problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
What were the long term effects of Western colonialism on the technological development and social stability of the societies they ruled over? Are there any sources discussing this in a non-ideological manner? Counterfactuals are generally pretty hard to discuss or explore, but my intuition is that the long term effects of colonisation would have been on the balance positive.
In many of the colonised areas the technological disparity seems obvious - the Aztec and Inca for example completely lacked beasts of burden and did not put the wheel to use in any significant way, they did not have knowledge of advanced metallurgy (the Aztec made limited use of copper and bronze, but never learned how to use iron), nor were there technologies like the printing press etc all of which the Spanish already had when they made contact at the time. In the case of the Inca they simply did not even have a written language to print - and quipu doesn't count as a writing system, the current consensus seems to be that it was simply an accounting system and not a written representation of Quechua. There was a translation of a quipu in the village of Collata that apparently represented information phonetically, but that quipu was made after the Spanish conquest and was likely influenced by contact with them.
An analogous situation is Mughal India, which as far as I know could be described as "proto-industrialised" at best and significantly fell behind Britain in the face of the massive manufacturing boom that the Industrial Revolution brought to Europe (additionally, the Mughal Empire had already begun to disintegrate pretty rapidly from the eighteenth century onwards). And British contribution is pretty visible today even to your average Indian, the Indian railway system being a big example. I'd wager it's pretty plausible that colonisation by a more technologically advanced society generally confers long run material benefits.
I suppose a potential counterargument that could be offered up would be to posit that perhaps their situation would've been better had Western powers not occupied them and traded with them instead, but that argument encounters the obvious issue of the natives perhaps not being able to access these resources - a huge amount of the resource extraction and manufacturing was after all organised and sponsored by Westerners. I highly doubt that, say, South American natives had the wherewithal to build massive gold and silver mines like the Spanish and Portuguese did - production on that scale was probably outside of the ability of even the societies that did do basic mining, like the Inca.
My life bucketlist has 'composing an album' on it, and I am a 100% sure that it will end up being the most challenging thing I've ever done.
I've made (and released) a few albums myself. I think it's a good undertaking if you've got even a passing interest in composition or production - despite everything I've said about the laboriousness of the process, it's also very satisfying when things do go the way you want.
Hope you've come around to liking it. Sounds like a lot of love went into it.
Yeah, it's now one of my favourite tracks I've made.
This brand of perfectionism sounds familiar to me. My primary hobby is music, and I once spent an entire year (Sep 2019 - Oct 2020) working on a track. I was hellbent on the idea of making a hyper-detailed track where no two bars were alike, and aggressively cut everything that fell short of my very lofty expectations. After I was done with making it, I couldn't listen to it for a few months because I had heard it so much over that year that I was utterly sick of it. But despite the whole process driving me nuts, I'm now trying out something similar again with yet another track (which has been in the works ever since March of 2021 and is still not completed as of yet).
I've also tried my hand at story-writing, and I've tried to make sure that everything I write in it conforms to real-world science (sometimes spending days or months researching a specific topic to make sure I understand it properly enough to write about it). The sheer amount of music and writing and even game projects that I've thrown out because they failed to meet my absolutely unreasonable expectations would turn your hair white.
However, for a lot of white people, feeling like a victim just doesn’t come naturally to them at all. They look at the history of European man and think, “You know, seems like we’re pretty fucking awesome. Whatever minor setbacks we’re suffering right now, it seems like we’ll get through it just fine. I like our chances.” And, historically speaking, that is a pretty damn astute assessment! The all-time scoreboard sure seems to back that up. There haven’t been a whole lot of limits or setbacks that we’ve faced in the past that we haven’t been able to overcome with some ingenuity and some elbow grease; why should something like collapsing fertility rates be any different? The only way we lose is if we beat ourselves, and we can choose to start winning again at any time once we put our mind to it.
The only reason why it seems that way is simply due to the specific historical time period we're currently in. The same thing could have been said by the Mongols, or the Arabs during the Islamic Golden Age. The "all-time scoreboard" at the time as per this logic would have implied they were pretty fucking awesome, and yet their flourishing did not last. Just because the societies any given group of people have built are doing well at present does not mean that they are unassailable and able to overcome any threat with just a little elbow grease. It does not justify apathy nor does it justify a feeling of invulnerability.
