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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34084 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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I'm committing a major faux-pas by posting a second consecutive top-level comment, but it's been 12 hours and people need to post more. (Seriously, post a top level comment. Do it now.)

What's something that you were wrong about?

I'll start. I was wrong about marijuana legalization. It was a bad idea and we never should have done it. Marijuana is, contra urban legend, actually pretty addictive. And it makes productive people into unproductive people. The benefits, such as they are, are best enjoyed in moderation. But legalization has resulted in a whole new class of junkies that wouldn't have existed otherwise. Also, weed culture is gross.

Scott, as always, says it best:

My views evolved in something like the way Steve implicitly points at here: decriminalizing marijuana seemed to go okay, it seemed hypocritical and dumb for the law to be “marijuana is illegal but we won’t punish you for it in any way wink wink”, so (I thought) why not go all the way and legalize it? And the answer turns out to be: if it’s illegal but tolerated, then it’s supplied by random criminals; if it’s legal, it’s supplied by big corporations. And big corporations are good at advertising and tend to get what they want.

In any case, what were you wrong about?

The main positions I've changed stances on would be:

1/ The British monarchy: I was a pretty hardcore republican when I was younger, now I don't have strong feelings about them either way, but I have a lot of appreciation for things like the monarchy as unifying symbols of tradition that grounds the nation in its history.

2/ MENAP Immigration: I always thought that the decisions by countries like Germany and Sweden to throw their doors wide open was a bit rash, but I've become especially black-pilled in recent years on the socially destructive nature of immigration from particular regions, even if they are genuine refugees.

3/ Criminal justice: I used to be a big believer in rehabilitation (and still am, when it can be done) but I've come round to the position that a lot of people who go to prison, particularly repeat offenders, aren't likely to change their behaviour when released and the best thing for society at large would be to keep many convicts locked-up.

it's been 12 hours and people need to post more. (Seriously, post a top level comment. Do it now.)

Last time I just posted a top level comment, I got threatened-to-be-modded at. Perhaps people have too high expectations for these threads.

What's something that you were wrong about?

I was wrong to let politics run my life. It almost ruined the best relationship I've ever had, because I kept grinding away at the political differences between us, trying to finally show once and for all that leftists have gone crazy and were destroying everything. I kinda still sort of think that is true, but I learned that to be happy you gotta put this aside. Once I did that, I have had the best years of my life.

I was also wrong that there would be no end to the feminist escalation, 10 years ago, and for many years afterward, I thought that the future would be a boot stomping on men's faces for eternity, because both men and women feel more sympathy for women. I still can't stand feminists, but for what it's worth over the past couple of years there has seemed to be some return to normalcy, where not absolutely everything needs to be framed in terms of female oppression and we need to constantly be walking on eggshells for fear of being called out and fired from work.

As a resident of the same state as @FiveHourMarathon, I'm going to have to semi-agree on gambling. As a resident of the western part of the state, though, I might be able to add some additional perspective. In 2001 West Virginia legalized traditional slot and video poker machines at racetracks. "Video lottery machines" had been legal at racetracks for some time, but they weren't particularly popular. Now that they had traditional slot machines, these tracks began constructing large casinos around them. 2 of the 4 racetracks in the state happen to be in the Northern Panhandle, practically an exurb of Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania had been talking about legalizing gambling for a while, most notably through various riverboat gambling proposals in the '90s, but these never went anywhere. It soon became obvious that everyone was simply driving to West Virginia to play slots, and local news outlets regularly did stories where they'd go to Mountaineer or Wheeling Island and point to all the PA plates in the parking lot and interview the owners, who invariably said that they'd go to casinos in their home state if they were only legal. Whatever their objections were before, state lawmakers couldn't ignore the amount of money that PA residents were taking to West Virginia, and the push was renewed.

One thing lawmakers were initially cautious about, however, was that they didn't want to actually become West Virginia. Once slots were legalized, a number of sketchy "hot spots" started opening up around the state. These were usually bars, tobacco shops, and the like that had a room with 4 or 5 slot machines. Gambling wasn't merely legal there, but unavoidable, and Pennsylvania didn't want the state to have casinos popping up everywhere. So gaming licenses were initially limited to existing racetracks and four stand-alone casinos, one of which had to go in Pittsburgh and two of which had to go in Philadelphia. (It should be noted that at the time, Pittsburgh was effectively getting two casinos, as The Meadows racetrack is less than an hour south, and there was no comparable facility in the Philadelphia area at the time.) The gaming commission was also going through a comprehensive review process to ensure that only the best candidates were awarded licenses. They also announced that the casinos would have table games, at which point the same news stations went back to West Virginia and interviewed their resident casino patrons, who invariably said that they would drive to Pittsburgh (or The Meadows) to play them. West Virginia soon amended their law accordingly.

The system actually worked pretty well for about a decade. Then, the US Supreme Court ruled that sports betting could be legalized in any state. PA legislators rushed back to Harrisburg in the wake of the decision. But while they were there they did a couple of other things. They also legalized online gaming, removed restrictions on resort licenses (around a while but always a minor player), and created a new category of "mini-casinos". I was always in favor of legalized gambling, but this just seems like a bridge too far. I know that going to a casino is no real barrier for a true gambling addict, but there's something disconcerting about the idea that you can blow your life's savings while lying in bed. As another user noted, legalized sports betting has made sports media even more unbearable than it already was.

I play in a couple fantasy football leagues, but I've always found fantasy sports programming useless at best and agonizing at worst (I can only care so much about the fantasy performance of players who aren't on my team, and there's nothing more annoying than watching a game for one guy). Now we've added betting programming to that, and it's become almost completely impossible. Does anybody watch sports purely for pleasure anymore? Some people's lives are apparently so boring that they need to gamble on games they wouldn't otherwise care about to make watching them more interesting. I have a slightly different perspective. Last Friday, I found myself watching the Eagles Packers game with two guys who had parlayed the spread with a bunch of prop bets. Normally I wouldn't care who won, but after listening to the vocal commentary about every play, ref call, etc. that had any impact on their wager, I became very invested in these guys losing their shirts.

Anyway, the situation in PA got even worse after various courts ruled that certain games that I don't entirely understand are actually skill games and thus exempt from gaming laws. I doubt these games involve skill to the extent that one can get good enough at them to win consistently, but they've been popping up in seedy convenience stores all over the state. There are also these virtual horse racing and football game things that I've seen in family friendly bar/restaurant type places, but I don't really understand these either. In 20 years we've gone from the lottery, illegal slots in dive bars, and the small stakes stuff that's allowed in private clubs to gambling seemingly being everywhere. You can't get through a news broadcast now without them playing an annoying ad for Rivers online where a jingle that sounds suspiciously like the diarrhea song from elementary school literally boasts that their app allows you to gamble while lying in bed.

The other thing @FiveHourMarathon mentioned that I might as well address while I'm here is aging. I'm a few years older than him and, honestly, make hay while the sun shines is bad advice. Most women who age terribly tend to do so in their late 20s or maybe early 30s. If they make it any longer they're usually stable for the long haul. I'd rather pick one up on the safe side of the divide than marry a girl right out of college without knowing that this nubile cutie has a ticking time bomb hidden away, that all of the sudden she's going to bloat out into something grotesque, like an self-inflating raft from which the pin has been yanked.

Also the rise of social casinos/sweepstakes site are an additional layer of hilarity in that they circumvent the actual laws around online gambling and they're available in far more states consequentially.

Essentially the model being that if you deposit into Chumba Casino (Billions of USD a year in revenue), you're buying coins which can then be used on slot games and then at the end of play you swap those back into real money. Which circumvents the whole structure around 'real money' gaming, which is an insane loophole even as an industry participant.

Legalised sports betting through Draftkings and the like seems to be the ultimate backdoor for financial fuckups. The emotional attachment, conscious or otherwise, people have for their faves and the now daily timescale refresh optimized for daily expensive dopamine hits. Its not possible to martingale an out even if the bets arent capped, because of the changing meta and emotional investment. Draftkings is evil, and I think it portends great ill for sportsball in the US.

As for the spirit of the thread, I was wrong on charisma. I used to think stacking int and str was what got you far in life, thanks to fucking biowares icewind dale and charisma being an utterly useless stat IRL. With social interactions mediated by common interests as kids, charisma seemed utterly unimportant and being socially adept seemed to be for losers striving for the approval of strangers.

Turns out being an obnoxious creep bragging about PRs and grades makes one unable to deal with the social meta. Making friends isn't the problem, navigating hostile social agents is the problem. Getting socially crippled with no awareness of it happening or recourse is not necessarily a better tradeoff compared to the eternal performance for approval.

I used to think stacking int and str was what got you far in life

See that’s your problem right there: you have to cast the int to a str before concatenating them, or else you’ll get a ValueError

{H}onestly, make hay while the sun shines is bad advice. Most women who age terribly tend to do so in their late 20s or maybe early 30s.

You got it backwards. I'm advising that a lot of people delay getting serious about getting married until they, themselves, are past-ripe. Until the raft is inflating, or the hair is receding, or the skin is leathery from years of tanning beds and cigarettes, etc. The thing is that...

she's going to bloat out into something grotesque, like an self-inflating raft from which the pin has been yanked.

is mostly a choice. No one has to pull the pin.

is mostly a choice. No one has to pull the pin.

Exactly. Which is why if you make a conscious effort to take care of yourself, you don't have to worry about being past-ripe. You can't do anything about the receding hairline, but as a balding guy, that's honestly not a big deal. I look much better with a #1 buzz than I ever did with hair, and the upkeep is much simpler. Not exactly a "make hay" story but there was this girl who turned me down in middle school who I hadn't paid much attention to in high school and completely lost contact with afterward. When I was about 24 I was in my local neighborhood dive bar and I hear my name and turn to face an unfamiliar blimp. She said her name and I was completely speechless. She looked like a shipping hazard. She told me I looked different (I had long-ish hair at the time) and I was tempted to say "speak for yourself" but wisely held my tongue. Not that a middle school girlfriend would have turned into a lifelong steady, or that 24 is the age when this happens, but man, the possibility is always there, and I felt like I had somehow dodged a bullet a decade earlier.

I had something similar happen to me. Hit on a cute girl in high school and got knocked back. She got BIG and thought I was a sure thing at a party in my 20's. Nope, nope nope.

I was taking my grandmother to a Perkins pancakes last year and ran into someone, maybe, who I knew. I thought maybe I knew him, but I couldn't be sure. Because it looked like the quarterback from our high school football team, who was also the star pitcher on the baseball team, who I hadn't seen since high school, but holy shit he's a balloon. It's unbelievable. I kept stealing glances at him, but I'm not certain enough to walk over and say Hi Casey, it's FiveHour.

So I went home and had my wife look him up on facebook, and whaddyaknow, it was him.

I'd rather pick one up on the safe side of the divide than marry a girl right out of college without knowing that this nubile cutie has a ticking time bomb hidden away, that all of the sudden she's going to bloat out into something grotesque, like an self-inflating raft from which the pin has been yanked.

You’ve just described 80% of “thicc Latinas”. The natural life cycle of a Mexican woman is to turn into a potato after having her first child and to stay like that for the rest of her life.

There are notable exceptions.

Salma Hayek’s ancestry appears to include no indigenous/Amerindian genetics, which is probably the reason why she has defied the Mexican curse.

Salma Hayek has Lebanese descent too, which has Arab thighmelt potential. I'll invite other brave souls to share any observations on cellulite/body fat distribution differentiation between races, since my casual observance maps too cleanly onto racialised beauty meta for me to suspect subconscious bias.

In any case, to see what a girl will look like in future just do a cute activity like compare family photos and look at the elders. Thats the easiest way to see the genetic destiny. An excess of surgery and vanity in said photos might allow a discerning individual to parse wealth outcomes too, so there is further useful info to be gleaned there.

It’s hardly new advice to take a good, hard look at your mother-in-law, since that’s what your wife will look like in 30 years. Physical appearance isn’t everything in a relationship, but it isn’t nothing either.

To defend @2D3D’s approach from the perspective of someone who does strongly value interpersonal compatibility and love, the point he’s making is that you need to consider: Will I still love this person in 25 years? If we’re going to get married, I should at least consider whether, down the line, she is going to look so radically different from how she looks now that the things about her that attracted me in an erotic/sexual sense - the things that made me want to make her my romantic partner instead of just a female friend/acquaintance - will have disappeared. Is it fair to her to put her in a position where your marriage could fall apart because you start having to fake attraction, and she begins to hate herself? I don’t know if these questions should be disqualifying, but it’s tough to say that they’re not worth considering.

(There are, of course, other perfectly salutary reasons to care about these matters, but I don’t think they’re incompatible with an approach that still centers interpersonal love.)

I actually did this 'family photo' thing to figure out the girls family dynamic and understand what her relationship modalities are. Physical commonalities among the elder generations gave a preview of what the likely attractiveness would be going forward, but I myself underprioritized that because matchstick leg + pot belly chinatown uncle is my own fate so I know my place.

More comments

(Business theme here. Because I kind of want more business content on the Motte.)

I was wrong about Sales.

Beginning of my career, I was an engineer thinker, but who could Talk To Girls (TM), so I was sent out to talk to clients for technical sales reasons. Back then, I hated it because I was still trying to integrate the Autism firmware into my brain. Everything was logical, right? Cost-benefit analysis. Couldn't these stupid "customers" just see that our product provided value and pay us?

That's not how business works because that's not how humans work. Humans are not efficiency seeking automatons. We have problems, we want solutions. If we can't see how a thing helps us solve a problem, then that thing has a value of zero. Sales is the process of understanding problems deeply and then matching those problems (or not!) with a solution. It is applied empathy. It is one of the best skills to develop (so long as it is developed with integrity). If every Sales bro suddenly spent a year as therapists, we'd cure all this millennial mental health nonsense right away.

The fact is that deep engineer types who try to engineer products or services without caring about human interaction are truly trying to dehumanize humans. I get the same bad vibes from Sam Altman and Elon Musk because I truly believe both of them privately think, "Man, this would all be so much easier if like 90% of people just died." Technical elegance, engineering genius, physics-defying new invention don't. actually. matter if they fail to help people. I think the one hack here are the Theoretical Physicts who might actually be discovering capital-T Truth with math. But I'm too dumb to actually validate that.

But but but but ... Used car salesmen! Pushy boiler room stock brokers! The whole pharmaceutical industry! Can't sales be used for horrible awful very no-good reasons? Yes, but not try at scale for a long time unless there's tacit approval from lots of other humans. In all of the examples I provided, what's really going on is people want to defy reality in one way or another. They're being greedy. They don't want to live healthy they want to not feel pain. They want something they can't afford because they want to feel like they have certain status. Sales people playing into the self-deception of others isn't some black magic - it's psychological failure and manipulation that goes on constantly all over the world. Calling sales bad or evil is the same logical fallacy as calling human beings inherently bad or evil.

Can you tell I do a lot more sales and sales like things now? It's infinitely more satisfying that being a smarter than everyone else engineer. I'm not going to pretend like the software I've been involved with cured cancer, but, in many cases, I did see get applied to solve meaningful business problems. I like to think it contributed to economic growth in a small way.

If you want to be "part of a great effort to promote human flourishing" ... learn sales.

I've seen some very good salesmen whom live purely off commission, and some very bad salesmen that I have to come in and correct their lies after the fact, or watch them fumble something horribly where I unintentionally gave them a potential deal on a silver platter.

I confess to not being very impressed with the majority of salesmen.

Sales is ultimately about being the single point of contact to yell or be yelled at when things go wrong. The human capability to know the one person who can unfuck a fuckup asap engenders more goodwill and long term value than any optimized automated sales chain. As more processes get commoditized and systemized, it means the edge case failures narrow to even more complex interlinks, and thats where a good sales person would understand a clients specific needs and highlight issues in advance or understand the client and the product well enough to propose solutions rapidly.

Having said that, the negative reputation of salesmen exists for a reason. Relying on personal affective tricks to convince cajole or coerce cooperation in information asymmetric instances is definitely bad. The only way to keep sales agents on their toes is to ensure continuity of engagement (not further sales) because you can pin them down and yell at them if things fuckup. If the salesman can and does run away after selling you something, you gotta expect something fucky is up.

