raakaa
2d ago
Yeah, that makes two of us. But I find it repulsive because I’m enmeshed within the culture wars surrounding its use. But what does, say, some random Chilean think if he sees some Anglophone Twitter user memeing like
Normalize wearing sweatpants all day, because I’m too lazy to dress nice
or something? (Note: I am clearly incompetent at writing Twitter memes, but certainly you’re familiar with the genre that I’m pointing at.) Would the Chilean think “huh, isn’t it weird how this person is using that word?”
raakaa
2d ago
I would guess that the name is in earnest. My own interpretation is that it essentially is implying that the app is like a vade mecum. Just as everyone used to carry around the Little Red Book that carried all sorts of wonderful wisdom, so too will everyone now carry around our app.
I get what you’re saying, though. I had a similar moment when I was watching some Chinese YouTuber who was doing a travel video about a museum founded at the site of the border between the Chu and the Han. When he was discussing why the Qin fell, he was sure to explain that it was due to the “contradictions within Qin society”. I didn’t know if he intentionally put it in there as a signaling mechanism or if concepts like this have just become standard tools of thought for Chinese people. It makes you wonder how non-Westerners react when they see how positively peppered our own discussions are with words like “marginalization” and “normalization”.
My own guess is that you have some number of small true believers who are very much intentionally lacing their speech with these words, and a much larger proportion who just get a vague good feeling when they use these words, something like “look, I’m saying something smart/morally correct/timely”.
Addressing your second point, as someone who knows next to nothing about economics [^1]: your question seems to be answered by the parable of the broken window.
Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage [to a broken window], and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier's trade – that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs – I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child [who broke the window]. All this is that which is seen.
But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, "Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen."
It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.
Applying this to your question about the security guard: any society in which stores (and in particularly bad cases, individual families) must spend on hiring security guards is a society where this money is not being spent on research and development, or on education, or on infrastructure, or on other investments that generally raise the GDP of that society (and often make life better in that society too). We should thus expect to see this opportunity cost of hiring security guards to be reflected in GDP figures, as societies that hire them are more likely to be beset with lower GDP. This is borne out in reality: there are many developing countries where elites live behind expensive walled compounds staffed by large security details, but no one particularly thinks that they’re major players in the world economy.
[^1] That is to say, don’t put too much stock in what I’ve written here.
raakaa
1mo ago
As a tangent, I disagree with his assertion that oppressive architecture is not intentional. There is explicit evidence of architects explaining that they intentionally design buildings to be psychologically destabilizing. For an example, refer to the debate between Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman, which has previously been discussed on The Motte.
raakaa
1mo ago
Wittgenstein calls this “family resemblance”.
From the Wikipedia intro:
[The idea of family resemblance] argues that things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all of the things.
raakaa
2mo ago
This discussion reminds me of another culture-war-adjacent meme referencing TF2 autobalancing (which I personally find a lot funnier)
raakaa
2mo ago
Yeah, telling the bleating sheep what they want to hear would probably work out better for them than telling the bleating sheep that they hate them and look forward to them being replaced by wolves.
raakaa
3mo ago
Speaking solely to your question regarding pick-me hate (I’ll let your original interlocutor handle the rest), my theory has always been that pick-mes are the equivalent of scabs in the sexual marketplace. Let’s assume that most women don’t want to act male-brained: they don’t want to have to play video games or watch anime to land a good boyfriend. In the absence of pick-mes, they don’t have to: if all women categorically refuse to engage in male-brained behavior, then any man who wants a girlfriend will have to accept that. But now, if we introduce the existence of pick-mes, the equilibrium changes: it is possible for men (including presumably high-status men) to get a girlfriend that aligns more with their interests, meaning that ceteris paribus, a man would choose a pick-me over the equivalent “normal girl”. This means that in order for a normal girl to maintain her same level of attractiveness, she has to engage in a bit of pick-meing herself to stay afloat (and as we’ve previously assumed, most women don’t want to do that). Shaming pick-mes is therefore a method of preventing this from happening, in the same way that anti-scab tactics are methods of preventing wages from being lowered. I also hypothesize that the male equivalent of this is “simp-shaming”.
Note that the one time I shared this theory in real life to a woman, she wholly denied it, saying that the reason for pick-me shaming is that it is simply fundamentally embarrassing to see a woman debasing herself for a man. But even if that’s how this behavior is psychologized or rationalized, it still serves the broader game-theoretic purpose discussed above. (The same goes for simp-shaming.)
The Repugnant Conclusion is a counterexample or argument against utilitarianism as an ethical philosophy. To illustrate the Repugnant Conclusion, it might be a bit helpful to phrase it in politically-charged words, even though the general principle is broader.