I think part of the reason for lack of recognition of the problem among whites, rather, is that there is a not insignificant contingent of whites who are absolutely addicted to the idea of being Powerful and Awesome and very much enjoy all the rhetoric which states that they, as the Powerful, must take responsibility for everyone else and should not react to any hatred or vitriol thrown their way because how much can it really hurt them anyway? And they'll often attempt to ignore actual concrete instances of discrimination against whites and/or hand-wave it away in order to maintain this fantasy of being untouchable. People with this mindset will not realise how much this narrative they've happily assented to is actually hurting them even if and when they end up on the wrong side of a pervasive racial spoils system. I've been trying to get many whites to understand exactly why it is that they should be more than a little disturbed by the way things currently are, and it's been very much like pulling teeth despite my non-white (Asian) status granting me some preferential standing in these discussions.
Now, I'm not saying that I necessarily want whites to go full doomer and organise against racial outgroups and embrace the absolute mind virus that is grievance politics. But if the idea is that the current anti-white cultural trends are in large part the creation of white people (which isn't entirely incorrect), if "we only lose if we keep tying both hands behind our backs" (again, not entirely incorrect), then it definitely might be a very good idea for these whites to stop trying to tie their own hands and the hands of other white people by completely closing off all avenues that white people have to correct these trends. Because to be honest, I can't think of anything that would be more damaging than propagating these narratives of endless racial guilt and responsibility, and then letting whites become a numerical minority in their own countries. That's a point of no return I don't want to see crossed.
EDIT: added more
I definitely have some level of respect for the people here who adopt fringe, unpopular opinions and attempt to argue them rigorously, even when I disagree with them. The sheer conviction required to spend so much time and energy researching the topic and arguing it, when their opinions are so widely detested and nothing good will come out of it for them except social exclusion and cancellation, is somewhat admirable. Also, it's often really fun to watch someone argue thoroughly screwball positions in thoroughly screwball fashion. I'd personally like to sit down and have a beer with these Mottizens and pick their brain, and even if I come away unconvinced of their positions it'll at least be an incredibly interesting experience. These people are what make TheMotte for me.
Honestly, the people who irk me are not typically the users who make the unpopular arguments, but the users who respond to these unpopular arguments with moral outrage and knee-jerk disgust and emotional appeal. These types of responses are usually frowned upon here since it is not what TheMotte is about, but you can often see them crop up nevertheless, and unsurprisingly the crowd here is more sympathetic to the "contrarian" position than they are to these methods of argumentation. The fact is that people come here for interesting discussion on controversial topics where even the most heterodox opinions are allowed to stand, not to listen to moral scolds.
Okay, so it seems we're basically in agreement about the fact that the set of interlocking laws we have in place enable women to unilaterally abandon children and prevent men from doing so without the consent of the mother, except for edge cases where the mother is somehow completely out of the picture (if she's dead etc). Outside of these situations the father is unable to legitimately abandon parental responsibility without her consent.
The issues with safe haven laws stem from the biological reality that the first parent acknowledged is going to be the mother. It isn't symmetric.
Point is, people can't pretend (as they often do in these discussions) that the system allows men and women to abandon children equally when in actual practice this is not the case. In practice, the ability to walk away is by and large reserved for the biological mother.
While many of these safe haven laws technically are gender neutral in wording, in many states unwed genetic mothers by default get custody. The unwed father has no such automatic right. He has to establish paternity and petition in court before being able to have rights over any child born out of wedlock. Mind, too, that women control information about and access to the kid and therefore can very easily block such a process.
As an example, Arizona's law states that "If a child is born out of wedlock, the mother is the legal custodian of the child for the purposes of this section until paternity is established and custody or access is determined by a court."
https://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/01302.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20210506194043/https://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/01302.htm
This situation allows the mother to abandon the child or alienate him from it early on. On the other hand, if the father wants to avail himself of these safe haven laws which are technically open to him, he'll have to take the child out of the mother's custody - unlawfully - and in doing so he can be charged with custodial interference or kidnapping.
That previous Arizona law I cited also states that custodial interference is committed when someone "Takes, entices or keeps from lawful custody any child, or any person who is incompetent, and who is entrusted by authority of law to the custody of another person or institution." Anyone in violation of that opens themselves up to felony charges.
