their possession at all times.
THAT would be one hell of an alternative. Scan everything you're buying, and pay digitally (or pay at some automated kiosk), and then walk out the door.
faceh
1mo ago
I'm not going to pretend to know the answer on that one.
I read Blindsight right around the same time I read A Fire Upon the Deep by Vinge, which also had a lot to say about the nature of Conciousness/sentient life. And I read Who's in Charge. These days I'd add in Behave by Sapolsky.
The effect on my psyche and outlook on the universe of reading these three books in short succession was noticeable.
Regardless of whether full-on sentience is adaptive from an evolutionary point of view, it is conceivable that intelligence could either evolve independently of full sentience, or that after evolving high intelligence, the part that makes the brain self aware could become vestigial.
And a society on the Culture's level could presumably do some engineering designed to remove the 'sentience' part while otherwise preserving as much of the self as possible.
I wonder if part of the bargain for joining the Culture was to sacrifice your self-awareness but otherwise still be 'you,' and you get all the rest of the post-scarcity hedonism to boot, how appealing would it really be?
faceh
1mo ago
Right, there's probably some benefit to honesty by having a real human present, I'd bet on the margins it makes people less likely to cheat.
But that staffer isn't going to catch someone failing to scan a $10 item or scanning something as a different item unless they're aggressively looking for it.
faceh
1mo ago
Seems like the math will make sense for any young person who doesn't have kids nor a need to carry large loads around, and for whom a car + insurance + gas + parking would be a serious burden.
I don't know as much about the associated expenses of owning a bike, but reducing the risk of theft takes a pretty decent concern off your mind.
faceh
1mo ago
And that sense of being a chump grates on me over time, until eventually I start stealing things.
I don't experience this feeling myself, but I kind of agree that Self-Checkouts exist in an unusual 'middle-trust' zone where they are giving you some benefit of the doubt and yet still making you go through the motions to 'prove' your honesty by scanning everything and in theory if they find out that you took something without paying they could drag you back in and prove that you knowingly failed to scan an item with the intent to steal it. They won't because evidently the losses to such incidents are not worth hiring somebody to man a checkout counter, much less pushing the prosecution of a <$50 shoplifting case.
The real 'high trust' option is Honesty Boxes and that's surely not an option for any large corporation.
And it isn't like they're watching you to reward honest behavior! You don't get a prize for "100 items scanned at self-checkout without incident" or a badge that says "Certified Honest Customer". They just expect to make more money off you than they lose over the course of your patronage, and they are trying to zero in on the minimum level of surveillance needed to get you to follow the rules.
Me, I like the option of self-checkout because most of the time I'm picking up very few things at one time and if the self-checkout can shave 2-5 minutes off waiting in line I'm happy to do the work myself.
faceh
1mo ago
Here's that cyberpunk future you ordered.
Seriously though "e-bike load-balancing grifter" is a job description right out of Snow Crash.
I respect the reverse-engineering and black-hattery of it in many ways, but it's not what the system needs or what the algo was built for.
More than likely its some ex-programmer for the company who wrote or worked on the algo and just let someone else have it.
I kind of hate it in the same way I really despise hackers/exploiters in online multiplayer games. Yes yes, very clever, you're technically staying within the confines of the rules as defined by the computer code, but any other player can tell you that isn't how they intended to play the game and it ruins the point for them, can you spare any thought for that?
Sure, maybe the game dev/Lyft can update the code and fix things to be less hackable. But in the meantime you're making everything subtly (or not so subtly) worse for everyone.
Grumble grumble low trust society grumble grumble
ON THE OTHER HAND. I'm also not a fan of gamification intended to save a company money by offloading labor to users by using incentives that explicitly aim to change their behavior patterns. At least this one pays out actual money rather than amorphous reward points or 'achievements' that have no intrinsic value.
Ultimately it is impossible to make any system that is even slightly complex 'perfect.' There are always weird edge cases, and always tons of people motivated to find and exploit those edge cases until the weakness is patched. Either you foster a level of social trust high enough that people will intentionally not exploit these loopholes (and indeed, will be white-hats and report them on sight!) OR you can have a society that is wealthy enough that these niche 'parasites' aren't worth addressing.
Me, I would never even consider this kind of approach to making money (unless I was truly desperate) because there is absolutely nothing about it that is fulfilling to me, and I'd be very acutely aware that I'm basically imposing an externality on other users of the bikes.
But I understand and mostly accept that there are people who get a lot of 'fulfillment' out of finding out ways to exploit systems and 'get one over' on the powers that be and for them the mere knowledge that they're getting away with an unintended boon is probably enough motivation to do it. They like this better than being a sucker with a 9-5.
And they have a role in society too. It doesn't do to have your entire society simply ignore weaknesses in their critical systems because everyone is too polite and honest to comment on them, and thus vulnerabilities can persist until a catastrophe emerges.
I'd say its close to 100% reputational. Morality plays a meta role there, but I think what is being selected for is one's ability to keep bad behavior 'on the down-low' since being known for being a druggie whore is VERY DIFFERENT from simply being a druggie whore in private, but having an overall clean social rep.
Or, could we say, its testing your ability to be discreet and in-control of the bad behavior.
Its less about abstaining from all sins, and much more about not being obvious and obnoxious about the sinning, so as not to harm the social standing of those associated with you.
While I'd still judge the moral failings, I get that many, many people are fine with the sinning but care VERY MUCH that their partner doesn't do anything to harm their social standing.
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