naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
You know better than to drop into this level of petty back-and-forth.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
You know better than to drop into this level of petty back-and-forth.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
to which I can only reply with an appropriate meme.
That's not a reply, that's empty mockery, both low-effort and needlessly inflammatory.
While you're reasonably good at padding the wordcount, I'm increasingly concerned with what I can only characterize as a continuing pattern of low effort posting. You show up to contradict people, including people who have put a lot of careful evidence and argument together, but about half the time you post there's no substance at all in your reply--just, well, hollow sneering. You dress it up well! And tone matters, here. But keeping just to the edge of the rules is not the goal. The goal is discussion, and one thing that undermines productive discussion is disingenuous or sneering engagement.
Combined with your username, this sort of thing pings the troll-o-meter really hard. Maybe... aim for quality rather than quantity? Aim less for policing other people's wrongthink, and aim more toward contributing your own actual thoughts?
But certainly don't post shit that boils down to "my response to you is only disdain." If that's your response to an idea, then you have failed to adequately steelman your interlocutor.
Thanks, this is all very good clarification. I do wish you luck with this!
I'm looking for a space where people would be interested in discussing random topics that they find interesting and this could perhaps cause other people to become interested in those topics. I don't want a space where people stick to the safe and popular topics (unless they are interested in discussing them in a deeper or unconventional way).
I'd definitely look for an SSC meetup, or start one next time Scott posts a signup calendar at Astral Codex Ten. Or maybe that's a rolling thing, now? I don't know.
I'd like a space where people who are bad with body language are comfortable. Where the focus is on the information being communicated and not on the mannerisms of the speaker. ... Where the norms of communication feel more comfortable to people on the spectrum. ... Instead of autistic masking all the time I want to find a space that is limited to people who identify as autistic.
Where I suspect you are most likely to fail, here, is that there's no such thing as "normal" autistic behavior. Normies gonna norm, normies gonna conform: that's what makes them normies. My own experience is that autism is not "a different way of thinking/communicating," but a diverse array of ways of failing to communicate. Other autists may well be more accommodating of that, but usually this will not actually improve their ability to communicate with one another. There will still be annoyances and slights and failures to communicate, they're just even less tractable than when it happens with normies.
If I may be forgiven a maybe-clumsy metaphor, consider sexual reproduction at the cellular level as a model of communication. Two gametes meeting is an "exchange" of information. If one is mutated too far outside the norm, the information exchange is likely to fail. If both are mutated too far outside the norm, the information exchange is astronomically likely to fail. Likewise, with patience and care normies are often able to complement aspies in the communication process, but between aspies communication compatibility will generally depend on them having compatible gaps in ability. I have seen this most crisply in romantic pairings (where perhaps all interpersonal quirks are seen most crisply), with for example aspies who struggle with displays of affection still wanting displays of affection from their partner, but being unable to communicate that in productive ways (either on the transmitting or receiving end!).
That is, in my experience, "high functioning autism" doesn't mean "bad at interacting with normies in the following particular ways," it means "bad at interacting with everyone in the following particular ways." Other autists are better positioned to empathize, but that doesn't make them good at empathizing!
Consequently I still think the closest thing to what you want would be group therapy for aspies. A trained and experienced therapist serving as a facilitator to a small group of similarly-afflicted individuals is often better than generic "mental health" support circles.
But based on some of the other things you've expressed here, I expect that in the end you'd be better off showing up at nerdy community events often enough to organically develop some accommodating friendships, of whatever neurotype. I do understand the reasons why you might consider this an undesirable alternative to the crafting of an exclusively aspie "safe space," though.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
When you say you want to "talk about special interests" my question is--why not find a group dedicated to those special interests? And--what are these interests? Are there SSC meetups in your area? What about board game stores that have open play tables and "game night" gatherings? Maybe a comic book store that does anime screenings or similar? These are all places you're likely to find fellow aspies, but also normies who are accustomed to interacting with aspies.
I admit the very notion of a "high-functioning autism peer support group" strikes me as a bit internally incoherent, to be an aspie almost by definition implies a tendency to be clumsy at things like "supporting" others. And unfortunately, in many contexts "reduce my autistic masking" boils down to "be various shades of offensive without being asked to make adjustments for the sensibilities of others." Interpersonal interaction demands varying degrees of "masking" from everyone, aspies are just bad at it (and often additionally introverted, and so also exhausted by it). "I'd like a space where I can interact with other humans without following the usual rules for interacting with other humans" is kind of the opposite of a support group, as support groups tend to lubricate social interaction by making expectations more clear, and more strict.