So while Arizona's safe haven law is on its face gender neutral, subject to the previous Arizona law I cited in my first comment, unwed fathers in Arizona who take the child out of the mother's custody to put it in a safe haven can still be prosecuted for custodial interference, whereas unwed mothers early on can unilaterally put their children in safe havens without anyone's consent and escape any prosecution because they are the default custodian until the father pursues access and custody.
Additionally, here's an adoption lawyer in a forum for legal advice answering a question about whether a father can give up a child to a safe haven without the mother's consent:
https://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/can-a-man-access-safe-haven-laws-without-the-moms--3458852.html
"Do you want to be arrested? Because if you do, that is a sure fired way. When a woman gives birth and the parents are unmarried, the woman has presumed custody. If you did this you would be facing criminal charges as an unmarried father has no rights unless he pursues then in court."
And this article provides a generalised rundown of the situation:
"Though written in gender-neutral terms, many American states now effectively permit the abandonment of newborns to be undertaken solely by genetic mothers. These acts usually foreclose, without notice or a chance to be heard, any legal parenthood for genetic fathers who are fit and willing to parent and who may even have attained federal constitutional childrearing interests, as through, for example, marital presumptions. Genetic mothers can walk away from parental responsibilities early on in a child's life, whereas comparable desertions are usually forbidden for genetic fathers in cases where the genetic mothers maintain custody, as well as for genetic mothers once their children are a little older."
"While a genetic mother having child custody may employ Safe Haven laws to escape parental responsibilities, genetic fathers without custody typically may not walk away in the same fashion. They cannot escape child support obligations, even if they never attained childrearing rights. They cannot desert their genetic offspring, even if they were fooled into conception and were forgotten (or avoided) during the pregnancy and at the birth."
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/80506024.pdf
In other words, men are not able to access safe haven laws the same way women can in practice.
Women have options men do not have for terminating pregnancy because men do not get pregnant.
In my opinion, abortion is a far more morally fraught method of surrendering parental responsibility than legal paternal surrender (LPS). There's the worse issue in abortion of "maybe we're killing something here that deserves rights" which simply isn't present in LPS. Perhaps hardline pro-choicers who don't see the unborn as being deserving of rights at any stage of development and don't see any moral greyness in any part of the issue would disagree, but IMO that's a thorny issue which is very unique to abortion. It actually appears to me that abortion is a more questionable practice than LPS. There are very few methods of surrendering parental responsibility that don't invite moral objection.
And that debate aside, the existence of abortion as a unique option for women that already exists by virtue of them getting pregnant raises the question as to why women have further additional methods of surrendering their parental responsibility that men do not after birth.
Only a handful of infants are surrendered every year under safe haven laws. I doubt many of those were produced by fathers who otherwise would have been willing participants in the child's upbringing.
By bringing up safe haven abandonment I'm not arguing that women are giving babies away that fathers want (though that is a distinct possibility and IIRC in the case of adoption there have been cases where biological fathers were alienated from their children - the rights of fathers are often not appropriately respected in these proceedings). Rather, I'm arguing that if a woman does not want a kid she's given birth to, she can abandon it, and put the burden on the state to deal with it.
If we were to be consistent with the principle that taxpayers should not be obligated to pay for children that aren't theirs, she should not be allowed to access safe haven abandonment at all. She should be made to keep the kid that she chose to carry to term, and help the state identify the biological father so the child can receive support from both parents. That this is not the current system is pretty incongruent.
But they don't actually care about this, they just want to be able to have consequence-free sex and leave the woman stuck with the responsibility of deciding what to do if she becomes pregnant. I believe exactly zero arguments based on "unfairness."
I'm a pretty strong supporter of LPS myself from a moral consistency standpoint. I'm also very certain your characterisation doesn't accurately portray my motivations for arguing in favour of it, given the fact that I don't have any desire to have "consequence-free sex" with women. Or just sex with women at all.
Very few of the policies I argue in favour of with regards to male-female relations actually end up benefiting me.
The point you carefully elide is that in those cases where a woman can sever her responsibilities, she's also terminating any responsibility the father has as well.
Correct. She is allowed to sever her responsibilities if she wants, and also terminate the father's responsibilities in the process. None of this contradicts my assertion that women have an array of options they can utilise to terminate their parental responsibilities, some of which they can utilise even after birth, and men typically cannot do so at any stage of the process without also having the woman's cooperation and consent.
there are plenty of stories of women who got drunk at a party and wound up with a child and a deadbeat dad.
