Gaashk
17hr ago
If you're wondering where the cranky conservatives from the Slate Star Codex comment section went, it's https://www.datasecretslox.com
Gaashk
18hr ago
This is the first I've heard of Vibecamp, but this lines up with my impressions of San Francisco rationalist culture. Assuming they don't get eaten by their peers' attempts to create silicon gods, it'll be interesting to read their children's blogs about this in 15 years. It does seem like a bad idea.
A while back I was following a blog where a childhood acquaintance was processing her bad experience of living with her extremely conservative cultish adoptive parents, and it was painfully clear that they shouldn't have tried both homeschooling, and even home churching them, her mother, especially, sounded like she was terribly impatient and should absolutely not have been stuck at home with four children all day every day. She wrote about how her mother would take her out on a mother daughter date for an entire day, buy her gifts and nice foods, and then hope she would be satiated, that she had done her work as a mother, and become angry when she wanter more interaction the very next day. And it sounded so clear that they shouldn't have been bottled up together like that. But, ideology.
I'm not familiar with the ideology of Vibecamp, but I assume there is one that pushes people to do inadvisable things.
Gaashk
1d ago
In an especially striking and interesting part of the report, it actually hints at some relatively fresh and semi-radical new solutions. Becoming a parent, muses the report, is most difficult for younger people around 25-35 who are less securely established both in career and life-situation, but who have the highest fertility and the best chance of a good outcome if they do have a child. Yet current policy sprinkles benefits over time rather than concentrating it in the hands of the young who need it most: so concentrate the benefits! Give new young parents a bigger concentrated dose of total spending instead of spreading them out over time.
That makes sense.
Society already provides a lot of benefits to school children, in the form of daycare, education, socialization, food, and other extraneous school related things. It provides surprisingly little to new parents, maybe healthcare and a small tax benefit, but sometimes not even that.
The problem of people not seriously pairing up remains unaddressed, though, and it seems to be the bigger issue. Especially, dating apps are for gay men and women who are fine with behaving like gay men because sex with sexy men is fun. Reports are poor in terms of actually establishing relationships likely to result in children, even heavily subsidized from birth children.
I'm personally in favor of increasing gender segregation in most spaces, including work, with the implication that mixed gender spaces are fair game for establishing romantic relationships. The current arrangement where almost all spaces are co-ed, but asking anyone out is fraught is retarded.
Gaashk
2d ago
I've heard "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog," but not "tits or GTFO," presumably because I never claimed to be an attractive woman. Nobody cares if someone is a dorky homeschool girl on the internet.
Gaashk
2d ago
I'm curious to see what, if anything, comes of the LLM driven automation of the next decade. It seems primed, especially, to take over low level management work. I wonder if it would be better or worse for the average worker to have high level decisions made by an AI program vs a human manager. Thinking of some of the human decisions, it might be mixed. Reports out of Amazon warehouses aren't great.
We've been learning about the mining labor struggles of 19th Century Colorado. This isn't from Colorado, but is a good song: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MjFcllICjUc
Gaashk
2d ago
I got an unsolicited neighborhood magazine recently, which is painfully on the nose for well off Gen Xers. There was an article about a couple who looked to be in their 50s, and it was all about their yoga studio, how they do hot yoga, warm yoga, dog yoga, and have a French handstand consultant, and here's a picture of the husband doing a handstand. There's a picture of their little dog. Somewhere in the middle it mentions that he was an engineer for 30 years and their two sons, one of whom is helping them run their yoga studio. They sound like normal wholesome people who are trying to pretend like they are alternative in some way.
None of it is wrong or bad, but I don't like it; it seems like it should be a parody somehow, but I can't quite put my finger on why I feel that way.
Gaashk
2d ago
it might be unseemly to ask people to rate their social interactions with me on a scale of 1-10?
Haha.
I remember enjoying how CS Lewis talked about philia in The Four Loves.
My parents keep joining book clubs; currently they're looking forwards to a TS Eliot meetup. But we were all educated lower middle class, and didn't have any idea how to get complex, satisfying jobs with quantized and measurable feedback. We've mostly had the kinds of jobs where feedback came in the form of getting yelled at, or sometimes unexpectedly fired. I can see how it would be very appealing to put time and effort into an actually good job that you're good at.
Gaashk
2d ago
I don't have a ton of romantic experience, but such as it is, it's been the same sources as friends. I do realize that this has the failure mode of ambiguously date like friendships, but I've never tried anything else, and so have no experience with relationships that are romantic from the start.
