philosoraptor
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User ID: 285
philosoraptor
8mo ago
And then wonder why the costs spiral out of control.
philosoraptor
8mo ago
What was this in response to, originally? It seems interesting but without the original context it's hard to know what to make of it.
philosoraptor
9mo ago
Also he needs to divest all but 100k in crypto and only keep that 100k so that if the guy does break in your friend has something to give him and his family doesn't get killed. I think the reason crypto is dumb doesn't really need an explanation beyond my comment being something anyone with a large amount of it needs to worry about.
Doesn't this argument prove way too much? Why doesn't it apply to money in any form? While I suppose crypto somewhat increases the available attack surface, it seems to me your argument applies to anyone known to be rich no matter where they have their wealth stashed, especially if they manage to make enemies with these kinds of resources.
philosoraptor
10mo ago
They certainly have Authority ("It's not my job to educate you" and the whole attitude of acting like there's already a huge consensus behind them that they can't believe you aren't aware of, what's wrong with you) and Sanctity (observe the frequent use of "Gross" as a term of moral criticism, often meaning nothing more than that someone disagreed with some prog shibboleth).
Loyalty is a weird one. There is an intense loyalty to the movement, and an expectation of same (e.g. exhorting people to be "good allies"), paired with a near-total lack thereof toward any of the individuals that make it up. I was particularly struck by this in their treatment of Germaine Greer. This attitude seems weird and almost incoherent to me - what is the movement besides a useful shorthand for the people who make it up? - but apparently they have no difficulty squaring that circle. Their whole shtick is reifying/anthropomorphizing abstract group identities in ways that seem weird and unhealthy to me, so I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was.
philosoraptor
10mo ago
I completely fail to see how pulling a number out of your ass and using it to have an opinion is in any way better than pulling a ready-made opinion out of your ass, the guiding principle is exactly the same in both cases sans the obfuscation layers.
If nothing else it forces you to stay internally consistent, at least on the specific topics the numbers cover. That's more than a lot of people seem able to manage without such tools. Nevertheless, you're not wrong that there can be an element of "garbage in, garbage out".
philosoraptor
10mo ago
or be defeated in a way all regard as fair.
I think people are judging such things in such a biased way that this has become impossible. This goes for all points on the political spectrum, not just the R base.
(Which, I suppose, might reasonably be parsed as "the nightmare scenario you're trying to avoid is already here".)
philosoraptor
10mo ago
Insofar as I understand Trump voters' motivations, "productive" is orthogonal, if not actively counter, to what they're looking for. Trump is essentially a big middle finger directed at (for want of a better term) the blue tribe, and many of them actively want to burn the government to the ground. This is not some rationalization I'm making up, it's a somewhat-close, if condensed, paraphrase of some of the defenses of voting for Trump that I've seen in this very space, or rather its predecessors.
Taking a shower there is different.
Where I'm from (Canada) you routinely see the sort of thing JFKay talks about at crowded bars, concerts, and similar events, as long as the restroom in question allows for a reasonable amount of privacy.
philosoraptor
10mo ago
he does not indulge in masturbatory stylistic flourish
Maybe if you're used to his non-standard spellings and such. He reads like an arrogant 15-year-old to me (albeit a very clever one, though not as much so as he seems to think).
philosoraptor
10mo ago
Very few people, especially ones who'd be considered "normies" by any sane criteria, think about the logical structure of their beliefs deeply enough for these sorts of questions to ever occur to them. This is true even if they are straightforward factual beliefs and not mere signalling (and I agree with a few others that what's going on here is more a complex mix of the two than straightforwardly one or the other).
philosoraptor
11mo ago
I tried like 8 times to write a long one and it all seemed absurd.
That's telling you something.
Okay, this got me curious so I tried it for the second period of tonight's hockey game, as viewed on a semi-local feed in Canada. For the most part only the people most prominently featured are mentioned.