Let’s say that you live in a country where everyone is very happy. Because we’re operating under utilitarian ethics, this amount of happiness can be quantified by summing up the amount of happiness of each person in the society. Now, let’s say that your country imports a bunch of foreigners who aren’t nearly as happy. If the foreigners don’t make your country’s original inhabitants any less happy, then under utilitarianism, this is a clear win: the total amount of happiness in your country has increased. But crucially, even if the foreigners decrease the amount of happiness of the natives, then as long as this decrease is outweighed by the increased total happiness you get from adding new people to the country, this is still a net win under utilitarianism.
So let’s keep iterating this: naive utilitarianism would argue that it is good to keep importing unhappy foreigners, even if they make everyone else worse off, so long as these foreigners still have positive happiness (that is, are not suicidal) and so long as there are enough of them to offset the decrease in happiness in everyone else. The end result: a country of a billion people, all of whom are barely happy at all, which utilitarianism says is still superior to the original smaller country of very happy people. That is the Repugnant Conclusion.
Note that despite my framing, the Repugnant Conclusion doesn’t quite directly apply to the question of immigration in this way; I haven’t addressed the salient real-world question of whether immigrants do decrease happiness rather than increase it, etc. The more general Repugnant Conclusion applies to not a single country deciding whether to import immigrants, but to the question of whether one possible universe is better than another possible universe. The most crucial way in which my framing differs from the real world is that it assumes that the only country that matters in the world is the country being discussed, which utilitarianism rejects. But framing it in these terms hopefully makes it more understandable than saying “say that N unhappy people are born into a possible universe…”
raakaa
3mo ago
Whether I like it or not, I am forced to engage with the buildings that architects build. If architects build repulsive monstrosities, then I, along with however many thousands or millions of fellow poor souls live among the same buildings, have to be subjected to them daily. In contrast, even if I make mean comments about architects online, the architect will almost certainly not even be aware of my existence. Usually, when people’s actions greatly affect the lives of countless others, then we tend to think that they should take those others’ opinions into account.
Now, an architect might respond that he should be unconstrained by the ressentiment of the plebs when he is exerting his own will upon the built environment at massive scales. But if that’s how architects see themselves, then my relationship with them is most analogous to some Persian peasant massacred at the whims of Ghengis Khan’s ambitions. I won’t look fondly upon the Khan among the slaughter as Merv burns.
raakaa
4mo ago
If the Wikipedia page on “Stalinist architecture” is anything to go by, then communists have produced some things of beauty. Although a quick wiki skim suggests that the communists pre-Stalin were just as strongly married to their hideous architecture as our own architects of today are.
raakaa
5mo ago
What you correctly hit upon here regarding polygynous systems marks a crucial distinction between blackpillers/self-identified-incels and redpillers/PUAs. The latter are more in favor of polygyny and harems, as they see themselves as better able to thrive under such a system, armed with their Game. The former, in contrast, long for a patriarchal system of strictly-enforced monogamy and government-mandated gfs.
Of course, to any normal, well-adjusted person, this all has the same flavor as arguments between the People’s Front of Judaea and the Judaean People’s Front.
raakaa
5mo ago
Yeah, Scott wasn’t a great example, for precisely the reason you give (he’s very principled and ideologically consistent, even despite whatever meanings and groanings have arisen from certain portions of his readerbase post-ACX).
Rather, I’m primarily referring to the wider array of more-explicitly-left-wing twitterers and bloggers who developed a sudden interest in opposing cancel culture during that one moment in time a few weeks ago. IIRC, a number of these folks’ reactions can be found linked to in the Culture War threads from that time. At the very least, it would be nice for the people who participated in that groundswell against cancel culture then to post a tweet now showing that they’re opposed to it in this case, too.
raakaa
5mo ago
A couple weeks ago, when right-wingers got that one Home Depot worker fired for supporting the assassination of a former President, there were reams of articles produced (including one by our own Scott) calling for a cancel culture ceasefire; reams of articles, along with torrents of tweets from left-wingers.
When a random Olympic official then gets cancelled for, in contrast, making an innocuous hand gesture, have any of these same peaceniks continued their call for ceasefire?
raakaa
5mo ago
combined with how much of a PITA it is to carry around a spear
This makes me wonder: might telescoping retractable spears be a solution to this problem? My immediate concern would be that such designs would fare far worse at imparting lots of force to an enemy without breaking, and this seems to have been echoed by one or two of the few things that came up when I searched for such spears just now. But there’s gotta be some clever design that could get around this, right?
raakaa
5mo ago
The pushback that you’re receiving is likely coming from people who are skeptical and scared regarding a general broadening of the definition of rape. Speaking personally, I’ve been pretty spooked by high-profile reports of women regretting sex the next morning and calling it rape, of drunk men being charged with rape for having sex with equally-drunk women (cf. that one infamous subway poster PSA that goes something like “Joe was drunk. Jane was drunk. Joe and Jane slept together. Joe committed rape.”), et cetera.