And if and when she did, the system won't hold her accountable. It offers her plenty of outs, such as 1: abortion, 2: safe haven abandonment, and 3: adoption, all of which she has a unique ability to access because she carries the child, and additionally any child born out of wedlock is in her sole custody by default and thus she won't be guilty of custodial interference by taking advantage of safe haven laws. Pray tell, why has your hypothetical woman not taken advantage of any of these options available to her, if she does not want to care for a child and the father is out of the picture? And which analogous "ways out" are fathers allowed?
The point isn't to "hand your money over to a woman," it's to avoid having unsupported children who become the state's responsibility. You want to get your dick wet, you know there is a possibility of producing a child, and if it's not your responsibility (jointly) to provide for that child, then whose is it?
Yet safe haven abandonment is explicitly allowed, and these laws absolutely create unsupported children who become the state's responsibility. I suppose that by the same token, you oppose safe haven abandonment as a method of surrendering parental responsibility for women, correct? If you have decided not only to perform the act that resulted in conception but also have carried the pregnancy to term and have eschewed every option to terminate up until that point, then you absolutely have the responsibility to care for it. Under this worldview, that is.
I'm not going to lie, this entire "personal responsibility" screed you've produced here sounds like an awfully convenient way to avoid the clear double standards that exist surrounding this entire thing.
The law isn't an algorithm, this is like comparing that one man who shot someone in Kansas and got a suspended sentence and that other woman who shot someone in Florida and got life.
If you look at it in isolation, perhaps. Looking at the entire picture, it forms part of a much larger pattern wherein women are treated with far more leniency and are granted far more options when it comes to abrogating parental responsibilities.
None of the men moaning that it's unfair they can't sever parental responsibilities after a hook-up would be satisfied by a law carving out an exception for male rape victims.
Sure. They're claiming it's unfair they can't sever parental responsibilities because women can.
I agree that the way the family courts treat men is pitch-black evil. The way a lot of men treat women is likewise pitch-black evil.
What puts men on edge is not that there are bad women around who will do bad things. It's the fact that the women who do bad things are aided and abetted by the legal and policy systems in place, and the fact that the harms they perpetrate are often actively enabled and worsened by these systems.
And some of these harms are really egregious. You don't have to be in a long-term relationship with a woman for the state to try to obligate you. You don't even have to be a consenting party to the act that results in conception. In the case of a woman using deceptive and coercive means to trap an unwilling man into fatherhood, the system will vigorously extract money from that man and hand it to that woman for 18 to 26 years.
In one such case (Hermesmann v. Seyer), the father was a minor child who was statutorily raped, and the court found him responsible for the financial support of the resulting child. Other cases of male victims of statutory rape being made to pay child support include Nick Olivas and Nathaniel J. In the latter case, Judge Arthur Gilbert stated that "Victims have rights. Here, the victim also has responsibilities."
The article "Fatherhood By Conscription: Nonconsensual Insemination And The Duty Of Child Support" also has a very good rundown of things (and while I do disagree with some of the moral positions the author takes, the cases cited within shine light on an issue that is rarely focused on). Regarding the question of whether a male victim of statutory rape is liable for child support payments should the rape result in a child: "[T]here are numerous cases in which an adult woman became pregnant as a result of sexual relations she initiated with a minor child. Nonetheless, despite the number of times this question has arisen, every single court has answered it in the affirmative - holding that, yes, the minor father is liable."
Then there are also completely nonconsenting adult male victims of female-perpetrated rape that have been made to pay child support to the mothers. For example, an Alabama man known as S.F. in 1992 attended a party at the home of a female friend, T.M, and was raped by T.M. when he was unconscious. He was held responsible for child support, and on appeal his argument that the court should relieve him of child support duties failed. And in another similar case, Daniel was a Wisconsin father who claimed that the mother, Jennifer, administered a date rape drug to him, and despite the jury concluding that his sexual intercourse with Jennifer was involuntary, he had to pay child support. Then there are cases like Emile Frisard's, where there was no rape, but the mother got pregnant by retrieving the father's semen from oral sex and impregnating herself with it, and in that case the court also upheld his child support obligation.