This is the thing that people who complain about Adobe's effective monopoly on creative software don't understand. Ignore the fact that most Adobe products have advanced features that the competition can't keep up with; it's not important. What is important is that, for all its complexity, Photoshop is easy to use for someone who has never used it before. The basic functions are intuitive. And if you learn how to do something more advanced, the program is structured in a way that you also learn the underlying logic behind how it's set up so that the next time you try to do something similar it will be easy to understand what you're doing.

Then look at an atrocity like Gimp. It's ugly, the basic stuff is intuitive enough but try to do anything beyond that and it's like pulling teeth. It owes its existence to an army of volunteers whose lone motivation is that they think software should be free. And that's pretty much where it ends; as long as they can make a product that looks enough like Photoshop to fool people who don't actually use Photoshop for anything serious, they'll always have an army of Linux fanboys who will whinge about Microsoft's OS dominance and point to Gimp as a perfectly acceptable alternative. And if you dare point out its shortcomings (which indeed are many), then you'll get scolded for not understanding that they don't have Adobe money and who cares what it looks like as long as it works and if it doesn't work then did you really need that feature enough to pay $10/month for it?

What they don't understand is that Adobe doesn't make its money on selling software to people who use it to make internet memes. Its customer base is people who actually use it for a living, and have to stare at the thing all day and don't have the time to deal with a janky workflow. I'm not even one of those people but even as a hobbyist I don't want to spend my leisure time dealing with the frustrations of crappy software. If you want your product to gain market share you have to give people a reason to use it, and "It's free" isn't a reason for people to use it if they're using it for business purposes — the up-front cost might be zero, but that doesn't account for the additional time spent using it and the loss in quality. Doing nothing is also technically free.

I should probably switch companies because at my company our sales isn't so much problem-solving as it is about warm and fuzzy vibes.

Virtually every feature I've ever worked on seems to have no users whenever I query prod. I assume the same goes for nearly all features in our Frankenstein's monster of a monolith. Instead, 99% of the product's value comes from this miniscule percent of product loops and workflows written by some senior architect 20 years ago.

Still, we're told all our features are very important to sales. You see, I don't work for a software company like I think I do -- I work for a sales company. The defects I fix weren't caught by users, but by internal sales engineers. The purpose of these bells and whistles is to give the client warm and fuzzy feelings that our product is better than the competition. Naturally these features don't solve user problems because they go unused! And the shot-calling higher ups who sign the contracts and see the demos aren't actually our users -- they are our users' boss's boss.

Still, it would be wrong to say we demo vaporware (it does work, although probably not as robust), or to say the features don't provide company value. They win deals (presumably). But our software engineers are jaded because we're usually not solving user problems.

Request bloat and cowardly/uncaring dev teams are usually to blame for useless features going nowhere. I've had to deal with a product that literally no one thinks is useful at all, but the request was built into production because no one cared enough to disabuse the boss of his false assumptions. 'Lets try and see how it works' turns into 'wait why is this even here' when it is caught four months later.

Seems to me more that sales types who complain about the way engineer types think or do their job are truly trying to dehumanize engineers.

Complaining about how other people think is dehumanizing?

Welcome to the Motte!

Can you offer more here than a basic "nuh-uh, YOU'RE stupid!" as a response? I'm willing to hear rebuttals to my evaluation of Sales style thinking, but I don't see much content in your reply.

Complaining about how other people think is dehumanizing?

The idea that the touchy-feely-schmoozy-douchey sort of interaction that salespeople are pros at is the be-all and end-all of human interaction and that what engineers engage in is not is "dehumanizing" the engineers.

touchy-feely-schmoozy-douchey sort of interaction that salespeople are pros at

Can you just ... try harder? There's no content here. Again, I'm all ears for a meaningful counterpoint, rebuttal, whatever. There are at least two or three already in this thread. Right now, you're saying "nah, salesmen suck" and leaving it at that.

Everything about your original post oozes contempt for engineers, from "autism" to "could Talk To Girls (TM)". But what I'm specifically complaining about is that you are claiming the way engineers work is not the way humans work. That places engineers themselves outside the bounds of humanity. It's a damn common thing, probably because sales and marketing people push it all the time, and they've gotten a lot of engineer types to accept it, but it's still bullshit.

Why? Why is it bullshit?

My post didn't say that the way engineers work is not the way humans work. My post said that engineers approach problems, solve them - often very well - and then fail to appreciate that solving the engineering problem alone is insufficient because what business is about is solving human problems.

Engineering, across all of its various domains, is a fantastically valuable endeavor for humans to pursue. On its own, it is not enough. And that's fine. We work, as humans, in complex organizations so we can leverage one another's relative strengths to achieve a larger goal.

Because you said;

"Everything about your original post oozes contempt for engineers, from "autism" to "could Talk To Girls (TM)".

I'll respond by saying that everything about your multiple posts oozes butthurt engineer who think that sales and marketing add no value. As a former engineer who felt this way for a long time, I have a strong prior that you're failing to understand some very human problems. You can change this and your life can improve.

I'll respond by saying that everything about your multiple posts oozes butthurt engineer who think that sales and marketing add no value. As a former engineer who felt this way for a long time, I have a strong prior that you're failing to understand some very human problems. You can change this and your life can improve.

The number one complaint engineers have about sales types is the sales people make deals by promising the customer things they expect engineering to back up. They then talk management into making it engineering's problem that the thing can't be done or is more expensive than the deal is worth. You can call that "butthurt" but it's certainly not dehumanizing.

Engineers communicate with each other. This mode of communication is not the same as salespeople use with each other or their buyer counterparts at the clients. Salespeople, including you, consider only the latter to be "human interaction". That's what's dehumanizing.

In any case, what were you wrong about?

Pretty much everything by now.

As a kid I was wrong on America, that was excusable. Had a pretty big row with friends over Americans bombing Serbia and Serbian infrastructure over Kosovo. Defended them flattening the bridges of the Danube and putting power plants out of commission because 'genocide'.. which apparently wasn't.

Later on I thought libertarianism is viable. It isn't, unless you can figure out a way of how to have libertarian armies, how to man them and finance them. That's the problem - we live on this mudball, we can't leave it. People are going to want to take your stuff, so you need something more than a 'why can't we all just live along' ethos to motivate people.

Don't look at me. I have no idea what that should be.

I held some money in Europe in the 2010s. At least I didn't get into "emerging (any day now) markets", but still kicking myself for the lost gains.

Totally understandable. Prior to 2008, the cool financial gurus were saying: "You should have 40% of your investments overseas, and 20% in commodities!".

Of course, the Chinese stock market peaked in 2007, Europe has treaded water for over a decade, and commodities have stayed in the toilet (with brief exceptions) since 2014. The gurus were wrong.

Now the same gurus are saying "100% of your portfolio should be in U.S. stocks, mostly tech! Don't even think of owning European or Chinese stocks. And the price of oil is going to zero". I bet they'll be wrong again.

I can't be bothered to look too closely at this but eyeballing the graph it seems VHGEX has had dogshit yearly returns for the past 30 years. Tech at least has made a lot of people very rich, so that seems like a different mistake.

The really crazy people are those keeping over a quarter of their portfolios (!) in international equities despite the fact that America is basically the last country on earth where you can innovate and make money. The gurus have never stopped talking up international equities.

Basically it makes sense to them that the US has been growing so much that there must be tons of potential left untapped in the rest of the world. Google called this "The next billion users"; my cynical response being "the next billion users don't have any money".

Not only do they not have any money, they don't even know how money works!

Getting the government to force someone to give you money counts as knowing how money works.

I was referring to the government not knowing how money works. A government that doesn’t understand how money is the way you get people to do the things they don’t want to do is doomed.

I wouldn't kick yourself. After all, if it was so obvious that EU growth would lag, wouldn't those stocks have been even lower-priced?

I’m not going to touch on anything political; I’ve spoken many times here about my early days as a loudly and annoyingly vocal socialist, the way I damaged so many interpersonal relationships by letting politics supersede everything else, etc.

For me, especially at this particular juncture in my life, I spend a ton of time agonizing about just how badly I bungled my prime years by not managing to seal the deal on a long-term relationship. And it was absolutely not for lack of trying! I spent my entire teens and twenties desperately pining over a series of unrequited crushes. It’s just that I was doing the exact opposite of the things I should have been doing to actually give those overtures any chance of succeeding.

I bought hook-line-and-sinker into the alluring but false promise of certain romantic comedies - The Office being probably the biggest culprit - that the secret to getting a woman to fall in love with you is to become her very close friend first, orbit passively around her but putting yourself into scenarios wherein romance could blossom but which maintain plausible deniability if it doesn’t, and eventually she’ll give you a clear sign that she has fallen for you. This is all, of course, pretty much 180 degrees the opposite of what actually inspires attraction in the vast majority of girls and women. It is, however, very comforting to believe if you’re a gawky, profoundly insecure, sexually unconfident, low-T guy like I was (and in many ways still am) because it doesn’t require you to take bold action and risk catastrophic failure and embarrassment. (Except actually it still does lead eventually to embarrassment, because over time one must face the facts that a particular crush is going absolutely nowhere and she’s clearly drifting away from you, and you realize that the failure was just dragged out over time, losing you precious time and other opportunities.)

I did manage to have one relationship that was, for a relatively short period of time, seemingly very successful, with a very beautiful and intelligent woman, but again, my total lack of understanding of what women want out of a relationship with a man was so lacking that I couldn’t hold the relationship together. However, while I’ve at long last come to the painful realization that women are not seeking an egalitarian and companionate relationship with a man - a friendship that just happens to also involve sex and cohabitation - I also pretty much optimized my whole personality and lifestyle toward that.

I never developed many of the skills (practical or internal) that would be required of a genuine paterfamilias. I’m too redpilled on women and too unable to play along with the female style of unfocused political venting to have much chance of a successful relationship with the kind of progressive woman who might actually be interested in a companionate relationship with a somewhat-effeminate underemployed head-in-the-clouds armchair intellectual; I’m also nowhere near what conservative “trad” women are, understandably, looking for.

@FiveHourMarathon is right about aging. I seem to have hit a real wall physically during the COVID lockdowns, losing a substantial amount of physical fitness that I’m now struggling to get back. (And some of my old crushes are starting to hit their own walls as well, such that even the ones who are still single are not nearly as appealing to me as they once were.)

Young guys, please do not waste your prime. It closes sooner than you think, and the dating scene once you’re out of it is, if not quite a wasteland, at least wasteland-adjacent. Find a good woman early and lock her down for life before she has a chance to experience all the guys she’s missing out on.

Young guys, please do not waste your prime. It closes sooner than you think, and the dating scene once you’re out of it is, if not quite a wasteland, at least wasteland-adjacent. Find a good woman early and lock her down for life before she has a chance to experience all the guys she’s missing out on.

While this is the correct way to play the game of hearts* for 80% of men, there is an alternative. There is only one alternative and it is high risk. You're betting the house on it.

You can use your 20s and early 30s to build a company or two or three and then have the financial support from your mid 30s on to date out of your league. If you don't have to work full time and have the discipline to stay in shape, the deterioration from 35 - 50 is negligible and with money and reasonable social proof (you can't be a shut in) you can date women that were not accessible to you in your 20s.

Two caveats:

  1. This is shooting the moon* (see what I did there?). Building a company is not easy. You will likely fail. To be fair, if you pass certain milestones failure isn't starting-from-zero. You can get hired on at other companies and skip ahead in your career. Still, however, it's a major gamble.

2.This is not a guaranteed road to meaning and satisfaction with life. I've seen it up close, and the playboy lifestyle just isn't real. What this life gives you is options and an extended vitality window in which to consider those options. It is still on you to make decisions that align with a deeper philosophy of life.

As I said at the top, this shouldn't be attempted by, well, anyone from an EV perspective. It's living in deep risk. I think it deserves discussion, however, because this is how society actually moves forward - extremely outliers with outsized return generated by high levels of risk taking.

a somewhat-effeminate underemployed head-in-the-clouds armchair intellectual

I loved your post and agree with your advice. But as a guy who had a sort-of-similar trajectory, this still sounds totally fixable! I know you said you're struggling with physical health, and I haven't used testosterone myself, but is there a reason you're not trying to simply become literally high-T?

I’m too redpilled on women and too unable to play along with the female style of unfocused political venting to have much chance of a successful relationship with the kind of progressive woman

My wife is the picture of ostensible progressivism, and it certainly causes tension, but it's not fatal. I always thought the red-pill message was that politics aren't usually dealbreakers even if they're stated to be - you can simply change the subject, agree and amplify, or simply be a compelling enough package that she'll find ways to make it work from her end. I know it's easier said than done, but it sounds like you have the basic ingredients at hand!

I know you said you're struggling with physical health, and I haven't used testosterone myself, but is there a reason you're not trying to simply become literally high-T?

I’ve considered this, but I’m really wary of the potential side effects, and of just being unprepared to deal with the likely changes to my personality. My vague sense is that testosterone supplements are only useful if you are totally committed to being very serious about working out, and the reality is that my lifestyle (I have a side gig several nights a week, hobbies that sometimes prevent me from going to the gym, etc) does not permit me to be as single-minded about exercise as I was for about a year and a half prior to COVID. I’d also be worried that my body would become dependent on the supplements and become unable to reliably regulate its own hormonal levels. (And I’m worried about losing my hair.)

testosterone supplements are only useful if you are totally committed to being very serious about working out

I don't know much about it, but my understanding is the opposite - that hormones + no exercise is much better for putting on mass than no hormones and lots of exercise. At least, I saw a study to that effect one time, and it's certainly the case that male teenagers put on muscle much faster than even relatively athletic females. But please don't take my word for it.

I remember that one! The study was anabolic steroids rather than hormones, but the roided couch potatoes really did gain more muscle than the natty lifters.

My wife is the picture of ostensible progressivism, and it certainly causes tension, but it's not fatal. I always thought the red-pill message was that politics aren't usually dealbreakers even if they're stated to be - you can simply change the subject, agree and amplify, or simply be a compelling enough package that she'll find ways to make it work from her end.

My girlfriend is more progressive than me, but not by too much -- except for her feelings on Trump, she's a lot more like the average Republican than the average Democrat. She sends me random texts about immigration and gender transition.

But she was a lot more progressive when I met her: what happened is we got together, started talking about things, and respected each other enough that we started moving towards each other. I became more opposed to COVID restrictions, she became more opposed to immigration, I became more sympathetic to abortion moderates, she became more sympathetic to evangelicals. I guess at this point she respects me enough that I can make an argument for just about anything and she'll either start nodding her head and say it makes sense or she'll say something like "I don't agree but I see where you're coming from, I see how your views come from a place of trying to do what's right for everyone," which is a wild thing to hear after you've argued against a central pillar of contemporary feminism.

So I don't get the dichotomy between "progressive woman who can only engage in two minutes hate while loving a somewhat-effeminate guy" or "tradwife who won't respect you if you aren't a blue collar strongman indifferent to physical pain." I guess I got lucky and met "mildly traditional woman from rural America who likes discussing ideas" and I consider myself to have gotten the best of both worlds.

Yes, sounds like we are on the same page, and OP is psyching himself out.

I said my wife is "ostensibly progressive" because she has a conservative personality, she just happens to have been raised and schooled in a progressive, feminist echo chamber. (Today's beloved conservative position is often yesteryear's progressive overreach). She just can't bear to be against the consensus, and I think instinctively knows that arguing with me is likely to move her away from the consensus, so literally can't discuss politics for more than 2 minutes without getting too upset to weigh arguments. I find this frustrating and sad, and she talks as if it's devastating to her to be with someone who has the wrong opinions, but it doesn't actually come up unless one of us brings it up.

I actually think it's reasonable for her to refuse to argue issues on their merits with me, because I'm just a much better arguer than her. She's right to fear that I could argue convincingly for just about any position, right or wrong. For this reason I've told her that it's fine for her to disagree with me on anything without being able to articulate why, especially when it comes to joint decision-making.

My girlfriend is actually the opposite -- raised by libertarians who rage about government corruption, she can't bear to be in favor of the consensus. She watches documentaries about government scandals, and has her own theories on historical scandals, like "Bush did JFK." She can't talk about politics without trying to dissect what's going on, and listens to political podcasts. Frankly I think it'd be devastating to her if I had normal opinions. I start railing against the government and she gives me puppy dog eyes.

That being said, she's more "normal" than this description makes her seem. If you met her, you'd probably think of her as just another politically disengaged young woman in jeans and a floral blouse. She says her coworkers watch their language around her, because "she's so sweet and pure"... oh, if they knew...