In short, "connect with other people on the autism spectrum" sounds to me like an instrumental goal; what is the final outcome you're looking for here?
- If the point is to make friends, I'd say skip the "spectrum" as a barrier to entry and go straight to social gatherings where people share your interests.
- If the point is some kind of group therapy, then start calling psychiatrists in your area and ask them if they have an aspie group session (or whatever psychiatrists call those now, it has been a couple decades since I was directly involved with such things).
If you have some other goal in mind, it is not clear to me what that could be.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
Sorry but only a woman could have written this.
This kind of ad hominem does not bring light to the conversation. Don't do this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
...women only want Chad, and would rather...
Post about specific groups, rather than general groups, whenever possible. Write like everyone is reading, and you want to include them in the conversation.
As a rule, if you can't differentiate between "women" and "some women," you're going to have a hard time.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
(((New York and California executives)))
Speak plainly, please. Not that the rest of your comment really leaves a lot of room for doubt, but the triple-parenthesis shibboleth is on par with emojis in terms of clarity and obnoxiousness both.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
Is there a reason you chose to make a low effort comment, rather than hit the "report" button? One person did eventually report @Conservautism's post, but five people reported yours first. A certain amount of community policing is good, but this I think does not meet the threshold.
(It may help to remember that we cannot be a community where people come to test their shady thinking, if shady thinking is itself banned from the forum.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
That's one artist showing one perspective in one piece of art, not evidence that 'your country hates you'.
You've landed quite a large number of borderline comments into the mod queue lately, and I think the pattern I would describe them as following is "low effort. In this case, the "low effort" approach is "contradicting people without bringing anything valuable to the conversation." Essentially, a slightly more eloquent "nuh uh!" This is a way of making low-effort points (even when you put effort into the word count).
On one hand, there's probably some value in interrogating the idea that a large number of people are "out to get you," individually. But "this is just one instance" is an especially frustrating form of low-effort objection, since every concrete example anyone can give is always just "one instance." But concrete examples are every bit as important a form of evidence as aggregated statistics (at least arguably, concrete examples may often be better evidence, despite what anyone rhetorically says about "anecdata").
You've also made some good posts in your brief time here so I don't want to discourage those! But being offhandedly or insultingly dismissive of the claims others make is not really something we allow here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
the median boomer is a selfish deeply stupid person who thinks of themselves and will do as I described above
Write like they're reading and you want to include them in the conversation. Don't weakman. And certainly don't embroil yourself in an antagonistic back-and-forth that ends with this kind of low effort gem.
Banned for 1 day.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
Unnecessarily antagonistic, write like you want to include others in the conversation, low effort, banned for this behavior before...
Let's call it seven days this time.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
Then why do we have the vote buttons?
I'm pretty sure the truest, most honest answer to that question is "because they came with the codebase."
My recollection is that there was a fair bit of discussion about this (codebase generally, and voting specifically) a year ago, when we took the exodus from reddit. There is a lot of stuff @ZorbaTHut wanted to do that we couldn't do right away. There were several possible codebases considered. We didn't really have the resources and time to build something up from scratch.
Once a day you should get a "The Motte Needs You" prompt; that is the bare foundation of the user feedback system Zorba has envisioned, and ideally the future of moderation and even perhaps AAQCs. But it is a work in progress; Rome wasn't built in a day and Zorba's current budget is about $200 per month plus whatever time he can steal from his employer and his family and himself. There are others who have very helpfully contributed to the code on a volunteer basis, and in fact anyone can do that provided they have some knowledge of coding (so: not me!); there's a Discord and everything.
If I misunderstood you and you were just bringing up groomers in some much broader sense, in that way that a priest 'grooms' a child to be a good catholic or whatever, then to me that's a surprising implementation of the term
That's what the term actually means, though, so you shouldn't be surprised at all. Setting aside the suspicion people might naturally develop when high-profile people belonging to such a tiny minority of the population keep getting outed as offending pedophiles (since for all I know this could be a Chinese Cardiologist problem), many people regard the inundation of children with confusing gender revisionism as per se abusive. The overwhelming weight of evidence available to me currently suggests that, at least for young girls, becoming transgendered is far more often than not a social contagion which, if indulged by peers and educational authorities, can do substantial lasting harm.