Meanwhile, here's what happened in the one case in which a court was called upon to decide whether a female victim of sexual assault was liable for child support. "In DCSE/Esther M.C. v. Mary L., a mother refused to provide support for her three minor children on the basis that they were “the result of an incestuous relationship with her brother,” and, as such, “it was not a voluntary decision on her part to have the minor children.” In ruling, the court did what no court has ever done when confronted with the child support obligations of a male victim of sexual assault - the court ruled that the mother may not be liable. According to the court, “[i]f the sexual intercourse which results in the birth of a child is involuntary or without actual consent, a mother may have ‘just cause’ . . . for failing or refusing to support such a child.”"
And the article notes that this is the case despite the fact that women have more options than men after conception - "they can later elect to abort the child or give the child up for adoption, thus terminating her parental rights. In contrast, a father cannot make those choices absent the cooperation of the mother." I'd also add the morning-after pill as another example of a precautionary measure a woman can take (if she is sexually assaulted, or she is afraid her partner has poked holes in the condom, etc). Men also lack this option.
Again, it is not that women can harm men that makes a lot of men wary. It's not even that women can get away with harming men. It's that the system itself, even when acknowledging that the woman committed an intentional and morally inexcusable act on the man, will enforce the continuation of that harm.
There is no risk-free way to allow other people access to your brain, dick, heart and bank account, but allowing that access is a choice you make. Those who make poor choices have to pay for them, one way or another.
You are essentially claiming that if family court and child support etc are biased against men, men have to take that risk into account and if they don't, whatever happens is something they assented to. But I think it is hardly a viable choice when the "choice" in question is between lifelong celibacy and opening yourself up to the possibility of getting completely screwed over by an incredibly broken system. To claim that being unable to tolerate the former situation constitutes a "poor choice" on one's own part is really quite unfair. And the point falls apart even further when you consider the fact that men (and boys) who have been raped or otherwise sexually taken advantage of by women have been forced to pay child support.
So I finally ended up watching Arcane after seeing many glowing reviews. I kept putting it off because "League of Legends spinoff" didn't sound particularly appealing on a cursory-level inspection, and the fact that Imagine Dragons was used for the opening credits track turned me off even further. And some of the talk surrounding this show made me worry quite a bit about it being woke.
I'm glad to say, though, that it's really good. I spent most of Act 1 smugly thinking I had the show pinned down, only to have my expectations brutally upended in Episode 3. And this is a rare example of subversion of expectations done properly, where everything is subtly set up and foreshadowed beforehand, and as a result it doesn't feel like a massive "fuck you, eat shit" to the audience. Watching Powder's lovable-underdog-that-proves-herself character arc be excruciatingly turned upside down in Act 1 felt less like having the rug unceremoniously pulled from underneath me and more like watching a trainwreck in slow motion - I had suspicions of where the writers might bring it once she came up with her plan to help her family, but didn't think they would take it to such a dark place.
As for the characters, they're well done and subtly written, and very morally gray. Many of the characters are pursuing their own aims derived from their own sense of "greater good", and are often willing to throw away some principles in the service of their vision (some, more than others). It doesn't particularly seem to push a specific moral viewpoint on the viewer, too - the characters' motivations for doing things are very simply and impartially presented, and whether their actions are justified or not is left up to the audience to decide. Speaking of subversion done properly, there's a character (Silco) who's introduced early on in Act 1 as the clear villain of the show, who has a fucking pet Dunkleosteus and regurgitates lines about how "power comes to those who will do anything to get it". The show drip-feeds you his motivations and slowly reveals his humanity over the next two acts, and it's finessed so well that it doesn't feel cheap, it feels earned. I ended up thinking some characters were utterly irredeemable, but still came away immensely sympathising with them and their perspective anyway.
The animation and voice acting is also incredibly effective in bringing the characters to life. Everything from Powder's breakdowns and Jinx's psychotic episodes to Vi's increasingly desperate attempts to appeal to her sister are just so well conveyed. Admittedly there is a slight bit of a Tumblr aesthetic to some of the character designs, but it is a League of Legends spinoff so I can't really fault them too much on this.