  • I once believed that political solutions to problems are viable, and now I believe that they are not, and that you need cultural solutions first in order to meaningfully affect the political

  • I once believed literature mattered, but upon inspecting the type of people who are into literature versus who are not, I no longer believe it is valuable. “Literature” is surprisingly new to civilization anyway.

  • I love dogs, but dog culture should be ended, and anthropomorphism should be banned from kids entertainment. Kids should be learning to understand humans and their variegated expressions, so that they can understand themselves and adapt to the social world in front of them. They should not be bonding with animals to a significant degree.

  • I once thought IQ was the be-all-end-all but now I think there are other qualities which are as important but less easy to measure.

I believe literature serves the purpose of setting the standard for high culture much like classical music and good art. The point is to develop good taste in those things, understanding how they’re ideally structured, rather than just reading low end pulp books or listening to nothing but low end pop music. Good taste in art is a thing, and I think a lot of our culture is degraded with low grade art because most people never get exposed to good art.

I once believed that political solutions to problems are viable, and now I believe that they are not, and that you need cultural solutions first in order to meaningfully affect the political

Could you give a couple of examples?

The one I can think of: regulating social media and news outlets is the political solution to a cultural problem.

That political solution will not occur unless there is already a cultural solution in place. In order to instantiate an effective regulatory body for social media, you need people to lobby for it; in order to get people to lobby for it, you need cultural organizations that create awareness. Next, you need to generate enough billions of dollars that your lobbying is greater than Meta et al. Why shouldn’t Meta, with a profit of $40b, spend all of that profit and more on lobbying against your solution? They will then selectively show you influencers who are against regulation on all your social media feeds.

Luckily there’s another way to regulate social media. Establish a tight-knit culture and create your own social media. Like how churches have always created their own media and social organizations against secular culture. It doesn’t have to be advanced. It would take a weekend to make an early MySpace clone. Now you have your own social media. Defectors who attempt to continue using mainstream social media are excommunicated and shunned.

This “out there” solution of crafting microcultures is the only way forward as capitalism becomes more and more intent on degrading human life quality. We will now always have gambling and loot crate mechanics because gambling companies are now able to lobby. We will always have marijuana because marijuana dispensaries can lobby. It is just going to get worse and worse. Nothing will be the same. You won’t be able to beat them in a lobby-off, but you will be able to beat them by banning them from your community, because at the end of the day there will always be reasonable people who listen to other reasonable people and are persuaded by reasonable arguments — and when these people form a community with rules then they will have a huge advantage over Consumer-Americans.

I love dogs, but dog culture should be ended, and anthropomorphism should be banned from kids entertainment. Kids should be learning to understand humans and their variegated expressions, so that they can understand themselves and adapt to the social world in front of them. They should not be bonding with animals to a significant degree.

As one of those "people who are into literature":

'I'll explain to you, then,' said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, 'why you wouldn't paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality—in fact? Do you?'

Yes, sir!' from one half. 'No, sir!' from the other.

'Of course no,' said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong half. 'Why, then, you are not to see anywhere, what you don't see in fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don't have in fact. What is called Taste, is only another name for Fact.' Thomas Gradgrind nodded his approbation.

'This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery,' said the gentleman. 'Now, I'll try you again. Suppose you were going to carpet a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon it?'

There being a general conviction by this time that 'No, sir!' was always the right answer to this gentleman, the chorus of No was very strong. Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes: among them Sissy Jupe.

'Girl number twenty,' said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of knowledge.

Sissy blushed, and stood up.

'So you would carpet your room—or your husband's room, if you were a grown woman, and had a husband—with representations of flowers, would you?' said the gentleman. 'Why would you?'

'If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,' returned the girl.

'And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?'

'It wouldn't hurt them, sir. They wouldn't crush and wither, if you please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy—'

'Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn't fancy,' cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. 'That's it! You are never to fancy.'

'You are not, Cecilia Jupe,' Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, 'to do anything of that kind.'

'Fact, fact, fact!' said the gentleman. And 'Fact, fact, fact!' repeated Thomas Gradgrind.

When I was younger, both I and my elder brother wanted to be writers, but we disagreed strongly on what made good writing. Probably the simplest way to describe it was that he liked art and I liked entertainment. We've never really resolved the disagreement, but I've spent a long time contemplating why I enjoy what I enjoy, and most of it seems to come down to one of two things; either the piece encapsulates a feeling, or it encapsulates an idea. Either way, these encapsulations are valuable in that they give one significant control over one's own mental state, and that is both pleasurable and useful in many ways.

I think a lot of my own bogglement with the general category of "literature" is that so much of the time, there doesn't seem to be anything useful being encapsulated. I can imagine that the encapsulations are in some incompatible format, but the general impression left is still...

Imagine that you encounter a signal. It is structured, and dense with information. It meets all the criteria of an intelligent transmission. Evolution and experience offer a variety of paths to follow, branch-points in the flowcharts that handle such input. Sometimes these signals come from conspecifics who have useful information to share, whose lives you'll defend according to the rules of kin selection. Sometimes they come from competitors or predators or other inimical entities that must be avoided or destroyed; in those cases, the information may prove of significant tactical value. Some signals may even arise from entities which, while not kin, can still serve as allies or symbionts in mutually beneficial pursuits. You can derive appropriate responses for any of these eventualities, and many others.

You decode the signals, and stumble:

I had a great time. I really enjoyed him. Even if he cost twice as much as any other hooker in the dome—

To fully appreciate Kesey's Quartet—

They hate us for our freedom—

Pay attention, now—

Understand.

There are no meaningful translations for these terms. They are needlessly recursive. They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have arisen by chance.

The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.

Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies.

The signal is an attack.

And it's coming from right about there.

Is that from Blindsight? Looks familiar.

Anyway, I see what you (and @coffee_enjoyer) are getting at, but as a book nerd (and also a wannabe-never-was writer) I think the great Literature vs. Entertainment debate is a false dichotomy. Literature, I submit, does do more than entertain. But good literature is entertaining. Conversely, you can enjoy being entertained by something that you recognize is objectively not good literature.

I love me some Dickens (as my post above should make clear). He was a massively popular author in his time. He is still read today because he was a good writer, but also because he gives us insights into his world that are valuable and useful. People have criticisms of his politics and proto-socialism; fair enough. I believe it was Oscar Wilde who called him maudlin and melodramatic. But we still read stories about a time and place that is utterly foreign to most people today because it's still recognizable on a human level, they are human stories told by someone who had a way with words. To me, Dickens is "useful," though I know there are those who do not like him. (Peasants!)

Now, Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert was assigned to me in high school. I found it utterly boring. Gustave Flaubert was an early "realist" writer. It's useful today to know how he fit into the evolution of literary schools, but you could say he's kind of like JRR Tolkien, in that someone reading him today might wonder what the big deal is because we've seen hundreds, thousands of books since that look just like this - not realizing that they are copying his beat.

I reread Madame Bovary a few years ago, and still didn't love it, but... I liked it and understood it a lot more. Because it's about a French housewife who is unhappy and bored with her marriage. It's about middle aged people being unsatisfied and disappointed with how their lives turned out, and how clinging to your juvenile fantasies as an adult is pathetic and a path to ruin. Of course I found it boring and pointless as a teenager, I couldn't relate! As a much older person, I suddenly found myself appreciating what Flaubert was trying to illustrate.

I am not sure if you are complaining about "literature" that seems pointlessly navel-gazing with no real message to it, just exercises in masturbatory wordsmithing, or literature that you think has a bad message (i.e., a weapon in the culture war). Both those things exist. But appreciation for literature doesn't necessarily mean being a Barnard English major sniffing one's own farts.

I also like Stephen King and Brandon Sanderson and JK Rowling and Ian Fleming and Robert Heinlein, and I could go on. All of whom have their own virtues and flaws as writers. I've even read some litrpg and fanfiction and the like, though I find 99% of it unreadable drek. So it's not about having snooty reading tastes.

Pinging @Hoffmeister25, since he seemed interested as well.

Is that from Blindsight? Looks familiar.

Yup!

Anyway, I see what you (and @coffee_enjoyer) are getting at, but as a book nerd (and also a wannabe-never-was writer) I think the great Literature vs. Entertainment debate is a false dichotomy.

To be clear, I entirely agree! One of the things I learned as I got older and a bit wiser was that entertainment for its own sake is, ultimately, empty, and not even particularly entertaining. You can't extrude it by the hundredweight according to a set formula without losing the special something that makes the best of it so delightfully seductive in the first place, and part of that special something seems to be insight, something that echoes and accretes in the inner self, that leaves an impression where lesser matter washes in and away without consequence.

I am not sure if you are complaining about "literature" that seems pointlessly navel-gazing with no real message to it, just exercises in masturbatory wordsmithing, or literature that you think has a bad message (i.e., a weapon in the culture war). Both those things exist. But appreciation for literature doesn't necessarily mean being a Barnard English major sniffing one's own farts.

Both, certainly. Some of it definitely feels either pointless or juvenile, in a Wow-I-Am-Very-Deep sense. On the bad message side... I'd be hard-pressed to find an author with worse messages than Peter Watts, but he's still a treasure to me because even if I fundamentally disagree with his worldview, I still come away feeling like my perspective has been sharpened thanks to the clarity with which he communicates it. To quote another favorite, "here comes, thank heaven, another enemy". And it's not even about naïve enjoyment, either; his Rifter trilogy was horrifying in the most literal sense, did permanent psychic damage to me, and I don't think I ever will want to read them again... but boy, did they leave an impression!

But there's a lot of other stuff that's just sort of unreflectively, unrefinedly bad. On the recommendation of a Mottian, I read Middlegame. There was a lot I really liked about the plot and the characters and the style, and I really wanted to enjoy it. but ultimately, the villains were one-note caricatures of misogyny, and eventually they stopped being monsters to me, and just became cartoons. They weren't doing what they were doing for sensical reasons, but rather because it was Very Important that I Update My Opions About Misogyny Now. And it killed the narrative for me, not because I think misogyny is super cool and don't like seeing it attacked, but because trite sermons from someone else's religion are really boring.

...Your point about Madame Bovary is well taken. Here's the thing, though: why was it assigned to you in high school?

Suppose that there's this idea that books and humans interact deterministically. People observe that good books leave an impression on the reader, and that the best books leave an impression on most or even all readers, and they think hey, we can shape people into the sort of people we want by having them read the right Good Books in the right sequence. Only, it doesn't actually work like that for a whole host of reasons, not least because people are different, and what they're ready for and what's relevant to them is different, and we lie to ourselves or are mistaken about what actually leaves an impression and which impressions are valuable... and so the end result is this big, unpleasant, brutalist machine covered in grime and bloodstains with a sign on it that reads "happy fun good-things dispenser."

There's a wealth of wonderful creations out there, no doubt. But there's this mass in the middle of it, with an ossified narrative maintained by a sort of pseudo-priesthood, and I'm deeply skeptical of the whole edifice. I would rather talk about "I liked this because I got such-and-such" out of it, and they seem to think they're doing something much more involved and much more serious than that.

Does that make more sense?

Madame Bovary was probably assigned to me in high school because my high school English teacher had to read it in college...

But seriously, Flaubert is important (at least, knowing how he influenced literature) and Madame Bovary has something to say, it's just maybe not a message that a teenager will be receptive to. My personal reading list for high school students might be very different, but I'd still make them read some "difficult" and "old" books, and if they ask "Why should I care about Dickens or Tolstoy or Flaubert?" I'd say "Because these are a few of the small stones in the foundations on which your culture was built. And you should also have some understanding of history, not just seen through history books."

Yeah, I understand the skepticism towards the "literary establishment" and teachers who decide on the curriculum for high school English students. But what I got from you and coffee was a general disdain for literature as something worth studying, or even appreciating beyond the enjoyment you get from any given story. And I think literature is worth studying and appreciating, for its cultural relevance, for its insight, for its facility with language and showing us what can be done with words in the hands of a master.

Fiction can teach a lot about history and psychology and human relationships. (Obviously it can teach incorrect things and even bad things, but then, how much do you trust any given supposedly non-fiction book?)

If we're complaining about whoever the NYT or the London Review of Books has anointed as the latest Important Writer To Read, sure, a lot of the literary establishment does seem like a self-regarding, incestuous coterie. But, ya know, just like Hollywood. Or Wall Street. Or Washington. There is still (arguably) something being produced there that is of value.

I've read some Pulitzer and Man Booker Prize winners that had me going "Why?" But when I reflected honestly, they were actually well written and had something to say - it just wasn't for me.

I think we maybe don't disagree that much, I just dislike seeing people dismiss Literature as if it's all something invented by hoity leftist college professors.

I think a lot of my own bogglement with the general category of "literature" is that so much of the time, there doesn't seem to be anything useful being encapsulated.

What are some specific examples of literary works which you consider to contain nothing but “useless” content? And do you believe that such content is not useful to anyone? Or merely not to you?

What are some specific examples of literary works which you consider to contain nothing but “useless” content?

Douglas Coupland. I love his prose, it goes down your throat like a perfect dessert, he would be a perfect dinner guest, but there's no message, just /r/til/top.

I'm not overflowing with examples because I actively avoid most of the stuff, but I can offer a few, direct and indirect.

Bless Me Ultima, a babbies first lit book assigned in an institution of higher learning.

Indirectly, Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy. A friend was enthusiastic about the book, and neither they, the wikipedia article, nor reading a few passages myself revealed why.

Bonus: the poetry of Sylvia Plath.

Theoretically, these texts fit the particular shapes of some particular population's mind, sure. But when I try to engage with the people actually claiming to find value on what value they find, I am left mystified or alienated.

All of "literature" ostensibly states it's trying to find "deeper truths to the human condition" or something. I think, at its best, literature is a kind of compliment to moral philosophy. It wrestles with the Big Questions - Why are we here? What does it mean?

The reality is that 80% of literature is just aesthetic mood affiliation and fashion. Over at Scott's Blog, they just had some millenial (!) post a review of David Foster Wallace's last book. David Foster Wallace was probably a genius, and he used that genius to write thousands of pages of Gen-X nonsense .... and Gen-x (and I guess millienials now) love him for it. He was very, very, very cool.

Charles Bukowski wasn't very cool when he was alive (except in Germany for some reason). At the end of his life and after he died, he became cool in (another) post-ironic "dirtbags are cool" way. He started popping up in literature classes at Bard and Oberlin. That was a real shame. The hipsters turn him into this "poet of the streets" when, in reality, Charles Bukowski wrote about real truth in life - a lot of it is desperate, gross, weak characters mutually exploiting one another to get through the day. Forget the intellectual goofyness of "making the profane divine" ... Sometimes life is just cheap whiskey and run down whores in East L.A.

I don't think literature is important because I don't think there's enough of it that can be generalized. Use my DFW example - there are people who love him dearly. I appreciate their love for him, but I never will. "Well, you don't have to love him, but can't you learn something from him?" No. No I can't. It's all too personal, too mood affiliation, too "what's your aesthetic?"

I'll quibble with DFW's work being nonsense.

It's dizzying, which is not the same thing. It's trying to capture the feeling of the modern world in all of its immense alienating complexity down to the mundane.

If you wanted to explain the feeling of living in our era to someone from 100 years ago, Infinite Jest would be more helpful than a history book in the same way that reading Burroughs is more helpful to understand the feeling of living 100 years ago.

There's lots of people you can accuse of being rote postmodernists with no ideas but the butchering of what is, they run most of entertainment right now. David Foster Wallace is not one of them.

I love dogs, but dog culture should be ended

Hard agree on this. I recently learned that the President of South Korea has no children, but several dogs. And he is a conservative who actually wants to increase the birth rate. Lol.

Based on no data whatsoever, I will propose that if a woman ever gets a dog before having kids, the chance of kids goes down by a lot. I have friends who have dogs that they treat like children, and I have to admit it bothers me a lot.

I once believed literature mattered, but upon inspecting the type of people who are into literature versus who are not, I no longer believe it is valuable. “Literature” is surprisingly new to civilization anyway.

Arguably literature mattered a lot from like 1800–1970 give or take. Supposedly, people would mob the docks to get the latest Charles Dickens serial. Harriet Beecher Stowe practically caused the Civil War by writing "Uncle Tom's Cabin". Even as recently as the 1960s, writers like Norman Mailer were actually well-known and widely read.