In other words, it's not about accusing anyone of being an offending pedophile, it's about accusing people of per se harming children (or "grooming" them to receive such harm) by deliberately exposing them to memetic hazards--functionally, grooming them into becoming front line culture warriors for gender revisionists. No one would be confused if I complained that 4chan was "grooming" my child to become a Nazi, and yet the moment someone says "don't groom my child to advance your gender ideology" suddenly it's "blood libel?" I just can't take that objection seriously. I don't strongly mind tabooing "groomer" when it gets in the way of clear communication, but I do have concerns about the way certain ideologies insist on obfuscating their manifest faults by forcing me onto the euphemism treadmill. If your ideology leads to mucking about in a child's sexual development--whether through hormones or surgeries or psychology or whatever--for no medical reason, but for purely gender-political or dubious "psychological" reasons, then please tell me what word I should use instead to summarize my perception that your ideology gives cover to child abuse (and of an inescapably sexual nature!).
Now, I assume that no one who thinks transsexuality is not in any way worth worrying about on any level is going to find any of that persuasive, of course. But neither do I think it's even remotely crazy to worry, based on the sweeping comorbidity of psychiatric malfunction that attends transgenderism, that this is not a healthy ideology and that kids should not be exposed to it.
I don't think teachers can do their job effectively if they don't have some discretion there, they need to be figures of at least some trust for kids. I think making all teachers into forced informants with no discretion about what they inform on would make highschool even more of a nightmarish prison sentence than it already is for a lot of kids.
First, the idea that this is somehow the information teachers need to be empowered to keep from parents to win student trust seems very suspicious to me. Second, the problems with public education are far too vast for me to respond to adequately here, but I just don't see any plausible way for teacher transparency on potentially serious psychiatric developments to be the straw that breaks the hellscape's back. It seems, rather, transparently political--treating a single tiny issue as so important it demands federal governance in a tug-of-war over who really has children's best interests in hand. Parents saying "it's us" are being shouted down by politicians and teacher's unions and trans activists saying "it's us," and there's just no question in my mind that in all but the edgiest of edge cases, it's definitely actually the parents.
They claim that Biden wants to make them law under Title IX, but they don't link to anything from the administration saying that and I haven't been able to find anything even remotely like that with google.
What--like, this?
Because this new Title IX frames gender ideology as an anti-discrimination issue, schools won’t have to seek parental permission for children to participate in lessons on choosing and changing one’s sex. Indeed, schools will very likely use Title IX’s anti-discrimination mandate to justify denying parental opt-outs from these controversial lessons.
The rules will also grant children an absolute right to use school facilities and participate in activities “consistent with their gender identity,” regardless of whether their parents agree or are even aware of said identity.
Is that "remotely like" what you're thinking?
Yes, but getting abused and then placed into the foster care system by CPS is much much worse than just... not getting abused and living a normal happy life with your family?
As with public education, I can't exactly solve all the problems with CPS in response here. But children who spend their school days pretending to be a different sex and then go home and pretend they aren't spending their days pretending are not, in my experience, living a life that anyone could reasonably call either normal or happy.
It is not always the case, but in my experience it is almost always the case that teenagers who keep things from their parents tend to endanger themselves as a result,
I completely agree with you, I just think that the 'almost' is important here, and want to give kids and teachers some lattitude in deciding whether they're in one of those cases.
I am actually quite sympathetic to the idea of giving people latitude, but I don't think that's a politically realistic outcome. Because the issue is a culture war issue and the poles have been set at "require disclosure" and "forbid disclosure," even in those places where teachers do technically have "latitude" they are already under tremendous social pressure to behave in ways that are not actually so nuanced. Speaking of which:
But what we're talking about is a case where a kid wants to use different name/pronouns in school, meaning that every teacher and administrator that interacts with them and every kid in any of their classes will know what is going on; there's much less room for manipulation with that many eyes on the situation, and any one of those dozen/hundreds of people has the authority and power to tell the parents at any time if they think something hinky is going on.
Much of the concern, though, is that children are not just being manipulated and exploited by individual abusers, as in the case of offending pedophiles, but that children are being actively enlisted into ideological warfare not of their own choosing, at substantial personal cost. This appears to be how FtM detransitioners (basically, the poster children for ROGD) come to perceive themselves. When every teacher and administrator subscribes to the Successor Ideology, when every kid is inundated with it, when otherwise responsible adults are cowed into silence through emotional blackmail, "everyone knows it's happening" is an incredibly weak response.
For all that: it's entirely possible that there is, actually, nothing at all harmful about gender revisionism. As an armchair transhumanist I think that at some point in our species' future, we're overwhemlingly likely to transcend sex and gender entirely--but by the time we are actually able to do that, we will be unquestionably transhuman--and not, I think, human. If that day ever comes at all, I expect it will be long, long after I'm gone. But in the meantime, I have seen no evidence at all that allowing teachers to conceal presumably important psychological information from their students' parents is meaningfully beneficial, and much evidence that allowing such concealment is in fact actively harmful to children and families, so--how could I conclude anything but that such concealment should be forbidden?