Gaashk
2d ago
How were your early 30s in terms of socialization? I don’t dislike the idea of it, but the effort vs returns can vary significantly
I moved states, got married, had a baby, and moved again during Covid, so my social life outside my husband and family was pretty thin.
In my late 20s, my social connections were through church, liberal arts college, and volunteer work, and that was lovely. We were putting on supras (formal toasting dinner parties), bonfires, game and beer nights, holiday festivities, meditation meet ups and other pleasant events.
Personally, I would have gotten burnt out working all the time and not prioritizing community get togethers, but I'm a woman, low in conscientiousness, and doing the kind of work where more work doesn't result in increased opportunities, so ymmv.
Gaashk
2d ago
Crafter and artist, if I could have a studio space during work hours, and not have to maintain the maniacal consistency of actual professionals who make my current income, instead shifting between different kinds of projects.
Gaashk
2d ago
It's reasonable if it's a stable, long term preference. If it's only an intermittent preference, and especially if you might want a family, your late 20s and early 30s is exactly the wrong time to remain socially secluded.
Gaashk
3d ago
It does seem much sillier in Europe than in America, where watching giants of African descent play sports has generations of tradition behind it.
Gaashk
4d ago
I didn't respond because it was called the "infidelity survey" and I had neither juicy gossip, nor a desire to speculate.
Gaashk
9d ago
It looked like much of the skill of ultrasound specialists was in moving the device around to get the correct locations in real time, and then they would mark it off on their checklist, and a doctor would look at it later (but also they already have an opinion on morality in the moment). So an LLM could replace the analysis, but not the moving the device around while jostling the item being scanned (at least for pregnancies).
Gaashk
10d ago
The most famous example Jesus used was a Samaritan, who were the Jews' outgroup.
Gaashk
10d ago
Enjoy!
We're two teachers and three children on summer break, enjoying a birthday, an anniversary, and the only babysitting we ever get, so we will be visiting mountains, restaurants, swimming, and not fasting. But I'm being a lapsed Orthodox, and most American Orthodox will be fasting until June 29th, some into July, depending on jurisdiction.
Gaashk
10d ago
They say that the miscarriages are God's responsibility, whereas the IVF fetuses are the parents' and doctors' responsibility, which is different. It isn't necessarily wrong for God to allow smallpox, but if you go and re-release it, you will be doing wrong.
Gaashk
10d ago
Two people I heard from in person, off the internet:
- Nurse for an extreme case of fetal alcohol syndrome, needs 24/7 nursing care (three full time adults?), cannot communicate, hooked up to various medical apparatuses, was already 8 or so, with no expectations of dying any time soon
- Sisters at a high school, who were part time caretakers for their other sister, who had various health problems that had left her basically without an immune system. The state was also paying for additional care, and they were carers, paid by the state as well. They did sound somewhat like indentured servants to their family dysfunction. Their father had already moved to another state, and during high school one of the daughters moved to join him.
Having a baby with Down's syndrome is probably fine, and it's a sin to kill it. But there are situations that medical science allowed and which it perpetuates, which are basically black holes of suffering, and which society should not subsidize.
Gaashk
10d ago
Read St Athenasius "On the Incarnation" if you're interested. "God became man by nature that man might become god by grace"
Gaashk
10d ago
In America at least, standards for what constitutes abuse or neglect are indeed quite high, such that it could feel like enslavement if the relationship doesn't eventually become reciprocal.
Gaashk
10d ago
What I've heard from couples trying to adopt kids 5 - 12 is that the state's priority is to reunite them with relatives, and even if they've been with a new family for a year, if they find someone in another state who's related and take them in, or their older sibling reaches the age of majority, the state will move them and place them there instead.
Gaashk
10d ago
Also, the people getting upset about medical abortions could probably easily prevent them by pledging to adopt and raise Down children.
Probably not, since from the point of view of a woman who wants children, but not this child, the recovery is much shorter for abortion than giving birth full term, and it's more common amongst older mothers, who have less time to lose.
Gaashk
10d ago
That's interesting, and exactly opposite my intuitions. I think that abortion in general is wrong, but that abortion for a life long disability is much more relatable and grey than abortion because the mother doesn't want to give birth to it (assuming the pregnancy and mother are generally healthy and normal).
LOL, very amusing that you put this at the end.
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