Today, of course, the entire industry should just be drowned in a bathtub. It is so ideologically captured as to be worthless. I don't care if I ever read another book of "literature" written after the year 1980.

Today, of course, the entire industry should just be drowned in a bathtub. It is so ideologically captured as to be worthless. I don't care if I ever read another book of "literature" written after the year 1980.

I think you have an overly narrow view of what the "industry" is. The publishing industry, certainly is staffed mainly by 30 and 40 something white women trying to appeal to the same. But the superset-- the literature industry-- is much larger, still relevant, and wholly unkillable. We think of "literature" as being "classical books about people being depressed in russian" and "modern books about suburban moms leaving their husbands" because that's what we learned about in school and that's what makes it onto the talk shows. And so because nobody reads those books and actually changes what they believe, we think literature is a dead, academic pursuit. But in reality, I think it's stuff like dark romantasy smut and isekai webnovels that are having the greatest net effect on philosophical and moral development. (Which is a terrifying thought, but I digress.) You can find any number of people talking about how, for example, Mushoku Tensei changed their lives.

/u/coffee_enjoyer this is also relevant to your comment.

Some books are fun. The key is ignoring people who say you have to spend all your time reading neurotic navel-gazing about the Female Experience if you want to be a good person. If something is annoying or boring... You just drop it.

I initially supported the popular response to COVID (lockdowns, school closures). I was completely and utterly wrong about this and I lament ever having had those opinions.

I didn't cotton onto the hidden cases of covid and thought it was way more deadly than it should be.

With hindsight, the Swedes were pretty much right ,and iirc their mortality in the end wasn't notably worse than countries that locked down much harder.

Sweden is much less densely populated than most other countries people compare it to and that has a large effect on viral transmission.

Seemingly not; I saw a study in which the death rates/100k were in fact a little higher in rural Sweden than the more urban areas.

Were there many more deaths per 100k in Stockholm as compared to a similar British city?

There was a point early on where "two weeks to slow the spread" was defensible. Turns out it was the very slipperiest of slopes and over a year later some children weren't allowed in school.

Yeah when it was genuinely an unknown and there was Fog of War I understand the first few weeks, but it being a 2-year saga (and still ongoing for some resolute bunker dwellers) is/was insane.

I'm in the same boat, although I suspect I became redpilled about the inefficacy and pointlessness of these interventions a lot faster than you did.

I was probably near 100% in favour of them until Summer 2020, when I witnessed both the prevalance of people in open spaces and a lack of rise in cases and I began to question everything I was living through. This was shortly followed by the BLM U-turns and then my faith was severely shaken. By late 2020 I was 90-10 fearing the government rather than the virus and by Jan 2021 I had turned into Patrick Bateman.

I can't remember when the U-turn on masks happened but I think that also contributed to my eventual turn. I certainly never trusted government sources after that.

I used to believe that college should be very rare, functionally restricted to a future academic track. Basically, if you ain’t gettin a PhD, don’t go to college.

I still believe that too many people go to college- the majority of them women who will go on to do jobs which don’t need to be done- and that superfluous college degree requirements are a problem, but now think that it’s perfectly reasonable to have engineers and accountants trained in the same compound as history professors. In part, that’s because there’s a body of knowledge not taught in high schools which is common to a sufficient number of job tracks and academic tracks both that it makes sense to do things in the same place. Also Chesterton’s fence reasons.

I maintain my belief that people worrying too much about selective college admissions are whiners- there is absolutely nothing wrong with transferring from community college to a commuter school, most people who go to college should do that for cost reasons anyways- and that much of college spending is subsidizing a lifestyle for teenagers. But it seems reasonable that ars scientia should need a four year degree.

I was wrong about God.

I was wrong about my chronic pain being mechanical, when it turned out to be psychological/emotional.

I was wrong about communism being the best thing ever, then later I was wrong about thinking we should RETVRN to a simpler time.

I was wrong about thinking that just because someone has meditated a lot they are perfect along other axes.

I was wrong about the importance of family in life.

I was wrong about the importance of length in terms of a relationship or friendship.

I was wrong in thinking that all women were whores who gave shit tests and only cared about status and looks.

I was wrong about thinking ADHD was just a moral failing and people used it as an excuse to not get their shit together.

I was wrong about how easy it is to have a well-behaved/trained dog, or child.

The list goes on and on.

Could you please elaborate on realizations that you find most important? I'm curious about God and communism, for example!

Well I was an atheist for most of my youth. I've said the story here a few times but... basically I had a really tough experience with Buddhism. Studied it very deeply for over a decade, then had a destabilizing anatta or no-self experience.

Long story short, events in my life made me think more deeply about Christianity, I went to an Orthodox Divine Liturgy, and it blew me away. I kept struggling with it, and here 2 years later I'm about to get baptized.

In terms of communism, I was a fairly standard college communist. Started studying history and philosophy, and began to realize how horribly wrong things had gone in the past with communism. That changed my mind over time.

I went to an Orthodox Divine Liturgy, and it blew me away.

Yep. That first Latin Mass (or Chuch Slavonic for the Orthdox homies) gets you all fired up to retake the holy land.

I never went full retard atheist, but definitely drifted for a big part of my 20s. I am 100% convinced that this was because I grew up in a Novus Ordo setting. Latin Mass is beauty, strength, and Truth.

Latin Mass is beauty, strength, and Truth.

Interesting, do you have a functional understanding of Latin, or is the ritual more important than the message?

You get a latin-english and follow along. The good ones have kneel/stand/sit directions. This creates an understanding of the Mass in Latin, though it would be inaccurate to say you have any real control of the language. Prayers in Latin help as well.

The ceremony is so much better. A big issue with Novus Ordo masses is that they have an odd 1970s folk musical esthetic. Acoustic guitars and piano. "Hymns" that are woo-woo and highly emotive. Combine this with an all around casual disposition - A lot of altarboys don't actually know the order of mass and respond to subtle cues from the priest.

At a good Latin Mass, especially a High Latin Mass, all of the altarboys have been drilled on the order of mass and know their movements to a "T." It's a similar vibe, in my opinion, to a silent drill platoon. The garments are more elaborate and so it conveys a deeper seriousness to everything.

or is the ritual more important than the message?

Always had been.

Church Latin is not language spoken of streets of first and second century Rome. It is much older, it is formal ritual religious language used in Roman worship long before Christianity.

Christians saw no problem in appropriating this pagan language to worship Christ, just as later, when they had power to do it, eagerly reused old pagan temples as churches.

See work of Christine Mohrmann

Of course, this is historical detail you will learn only on obscure traditional Catholic places, because it torpedoes the whole purpose of Second Vatican council. The liturgy was never meant to be "vernacular", comprehensible to the ordinary plebs.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150912021156/http://liturgicalnotes.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/mohrmann-1.html

A lot of these are a bit vague and I would love to hear them expanded upon. Is family more important than you once thought, or less? In what sense were you wrong about God (wrong to believe that God existed, or the reverse? wrong to believe that God was benevolent, or the reverse?)?

Family is more important. I replied to another person, but I was wrong to disbelieve in God.

Its probably a bad sign, but I don't feel I've been wrong about much. Probably because many of my views are hedged in the first place. I expect tradeoffs for policies, so I'm less surprised by the downsides. I'm also deeply uncertain about many things. I only hold a few opinions super strongly, and those opinions tend to be values statements rather than policy prescriptions.

The last time I remember having a seismic shift in my views was about a decade and a half ago when I was in college. I suppose I'd bought into the sexual revolution hype that women could be carefree and open about sex, and I thought as a guy I just wanted a lot of sex with different women. After I started actually having sex with real women I quickly came to feel that this was all wrong. Women care about sex, and can't help but become emotionally invested in it and their partners. And I wanted a steady and loving relationship more than I wanted a parade of new women. I came to view women that don't have the emotional attachment to sex as emotionally broken and likely abuse victims. And men that haven't figured out the benefits of a relationship over casual sex as just immature.

My positive views on drug legalization, open immigration, open trade, and free markets have remained almost entirely unchanged. If anything I feel more certain in these views because I have witnessed the negative tradeoffs of them and have found that they are tolerable and not as bad as I feared.

My negative views on government power and foreign intervention have also remained unchanged. I feel that some of my fears of these things have been borne out. The failures in Iraq and Afghanistan were things I thought would happen. If they had instead been huge success stories I would have had to shift my views. State surveillance and power over the internet led to some very ugly things during the Covid era.

I'm mostly the same as you, almost no changes in my beliefs since my early teens, only evidence that I was correct all along. However, there's some classes of very unintuitive insights, like the following:

I was wrong about the value of freedom. It's still valuable to me, but I believe that many people are better off with less, and know I know that restriction helps creativity (writers block, analysis paralysis, indecisiveness, being lost in life etc) seem to be consequences of excess choices. Furthermore, excess freedom often lead people to ruin themselves.

Like Dag said, people who meditate aren't perfect. I think this is because people who meditate the most are those who need it the most. Those who go to psychiatrists also aren't the most mentally healthy, right? It's the opposite.

Suffering isn't really a bad thing. You're meant to act as if it's bad, but it's good for you (but only if you fight against it as if it weren't!).

I used to think that intelligence was the answer to everything. Raise the average IQ by 15 points, and we'd get 100 times more people like Hawkings, right? But now I don't look for friends in intellectual circles anymore, I'm having a much better time around people with IQs in the 115s. I've liked very few of the 145+ IQ people I've met.

I used to dislike vagueness, but now I love it. If you don't label things, you allow them to be what they are, and when you label things, you restrict them. Socially, this can work like magic, you can flirt with somebody, and they get to decide how seriously you were being when you said what you did.

I now consider information to have serious downsides. Knowing less is often better. I even avoid environments in which the legibility is too high. In Ribbonfarm terms, I stick to Warrens and avoid Plazas. I sometimes intentionally keep myself from understanding others, and (selectively) keep them from understanding things about me. Physical cash has a much lower legibility than credit cards, which is why I think it would be a terrible idea to get rid of it.

In the past I thought egoism was bad, now I think it's good. Gatekeeping is good too. Discrimination? Invaluable (choosing a romantic partner is like the ultimate discriminatory behaviour). I used to think I was a good person, but it turns out I was a coward. By the way, while I dislike Muslims, I believe that their lack of self-doubt is very much a sign of health. Human beings aren't mean to suffer from their conscience to the degree that we now do in the west. I'm inferior to Genghis Khan because I will never be as true to live as he was.

Anyway, the pattern here, which I likely didn't show very well, is "Sometimes the truth is the complete opposite of what's intuitive". When you take something to the extreme, it tends to flip onto the opposite extreme (like atheist scientists becoming religious), and I did this to myself in many areas

I think I’m similar for the same reasons. If I ever leaned toward libertarianism, it was only for a very brief period. I always found the idea of "Everything the government does is the worst, and everything would be better if it ceased to exist" to be cringeworthy. For example, yes, I’m willing to tolerate school shootings so I can have easier access to guns. I was told this perspective would change when I had a kid… but nope. Legalization of drugs? The opioid epidemic has had zero effect on my stance, and people getting lazier on marijuana doesn’t change my opinion either.

I don’t argue for straight anarcho-capitalism much anymore; instead, I try to engage within the mindset of the person I’m speaking with. For instance, I’m against foreign intervention across the board, but if someone who voted for George W. Bush criticizes U.S. support for Ukraine, I’ll argue that it’s probably the best deal in foreign policy in decades.

This thread invites people to discuss things they were wrong about, but most people are using it to grind their usual axes.

"I was naive when I was younger. I thought that the outgroup might be reasonable on a certain position, but I underestimated how evil and far-reaching the policy is in practice. I know better now (and presumably am a bit closer to hating the outgroup with every fiber of my being)."

There are a few that dodge that description but the vast majority fall into it.

I’m not sure if you think my answers qualify, but I think at least part of what you’re observing is due to the nature of the question.

“I thought X and now I don’t” would seem to warrant a bit of a follow up as to why you did and why now you don’t.

Most things people think, especially early on, are from being told, not experience. Told by whom? Well….

This thread invites people to discuss things they were wrong about, but most people are using it to grind their usual axes.

I don't think the "but" belongs there. If you believe you used to be wrong about something, then of course it's natural that you'd have an axe to grind with whatever forces led you to believing that wrong thing in the past. And grinding that axe is how you discuss things you were wrong about in the past.

I think you're not completely wrong, but you're being a little uncharitable. Not sure if you would put my post in that category, but certainly mine is like the majority of posts here consisting of people who used to hold much more progressive beliefs and now believe they were wrong.

But that's the point of the thread (and to some extent, the Motte), isn't it? We test our shady thinking, our untested beliefs, and hopefully are willing to change our thinking based on new evidence. If no one is ever willing to change their mind, what's the point of discussion beyond points-scoring and dunks and getting affirmation from fellow travelers? (Something that many people seem to be here to do and get very angry when told that's not what this place is for.)

I can see how it would be discouraging for a leftist to see a bunch of former leftists saying "Boy, was I stupid," and no former right-wingers are coming forward to say "I changed my mind about women/blacks/gays/Jews," etc. This place attracts a lot more disaffected leftists than it attracts disaffected rightists.

Most of the posts here don't really seem like they're "testing shady thinking". For that, it would be something like Scott's mistakes page. Most of the posts here instead seem like justifications of taking a few swirls down the toxoplasmic spiral. It seems a lot more "boo outgroup" with just a thin veneer of "here's how I was foolish enough to fall for their lies".

Yeah, it does seem that disaffected left-wingers are the majority of this forum. I know that label fits me pretty well.

That will make things extremely annoying for the left-wing people here. Because they are constantly confronted with people who used to hold left-wing beliefs, but now don't. And it implies that those old beliefs were stupid and wrong. And it comes off as smugness.

But are those old beliefs actually stupid and wrong? Well, that's why we talk about them. Who knows, maybe in another 20 years, I'll be left-wing again? I'm sure I'm wrong about a lot of things, but I don't know which ones yet.

For a long time, when people criticised the methodological and predictive shortcomings of psychology as a discipline, I would come to its defense and insist that the reason that psychology hasn't made as much predictive progress as other fields is intrinsic to the nature of the discipline: the human brain studying itself is vastly more difficult than the human brain studying the kidney or whatever.

I haven't believed this for years. Yes, the factor outlined above does contribute, but the real reason that I no longer consider psychology a science in any meaningful sense is that it's essentially a cargo cult: it's a bunch of political activists and woo-peddlers going through the motions of following the scientific method, but without any understanding of why the underlying principles exist, and only doing the bare minimum to validate their own pet hypotheses with plausible deniability.

Do you mean pop psychology? Almost every business in the world uses psychology to recruit and retain customers. There’s probably 20,000 publications in psychology a year, if you ignore pop psychology there’s tons of meaningful insights.

Pardon me for thinking that that is probably complete nonsense. E.g. it's well known that open spaces are shit for people who need to concentrate, yet almost everyone uses them.

It's probably same for utter majority of workplace and recruiting psychology. Just trash that exists so managers can justify their decisions.

People don’t automatically or naturally do what is best for them. For instance, the “natural” way that people often study is by rereading or highlighting. But these are unequivocally the poorest ways of learning according to many studies. By many I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s 5000 studies related to this. Or if you consider exercise science, people don’t automatically rest or exercise in the optimal way. It’s not intuitive that active rest would be superior than inactive rest. It’s not intuitive that HIIT would be so efficient. For nutrition, we had no idea the optimal way to eat to retain vitamins, cooking in lead and so on, or overcooking vegetables and throwing out the broths.

I think the reason people study in open areas and with a show in the background is because it makes it fun. Quiet studying may be too boring for someone to do all the time.

Like what?

In regards to meaningful insights: that we unconsciously tend to agree more with a speaker the more attractive they are; optimizing learning using spaced repetition and retrieval practice; that we tend to remember the beginning and end of experiences; the whole “flow” literature about which activities produce the most happiness.

that we unconsciously tend to agree more with a speaker the more attractive they are

I feel like this insight in particular was abundantly obvious to just about everyone centuries before psychology as a discipline came into being.

When I was an undergrad, while I recognised that black Americans were disproportionately likely to commit crimes (especially murder, per the 13/52 meme), I believed that the underlying cause was socioeconomic status, and that if you looked at working-class whites you would find them committing murder at about the same rate as working-class blacks.

