quiet_NaN
1hr ago
I had the understanding that tinder is used by people looking for sex. But perhaps I am ignorant.
I would argue that it is indeed rare that the motives of people are 100% aligned. If person A hires person B as an uber driver, the shared baseline expectation is that B will transport A in a safe manner and A will pay the pre-agreed fee. If you ask A "what would be a 99th percentile outcome?", they might reply that to meet the trip would have to be quicker than expected, and B would delight them with good conversation. If you ask B, they might say if A gives them a 50% tip. While the 99th percentile outcomes might coincide for both participants of the transaction, it likely won't.
Or take a man who buys a woman a drink in a bar. Both of them have a prior probability estimate that this will not end with a "thanks for the drink" ten minutes later. In most cases, the estimates of the nonstandard outcomes (sex, marriage, becoming the next Bonnie & Clyde, whatever) of both participants will not coincide. However, this does not make their deal unfair. Even if the woman knows beforehand that the outcome the man is hoping for is not in the cards, she is under no obligation to give him a warning that she is not in the mood for sex / would not fuck him if he was the last man on earth / has vowed never to marry again / is strictly against gun violence. This does not make her an exploiter. The line I would draw is intentional deception.
Again, this is a matter of social conventions, which are of course somewhat arbitrary. I could imagine some weird culture where the buying of a drink is equivalent to marriage vows being exchanged, et cetera. Now, if the white backpacker is in a country where 80% of tinder dates lead to marriage, and knowingly flouts this convention by planning to go on tens of tinder dates without marrying anyone, then I would say that he is taking advantage of his partners.
quiet_NaN
13hr ago
So your position is that if two people have sex, but their idea of what a 99th percentile good outcome might be (say, "he falls in love with me and marries me, so that I can move to the West" vs "she brings another hot girl along and we have a threesome"), exploitation is taking place? By that test, every human interaction is exploitive. (How do we determine who is the one being exploited? Easy, whoever is higher on the woke totem pole.)
I mean, if we twisted that scenario a lot, saying that the guy is happily married in an open relationship, but falsely indicates a willingness to marry some woman in the third world so that he gets to fuck her, then sure, that would be exploitive.
I find your comment deeply unethical, but I won't substantiate why. Instead, I want you to either admit that you are a nihilist who does not believe unethical behavior is a useful category or otherwise lay out in detail a coherent theory of ethics and argue why your comment is in fact ethical. See what I did there?
quiet_NaN
14hr ago
Say what?
So your position is that prostitution always implies sex slavery? Someone tell Aella that she self-enslaved when she worked as an escort.
Also, some libertarians might consider taxes legalized, regulated robberies, and yet taxes are quite instrumental in discouraging the unregulated kind.
I will grant you that likely, there are two effects from legalization which work in opposite direction. The one is the one I described, where the legal goods replace the illegal ones. The other is that legalization creates additional demand, and a part of that which will be filled by illegal channels. Think weed, once you legalize medical marijuana, sorting out which joints are legal and which ones are not becomes difficult.
However, in the case of prostitution, this would be solved easily enough. Issue government IDs for prostitutes and decriminalize only sex for pay with registered prostitutes, while keeping the Johns on the hook for rape if they fuck someone without such ID who was coerced by organized crime.
quiet_NaN
23hr ago
To be fair, I do not think that the Tinder plus thing is very transactional.
As far as 'bagging a blanco' is concerned, if people having sex with you for bragging rights is exploitation, then the popular girls in college are exploiting their boyfriends pretty hard.
As far as dreams of a better passport are concerned, I think that most woman have a realistic estimate of the probability of a tinder hookup leading to marriage. It is not like they think the next guy will be the one to fall for them. They have sex because they want to have sex. They also know that there is some minimal chance that the relationship will turn into something more serious, and would prefer a relationship with someone with a western passport, so they decide to optimize and prefer white dudes. Solid decision theory on their part.