I, who respond viscerally and emotionally to these instances of the expansion of the definition of rape (these horror stories teamed up with my natural cowardice to ensure that I did not enjoy my youth while I had the chance), am thus inclined to instantly oppose the usage of the same word “rape” to describe non-central examples of the crime. Your argument that “he legit is a convicted rapist” doesn’t quite resonate with me when Joe from the PSA above is equally a convicted rapist. Others with similar viewpoints as mine would likely feel the same.
I hope that this explains why you might be facing opposition from people who nevertheless think that a nineteen-year-old guy having sex with a twelve-year-old girl is still a very bad thing.
raakaa
5mo ago
The singular “they” is often used in a particularly annoying motte-and-bailey fallacy.
Motte: The singular “they” has been used for thousands of years! Shakespeare used it! [Used it—but in the context of an unknown person or unspecified person, as in “Someone left their bag here”]
Bailey: Let’s use the singular “they” to refer to specific, named people! (E.g. “When I asked Jamie what they were doing this evening, they said that they were going to the protest”)
raakaa
5mo ago
Yeah, I think that’s true in a lot of cases. But I also see a decent number of posters who seem to be absolutely “OBSESSED”, as it were, with “trannies” in a qualitatively different way than the former crowd. Working it into unrelated posts, bringing out barrages of buzzwords…. (Using your example, there’s a difference between your average anon who replies “tits or gtfo” to a low effort “as a girl, I don’t see why guys like these stupid cartoons so much” post, and an /r9k/ native.) At the very least, these latter anons’ actions are best described by conflict theory.
raakaa
5mo ago
[A]proximately nobody wants to make the lives of your other friends worse.
Prefacing this response by stating that I am on the side of Team Nerd rather than that of your interlocutor: this statement in particular seems false. In particular, it seems false in a quokkic, mistake-theorist’s way. There are absolutely many right-wing nerds who want to make e.g trans people’s lives worse. For example, when a poster suspected of being trans on 4chan is met with countless replies of “you will never be a woman”, I doubt that those replies’ authors are not intending to cause pain. Granted, one can say that this is a defensive reaction to an SJW takeover of nerd hobbies—hence that old “why did you make us do this? We just wanted to play video games” image. But if that’s the case, then this is just arguing that the conflict is justified instead of arguing that there is no conflict.
raakaa
5mo ago
I am willing to extend someone enough charity to accept that “Pro-Palestine” does not necessarily mean “Anti-Israel” (in the sense of “wants Israel destroyed”)
I’d agree if the pin were just a generic watermelon or flag. But given its shape, it’s hard to make that argument. The pin in question is essentially the Middle Eastern equivalent of this image. Wouldn’t you characterize someone wearing that design as “anti-Taiwan”?
raakaa
6mo ago
The Home Depot lady, like many liberals, likely believes that Trump is a threat to democracy and that he is responsible for the current state of political affairs. […] Trump fucked around and found out (almost). It would have only been fair.
The problem is that our current political situation is not the fault of one single ex-real-estate-mogul-cum-reality-TV-star-cum-President. It is the fault of the sum of the actions and reactions of millions of Americans (and foreigners) on both sides, spurred by concerns material and ideological. Part of the blame rests on Trump. Part of the blame rests on liberals who are so quick to condemn democracy to save Democracy that they encourage assassinations of former Presidents/current candidates.
So going by the Home Depot lady’s logic (or rather, your logic): she is part of the problem responsible for the current state of political affairs. She fucked around and found out. Her losing her job is only fair.
Do you see the problem with this sort of approach to politics?
raakaa
6mo ago
We are already exerting an extraordinary level of control over the thought processes of current AIs - they are entirely written by humans.
Do you mean this in the sense of “AIs are trained on human creations and human preferences, so their thought processes are derived from humans’”, or in the sense of “humans have explicitly written out or programmed all of the thought processes of AIs”?
If you mean the latter, then this is wholly false. There is no (legible) correspondence between the intention of any human and, say, the ninth column in the layer 20 self-attention weight matrix of a modern LLM. It is an entirely different situation from that of traditional programming, where even a line of machine code can be traced back through the assembler and compiler to a human who had a specific intention.
If you meant the former, then that’s a lot more sensible. But if that’s the case, then “give birth” seems like a very apt analogy. When one sires a child, the child derives its phenotype, its character, and its thought processes largely from the parents, while the vagaries of chance (environmental factors) introduce novelties. The same seems broadly true with modern AI systems.
This is false. The smartest people are often able to construct the most elaborate rationalizations and justifications.
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