- Grocery store - White family. Daughter (who looks about 13) firmly in charge, dad prominent but made to look kind of goofy (the mother is a bit of a space cadet too). Other ads in same campaign involve them interacting with the (white) president of the company.
- Building supplies - Everyone I noticed in the ad was white.
- Bank - In rough order of prominence, black guy I assume is a minor celebrity, black woman realtor, white family (only the wife is featured prominently).
- Pizza - Ethnically diverse group of friends watching a sporting event. There was a white male in there.
- Lottery (tied to one of the teams involved in the game) - White male celebrity (current captain of said team).
- Restaurant - Couple that appeared to be an east Asian but very Westernized male and a somewhat less integrated south Asian female.
- Quaker Oats (more their sponsorship of minor hockey than their products, though these get their spot) - No humans particularly prominent. Most people seen incidentally seem to be white.
- Grocery store (different from the first one) - No humans shown, only products.
- Sports team (one of the ones playing) - White male celebrity.
- Restaurant - No people prominently shown, only their food. (White hand briefly seen.)
- Apple iPhone - Black household that seem to be college roomies or something.
- Car - Centered around a white female/east Asian male couple, some similarly diverse friends are briefly seen.
There's actually less emphasis on diversity than I would naively have expected, though there's certainly more than there would be in, say, 1984.
Also, no ads particularly geared to farming and no ads for sports betting (though these get small spots outside actual commercial breaks, which I didn't count). These would have loomed large in a game shown on CBC, I'm sure.
EDIT: Much more notably underrepresented than whites were aboriginal Canadians and South Asians. When I look at my city, even in the expensive apartment complex where I mostly work, I see way more of these demographics than I do on television, even fairly woke television. I don't think I saw a clearly aboriginal face even though I'd expect there to be some among the construction workers seen in the second ad. Blacks are way overrepresented, no doubt partially due to spillover from the US. I'd say whites and East Asians are represented about right. "Hispanic" as its own distinctive group is barely a thing here.
There was one ad (not noted above) I'd characterize as very woke, but not in an obnoxious way. It consisted of a South Asian man talking about how Bell Canada's support had helped him move to Canada, learn English (and he was pretty well-spoken though he did retain a noticeable accent) as well as gaining technical skills, and build a new life here, over re-enactments of key moments in his early time here.
philosoraptor
11mo ago
Most of what I watch on live-ish television are hockey games on Canadian channels, and I'd expect results much like yours except that ads for farm equipment would be a noticeable presence. (Which would show predominantly white farmers.)
Okay, that at least makes it understandable. I'd still say that information is more background context than it is a feature of that conversation in particular, especially in a normal, healthy social dynamic. I mean, look at Walter's text message example. The power dynamics, if that really is the most salient thing, are just as present in a text with no body language or tone involved.
Additionally, even in person I'd say far more of the information about power relations and such is conveyed by the words as by the nonverbal parts. There's understanding of subtext involved (that even neurotypicals with long experience dealing with this shit get wrong with some frequency!), but that's got less to do with body and tone than it does with reading another level into the words. (Not nothing, mind you, but less.)
philosoraptor
11mo ago
If, in your experience, ordering dinner routinely turns into the kind of power play where these seem like the most salient questions, you have my condolences. All I can tell you is that I seriously doubt your experience is representative or, more importantly, in any way healthy.
Another of my most hated ones is the idea that only 7% of meaning comes from words (the rest from body language and tone). This doesn't even make any fucking sense, much less have any evidence that it's true. It's a terrible description (like, you'd have to be borderline-illiterate to go to the original source and have this as your takeaway) of a study that was making a completely different, much narrower point. (Specifically, that if your verbal and nonverbal communication don't match, people will generally believe the nonverbal portion - e.g. you say to your spouse "everything's fine!" in an angry, aggressive tone, this will not persuade them that everything's fine.)
Thinking for ten seconds about the last non-trivial conversation you had (roughly speaking, one where novel information was exchanged on a topic other than the participants' current emotional states) should be enough to disprove this idea decisively. How, you should ask yourself, could 93% of that information have been exchanged in a way that was independent of the words used? In most cases, you will find that the question not only does not have a good answer, but is hard to even make sense of.