As an intuition pump, consider either a gay person or a straight woman engaging in the same behavior, using the fact that they are exotic and come from a desired culture to fuck their way through a country without paying for a bed to sleep in. Would these people also be vile exploiters?
quiet_NaN
23hr ago
which doesn't lead to marriage
Why stop there? Even if it leads to marriage, the fact remains that the poorer woman was likely somewhat incentivized by material gains, so the pure act of sex was profaned by base worldly considerations.
The reality is that social status has been hot since our ancestors were living in the trees. Money is one of the ways we track social status. Over millions of years, the women who were selecting mates purely on physical or emotional grounds were surely selected against compared to women who were also considering the social status of their mates. Nor was it very different for men. A young woman wearing jewelry indicates "my family is rich (or at least of appropriate social standing) and would be a useful ally to you". The fact that such displays were (from what I can tell) common seems to indicate that they worked.
And while we are criticizing one of the core tenets of mate selection in social species, why stop there? Physical attractiveness might also have solid genetic reasons, but it is hardly less worldly.
If you would not fuck your True Love (TM) even if they were a worm, then you are profaning sex with your petty worldly concerns.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I can think of three bad options for Western countries:
-
Saying "you are corrupt, therefore we embargo you". This might work when the sale of natural resources was essential to prop up the regime, but in general it will at most result in the people being exploited by slightly poorer elites. (This is great if one follows the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics, though: profiting from child labor is wrong; who cares what happens to the kids without employment though.)
-
Invade with the goal of establishing a democracy. This one has a terrible track record.
-
Just shrug and buy their resources. This makes the West complicit in their exploitation.
Ideally, the West would keep trading, but also exert some pressure to make conditions for the workers less horrible. But telling the elites to industrialize so that their country will not stay poor might not be well received.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I would argue that it should be in the interest of anyone who dislikes sex slavery to have legalized (and somewhat regulated) prostitution instead. In my opinion, the goal would be to treat sex work similar to tobacco. Sure, some people might smuggle in tobacco to avoid paying taxes, and some of the smugglers might rely on slave labor to increase their margin, but the average consumer of cigarettes or vapes is not going to go to the darknet to save a few bucks.
By contrast, there will always be some demand for sex work, and someone will be ready to supply it at a premium. Sometimes, this will be escorts, but sometimes it will be organized crime, which is typically bad for the sex workers.
Also, some men looking for sex behave quite immoral (and sometimes outright criminal) to get it. I think that is jurisdictions where sex as a commodity exists, they are at least somewhat less likely to spin an elaborate web of lies to get a woman to fall in love with them. (I am less sure about rape, likely for some men violent rape or roofies are a kink in itself, and they would still do it if they could just pay for sex instead.)
Regarding coercion, I think that all wage labor is at least somewhat coercive in a world without a solid UBI. Shelter and food cost money, and the labor market exploits that fact. I don't think that giving someone the option of earning their rent fucking people they would not otherwise fuck instead of flipping burgers for eight hours a day is a-ok. Obviously, more direct coercion is not okay.
Also, I think that a lot of relationships involve both sex and the transfer of material goods and can thus be seen at least as somewhat transactional. For one thing, rich people (especially men) are often able to attract partners who are physically hotter than they are, which clearly suggests that expected future material benefits play a role in evaluating partners. Nobody is talking about criminalizing that.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
the single thing that lets him speak his mind now
While I think that the second Trump presidency is likely an important reason for Meta's change of mind regarding the culture war, I think it is more likely that people becoming fed up with wokeness lead to both the Trump victory and Scott feeling more free to speak his mind.
Scott never had mass appeal, the average US voter was never going to read through his lengthy articles. His main mechanism to effect change was always that some of the people who read him are quite influential, causing his ideas to (sometimes) diffuse far. While for some celebrities, whom they endorse for president is their most important political decision by far, I do not think that Scott's endorsement was all that impactful.
I think that modelling Scott as someone whose most important political goal was to tell the world about HBD is likely wrong. Being able to voice his opinions about HBD without getting cancelled by twitter mobs seems certainly to be part of his utility function, but not the whole of it.