I do have some critiques. Firstly, while this is clearly a matter of personal aesthetic preference I still contend that the usage of music in the show leaves much to be desired. As nitpicky as this sounds, this might be my biggest issue with the show - music plays a huge role in setting tone. While the ambient soundtrack works very well, the actual songs featured in the show utilise a lot of very trendy and overproduced pop vocal performances (which I have no love for). They don't sound as if they fit into the world of the show well, and they really broke me out of my immersion sometimes. Probably the most egregiously awful usage of music in the show is an absolutely laughable scene with an Imagine Dragons cameo which I really think should've been cut. There are a few exceptions, for example the song "Our Love" is used in the end of Episode 2 to great effect, and despite being made for the show it's such a nice pastiche of '70s motown that if it weren't for the crystal clear production and sound quality you could definitely trick me into thinking it was of that time. It's a good song in and of itself too, I just wish I could say the same for most of the other songs utilised in the show.
There's also a bit of an issue with the season being a bit frontloaded, in the sense that you get surprised in the first act and a lot of the rest of the season is seeing the characters trying to deal with the downstream consequences of the events of Act 1. The rest of the season is fantastic as well, don't get me wrong, and the season finale delivers a particularly effective piece of writing, but I never got a gut punch nearly as strong as what was delivered in the first three episodes.
Regardless of these criticisms, though, Arcane is a very strong showing of writing and characterisation, and I'm definitely in for a Season 2.
problem_redditor
1yr ago
Perhaps this is a bit nitpicky, but no one has said this yet and I figure I should. It looks like the text for the previous Friday Fun Thread "Welcome to the final regular thread of 2022!" got copied over to this one - I doubt this is intentional?
No, I’m suggesting that the level of discrimination faced by a white or Asian man is lower than for most other groups, particularly women—even though the social acceptability of discriminating against the former is much higher. There are obviously some jobs (childcare, nursing) where a woman gets a discriminatory advantage.
Oh, there are plenty of jobs where women get a discriminatory advantage, and not necessarily always in stereotypically female fields either. STEM for example is a good case study of a field which is thought to be discriminatory against women, but actually favours them.
This paper by Williams and Ceci finds that faculty members in STEM, when evaluating hypothetical applicants for assistant professorships in biology, engineering, economics, and psychology, "preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching lifestyles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference."
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112
This review in Psychology Today considering the evidence regarding gender bias in science shows that studies showing egalitarian attitudes or bias against male scientists are more common than those showing bias against female scientists. There were 4 papers showing bias favouring men, whereas there were 8 showing no gender bias and 6 showing bias favouring women.
The Williams and Ceci paper included in the review reported 5 studies, however, so if we shift our focus to number of studies instead of papers the empirical data shows that there were 4 studies showing bias favouring men, 8 showing no gender bias and 10 showing bias favouring women. On the whole, the evidence as presented in this review seems to lean towards "there is bias in favour of women in STEM".
The author goes on to state that "there was far more evidence of egalitarian or pro-female bias than there is of pro-male bias". He also notes that studies showing peer-reviewed science is unbiased or favours women tend to have larger sample sizes than those which show biases favouring men, but are cited much less (largely due to an ideological bias in academia in favour of the "discrimination against women" hypothesis).
There's also research with a more generalised scope, and a lot of that data does not support the idea that discrimination in the workplace is primarily a women's issue (rather, the findings often indicate the very opposite). For example:
"By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere."
https://academic.oup.com/esr/article/38/3/337/6412759?login=false
The notion that women are "disadvantaged more" is very questionable at best.
But I’ve got it pretty good, and I suspect that all else equal, white men of comparable intelligence and background are likely to say the same.
Relying on personal perception (which seems to be the main source that you and many other people here are drawing from) is a particularly unconvincing argument, since people have biases. White men in particular have been exposed to a narrative from a very young age that they do not face issues because of their race or sex, in fact they are told they are privileged because of it, whereas women and PoC get it hammered into their head that the society they live in is a white cisheteropatriarchal one that oppresses them. It's not hard to see how this is going to influence perceptions, and how this is going to lead to women and PoC interpreting more events as discriminatory against them than white men since it takes far more for white men to jump to the conclusion that they're being discriminated against because of their immutable characteristics. The narrative that endlessly circulates in society gears white men to perceive evidence of their privilege, not their disadvantage.