This has not prevented the idea from showing up in training materials from major multinational corporations, not to mention the Web sites of universities that should damn well know better.
philosoraptor
11mo ago
This is nice. I always assumed the intended meaning must be something related to this, until I learned the real origin. IE, something like "Okay, we admit this is an exception (points at really weird special case), but look how far we had to go to come up with an exception - clearly the rule is going to apply the overwhelming majority of the time."
With easily demonstrable skills or testable claims this is relatively rare. But with skills or claims that are hard to test I feel like this is relatively common.
If you've actually read the original Dunning-Kreuger paper, they make this point explicitly, using basketball as an example. The percentage of people who think they could go one-on-one with a top NBA player and end up looking like other than a complete fool is, I would imagine, statistically indistinguishable from zero. And those few exceptions probably really are mostly outliers in basketball ability relative to the general population, even if they aren't as good as they think they are.
philosoraptor
11mo ago
Canadian here, and I'd never heard it until this year when it was suddenly popping up all over, and never for a school or daycare located anywhere other than Ireland or Faerun.
philosoraptor
1yr ago
I took the point to be adjacent to the one Scott made - wow, is it really that long ago? - last December about how the media rarely lies. I don't agree with how Scott frames the observation, which I would have phrased in terms of how the ways they lie are relatively subtle - but the observation itself, as distinct from the debate over the best language to characterize it, is solid.
Skilled liars make as few statements that are straightforwardly false in a plain, literal way as they can and still spread whatever narrative they want to spread. One of the many advantages of this is that there's rarely a clear-cut smoking gun someone in the board's position can point to. Instead it's a matter of which facts they emphasize and which they omit, what they juxtapose with what in order to imply connections that may not actually exist, how they manipulate your emotions around aspects of their narrative, how they take advantage of people's trust in them, or at least willingness to give the benefit of the doubt, in situations that really are ambiguous.
So while I can see how the statement you quote is poor optics, I have no trouble imagining how it could be true.
Well the people on my socials most inclined to trumpet, and/or presuppose, the "born this way" narrative WRT LGBT+ people definitely don't apply that logic to pedos - think wood-chipper memes - regardless of whether that's consistent with other things they say.
Don't assume SocJus crusaders believe something just because you think it follows logically from other things they believe. They are, IME, almost all capable of compartmentalizing to an extent that makes my brain hurt.
philosoraptor
1yr ago
Upper 20s is also pretty bloody hot for "room temperature". Try 20-21. Of course the basic point still stands.
philosoraptor
1yr ago
Sex positive feminism maintains women should be free to engage in sex, in pornography, in sex work, etc without being shamed or otherwise punished for doing so. That seems to be by far the most prevalent form of modern feminism to me. This is completely separate from whether or not men should be able to take advantage of that freedom to satisfy their own desires.
That seems incoherent to me, or at least to have some obvious and serious internal tensions in practice. What, women should be free to engage in sex work but shouldn't have any customers?
I don't think anyone self-describes as "sex-negative", and I kind of agree with the "skinsuit" theory on what "sex-positive" means in practice, i.e. feminists feel a need to publicly identify that way whether or not it actually fits. Even from feminists who self-describe that way, the overwhelming majority of the messaging seems to be "sex hurts" and ideas about "rape culture" et al that I would characterize as extremely paranoid. (Granted, I'm mostly around people with upper-middle-class values where sexual violence is quite rare and any appearance otherwise is largely an artefact of expanding the definition beyond reasonable limits. But so are most feminists. These are mostly academic-adjacent notions we're talking about here.) When I deal with these people I'm constantly asking, or at least thinking, "If you're so sex-positive, why do you never seem to have anything positive to say about sex?"
A backpack seems like an almost uniquely bad example. You just separate the parties and ask each a few questions about its contents and it's easy to figure out which one it belongs to.
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