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
You seem to just be imagining teachers to be some type of demonic criminal bent on destroying children's lives
I don't know how you could possibly take that from what I wrote. All I said was that there's no reason to think that teachers, as a class, are in a better position to decide what is good for children than are their parents.
Teachers are not assigning children new pronouns against their will.
I never suggested as much. Teachers and administrators are deciding to hide information about children from parents, selectively and based on politically popular but empirically dubious notions of sex and gender. When my children were young, I was in communication with teachers about basically every aspect of my child's schooling--if they got a nosebleed, if they were struggling in math, who their friends were, basically anything that dealt either with my child's welfare, the quality of their education, or even just things it seemed like I might want to know.
What is the difference between 'concealing information about' and 'not informing on'? Because it's not like we're talking about a law preventing teachers from giving parents information
In the Saskatchewan case from the OP, yes, but trans activists make policies, too.
If a parent cares about their child's life then it is their job to find out about it, and if they've scared their child into thinking it is literally not physically safe to tell them something then that is the parent's fuck-up and they're not entitled to state-sponsored spy operations.
It is absurd to suggest that open communication between parents and teachers constitutes "spying" just so long as a child wishes to keep something from his or her parents. Many people entertain irrational fears. But even if those fears are rational, I can't imagine a child confiding their sexuality or gender confusion in a teacher, and then not confiding abuse to that teacher, at which point mandatory reporting laws kick in (there are many things teachers must tell the government; why wouldn't there be many things teachers must tell parents?). It is not always the case, but in my experience it is almost always the case that teenagers who keep things from their parents tend to endanger themselves as a result, even if only in the sense that they expose themselves to manipulation and exploitation. Google "sextortion suicide" if you want to read more about the effects of teens "confiding" in people who aren't their parents.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
And even if they find out eventually, buying 6 months or a year or three years of time can be very important for a kid trying to build a secondary support network.
Six months or three years can also be exceptionally damaging to a kid who is confused or being taking advantage of by others, be they teachers, peers, or otherwise. The idea that government employees would conceal information from parents about children is so horrifying to me. To talk casually about "buying" time for children to deceive their parents strikes me as deeply misguided.
There is good reason why people sometimes call this "grooming": because the most common kind of adult who keeps secrets about a child from that child's parents is someone who is taking advantage of that child for their own purposes, "grooming" them to some role. If I ever had a child whose teacher presumed to know better than me what was best for my child, that would not be a problem to lightly overlook. If this involved core aspects of my child's identity, I would seek that teacher's dismissal. If it involved my child's sex and sexuality, I would be willing to burn through substantial personal resources to impose serious and lasting costs beyond mere dismissal. I cannot imagine a reasonable and loving parent feeling otherwise. There is nothing so special about transsexual activism as to exempt it from these feelings, and that is why transsexual activism continues to be a catastrophically losing issue for Democrats who swing at that particular tar baby.
I understand that some parents are wrong about what is best for their children, and that some parents are abusive, and so on. But this does not meaningfully distinguish them from teachers, who are also often wrong, abusive, and so on--and teachers have less reason to love children and see to their best interests. As Aristotle notes in the Politics--"how much better it is to be the real cousin of somebody than to be a son after Plato's fashion!"
I have seen enough cases of ROGD, as well as the results of decisive parental action against ongoing ROGD, to believe that the evidence of my own eyes is that schools should absolutely never conceal relevant facts from parents. Not for six months; not for six days. Better that a few children face harsh discipline at home, than many be subjected, with the aid of government actors, to the (often, lifelong) suffering brought on by politically popular social contagions.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
However, I can’t muster up much sympathy for Rubiales either.
This is the only sentence in your whole comment that does not arguably break some rule or other. But it does not really salvage the rest of your comment.
If you'd called someone posting here a "camwhore" (without them, say, pimping their actual OnlyFans site or something) you'd eat a ban for sure. Dropping an "at least it isn't" is just apophasis at work. We're generally pretty lenient about casting aspersions on public figures under discussion, but at some point it just becomes "boo outgroup" even if it's an outgroup of one. This comment strikes me as over that line; please don't.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
This response is arguably unnecessarily antagonistic (for which it has been reported twice) but I'm more inclined to lay down a warning for "inflammatory without evidence." There are plenty of examples of predatory homosexuals being on the receiving end of social or legal fallout. Asymmetries in social responses to behavior based on sex roles surely exist, and almost every culture warrior takes a turn arguing that those asymmetries are good actually, so your response to the hypothetical isn't necessarily wrong. But you've framed it in a needlessly inflammatory way ("severe beating to this queer") instead of taking the time to consult direct examples of same-sex sexual harassment and how it has been treated by the public over the years.