I haven't believed this for many years. For a long time I believed that the overrepresentation of black Americans in murder statistics was "unexplained" (while scoffing at certain woke "just-so stories" like the legacy of slavery or Jim Crow). Recently, @beej67 (who doesn't post here anymore, I don't think) persuaded me that the real underlying cause is "rate of fatherlessness", and black American men are vastly more likely to have been raised by a single mother than other ethnic groups.

I don't think "rate of fatherlessness" works as a single cause, I would think, though it's surely a contributing factor. I think there's more of a whole cultural milieu that leads to worse behavior and outcomes. African American is not merely a racial group, but also a cultural one—I believe I've read that immigrants often dislike the influence of their children's peers on their children.

Now why does that culture exist in the way it does? No idea. It's surely has many causes, many pressures that have pushed it to be that way, but I'm not knowledgeable about that.

In childhood, adolescence and possibly even in undergrad, I believed that most problems facing the US (and possibly other countries in the Anglosphere) could be resolved by greater investment in primary and secondary education.

I so agree with this. Teachers told me that schools were underfunded, and I believed them. I had not yet learned about how incentives drive what people think and say. I also uncritically believed that more/better education = smarter/more effective and thoughtful people; and I also didn't think about American public education as it is done, having any directional political valence.

Teachers told me that schools were underfunded, and I believed them.

Practical question. What do you do when people say "our underfunded schools" or similar nonsense? Do you reveal your power level or do you just nod along?

Last night at an event someone used the word "underfunded" to refer to Seattle's famously bloated school system. It was all I could do not to spit out my drink. But it's hard, and probably counterproductive, to push back against someone's quasi-religious beliefs. I don't want to destroy people with facts and reason. I just want to chill. But I just hated leaving stupidity unchallenged as well.

In the end, I just said something about how I'd never send my kids to Seattle Public Schools and then changed the subject.

I imagine, if they really want to spend more funding on teacher pay, and want to increase the performance of the school, the best way to do so is to fire many of the existing teachers, and hire top-notch new ones.

Good luck advocating for that.

Personally, I nod along unless I foresee some reason to have significant future dealings with them. I tend to leave stupidity unchallenged; "let wrong people be wrong," is what I usually say in life. If I'm in a room with people who say things like "our underfunded schools," I'm generally thinking about how to leave that room and go somewhere else.

With people who I respect and who I know are actually open to thinking about the topic, I would ask them if they could describe to me what the schools need more money to do; if they could name specific budgetary shortfalls, or if they had any idea of the amount that is currently spent per student, and what they think that amount should be instead. Questions like this can lead to an interesting discussion with a non-hostile interlocutor. With a hostile interlocutor, they'll probably see you're trying to trap them and terminate discussion somehow.

I'm trying to model their responses in my mind now, and I know I've often heard, "Pay teachers more." But I don't see the path for that leading to better educational outcomes, and indeed if we pay them more for shitty educational outcomes, that would work against incentives.

Anyway, as you know, few people are actually thinking about the issues to this level of depth. I rarely have these conversations in real life.

Practical question. What do you do when people say "our underfunded schools" or similar nonsense? Do you reveal your power level or do you just nod along?

Not who you address this to, but I 100% reveal my power level on the subject. It’s totally doable.

ITT: conservatives revealing they regret ever trusting those neoliberals.

I jest, at least in part. There’s some real variety in how we’ve ended up at our current beliefs, whatever those may be.

For my part, this forum proved me wrong about DEI training. Shit’s wild. I’m now willing to believe it’s characteristically different from the slew of other regulatory hurdles we jump on a monthly basis.

Twenty years ago, in college, I was a neocon/hawkish liberal/big government conservative and I was wrong everything they were wrong about: the Iraq war, the idea "no excuses" schools were the solution to fix the racial achievement gap, the idea that modern economists had basically figured out the business cycle and how to stop it, that the gold standard was a barbarous relic, the idea that it's women who want "nice guys" and marriage and its men who are generally the cads.

I was wrong not to buy bitcoin in 2010 (this was partly laziness and partly that I thought it was too risky, that I would end up sending money to drug dealers by accident or something and get roped into an investigation).

I was wrong in thinking in 2010 that American cities would continue to have smarter leadership and be on the upswing from their nadir in the 70s and 80s.

More recently, I was wrong in thinking that the Internet could fuel a new generation of elites (think 2010 era Y Combinator, Reddit and Google leadership) that would create their own better information ecosystem, and not be bound to all the myths and lies that academia and mainstream media had been peddling for decades. Instead, the same people and type of people who ran the old media-academia-NGO-government axis ended up converging the big tech companies and people like Paul Graham ended up on the outside.

I was terribly wrong in predicting in March 2020 would lead to moderating American political divisions and hatred of Trump, and would lead to liberals wanting to be tougher on crime, particularly against blacks and the underclass if they were to disobey covid lockdown rules.

I was effectively wrong in believing Pfizer and Modern when I read their study results that showed the covid vaccine was 95% effective against symptomatic infection.

Twenty years ago, in college, I was a neocon/hawkish liberal/big government conservative and I was wrong everything they were wrong about: the Iraq war, the idea "no excuses" schools were the solution to fix the racial achievement gap, the idea that modern economists had basically figured out the business cycle and how to stop it, that the gold standard was a barbarous relic, the idea that it's women who want "nice guys" and marriage and its men who are generally the cads.

Isn't it awesome how you've learned that all those things the people in the circles you moved in twenty years ago believed were wrong and all the things the people in the circles you move in now believe are right?

I was wrong not to buy bitcoin in 2010 (this was partly laziness and partly that I thought it was too risky, that I would end up sending money to drug dealers by accident or something and get roped into an investigation).

This isn't quite like saying "I was wrong not buy yesterday's winning lottery ticket", but I think circa 2010 it was hard to tell exactly the kind of mania/cult of enthusiasm that would grip bitcoin. You could've maybe predicted that an alternative currency would generate some buzz, but to have picked Bitcoin specifically (let alone imagine what kind of heights it would rise to) would have been to much to dream.

I was tapped into the circles that had been discussing alternatives to a dollar standard for a while, so I knew exactly why bitcoin was so exciting. It was only a $1 a coin, I was making six figures at the time with minimal expenses, so putting down $100 or $500 (or $10,000) to take a flyer would have been a no-brainer move, except that I was too cowardly. I console myself with the knowledge I have done financially very well regardless, and with the thought that if I was a bitcoin billionaire I would have a new set of problems, like worrying about kidnapping.

cc /u/amadan

I was wrong not to buy bitcoin in 2010 (this was partly laziness and partly that I thought it was too risky, that I would end up sending money to drug dealers by accident or something and get roped into an investigation).

I don't think anyone could have honestly been certain it wasn't too risky. Crypto is like stock-picking and forex and every other highly variable investment; it's easy to feel justified/regretful with 20/20 hindsight. The people who bought into Bitcoin were lucky, but they could have been unlucky and crying about it now.

What always consoles me is that I'd have likely been a mt. gox victim.

Something else I was wrong about. The Christians insisted back in the Great Atheism Wars that atheism/science was just another religion replacing Christianity.

I thought that was absurd, and atheism is certainly not a religion for me, but I concede I am in a small minority. I think one of the better explanations for The Madness is people scrambling to fill their religion-shaped holes. I genuinely don’t think I have one because of my upbringing, but many friends and family who claimed to turn away from religion are clearly just new members of the nascent Woke/Science religion.

It’s made what I thought was intolerable about the Christians seem tame in hindsight. I’m not sure where it leads though.

I was wrong about what people are like and what they want.

At my first corporate job after grad school I was unchallenged, frustrated with the slow pace, and eager to make more aggressive plays.

I left for an AI startup after a couple years and it totally changed the trajectory of my career and my life.

What blew my mind was trying to recruit people and seeing how risk averse they were. I left 6 years ago and most of them still work at a 200-year old company.

I completely reworked my model of what people get out of “wage slavery” and realized that many, many people will trade 20%+ of their earning potential for stability and security.

My dreams of democratic workplaces with profit sharing and so on fell apart because I realized, as much as the left might insist otherwise, that’s not actually what most people want.

I completely reworked my model of what people get out of “wage slavery” and realized that many, many people will trade 20%+ of their earning potential for stability and security.

were these people alone or with families?, I would assume family men would be reticent to trade stability for a few more bucks.

The ones who surprised me were 20s with maybe a girlfriend or boyfriend.

I wasn’t surprised the older ones didn’t want to take risks per se…but it did reinforce that calling wage labor inherently exploitative was ignoring many non-tangible benefits that people opt for.

I think this is pretty rational, isn’t it? Stability and security are extremely valuable things, especially for people with a lot to lose.

I’m not saying it’s not rational, just that I’d mainly encountered descriptions of getting a wage or salary as exploitative because of profits etc. etc.

The idea that you’re getting something (stability) in exchange for lower upside had never occurred to me.

I don’t think it’s a bad trade at all. My main point is it was an unquestioned assumption I’d held and it led to me rethinking a lot of things.

This is a weird one but: cosmetic microtransactions in videogames.

I started really getting into video games at a point where these were still somewhat novel, and thought that despite some obvious fumbles like horse armour I thought they were the future. They provided the means for developers to sustain continued development without the requirement for subscriptions, expansions or pay-to-win benefits. And these benefits have been realised, MTX have proven to be an incredibly strong revenue stream. They are also consistently damaging to the games that use them. They bloat install sizes. They're often a source of framerate or other optimisation issues. And worst of all they inevitably descend into garish absurdity as developers try to tempt more purchases with offerings ever more outlandish and extravagant. There is nothing I have come to hate more seeing developers craft a rich and immersive world and proceed to desecrate it for money.

These days I'm team subscription.

Yeah, the worst-case a lot of people were proposing back in 2005-2008 didn't seem that bad. Big bad game developers might make extra content only a tiny fragment of the playerbase is interested in, and charge them extra for shit I don't care about? Oh no, not that briar patch! Yes, yes, selling to willing buyers at the current market price, but everyone knows this stuff is worthless, and indeed most people want it to be worthless since PTW is a deathknell.

And then we started getting more and more DLCs or MTX that fail to fit well into the space between 'should have been in base game' and 'shouldn't have been in the game at all'.

FFXIV's been less bad about it than most, but it's a) a subscription game and mtx, b) there's a lot of goofy non-mtx gear, and c) still has some pretty bad stinkers (a literal whale mount for whales). And I still get the feeling that some of the treadmillisms around goofy gear and seasonal events are a little downstream of it. I'd also put Rimworld and Oxygen Not Included in the same boat -- it does seem like it's helping fund genuine improvements and development, but both feels more like making a different game out of the original, rather than extending on or augmenting it.

I used to be a blank-slateist, both about race and gender. Fully believed that absent racism and childhood inequality in education and nutrition, etc., we'd see proportional representation of black and white and Asian and Australian Aboriginal Nobel prize winners.

I have since come around to the HBD position, though not the ethnostatist "hard" HBD position that says, essentially, that some people are incapable of functioning in an advanced society and we can't/shouldn't live together.

Likewise, I mostly believed the second wave feminist idea that men and women would all be more or less equal and share roles and aptitudes equally if not for sexism. I started seeing the holes in this sooner, but didn't get completely redpilled* until I was past college age.

I definitely believed "It's just some crazy kids on college campuses who will grow up once they hit the real world" for too long.

Like some of the others below, I used to be pro-marijuana legalization and even considered that it might be better to legalize hard drugs. I think marijuana is kind of a disaster, and like alcohol, if I could magically make it disappear I would, but it's too late now. But experiences where harder drugs have been decriminalized and everything we are seeing in meth country convinces me that drugs are just fucking bad and while I don't want to go all police state and I recognize the failures of the War On Drugs, miss me with libertarian bullshit.

* redpill probably implies too strong a shift, since I still think most redpill guys are outright misogynists - literally, as in they really don't like women and resent the fact that they still want to have sex with them and need their permission to do so. However, I think it's an apt term in the sense that I really did come to an "awakening" about sex differences that I had been in denial about for most of my life.

I have since come around to the HBD position, though not the ethnostatist "hard" HBD position that says, essentially, that some people are incapable of functioning in an advanced society and we can't/shouldn't live together.

Appreciate the post and my intent here isn't to argue but to suggest a next step in this thinking.

You do accept that some people are incapable of functioning in an advanced society and we can't/shouldn't live together. Or I assume you do; that you're in favor of prisons and facilities for people with severe mental issues.

So the next step here is to acknowledge that a lot of the traits which make people suitable candidates for such institutions are at least substantially hereditary and that different ancestral groups express them at differential rates. And, sometimes, this can be really staggering. Especially at the tails.

Would you want as neighbors an ethnic group where almost none of the members are particularly valuable, roughly half are basically decent people, roughly half are at best borderline-incapable of productive employment (and tend to ruin social institutions which were designed to expect higher-quality input), and maybe five percent are extraordinarily-prone to violence, crime, and so on? Those tails make a big difference.

The reason I generally come around to agreeing with you that 'ethnostates' aren't the answer to this problem (though I think they're a great solution to other problems) is that there's enough individual variation, especially given the amount of admixture that is occurring/has occurred, that it'd be a silly place to draw the line between "Our kind of people" and "Stay over there away from us."

You do accept that some people are incapable of functioning in an advanced society and we can't/shouldn't live together. Or I assume you do; that you're in favor of prisons and facilities for people with severe mental issues.

Sure, but those people exist among all demographics. We don't put put someone in prison because he comes from a high-crime demographic; we put him in prison because he committed a crime.

Would you want as neighbors an ethnic group where almost none of the members are particularly valuable, roughly half are basically decent people, roughly half are at best borderline-incapable of productive employment (and tend to ruin social institutions which were designed to expect higher-quality input), and maybe five percent are extraordinarily-prone to violence, crime, and so on? Those tails make a big difference.

As literal neighbors, living next to me? No. I feel sorry for the residents of Springfield, Ohio. That said, I would still want any individual Haitian to be judged as an individual.

I used to be a blank-slateist, both about race and gender. Fully believed that absent racism and childhood inequality in education and nutrition, etc., we'd see proportional representation of black and white and Asian and Australian Aboriginal Nobel prize winners.

I have since come around to the HBD position, though not the ethnostatist "hard" HBD position that says, essentially, that some people are incapable of functioning in an advanced society and we can't/shouldn't live together.

What changed your mind? Life experiences? Books (if there are any, I'd appreciate if you could list them)? Something else?

I actually voted for Joe Biden in 2020, specifically because I thought his election would cool the culture war. In hindsight, this displays an unbelievable level of misunderstanding of the sources of the culture war and its continuing escalation.

I felt like it did cool the culture war?

To me it feels like both the left and the right have calmed down somewhat over the past few years.

It seems like the calming is partly just out of exhaustion, and because its no longer the 'new hotness'. It was a cultural fad, and such things tend to lose popularity mostly on their own.

Not to say the damage will go away.

To be honest, I just don't know how this could be measured.

To be more specific about my feelings: I thought that Democrats winning the election would reduce the amount of grievance media generated by the left. I guess my thought process was: "We have had four years of loud, grating Orange Man Bad/white nationalism is the greatest threat to our country content. Well, now Orange Man is out, you have achieved what you wanted - we can all move on to something else, right?"

I did not realize the full extent, at that time, to which the media cycle is driven by generating fear and upset, and how little interest there is in the truth; nor did I realize to what extent many people take what the media tells them to be truth, without questioning it.

I suppose I actually agree with you - I think the war is less hot; but I also feel like @The_Nybbler was vindicated too many times, and the world continued to get worse.

Do you think Trump’s election would have made things any better?

Other than avoiding the 1/6 circus, I guess.

It would also have avoided the endless Trump lawsuits or at least most of them.

But I think it would strictly make things better because it gets Trump out of the game. The culture war is probably an endlessly rising tide but for some reason Trump makes it rise much faster whether he's winning or losing as long as he's playing people are losing their minds and justifying literally any culture war item they support or reject on the back of his uncouth facebook-level news regurgitation.

It's also worth saying that it completely evades Kamala being the candidate which, in my mind, would lessen the culture war. It would have possibly stymied the idea that "my enemies are fascist and going to disenfranchise or even destroy any minority they encounter" not because it's true or not, but because it didn't work.