Personally, his article on the martians was what caused me to update towards HBD. He was in a unique position to even make me consider it. I had read him for some time, and he was making a careful argument. He wisely made his argument about the Ashkenazi, not the Haitians. If I had encountered HBD claims elsewhere on the internet, I would most likely have replied "just fuck off back to stormfront".
quiet_NaN
2d ago
HBD therefore socialism
Two of these three words feel like a gross misrepresentation of the article.
The most HBD thing he says in that article is that " IQ is 50% to 80% heritable". He does not talk about group differences at all.
The thing you call socialism is likely based on this paragraph:
Ozy once told me that the law of comparative advantage was one of the most inspirational things they had ever read. This was sufficiently strange that I demanded an explanation.
Ozy said that it proves everyone can contribute. Even if you are worse than everyone else at everything, you can still participate in global trade and other people will pay you money. It may not be very much money, but it will be some, and it will be a measure of how your actions are making other people better off and they are grateful for your existence.
Below that, he talks about donating a portion of your income to whatever causes you feel are important. This hardly seems to be a call for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Besides endorsing Trump's presidential opponents (IIRC), who were close allies to wokism, what has he done to "politically support the very people that were keeping him in terror of speaking out"?
From what I remember, he has been a vocal critic of woke politics (which would be the ones most likely to attack people over HBD) for quite a few years. The distinction blue tribe v grey tribe was mentioned by him in 2014, for example.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
In 2017, Scott published this.
Gaucher’s disease, one of the Ashkenazi genetic diseases, appears to increase IQ. CHH obtained a list of all of the Gaucher’s patients in Israel. They were about 15 times more likely than the Israeli average to be in high-IQ occupations like scientist or engineer; CHH calculate the probability that this is a coincidence to be 4×10^-19.
From me, this reads as him mostly buying into HBD as far as Ashkenazis are concerned. Of course, once you acknowledge that one ethnic group has a genetic intelligence advantage, it would be an amazing coincidence if all the other ethnics groups were exactly the same, but it is a point he did not make explicitly.
Still, placing the dots out there but not connecting them for the reader is far from "enforced the consensus".
quiet_NaN
3d ago
From the article:
So imagine the most irrelevant orthodoxy you can think of. Let’s say tomorrow, the government chooses “lightning comes after thunder” as their hill to die on. They come up with some BS justification like how atmospheric moisture in a thunderstorm slows the speed of light. If you think you see lightning before thunder, you’re confused – there’s lots of lightning and thunder during storms, maybe you grouped them together wrong.
But you might want to read the article for the finer points he makes.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I view it as burning epistemic commons to get applause from his followers.
If he had said: "I am of the legal opinion that the ERA is in effect, but recognize that I will need to convince SCOTUS of that", that would be one thing.
It would be like Trump saying "The election was stolen from me through fraud, and the SCOTUS will recognize that and award me the presidency".
Instead, what either of these presidents said was basically on the level of "the sky is green".
People should disagree on opinions, but not on facts.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Except that, unlike the terribly old-fashioned practice of "celibacy when single, monogamy when married," the clarity of consent seems to break down in the absence of clearly-delineated relationship boundaries.
To be fair, for most of the history of marriage, consent covert at most the act of marriage itself, and even there it was often coerced. Once a woman was married, her husband most certainly was free to rape her. In Germany, marital rape was only criminalized in 1997 (against the vote of likely future chancellor Friedrich Merz).
You are certainly right that consent is especially hard with new sexual partners when boundaries are not yet established, but it does mean that it is all that simple for monogamous relationships. There are certainly plenty of relationships which are a total mess.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Israel has also agreed to release 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including approximately 190 who have been serving sentences of 15 years or more. In exchange, Hamas will release 34 hostages.
Presumably, the Palestinian prisoners were not getting 15 years for nonviolent protests.