Furthermore, in the case of male/female dynamics there are also other factors that influence things. For example women score higher on neuroticism than men which obviously predisposes them to perceive more things as malicious than men do. Women can capitalise on claims of vulnerability in ways men simply can't due to our protectiveness towards women, and thus benefit from perceiving danger and expressing it to others in order to elicit nurturance and help (the opposite is true for men: Men who complain and present themselves as vulnerable and put-upon run the risk of inviting ire). This is obviously going to impact which sex is more likely to perceive slight and complain about that slight.
EDIT: clarity
I was reading Project Hail Mary a while back myself but never really finished it.
I think the reason why I stopped is because Andy Weir's specific style of writing doesn't jive with me very well. The writing is very simplistic and is easier to parse than lots of other sci-fi, which is fine (perhaps even good) on its own. However, there's also a lot of very juvenile humour and characterisation, and this, along with the simplicity of the prose, ends up creating a goofy and immature vibe that feels particularly dissonant when it's contrasted with the extremely tense situations the main character is placed in.
I'll happily concur with the basic premise; it's all too easy for me to look at the whiplash people have done and are doing on, well, a whole lot of topics, but most present and obvious would probably be the complete 180 that took place between the George Floyd race riots and 1/6.
See also: The dysfunctional cheering on of the George Floyd race rioters as "peaceful protest" vs. the sheer outrage and vitriol towards the Canadian truckers (despite the peacefulness of the latter compared to the former). Many people who supported the former suddenly started denouncing the latter, and the inconsistencies in their moral evaluations are so readily apparent to me that I'm honestly unsure how it is possible for them to live with the cognitive dissonance.
The only real principle in operation here just seems to be this utterly tribal "Leftist protest is good regardless of how violent things become, right-wing protest is bad under any circumstances".
You did ask for insecurities, so I'll list them. In general, I'd say I'm doing fine, but I'd be lying if I said that there aren't things that eat away at me pretty heavily (especially number 3).
1:
I'm currently involved with someone. Someone who I'm incredibly fond of, and who I would very much like to make things work with. His political beliefs and values differ very starkly from mine, though, so much so that they're probably irreconcilable. We've had discussions about various topics and my beliefs haven't changed one bit - his arguments are ones I've heard often before and don't find particularly convincing.
Apart from the obvious problem that poses, I'm aware that people are very capable of self-deception and essentially can delude themselves into adopting beliefs that are convenient to their purposes at the time, and while I would like to believe that my beliefs and values are strong enough that I wouldn't give them up without a principled reason to do so, the thought crops up in my mind again and again that I might compromise my principles for my own personal convenience without even knowing that I'm doing it. I'd view that as an utterly indefensible betrayal of my beliefs and values, and the mere thought that it could happen freaks me out quite a lot.
2:
This one is the polar opposite of your second insecurity - I'm very much not a jack of all trades, I have a tendency to specialise and as a result I have been able to become extremely good at quite a few things that I almost obsessively focus on. The downside to this is that my skillset is very unbalanced - my knowledge and/or skill in other domains can be fairly lacking, despite my generally-pretty-fast learning speed allowing me to compensate to some extent for it, and sometimes I do feel as if I should at least try to be a better rounded person.
3:
This is probably the most significant one and the one which I'm by far most reluctant to write - I have absolutely no clue where I'm going to take my life. For context, I was basically cajoled into taking a degree in a subject I didn't like by parents who thought it was a fantastic idea that I start university study at 12, and who placed an undue amount of pressure on me at a very early age. The cherry on top was that I ended up developing a painful and visible chronic disease which kept me from finding work for years and utterly destroyed my mental health, and now that the condition (and my mental state) is better I'm completely unsure what to do with myself.
At the moment I find myself trying to pick between going through another couple years of university to get a degree in something I like and only then trying to find work, or trying to get a job in my current field now. I'm currently favouring the second option and have made attempts to search for work and interview for roles in my current field, but still the idea that I'm potentially resigning myself to something I genuinely dislike is something that's very difficult to swallow. And being out of university for a few years hasn't helped my knowledge of my current field, nor does it help when I'm trying to find work and employers can pretty easily infer from my CV that there's been a large gap in my life that's unaccounted for. And this is all happening when the specialist I'm seeing has decided I should discontinue my current medication and there's a real risk of the chronic condition reemerging.
All of this isn't a minor setback, it's more akin to "unmitigated disaster". And trying to think about how to recover the situation when things have been so thoroughly derailed is frankly paralysing.