Trump, for all his faults, did not decide to try to arrest Hilary. The complete disregard for law or procedure maybe came earlier but to me it seems like it was fully ignited because of January 6 and dems implicitly saying that this "insurrection" not only defines any of our enemies but also empowers us to treat them as enemies in what should be neutral situations. Trump has some classified things or not whatever but a law that nobody respected or expected would be used in this situation is somehow exceedingly important because it can be used to attack Trump.

I am becoming more and more blackpilled about this but I do think the difference between waiting for Trump to finish and vanish and just lying, throwing away decorum and meeting him far below his level because you can get away with it doesn't happen if he's elected. It would have probably ended up this way regardless but Trump makes decorum decay at warp speed.

(maybe his level is that low, I don't know, but one thing's for certain in my mind, he would be ineffectual because he mostly has been.)

I am perhaps not a deep enough thinker to analyze the many variables that would go into that answering that question intelligently. I also do not have a sufficiently complete model, still, of what drives the culture war.

I do think that one theoretically possible end state of the culture war would be: Both sides accept that the other side exists, and is too widely supported to extirpate; therefore, it is not worthwhile to spend energy on waging that war. A second Trump victory, in this model, could have sent the signal: "The Right is strong. We leftists do not have as complete a mandate as we imagined. We must modify our offerings to appeal to more people;" and I think this would cool the culture war if it happened.

However, that is more of a mistake theory model.. I am now a conflict theory thinker, and now I am not sure what could cool the culture war apart from shows of chilling authoritarian force, which I pray are never used. I'd rather have a healthy culture war, no matter how unpleasant I personally find its existence, than to have an environment where the war is no longer allowed to be fought.

Weed is bad for young people. Is it really worse than alcohol? I think a lot of people have limited experience with true alcoholics, they’ve always seemed worse afflicted to me, and I say that as someone who prefers booze to weed.

The thing about stoners is that while weed saps motivation and leads to many a wasted life, they’re not really dangerous in and of themselves, and in an age of mass automation and bullshit jobs, I don’t think maximizing labor force participation is critical enough that forcing them off the couch is necessary.

I would lay down the law if my teenage child started smoking weed, but as a vaguely responsible adult I enjoy it before bed and have a relatively respectable and moderately successful career.

I've known true alcoholics who still manage to hold down a job and live a normal-ish life, but I've never known a true stoner who was able to do this. Even light smokers seem to have more fucked up lives than light stoners. Alcohol will kill you faster, though.

true alcoholics, they’ve always seemed worse afflicted to me

What do you mean by ‘true alcoholics’? Like the question ‘is being addicted to alcohol or weed worse’ is one which depends on categorization to answer.

Presumably they mean dysfunctional alcoholics drive drunk, beat their kids, lose their job, etc...

But most alcoholics are functional alcoholics who suffer no social problems from drinking, merely health problems.

It’s kinda hard to tell. One advantage that mitigated the damage alcohol does is the notion of alcoholics and drinking too much being bad. Everyone is pretty much aware that drinking 3+ days a week and more than 2 in a sitting is probably a sign of problems. With cannabis, you can tome up every single day and not think you’re addicted. There is no point where even your pot smoking buddy will tell you to get help.

Tbf, the same is true of gaming and screens (which can absolutely be addictive). We simply haven’t yet put up guard rails around th3 behavior to prevent people from gett Seriously addicted.

More than two in a sitting is seen as a problem? I can’t tell if I’m in a bubble or if you are. I’m not even slightly buzzed after two drinks, and I only drink a few times per year.

Is it really worse than alcohol?

Alcohol is worse. And, obviously, prohibition of alcohol has been tried and it didn't work.

But marijuana was already prohibited, and it's not like there were weed gangs with tommy guns ruling Chicago. The disruptions caused by the illegal marijuana trade were relatively mild. And legalization has created millions of addicts that didn't exist before. (It's not the same sort of addiction as an opiate or alcohol addiction, but it is addiction none the less. If you wake-and-bake, you're an addict).

Now that these addicts exist, it would be virtually impossible to re-ban marijuana. Which is another reason not to have legalized it: it's a one-way ratchet.

-- Gambling. I thought when my state legalized gambling, what's the big deal? It's legal in Atlantic City and Vegas, plenty of people travel there to gamble, and everyone knows someone with a poker game or buddies who keep a pool of NFL bets going. Why not keep that revenue in the state? I miss the old equilibrium. When one had to take, at least, a two hour trip to Atlantic City to gamble, there was at least a certain occasion to it, now there are guys gambling away their paychecks to a video poker machine in the back of a truck stop. And don't even get me started on phone gambling. The idea of people losing huge sums of money without ever leaving their house or talking to anyone is horrifying to me. All the old forms of gambling that lead me to view it as harmless had strong social elements: your local poker night was really everyone hanging out together, the office super bowl pool was a bonding experience, even the casino in Atlantic City had the advantage of travel and adventure and glamour. Legalizing it in every state removes the glamour of the destination gambling trip, and turns it into just a straight suck of money from the foolish to the pockets of casinos. If we're going to have sports gambling, we should just make it a state monopoly like the lottery, and shuffle all the profits into the education system.

-- Aging. When I was a teenager I bought into the Sex and the City-era framing for how the first half of your life path was supposed to go: a series of romantic adventures, serial "serious" monogamous relationships, and then at 30-35 getting "serious" about settling down. Plenty of time! People getting married later was treated as an unalloyed good in the media, and I should note that my own parents married late and had me late. Now, a few days from 33, great Odin's raven how did no one tell us how fast we were going to get old? The number of single friends I have who got unbelievably fat or have aged out of their looks! I talk to my friends, and especially my wife's friends, and they have these romantic problems, and the sad grainy truth is that they should have made hay while the sun shined and hooked someone ten years ago when they were still hot. There are girls we went to college with, and they were reasonably in the same league as my wife at the time, and now they're completely unfuckable, to the point where effort will never get you back where you were.

And it's blackpilling, because there's no advice to give them on their relationship strategies that doesn't run back up against that cold hard fact: you're fat now and there's nothing you can do that will deliver what I would consider good results for them at this point. And I knew that there would be some point where that would be true, but I thought it was 40 or 50 or after the third kid. Not 32. It hits women harder, but hits men too, the curves that online dating sites show men getting more attractive only in relative terms. The media told us at 32 we'd just be hitting the peak of our hotness, not that better than half would have fallen off.

Somebody needs to warn the youth, we need to be sending our freshmen to college this fall with a copy of Princeton Mom as required reading. In media I felt like the point at which one really aged, in the sense of looks, was at least 40. Certainly, though I wouldn't watch the show until after I was married it was just in the air at the time culturally, Sex and the City's girls dealt with the idea of aging in their 30s and 40s, but they didn't even have friends or side characters who got fat, or were completely aged out of attractiveness in dating. There's a huge number of women, and a decent number of men, in my social circle where I look at them and I'm like wow you've already missed the window. It's not "over" for them, after all they might find each other, but their championship window has closed and that's indescribably sad for me. I can't imagine not being hot at your own wedding, that should be near the hottest you've ever been, and some of the weddings I've been to lately it's a joke. And these people are only in their early 30s! You have a narrow window to really maximize your talents in looks, narrower if you don't take care of yourself. Pick ye rosebuds while ye may!

-- Donald Trump (on foreign policy). I voted for him in the 2016 primary after he got up at the debate and said that Iraq was a big fat mistake. While I'm a bit more of an internationalist, I bought into his America First isolationism as at least reasonably peaceful. In office he mostly got captured or railroaded by neocons in his administration, or turned out to lack the temperament for peace. Continued most of the bad policies of his predecessors, while adding a few new ones of his own, and reducing the reliability of the USA as a global partner around the world.

-- Dress shoes are dead, and my decade of resistance has been pointless. No one wears them anymore.

-- Church. I sort of thought church would always be there. That I could wander in and out of religion as I chose, and there would always be other people who kept the place going while I figured my shit out. Now we're seeing churches die out in my town and it's dawned on me that I, me, personally, I'm responsible for maintaining these things. That if I don't do it no one will. I'm back at my church, but even then it makes me sad seeing the parking lot at the historic lutheran church near my house and knowing that they're dying. And it's not like I can do anything for two churches at once. There's got to be a German word for the sadness at seeing things that you didn't like die out? These assumed bedrocks of our lives just aren't as secure as we thought they were.

-- Marijuana, from the opposite direction. I didn't use weed until I was married, and I didn't get it, I was a straight edge teen. Legalized marijuana has been a Good Thing. Notwithstanding my immense dorkiness, when I was a teenager, I could get pot more easily than I could get alcohol. I knew guys who dealt pot from the Boy Scouts or from basketball or from debate club, it was normal to know someone who sold pot. Because the marijuana distribution system was already illegal and underground, so they weren't exactly checking IDs, and a teenage could go buy a half pound and chop it up and sell it, where alcohol had to be stolen from an adult or a store. Now, marijuana is mostly distributed through legal channels, so you equally need a 21 year old willing to get you weed or beer, and fewer teenagers can swing that. And we've seen that decline in youth drug use. See attached image. Youth drug and alcohol use has continued to drop during the process of marijuana legalization. The kids are, by that standard, alright. Further, traffic deaths have not correlated with weed legalization driving high is probably bad, but it's not as bad as driving drunk so we see a replacement effect.

In general, Marijuana is and was normalized already, even before legalization. And I'm of the opinion that there is a deleterious impact on civic fabric from ordinary, law abiding citizens being anti-cop, in the sense of breaking the law and hoping not to get caught by the police. The policeman should never be the enemy of the citizen, the citizen should always see the policeman's presence as a positive. That's why I'm also in favor of more reasonable drinking age laws. There should only be laws against things that the average person would find morally blameworthy. Laws that over-reach and criminalize the conduct of ordinary citizens set up a conflict between the state and the citizen.

And, for that matter, I use thc these days, and I think done right it is the conservative family drug. The effects are, in context, ideal for relaxing after a hard day with people you love. Alcohol leads people to get into fights with their family, to sleep with people they shouldn't. Marijuana leads to hanging out with people who annoy you and just laughing it off, it makes sex with your spouse better but sex with anyone else unthinkable.

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Re: Aging, I find it very odd to attribute ballooning in weight to "aging". It's not aging doing that, it's eating.

Now in some sense that's true of most things, because being alive longer is more time for things to go wrong. If everyone played brutal high-intensity sports all their lives to the point where they accumulated new permanent injuries each year, then one could believe that it's normal to become functionally immobile by your mid-20s. But I still wouldn't attribute that to age. Even if all aging is accumulated damage/entropy, I think there's some sense of "reasonable wear and tear" which should apply.

Not arguing against your main point which seems decent enough, although "lock it down early so you can then bloat into a cave troll" seems unfair to your partner. I don't think there's any shortcut that lets you avoid taking care of your body, especially since you're the one who's stuck inhabiting it.

Speaking of that, the biggest take-away I noticed is that people diverge a ton they get older. Two eight year olds will have a lot in common just because they haven't had much time to accumulate the effects of their good and bad choices, genes, injuries, luck, etc. The gulf can be massive.

That is basically the dynamic of aging and weight gain because (pre ozempic) essentially no one loses weight in a significant way. So if every year there's a certain chance one gets fat, then every five years multiples that chance, and it catches most people eventually unless they're working to minimize it.

Maybe this is idiosyncratic to me, but in my mind being in a good relationship is encouragement and support to avoid bloating into a cave troll. My wife and I encourage each other to work out and stay in shape, both directly and indirectly. We hold each other accountable, we teach each other things, I go with my wife to get her an exercise bike off Craigslist. And because my wife is hot, I feel like I have to keep it tight if I want to keep her.

While I see a lot of bad relationships take a very crabs in a bucket mentality. One of my best friends from college got a little fat, started dating a guy who was a little fat. Now every time she tries to work on basic diet and exercise, her boyfriend (now husband) talks shit on her and sabotages her. And they've both only gotten fatter.

It’s also heavily weighted by social class and region. Among rich people in Manhattan being fat is unusual (especially for women, but also men) well into one’s forties and fifties, sometimes later. Obviously many of the women have some work done, but many haven’t and obvious TV license accounted for the cast of SATC broadly reflect the average hotness of many single women in that age and class bracket in NYC then; arguably it’s better now as subtle facelift and filler techniques have improved since the early 00s, see eg. Anne Hathaway at 41. By contrast it seems like in parts of the Midwest and South people give up almost universally at 25, the men usually after they stop playing sports after college, and the women when they get married or have their first child.

Good news, I wear dress shoes five days a week! I have three pair, depending on the suit and level of wear (brown, black, cordovan). Of course I am not in the US.

I would also suggest re: hotness and rapidly diminishing, to borrow your term, fuckability, it really does depend (and to channel Rodney Dangerfield: "on what I have no idea.") I see women here (in Japan) who keep their looks and figures well into their forties (though even they are not blindingly hot in the same way as younger women) although I believe many of them, certainly if they are still single, seem to have an almost visible cynicism and contempt regarding men, as if the veil of Isis had been pulled back for them long ago, and if they ever did end up coupling with a man it would be with the resignation of a Circe looking at a particularly muscular swine and thinking, ah well....

As for my acquaintances back home any woman my age who still lives there has ballooned into an almost unrecognizable caricature of her younger self. I can think of two exceptions. The men fare little better, perhaps not better at all I'm just viewing them with different criteria.

re: hotness and rapidly diminishing, to borrow your term, fuckability, it really does depend (and to channel Rodney Dangerfield: "on what I have no idea.")

It seems pretty obvious that taking care of yourself, avoiding putting on weight, are pretty simple and straightforward.

True. Also I think genetics has something to do with it as I would never suggest most Japanese people are particularly rigorous in their exercise regimens. Certainly diet and, so far, the lack of a culture embracing fatness has something to do with it as well.

I see women here (in Japan) who keep their looks and figures well into their forties (though even they are not blindingly hot in the same way as younger women)

This was one of my major takeaways from my trip to Japan, though more of a confirmation than a surprise. East Asian women retain their youthfulness for a length of time unimaginable to most white (and nearly all black and Latina) women. I would look at Japanese women and think, “She could be 22, or she could be 40.” The neoteny is very real, and very appreciated.

I agree about marijuana, especially the point about cops. I think the fact that for so many years, cops would harass or even arrest people for making a personal choice to put a substance in their own bodies, helped to lead to the current widespread distrust of cops and the overall rise of extreme leftism. When you're an impressionable 18 year old, the idea of some cop arresting you for using weed naturally makes you distrust the entire system, and especially law enforcement. I think that many young people have been drawn to leftism by this over the years, to our detriment. The drug war helped to create several generations of people who had a natural and substantial reason to distrust and oppose civil order, law enforcement, and the legal system.

I disagree about women/attractiveness in some ways. In my experience, aging by itself takes a very long time to degrade a woman's looks substantially. 90% of the problem is simply obesity. The overwhelming majority of women who are hot in their 20s are still going to be very attractive in their 40s, as long as they do not get fat. They will probably have some subtle wrinkles and lines in the face, but they will still be attractive. If they take really good care of themselves, they will still be attractive even in their 50s. Maybe your standards are higher than mine or something, but in any case, this is how it seems to me. The key purely physical aspects of a woman's attractiveness - facial beauty, breasts, butt, legs, etc. - do not really change shape much with age until quite an advanced age, assuming that the woman does not get fat, although the skin does get less smooth. Out of those characteristics the face starts changing the quickest, probably. But even then, a woman who had a pretty face at 20 is still probably going to have a decent face at 45 as long as she does not get fat.

When you're an impressionable 18 year old, the idea of some cop arresting you for using weed naturally makes you distrust the entire system, and especially law enforcement.

I don't know why that would be the case any more than they would have that same reaction for any other thing that they clearly know is a crime. Are you positing that impressionable 18 year olds just don't understand what the law is? What it does? They certainly were aware that it was illegal. Does an 18 year old getting into legal troubles for underage drinking and driving naturally make them distrust the entire system and especially law enforcement? I have to imagine it would only do so if they were extremely stupid. The only other explanation is that they'd simply drank the 'first principles' "drugs are my human right" kool-aid, but that's more a problem with the dumb propaganda than it is with the law, itself. If some dumb 18 year old gets arrested for assaulting an officer in their anti-police riot, I'd say that the blame for them possibly turning even more ACAB is the fault of the stupid propaganda that led them to believe stupid things, not laws allowing for riot control.