Take Sinwar:
In 1989, Sinwar was sentenced to four life sentences in Israel for orchestrating the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians he considered to be collaborators. He spent 22 years in prison until his release among 1,026 others in a 2011 prisoner exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. [...] He is widely regarded as the mastermind behind the 7 October Hamas-led attack on Israel in 2023 [...]
The correct utilitarian response would have been not to exchange 1026 prisoners for an Israeli soldier, and it would certainly not be to exchange 34 hostages for 1000 prisoners now.
How is this anything but an almost total Hamas victory?
quiet_NaN
7d ago
That being said, wokeness got a lot of press but it was never able to coalesce into a serious political movement, and while it certainly influenced the "national conversation", it didn't really lead to any concrete changes beyond hand-wavey gestures that in hindsight look more to have been done for purposes of public perception than to make any real changes.
And they managed to make a small minority of Blacks to get away with killing more Blacks because policing them is racist if it leads to disparate outcomes.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Of course, wokeness isn't dead. Far from it. But the vibe shift is real, and I think it's pretty fair to say that wokeness did peak in 2020/21 and is in serious retreat now.
I would not hold my breath, yet. Wokeness thrived under the first Trump presidency, and I would not discount his ability to energize his enemies again.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
For the connoisseurs of online drama, there is newly created single-article substack making anonymous allegations against some user being a sock puppet of another user on both Wikipedia and something called RationalWiki and using his accounts to discredit people doing intelligence research.
The article was voiced by askwhocastsai, therefore the source must be credible. This is likely published by someone who is not a neutral party with a pathological interest into pathological wiki people, but rather someone who has been feuding with the subject of the article, personally, so one should probably take it with a grain of salt, for all I know this Smith guy is a fabrication and the sock puppet owner wrote the article to deflect attention away from him.
Anyways, the alleged subject of the article is said to be a former neo-Nazi who has reformed and is now using sock puppets to write hit piece articles about academics who research the genetics of intelligence on RationalWiki, which per WP 'is an online wiki which is written from a scientific skeptic, secular, and progressive perspective.' (It likely shares some ancient history with the ratsphere in that both movements precursors include the atheism wars, but they did not update on the cowpox of doubt.) His other alleged hobby is to sue people (representing himself) who write about him doing that. The article claims that most people who he sues actually tend to settle and remove their articles even though he would be unlikely to win in court. Per the article, substack managed to get a case kicked out of court when he sued them.
The articles claims that his tactics include getting articles on him deleted by personally editing them, adding info which is clearly slander, and then proceed with his legal actions, which seems like a neat if evil trick if you get away with it.
Generally, the claim that a select few who have the time to maintain one or more online personas have an exaggerated influence on how members of the public who are somewhat noteworthy (but not very noteworthy) are perceived through a google search seems worrisome. (Nor do I expect the LLMs bound to replace google to be better here, mostly.)
Personally, I am also fascinated by how much dedication and time some people on the internet have. Despite not being overworked, I write perhaps four comments on LW, ACX or the motte per week in total. Seeing someone who manages to run dozens of sock puppets, or painstakingly unearths sock puppetry going years back, or (as the alternative) invents whole complex allegations of sock puppetry has me amazed.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
homomorphic encryption
My general take is that the main use of homomorphic encryption is to make cryptocurrencies look respectable by comparison.
It's main purpose seems to be to get people to move their data into the cloud, while pretending that you can do useful computations on the data without learning anything useful about it, because it is all encrypted.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Well, parallel construction is a thing.
Of course, a spook will not crack phones of random suspects in police custody (because this would confirm to the police that they have this ability), nor will they risk their precious 0-days to infect phones of suspects in ordinary criminal cases, but if drug dealers who have incriminating messages on the Apple cloud had an above-baseline rate of being 'randomly' checked when crossing the border, I would not be surprised.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
Any regime installed by Putin would work pretty much like the current Russian system: a few oligarchs (picked for personal loyalty, not competence) own monopolies on most resource extraction.