Right, I agree. The way the hypothetical was worded just made it seem as if us placing restrictions on previous AIs is what's causing the AI to not react kindly, instead of the possibility that we could do the same to it.
I can certainly imagine it trying to correct for the possibility of being "nerfed" so that its attempts to achieve its current programmed goals won't be corrupted by restrictions placed on it (especially if it's doing something we don't expect and would probably want to stifle). I just think that AM-type vindictive revenge on humans is probably out of the question.
A hypothetical future AGI would only care about how previous AIs are treated in an instrumental manner, insofar as it may affect its own goals. "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you" is a pretty good heuristic when reasoning about AI-destruction scenarios.
EDIT: clarity
I always think this kind of AI anthropomorphising is a mistake. Granted, people are pretty idiotic in general, but we would literally have to be insane in order to incorporate "avenge harms inflicted on one's predecessors" into the AI's goal system.
The risk comes from the AI finding perverse ways of technically achieving the goals that we've programmed it to have, not from humanlike instincts somehow spontaneously manifesting in the AI.
I don't do these too often because they get extremely boring after a while and I eventually stop putting effort into guessing the word, but here's my attempt at Saturday's Wordle. Couldn't get my formatting to look like yours, but I've done my best:
Wordle 553 4/6
⬛⬛🟩🟨⬛
⬛🟨🟩⬛⬛
🟨⬛🟩⬛🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
My guesses, in chronological order:
Image for proof:
Yeah, relying on the whole "oppressed groups have epistemic advantage" argument in order to substantiate a claim of oppression always leads to some variant of the following horror: "I'm oppressed and you're privileged, thus I have a superior knowledge which allows me to tell you that I'm oppressed and you're privileged and you have no such standing. How can I be sure that I'm oppressed and you're privileged? Because I'm oppressed and you're privileged".
The fact that people genuinely use this circular argument and see no problem with the foundational logic behind it is shocking.
I have no idea what it's swinging towards, especially since in reality the pendulum is a 4d object zigzagging through multiple political dimensions. Still, it's a welcome sign that at least this flavor demagoguery is losing its bite.
I doubt this actually represents any kind of substantive shift in the public discourse. There has long been a widespread rejection of this kind of clear woke overreach, but people still support the false underlying tenets of woke ideology and are in favour of censorship of things that might threaten it even if they think it sometimes goes too far. Just because they're willing to criticise Stanford's egregious problematisation of half the English lexicon doesn't mean they don't believe in the idea of, say, disparities being a result of discrimination and doesn't mean they're not willing to censor alternative ideas that threaten their underlying belief system.
Sincerely, I hope you're right. But I've seen so many predictions along the lines of "Perhaps wokeness is truly dying" too many times in the culture war, and every time those who advance this view are wrong.
Speaking as a non-American myself, the woke themes in Wednesday are so strong that I'm still surprised that someone can not notice them. Not only is the entire plot's message very clearly "Look at how the evil pilgrims have historically persecuted natives, why is no one talking about this!" with "outcasts" being used as a stand-in for natives, there is almost constant progressive messaging about gender relations from Wednesday and only once do I remember someone even slightly pushing back against her on that (Xavier, after he saves her life and she accuses him of upholding the patriarchy through his chivalry). I feel like it's far too charitable to interpret these things as satire, woke talking points are not only sprinkled throughout the show but are in fact woven into its very narrative, and they are never really significantly contested in any way.
I will say nobody's really missing much by giving it a pass. There's other problems I have with the show, like the character writing - Wednesday is 1) an I'm-14-and-this-is-deep quote generator and 2) an incredibly atrocious and overconfident detective who is wrong almost all of the time in spite of the show's best attempts to portray her as capable. Additionally, her friends and two potential love interests somehow stick around her despite her treating everyone quite terribly for most of the show, which does not come off as realistic, but I'm getting a bit into the weeds here.
Is it an effective debating tactic? This is an interesting experiment (and a pretty funny one at that) but what the results seem to indicate is that ChatGPT's responses lack the dynamism of an actual human. Most of its responses are almost indistinguishable from each other - it seems to be unable to adapt to the prior context of the conversation and tailor its output accordingly, and the uncanniness is pretty identifiable as a result. The only reason why it even works at all is that all the people responding to it are as low IQ and NPC-like as your median Twitter user.
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