Most Americans drink alcohol before they turn 21. A slim majority have tried pot at least once. The other major category of crime I'd put here is speeding, most Americans speed at least some of the time. And even people who don't commit these crimes themselves know people who do, who are normal and fine upstanding citizens. As a result, most young Americans experience of police is as someone you watch out for, a threat to your fun, rather than as a protective force of order. When society makes things that most people do illegal, they set up a conflict between the police and the citizenry. The police are in a relationship of distrust, rather than one of cooperation.

Police should only get involved where there is a clear distinction to be drawn between criminals and citizens. Tomorrow I'm going to my niece's sixth birthday party. If I told people there that I was going to the MNF game this week, and I planned to sucker punch someone in a Falcons jersey, as I do every time I go to an Eagles game (GO BIRDS), everyone would kind of edge away from me, and certainly mark me down as a bad person, not normal and not to be trusted. That should be the reaction if I tell people I plan to commit a crime!

Contrast. If I told people I was going to get my BMW up to 100 on the drive home on the turnpike, people might roll their eyes, they might think it's lame, but nobody would look at me and say "That's wrong, that's criminal!" More likely, someone would tell me to watch out for cops.

Weed is probably a little less accepted than speeding, but a certainly a lot more accepted than punching a stranger. If I told a stranger I smuggled my penjamin into the MNF game, and that I was going to get a little buzzed, how would the typical American react?

My opinion is that weed laws, drinking ages, and speed limits should be set up in such a way that most people would view breaking those laws as a bad thing, and view someone who admitted to breaking those laws as outside the norm. I contend that currently, those laws are set up in such a way that breaking them means nothing to most people, either for themselves or others. As a result, the respect for law as a whole is reduced.

If I told people there that I was going to the MNF game this week, and I planned to sucker punch someone in a Falcons jersey, as I do every time I go to an Eagles game (GO BIRDS), everyone would kind of edge away from me, and certainly mark me down as a bad person, not normal and not to be trusted.

Russ Roberts talks about how explaining basic economic ideas from his libertarian perspective "causes people to edge away from you". When you even ask about science on some topics, people edge away from you. In both cases, they will mark you down as a bad person, not normal and not to be trusted. So, this heuristic is pretty terrible for distinguishing anything real.

No, there is a big difference between various kinds of laws. A blanket principle of "always obey every law, simply because it is the law" makes no sense, since many laws are stupid and/or immoral, and that is even more the case in authoritarian countries than in the US. The law, in and of itself, has no moral authority. So one must pick which laws to obey. The law against, say, raping people makes sense to obey because clearly, raping people is immoral because it seriously harms others. Using marijuana, on the other hand, does not harm others, so the law against doing it is stupid and immoral.

Making laws against things that do not harm anyone except the person who does them is a quick path to raising generations of people who feel contempt for lawmakers and the legal system. And then you get more leftism, because some of those people who feel contempt eventually go down the rabbit hole of starting to believe that the entire system, rather than just part of it, is fundamentally wrong, and that it must be overthrown and so on.

A blanket principle of "always obey every law, simply because it is the law" makes no sense

Good thing that this is not what I said. I said that your particular statement makes no sense unless you're extremely stupid, not having any idea how law works, or drank the propaganda kool aid. Yes, dawg, you will be arrested for something that's obviously illegal, even if it's a dumb law. This happening can't possibly shift your position, unless you were really really dumb/naive.

Many teenagers are naive, or more charitably, they think of the people around them naturally while the law is not a natural thing. In the natural world, you either face the consequences for an action with some degree of certainty (therefore it's a bad thing to do) or do not (therefore it's an okay thing to do); there is no "as long as you don't get caught", or rather, the ones doing the catching would be fellow members of the community, not faceless distant "authorities". When they're faced with a dumb law, their naive expectation is that no one would really put you through the wringer over such a dumb law, come on. Everyone does that. They'll just give you a slap on the wrist unless you do it so stupidly openly that the authorities have no choice.

Then they learn what cops are and conclude that cops, too, are not natural, hardly human.

Many teenagers are naive, or more charitably, they think of the people around them naturally while the law is not a natural thing. In the natural world, you either face the consequences for an action with some degree of certainty (therefore it's a bad thing to do) or do not (therefore it's an okay thing to do); there is no "as long as you don't get caught", or rather, the ones doing the catching would be fellow members of the community, not faceless distant "authorities".

Up to this point, all of this is relevant to all law.

When they're faced with a dumb law, their naive expectation is that no one would really put you through the wringer over such a dumb law, come on. Everyone does that. They'll just give you a slap on the wrist unless you do it so stupidly openly that the authorities have no choice.

This beggars belief. What kind of childhood did you have? Did you literally never get in trouble for something that seemed dumb? That happened to me allllll the time.

Great, deep post. AAQC'd.

Some thoughts I have:

  • Regarding churches: I have certainly felt the same thing about sadness at them dying off. And I am myself part of a relatively small cohort of under-40s at the church I attend now. However, I do think this is creating some healthy pressure on them to adapt. I have spoken to pastors at some declining churches and asked them what they are doing to try and recruit new members - I have never gotten a response that indicated they even think about it seriously. That is not good enough. Sincerely, I believe that churches with that attitude deserve to die out. Meanwhile, I am indeed aware of some churches in my area that have retrenched, come up with some new ideas, and are expanding. I think my church "makes a great product," for lack of a better way to put it; we have something good to offer, and we should capitalize on that. I may look to start a committee about that in the new year where we members can work on that.

  • Regarding aging: this is just really true, and I commend you for pointing it out. In particular, it makes me think about "bubbles." I have been awash in "self-improvement culture" for many years now; I don't know if I started seeking it out, or if the algorithm presented it to me, or if my involvement developed from my own ideas, or what, but - I have internalized the idea that, to be a desirable partner, you have to improve and maintain yourself. You must meet standards of physical wellbeing and style; cultivate yourself into a person that others would like to talk to and be around; achieve adult levels of life stability.

To me, that is so clear that I can't imagine not doing those things. Conversely, as you mention, there are some people for whom these ideas make up no part of their thinking. I genuinely do not know what they are thinking about instead. I am not entirely judging them; perhaps they like their way of life better. But the outcome is that there are a surprising amount of young-ish people in my extended circle, who are not legitimate romantic prospects for anyone. And these may be people in their age-based "prime;" it only gets worse from here if they don't shape up. Or they may, as you say, be people who spent their entire prime in a totally unviable state, and are now declining even from there. As you say, it makes me really sad. Personally, if I died relatively soon, I have a couple of decades that I can look back on very positively. I made the most of what I was given, more or less. It's very, very painful to think about someone looking back on having failed to do that.

  • Regarding dress shoes: I admittedly work in a manufacturing facility, not an office building. But I do try to wear the dressiest shoes that are comfortable throughout the day. I at least wear black or brown leather shoes all the time; I abominate my coworkers who wear New Balances. We are allowed to wear whatever we want, but I want my department to look like we give a shit.

Regarding dress shoes: I admittedly work in a manufacturing facility, not an office building. But I do try to wear the dressiest shoes that are comfortable throughout the day. I at least wear black or brown leather shoes all the time

That's pretty much where I'm at unless I'm in court or similar. I went through a strong thrift-store #menswear phase in my 20s, and I put together a pretty great collection of Allen Edmonds and Alden etc dress shoes. But more and more, I found that there wasn't really anywhere one could wear them without being overdressed. A casual leather shoe is more than good enough in the vast majority of situations these days, anything more feels costumey.

Sincerely, I believe that churches with that attitude deserve to die out.

Probably they deserve it, but it still makes me sad in a way. The Lutheran church was supposed to be there! I didn't want to go there, but if I wanted to go there, I expected them to be there to welcome me, and somehow it's sad to know that they aren't.

Conversely, as you mention, there are some people for whom ["self-improvement culture"] ideas make up no part of their thinking. I genuinely do not know what they are thinking about instead.

From my own personal experience as someone who has never been able to bring myself to give two shits about "self-improvement culture," object-level stuff, mostly. Work and whether I should apply to a new job or try for advancement at my current employer; the Napoleonic Wars or whatever other period of history has grabbed my interest recently; the podcast I am listening to; whether my favorite baseball team would be better or worse if they traded for someone or called up the hot prospect du jour; how to reply to the latest interesting post here; whether my car needs an oil change, etc.

But I do try to wear the dressiest shoes that are comfortable throughout the day.

As someone who mostly wears retired running shoes (Altra, not New Balance, and generally more muted colors), do you have any recommendations for finding durable, comfortable, and good-looking shoes?

I have two pairs of Thursdays and once they are broken in they are comfortable and will last for a long time. They have a line of leather sneakers with sheepskin interior lining: https://thursdayboots.com/collections/mens-sneakers-low-top

SAS shoes.

One pair will likely last you a decade, if not longer.

These mostly appear to be hideous.

Shrug. I like them. Don't know what more to say than that.

My honest-to-God answer to this is that for daily use, I just buy simple, conservatively-styled Rockports, and replace them when they wear out. Like this. Yes, it's just a basic-ass black shoe; but it feels and performs very well, and it looks okay.

Real shoe connoisseurs will not be impressed by this, but the man on the street or the lady from Inside Sales might. And after all, I live in Ohio. People's expectations are easy to exceed here.

I do believe that durable, comfortable, good-looking true dress shoes exist, and I also think there are some Mottizens who will be happy to chime in with recommendations. I feel like I've seen them talking about it before.

And, for that matter, I use thc these days, and I think done right it is the conservative family drug.

I wouldn’t go that far, but I’ve been open here about my own change in opinion on this. Very little that weed critics say is wrong, but society needs its vices and it seems to me obvious that weed - a drug that mostly makes people friendly, docile, jovially hungry and relaxed - is better than most alternatives.

And I also think that as you grow up you realize that hangovers really suck, and that many of the more competent and successful people you know (who are also healthy and aren’t destroying their liver etc) consume THC regularly.

Getting absolutely sloshed with your family, who you find annoying: you'll get in a screaming match with them, say something hurtful that you'll regret, worst case maybe get into a physical fight.

Getting shit-ripped on a 20mg edible with your family, who you find annoying: you'll giggle a lot, eat a bunch of snacks, love watching an old movie with them. This is basically exactly what my mother in law wants from me when I visit.

Weed is the perfect drug for easing the frictions of ordinary interactions between family and friends.

Maybe, but I think this only works for intentionally superficial interactions.

If THC replaced alcohol, it would definitely be a positive for society. If we can find good evidence of that happening, I'll be glad to be wrong a second time.

My gut feel, however, is that consumption of almost all drugs, including alcohol, is up.

For my own self, I drink more than I want to. I don't really ever use marijuana, although I enjoy it. My worry in consuming THC, is that I would simply develop a second habit.

Isn't consumption of all drugs, including alcohol, way down for young people? The only thing that's really up is public opioid use, but not use in general.

People stay at home and consume digital media instead of getting intoxicated.

I may be wrong but I feel like I've read a lot of articles talking about this.

IIRC, marijuana use is way way up. Especially habitual use.

I wouldn't be surprised if youth drinking (under 21) is down, because that would require one to leave the house and have friends. For the population at large, I couldn't find good data for alcohol consumption. What I did find cut off in 2016 or 2019, which is too early to capture marijuana legalization.

When I went to look I found that drug use among Swedish youth is down, especially among boys, but only alcohol use is really down.

Perhaps it's different in other places and only alcohol use is down everywhere. I might have conflated English language articles about decreased alcohol use with Swedish articles about general decline.

Weed is still really unacceptable in Sweden in a way it's not in the Anglosphere, right? I know teenagers in the US are less likely to drink but much more into pot.

Define unacceptable. I'd say that most younger people who aren't shut-ins or teetotalers have at least tried weed at some point. Habitual use among respectable adults is very rare and you most certainly wouldn't smoke with colleagues even if you might get drunk with them.

I'd say it was really unacceptable in the 90s, somewhat unacceptable and naughty in the 00s and almost whatever from the mid 10s and on, among younger people anyway.

I think Sweden might be at the late 00s level of American acceptance?

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And don't even get me started on phone gambling. The idea of people losing huge sums of money without ever leaving their house or talking to anyone is horrifying to me.

The widespread legalization of sports betting, and to a lesser extent the ubiquity of fantasy sports, have largely ruined sports media coverage. You can’t watch ESPN or listen to a sports talk show or podcast without seeing or hearing numerous gambling ads. Most networks have at least one show dedicated to gambling. Even normal sports coverage (NFL Sunday and similar) is constantly scrolling lines and prop bets as they talk about each team.

It used to be that just some people would talk about it, and they always seemed insufferable. Now it’s a major topic of sports talk, to the point where the actual games and outcomes are largely considered secondary to the lines and the spread.

I have actually had multiple people - a neighbor and a coworker - try to talk me into making wagers on sporting events via apps. Not just telling me about their own, but actively trying to convince me to do it myself. It's the first time I can remember being peer-pressured as an adult.

To be fair to them, I think this is because they'd get some sort of referral bonus, not entirely because they want their decision validated by me.

The gambling thing is really bad in the US because gambling was so strictly prohibited and regulated for so long. In the UK where there’s been a sports betting store on every street corner (in some places literally) for a long time online gambling has come very well but has not led to the same cultural shift, in the US a lot of people don’t even seem to think it’s gambling™️.

I used to believe that the green parties and their members wanted to save the environment and stop climate change. I've now come to believe that isn't really true and that their championed policies are at best counter-productive in relation to their stated goals, and they're uninterested in improvement. They don't want society to work well, decrease suffering or the environment to be saved. What they really want is for their aesthetic preferences adhered to, consequences be damned.

Furthermore, like all parties outside of the mainstream they seem to be magnets for the worst members of society.

All of this is commonplace things on both the right and leftwing extremes, but it isn't recognized as much for the greens, which is an issue. They get legitimacy from championing the cause of the day while having just the same skull generating disregard for reality and/or the consequences of their actions as the commies or Nazis.

Ever since I heard green parties referred to as "watermelons" (green on the outside, red on the inside) I've been unable to get the comparison out of my head. Whenever a "green" politician has an opportunity to back a policy which would have a positive impact on the environment (but which would not support a woke/Marxist-adjacent worldview), they can be relied upon not to do so.

It's not necessarily true that green parties are progressive/leftist; the one I'm most acquainted with, Canada's federal Green party, has always been sort of derisively referred to as "Tories on bikes" for its general conservative bent. It was going through an increasingly woke/progressive phase which resulted in longtime leader Elizabeth May retiring and being replaced by Annamie Paul (the first black woman to lead a Canadian federal party, everyone was constantly reminded) but that all fell apart when she tried to force all the Green MPs to make declarations of support for Israel. Now Elizabeth May is back in charge and things are somewhat back to normal. In Ontario the Green Party is emerging as a force among centrist liberals who don't want to vote for the corrupt PCs and Liberals.

I would say as a somewhat broad generalization Green Parties tend to fairly badly fail at their central purposes (a. getting elected and b. protecting the environment) which makes them vulnerable to hijack by outside causes.

Okay.

I’m less and less in favor of libertarian ideas than I was before. There are some behaviors that are harmful to society even if done behind closed doors because the pathologies they cause or enable tend to be a net drain on resources. Drug use is a big one, which is being made more obvious by the recent legalization of marijuana. But the same can be said of both the consumption and production of porn, the glorification of overconsumption and consumerism, and the normalization of ignorance.

There is an actual fate. Blank slates and infinite possibilities are both absurd lies we tell ourselves because we can no longer tolerate the notion of limits to ourselves and others around us. The results have been a disaster. We teach kids to want things that they won’t be able to achieve and then they get stuck with the horrific realization at 25 that they will have lifelong consequences for believing that junk we told them in school and on TV. It also creates social problems as those who were promised a future in the now over saturated elite ranks agitate for what they were told was a birthright, and at the same time the low status jobs go unfilled because those who should be doing those jobs went for elite jobs. Or we tell women to girlboss which, frankly only maybe 5% of women can even be middling good at, and get shocked when it means that women aren’t filling the traditional female jobs or having kids.

Crime is only deterred by the certainty and harshness of punishment. Compassion is nice, but what it teaches criminals is that there are no consequences to doing serious crimes. The results are that areas of the city where criminals are most active become too dangerous to live or work in. And this harms those too poor to flee. What those areas need is over-policing, harsh punishment for first time offenders, and zero tolerance for crime no matter what the criminal’s past is. When people don’t have reason to fear the lawman, the law doesn’t exist, and eventually you have people forced into defending themselves.