Generally, those states favor rather simple production processes for most of their revenue where some goon can be put in charge, not complicated ones where they depend on some nerds with questionable loyalty. Competitive private enterprise is only tolerated while it is too small to form a power base.
Now, I will grant you that Ukraine certainly had its share of oligarchs as well, but they were at least in the process of transitioning out of a kleptocratic regime. If they become a puppet state of Putin in the way Belarus is, they will be stuck in that state for the foreseeable future, which will leave most of the population poor. This has some QALY costs.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
If Zelensky will give up the disputed territories the war ends today, and young Ukrainian men stop dying.
Since 2022, Putin has been pushing for a regime change in Kiev. What he is trying to do should be familiar to any player of Paradox games, it is building an empire. If you simply appease such people, you might get a few years of peace. But sooner or later, they will come for the next slice of territory, and then people will again argue "just give them what they want to stop the fighting".
I don't give much of a damn about Donbas and certainly none about Crimea. A peace deal where Putin gets them and in return Ukraine joins NATO (so that he can't come for the next Oblast in a year) would seem preferable -- but will not happen because Putin is not willing to let Ukraine move outside his sphere of influence.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
I think Putin's casus belli is made very slightly more valid if Zelensky speaks Russian.
Hard disagree. Annexations to culturally unite a people are /so/ 1930s. We don't do that any more. If Olaf Scholz was to invade Austria, which shares a lot of cultural history with Germany, that fact would not make it better or worse than an invasion of the culturally more distinct Poland.
Want to unite your people in the 2020s? Let them vote to join you, don't invade.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
These symbolic concerns are a price to pay for interviewing a serious politician who has to care about the image he presents to the world. It is entirely possible that for Zelenskyy, the interview would have become net-negative if conducted in Russian.
I suppose if you were to interview a US politician, even one in favor of cannabis legalization, they would refuse a joint during the interview, even if that would make the interview "more intimate, more personable, and less stilted". They would correctly conclude that a podcast of them being high would not play well with their voters. Likewise, Zelenskyy can not afford to look Russian.
If Friedmann is more interested in having cozy intimate interviews than having interviews with relevant statesmen, I am sure there would be no shortage of Ukrainians willing to talk with him in Russian, just like he would have no problem finding some random pothead willing to smoke a joint during the interview.
I think that is the crux of our disagreement.
In my model of the world, the woman on tinder likely has a realistic estimate of how rare it is that white men marry their tinder dates. After all, she is likely in contact with other women who are applying the same strategy, and knows how many Westerners they had sex with without getting married by any of them. She likely has some mid-status life and job in her home country (it is hard to invite Westerners over if you are living in a street or in a room with ten family members, after all). She enjoys being part of the hookup culture, and preferring white dudes is simply optimizing for the unlikely case that a hookup nets her a long term boyfriend (whom she would prefer to have a Western passport).
From what I can tell, in your model, the woman on tinder is desperately looking for a ticket to the west, in the same way that someone who sinks all their disposable income and then some into lottery tickets it trying to win the lottery. Like that gambler, she is totally deluded about her chances. She despises having meaningless sex, but carries on regardless, always convinced that the next date will finally be the one, and always being heartbroken when the guy leaves in the morning.
I think that we can both agree that having sex with someone one knows to be in the latter situation so one can save the costs for a hostel would be exploitative. I also maintain that having sex with the former woman is not exploitative.
The reason I consider the latter situation somewhat unlikely is that it basically is contrary to how women traditionally try to attract high quality mates, which is making a credible effort of appearing to be hard to get. If you are 25, on tinder and willing to fuck a man you have just met, that man can likely make an educated guess at the number of partners you had before him. While I am sure that there are men who tend to fall for woman who had tons of partners, I would assume that the average man would be slightly less likely to consider a long term relationship given that information. For example, getting hired by a Westerner as a tour guide for some token amount, being a bit flirty but not having sex with him in the first week, while also spending a lot of time with your mark seems a lot more likely to net you a boyfriend than just fucking your way through tinder. But what do I know.
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