Stated a little differently, even if the substance of your post is correct, you've framed it in a way that is more likely to make people angry and defensive than to persuade them of your own correctness. That's exactly the kind of outcome the rules exist to discourage.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
This is unnecessarily antagonistic, and also oddly specific, which I suppose tracks.
If you would like to talk about the specifics of your personal difficulties, we do have a weekly Wellness thread. Though even there, you'd need to be seeking advice (and be open to gracefully receiving it!) rather than just venting. I don't think I could draw a bright line between "expressing frustration over CW-adjacent issues" and "aimless heated venting," but your posts seem to lean more toward the latter than the former, and if you can't rein that in, you're going to eat a ban.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
The big ones everyone seems to be talking about, Ozempic and Wegovy, are owned by Novo Nordisk, and their stock has indeed been rising lately.
However, both are semaglutide products, and several of the related patents expire in the next few years (depending, among other things, on what country you're in). Someone with greater knowledge of specific semaglitude patents would have to weigh in on the likely next steps, but there are apparently some other glucagon-like peptide-1 agonists out there as well. So I suppose a person could pick specific stocks based on who appears to be positioning themselves to pump out GLP-1 agonists (for example, by lobbying Congress to approve said medicines for medicare and medicaid)--or maybe just find a good "big pharma" mutual fund. But I would expect a fair bit of this to already be priced in; you could make a bunch of money, but you could instead lose a bunch of money to an economic downturn and market contagion, and certainly I wouldn't expect anyone to be making bitcoin-boom levels of returns.
What really set bitcoin apart, as an insane wealth generator, was that many thousands of people with no capital whatsoever and through no particular effort of their own found themselves essentially holding stacks of practically-free "founder stock" in a "company" that suddenly became incredibly valuable. Almost everyone of significant wealth in the world has that wealth either because they (or their ancestors) put years of effort and capital into building something they owned into something other people wanted to buy, or because they had a large amount of capital they were able to invest into a low-cost enterprise that the effort of others transformed into a high-priced enterprise. Crypto was nothing like that; crypto essentially invented a new currency and early adopters became enriched by rampant speculation. This has not changed; the vast majority of crypto transactions are still purely speculative. The originally-intended benefits of cryptocurrency (anonymity, fiscal anarchy) have almost entirely failed to manifest, and that is probably at least in part because of the rampant speculation that drives the crypto market.
That sort of thing is far less predictable, and therefore far more difficult to price into equities valuations, than a new-ish class of pharmaceutical. That doesn't mean you can't make a decent profit trading on big pharma, I'm sure, but the way you posed the question suggests to me that you should probably begin by tempering your expectations.
If you doubt it, you could literally just hit your favorite search engine up for an explanation of self-insuring companies.
No, the whole point of health insurance is to pool risk. Companies offer it as a perk, now, but the typical American association between employment and insurance is exceedingly contingent. Insurance companies collect premiums to finance the pool, as well as to finance the administration of the pool and also to distribute profits to shareholders and do all the other things companies do. Large insurance companies have larger pools, distributing risk more widely and collecting more money to the pool. If you're a large enough corporation, however, collecting the premiums yourself (and perhaps paying a small administrative fee to an insurance company) may save you and/or your employees a lot of money, for example if your employees tend to be some combination of young, healthy, unmarried, and/or childless.
Strictly speaking, you can self-insure as an individual, too. If you forgo insurance and simply put your "premiums" into a high yield savings account every month, then over the course of your lifetime you should on average actually come out ahead of people who buy insurance, since the whole point of insurance companies employing armies of actuaries is to be sure that they don't go bankrupt--that is, to insure that more money is coming into the pool, than going out of it. So if you believe the mathematicians, you should self-insure! Of course in reality it doesn't work out this way, even if you're relatively lucky; since insurance companies also have enormous negotiating power, even when self-insuring accurately duplicates the risk pool it doesn't duplicate stuff like "in network" discounts, negotiated rates, "maximum out-of-pocket," and other such perks. To say nothing of most peoples' inability to truly weather a large financial shock on the theory that they should, by the time they are ready to die, still technically come out financially ahead.
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