raakaa
20d 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
1mo ago
This discussion reminds me of another culture-war-adjacent meme referencing TF2 autobalancing (which I personally find a lot funnier)
raakaa
1mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
3mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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.
Still sore about lockdowns impinging on freedoms in order to save lives, I guess.
Yeah, sure, the lockdowns were about saving lives — unless we’re talking about Black Lives, in which case lockdowns no longer work, since The Science said that mass gatherings in order to protest/riot (but only to do those things!) are A-okay.
I will never stop being “sore” about this.
(Edited to expand/clarify: after the shitshow of contradictory statements and lies that our experts subjected us to during 2020 (e.g. masks don’t work, until they do, oh wait only KN95s do but; mass gatherings are bad, unless you’re going to have a BLM march; the vaccine prevents transmission, until it doesn’t), many right-wingers adopted a stance of epistemic learned helplessness, and decided that they wouldn’t believe anything that comes out of these experts’ mouths. Yeah, this leads to dumb conclusions occasionally like “COVID doesn’t exist”. But it’s only a rational response to the maleficence of the adults in the room.)
raakaa
5mo ago
This sort of thing puts a pretty big dent in Scott’s (and Hanania’s) thesis that for all their faults, the mainstream media is the best place to find accurate factual knowledge about current events. An ex-President (and current candidate) came three inches away from assassination and CNN readers might come away with the impression that he was spooked by a little noise.
raakaa
5mo ago
Okay, that’s a great declaration of moral virtue. But how does that play out in real life? I’ll pose the same question to you that I just did to sun_the_second: how much more would you pay to live next to a bum than next to Hoffmeister? Surely, it’d be a pretty substantial portion of your income, if you believe that people like Hoff should be getting shipped to penal colonies rather than bums.
raakaa
5mo ago
Before going further, I would like to note that I am broadly on your side: in addition to any personal squeamishness regarding the idea of mass executions (which may equal morality or weakness, depending on how you view it), I deeply distrust a state of affairs in which the State has the capacity to carry out such executions, and I fear that if vigilantism is encourage instead, it would lead to a general rise in violence.
But what I am mainly skeptical of is the original claim of Outlaw that Hoff would be a bad neighbor to a similar degree as a psychotic bum (note, by the way, that “psychotic” here is a qualifier rather than a descriptor). I also remain skeptical that your Marxist-Leninist is as bad a neighbor as the psychotic bum or as good a neighbor as Hoff. Even if “exploitative landlord monopolist” reads as clear-cut to you, it doesn’t to me, when compared to a definition of “psychotic bum” along the lines of “repeatedly makes direct/immediate threats against person or property”. (I do realize now, rereading the original comment chain, that Hoff might’ve been using a more expansive definition of “bum”, in which case I recognize that I might be sanewashing here.)
Anyway, like I said, when it comes to homeless hunting season, I’m more on your side than Hoff’s. So, returning to my main disagreement, here’s a question: whom would you rather live next to? Hoff, your Marxist, a palette-swapped online Turner Diaries fanboy wignat, a non-psychotic bum who’s still intrusive (e.g. Hoff’s upthread example of a guy who blocks your entrance/exit to your home with his encampment), or a psychotic bum? If we’re engaging with this question as a serious hypothetical (e.g. you’re searching for your next apartment; how much more would you pay to live next to each group), then I would personally much rather live next to Hoff than the rest of the options. (My full ranking would be Hoff >> Marxist > wignat >> non-psychotic bum > psychotic bum.)
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.
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