Most of the wokeness in schools and Hollywood is a result, not a cause of the decline of those institutions. We aren’t teaching that just because the state says to. We teach it because we have lost the institutional ability to teach math, science, reading and writing. Test scores on those subjects are not good, and a ten minute conversation with even college graduates shows a shocking level of ignorance about the world outside of their bubble. Unless you’re a STEM student, chances are that you know less about the outside world than their high school educated grandparents at the same age. In the arts, I suggest the same thing — the complexity of characters, plots and dialogue have fallen quite a bit from the kinds of things people were writing a generation ago. Modern art frankly sucks at this point, as artists generally lack the skill to make representations of the real world.

Would you agree if I said that these "harmful behaviours" all depend on the people who engage with them? The trade-off is actually what age limits achieve. Why can't children drink alcohol? Because children can't bear that much freedom, they'd likely destroy themselves. So before 18, drinking is a "harmful behaviour", and afterwards, it's not, under the assumption of course that people above the age of 18 have more self-control. I agree that, for society, more rules can be better, but I personally don't need nearly that many myself. So less libertarianism is only best under the assumption that everyone should live by the same rules. A more flexible "Every individual should have as much freedom as they can handle" opens up more more interesting possibilities. Finally, may I add that rules are of almost no importance? Same with police, laws, restrictions. These are just symptoms of deeper problems. If you need them in the first place, something has already gone wrong. Even if cocaine was legal, I would still avoid it. For a society, it's more important that its citizens don't want to do drugs, than it is for said society to ban drugs.

I agree that "over-policing" is a good idea now. It worked in El Salvador I believe. But why is it necessary in the first place? I think it's possible to cultivate people in such a way that you don't need rules. For example, I allow myself to be as immoral as I want, but I don't ever feel like doing anything bad, so the natural consequences of doing whatever I like is that I do what's right.

Perhaps, the need for rules is a sign of decline?

I think it's possible to cultivate people in such a way that you don't need rules.

But you can't control them then. The need for control is a need for rules is a sign of decline; people who love are more productive than people who fear, but fear is the fallback option (per Machiavelli).

under the assumption of course that people above the age of 18 have more self-control

The assumption that people under the age of 18 don't have self-control is actually very, very damaging to those of them that already have it but also take social messaging [a little too] seriously. The people you want to accelerate hold themselves back for the benefit of the people who will never be responsible- these rules are redistributionist, communist even (while the most common person to scream about this won't make this argument they are, trivially, directionally correct).

A more flexible "Every individual should have as much freedom as they can handle" opens up more more interesting possibilities.

Yes, but that pipeline is ripe for abuse. Best example for that is gun licensing in areas that do more invasive checks; they're going to come for that freedom with the excuse of "nobody needs it" and there's strength in numbers.

It requires a more temperate people to do this properly. Europeans can do it more often these days (and have more liberal gun laws than several very populated US states); Americans clearly can't (I think it's a genetic problem with the English). But the fact the freedoms are granted by default is what brings in liberals-who-deserve-liberalism, temperate people who don't want to jump through the hoops.

I love being around people who are competent and developed, around such people you can just let cause and effect do its thing, without worrying about where you're heading. Is your point that a mentally healthy society cannot be properly controlled, which is why people in power are implementing changes which reduce the mental resilience of the population? Because if so, I do agree.

The assumption that people under the age of 18 don't have self-control

Oh, I don't believe that myself, I just agree with society that there's more people with self-control above 18 years of age than below. We are punishing capable people by designing society in a way which protects the lowest common denominator. But my point is that, while I'd like to give everyone more freedom, it would only result in a more hedonistic society. The sort of "rights" that people are after today just seems like the desire to indulge in harmful behaviour and to destroy oneself. Activists are trying to get rid of social judgement towards behaviour which is harmful (like being obese, having casual sex, or fetishism) but one is in a really bad state if one seeks agency for such reasons.

Yes, but that pipeline is ripe for abuse.

By the government? Sure. Our society isn't good enough that we can give somebody the authority to decide who gets to have freedom and who doesn't. By the way, I said as much freedom as one could handle, not as much as they needed :) Here's a quote by Taleb that I quite like: "I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist". I must agree with him that something goes wrong as a result of scaling. I've only experienced "rules aren't necessary" in smaller communities.

It requires a more temperate people to do this properly

Perhaps the sort of calm which is a result of confidence and competence? For I don't think being "temperate" is good on its own, if it means having no strong convictions, not caring much, and having weak emotions and drives. It has been said by Nietzsche, Jung and Jordan Peterson that one cannot be a good person if they can't be dangerous, and I can only agree with them.

Anyway, is this temperateness something we can cultivate in people? For it's my point that there's something fundamental in people which makes all the difference. Something that, if it turns out alright, everything will work out, and if it doesn't, then you need rules, and regulations, laws, and punishment, surveillance, micromanagement, and so on. My point is that improving society can only be done by improving people directly (from the inside, not outside), and that this kind of improvement is sufficient. People are the atoms of society, any "solutions" on the upper layers are wasted. Japan doesn't have less crime because they have better laws, but because they're Japanese. The Japanese are not a consequence of Japan, Japan is a consequence of the Japanese people. People, their characters, and their nature is the root of everything, and everything else is downstream from that and barely worth bothering with (at least, that's my current worldview). Please let me know if I misunderstood you along the way

It’s so intriguing to me how the quality of our art, music, entertainment, education, ability to build things, and political discourse all seemed to decline together.

Fascinating to think about what the underlying cause to the general decline has been.

I think in a lot of cases, it’s a set of cultural norms that drive all three.

First of all, most high achievement societies tend to have a culture of hard work and value their high achieving people. When society promotes things like learning science and maths and building things and creating new businesses and so on obviously everyone seeks status and they want to learn, invent and build as well. When high status people like good art, then artists arise to create it. And even in behavior, when high status people choose to not associate with vulgar ideas, fashions, music and art, it becomes unfashionable to like that stuff as well.

Second, most high achievement societies tend to not mollycoddle failure as much as we do. If you aren’t trying to make it, the rest of us aren’t going to do it for you. If you want it you work for it. Modern society just doesn’t do this anymore, in fact quite the opposite— we pay quite handsomely for lack of effort and doing horrifically self destructive things and making terrible life decisions. A guy who does drugs and plays video games all day won’t miss a meal. If you have six different baby-daddies, you still get lots of help from the rest of us to live life.

Third, there’s a lot more effort put into keeping the marketplace of ideas free from promoting bad memes. Up until the 1990s, TV and movies were much more reluctant to make positive role models of people doing stupid things. You wouldn’t find heroines who had sex with random men. You wouldn’t see heroes doing drugs.

Third, there’s a lot more effort put into keeping the marketplace of ideas free from promoting bad memes. Up until the 1990s, TV and movies were much more reluctant to make positive role models of people doing stupid things. You wouldn’t find heroines who had sex with random men. You wouldn’t see heroes doing drugs.

This was true during the Hays Code era. Not sure it was really true in the 90s. You already had things like heroines cheating on their fiances with random bums (Titanic), heroes marrying single mom strippers (Independence Day), heroes marrying girls who friendzoned them for decades until they were rich and famous (Forrest Gump), etc. Those are all pretty stupid decisions.

I think you’re hitting the nail pretty much on the head.

Interestingly, just today I was writing some notes on the importance of pressure in making us humans get things done and become better people.

As context, I’m currently doing a STEM PhD. I’m one of the people who has always been smart enough to have my intelligence make up for poor work habits. That is, right up until now when the demands of my program have become challenging enough that I need to develop my work habits at a much higher level to keep afloat.

Meanwhile I’m advising a bunch of undergraduates on their big year long final project. Maybe 5% of them have good work habits, usually the more anxious and detail oriented types. The rest don’t get started on time, miss important meetings, don’t tend to read simple instructions, etc.

I’m chatting with the professor today, and he’s laughing, telling us about the methods he uses to make the students feel “pain”, get “nervous”, put them under “pressure”. He tells us his catchphrase is “you’re never early when doing a project like this. You’re always late. You need to catch up!” And his demeanor really got me thinking.

Personally, I had a realization that in order to execute my longer term projects I needed to place pressure on myself from the get go. Positive motivations are nice, but they don’t get you out of bed in the same way as pressure does. The panic monster needs to be on my shoulder, and be there, at least in a small way, from the get go. I’m a very relaxed person, I was raised in a very lenient household, and I grew up thinking this kind of pressure was bad. But I increasingly think I’ve been wrong.. in moderation, this pressure is truly good, it’s formative. And that golden mean of moderation in pressure may be much further to the harsher side than our culture currently appreciates.

Our culture has really devalued using pressure to shape people. We look at the Chinese kids being forced to study and exercise for all their waking hours and say.. not us!

But perhaps if not fully to that extreme, we’d do better to go further in that direction.

I’ve come to think of a human being as a system which is shaped by pressures. Long ago this system was shaped… by hunger, by social pressures… into hunters, and farmers, and blacksmiths, and soldiers. But modern society has seen the removal of a great number pressures. And like a body without the influence of gravity, I believe that the system suffers without these.

And going back to your point about status and what society values… if we in the society do not have pressure placed upon us to become better, to do hard things, to face larger and larger challenges, we end up mostly content to just exist. Without an upward force society stagnates. Because in the end, solving problems in the real world tends to be highly challenging and requires hard won expertise.

I agree with this. I’ve long suspected that “pressure” as you call it is necessary in the right doses to bring about what we call maturity. In other words, if you took a child and remove all negative feedback from his life (which were often doing in the name of “mental health”) you short circuit the feedback mechanisms that teach kids to handle adversity in healthy ways, and furthermore, you stunt their ability to mature. What you’d end up with is a human with a mature body but a mind that’s much less mature. I would probably estimate that the median 18 year old kid would be about as mature as a 19th century 12 year old. A 24 year old adult often thinks and acts with the maturity of a 16 or 18 year old.

I’m also fairly convinced that social pressure can and does move society in positive directions. And in that regard shame is a perfectly legitimate thing to use to enforce good behavior and punish bad behavior in the wider culture. At the same time acclaiming the people who are doing great things can often inspire other people to try. I want my kids to build the future, so obviously one way to go about that is to praise great scientific minds, great inventions, and try to make kids want to build and invent. Our heroes are celebrities. There are lots of books about Taylor Swift but not many about Richard Feynman or Elon Musk or the like.

If all our pressure is of the negative kind, then it results in stress, hopelessness, depression, poor sleep, etc. Ideally, we find competition to be both fun and rewarding. Human beings are largely "anti-fragile", but some of us are more anti-fragile than others. I'm extremely harsh with myself, but I have a friend that I'm helping pass university, and I simply cannot help her by applying pressure, it only makes her weak, doubtful of herself, and prone to giving up.

You can cultivate anti-fragility in people, but it's hard to tell what it's made of exactly. Core beliefs, past successes, pride, hormones, masochism, strong drives? What kind of people play video games on hard mode and enjoy it, and how can we make sure that we get more of this type than of the victim-mentality type?

I know some people who broke because of stress, and it's unlikely they will ever be able to work again. Meanwhile, I'd put myself in danger if I did not push myself.

"I'm extremely harsh with myself, but I have a friend that I'm helping pass university, and I simply cannot help her by applying pressure, it only makes her weak, doubtful of herself, and prone to giving up."

Are you trying to sleep with this friend?

I have a girlfriend already, I still like helping people. I don't want to see people procrastinate so much that it fucks up their future, so seeing a better outcome unfold is enough reward for me. It's like cleaning your house so that you can endure looking at it, except you're removing bad futures/possibilities, rather than trash

harsh punishment for first time offenders, and zero tolerance for crime no matter what the criminal’s past is.

You need inevitability and timeliness of the punishments. Harshness should be just enough. You can get this way most rational people to behave. Case in point speed cameras - everyone learns to slow down around them. Eventually.

They learn to obey on two conditions. First that the law is actually enforced to a meaningful degree. Second, that the fines are high enough to feel pain when paying it. Of course even with speed cameras, it tends to work literally how you describe it — people do slow around enforcement zones. Once it’s known there’s a speed check via cop or camera, people slow down there — and go as fast as they can get away with everywhere else. There are roads with a speed limit of thirty where everyone goes 60 — except for the end of the month when the cops enforce the law.

Agreed. Harsh punishments for first time offenders are cruel and unnecessary.

Swift and sure (but mild) punishment for first time offenders would be more effective. But the punishments need to escalate quickly after that. Most crime is committed by serial offenders. The average prisoner has been arrested like 10 times. By removing people from society after their 3rd offense, or 4th, or 5th or whatever, we can reduce crime by huge amounts at little cost to society.

I've gone in the complete opposite direction as you when it comes to cannabis. I used to feel very strongly that it should be outlawed, that it is a gateway drug, that it will make you crazy, etc. But as the years went on, with states legalizing it for medical and later recreational use, I just haven't seen the "downfall of society" that conservatives have been espousing since time immemorial. As I understand it, the benefits of legalization have been (1) decreased arrests for possession and growing, (2) a viable treatment option for neurological and psychiatric disorders, (3) an increase in safe and quality products, and (4) an alternative recreational substance to alcohol. I am a daily cannabis user. I have a dry leaf vape and a 510 vape that I go between. I only consume cannabis after work to wind down and I certainly don't get behind the wheel when I'm high. I don't find it do have affected my performance at work in any way. Are there people who abuse cannabis? Absolutely. Should those people seek out treatment? You bet, no different than someone who's an alcoholic or abuses any other substance. Are there people who drive high? Certainly, and they should be prosecuted in the same fashion as any other impaired drivers. I find it very interesting that staunch conservatives will be so opposed to legalization and yet they will give alcohol a free pass. One could certainly make the argument that alcohol is an objectively more dangerous substance -- binge drinking can lead to poisoning (you could wind up in the hospital needing your stomach pumped), hangovers are a bitch (never had one coming down from a high), it can lead to developmental abnormalities in unborn babies, lead to liver disease/failure/cirrhosis. I don't see any concerted push by conservatives to bring back Prohibition, but yet when it comes to cannabis legalization, they immediately push back.

It’s interesting that everyone in this thread who’s changed their mind on this direction has also become a regular user.

It kind of undermines the strength of the point

(3) an increase in safe and quality products

From my very distant PoV (weed isn't legal here and neither me nor any of my friends smoke), it seems like this isn't an entirely good thing. When I listen to some podcasts, life long smokers talk about how it used to be that you couldn't really overdose because the weed was kind of shit but now with capitalism fueled breeding operations and distilled specialised products, this is now a real concern, especially for new users.

I guess it's mostly a thing where culture and regulation needs to catch up to the new reality but the process isn't entirely painless.

Oh yes, potency is definitely a concern now. My state actually restricts the max potency of recreational flower to 30% or less. There's some flower that goes up into the 40s or 50s. I was getting more at the fact that the safety and potency of the product is more consistent, now.

I don't see any concerted push by conservatives to bring back Prohibition, but yet when it comes to cannabis legalization, they immediately push back.

Non-overlapping social spheres contributes to this IMO. Functional weed users may be more common than they used to be, but I would be many perhaps most conservatives have never met a truly functional weed user of the sort that's going to be somewhat overrepresented among rationalists. The people they know that use weed are the grungy ones that stink to high heaven even at the grocery store or the neighbor's failson, nice kid but never really grew up and can't keep a job.

On the alcohol side, they know functional alcohol users because they are functional alcohol users, and most civilizations have been alcohol-civilizations for thousands of years.

Also the common trait that users on both sides underrate the risks and overestimate the benefits of their preferred intoxicants, same as any policy or preference.

Major career decisions

  • Overestimating how much ScienceTM still worked like it did back when Richard Feynmann was still alive, causing me to waste five years of my life doing a PhD rather than going into finance straight out of undergrad.
  • Thinking that the 2009 rebound in conventional bank-based finance careers would continue and therefore not making more effort to jump into fintech before my skillset developed in a way which makes that difficult to do now.

Politics

  • I supported the Iraq War on the basis that Blair's career wouldn't survive being caught lying about WMD (false), that if he was lying the risk of getting caught was very high (true), and that therefore he must be telling the truth (false conclusion follows from false premise). I also assumed that the Bush Jr foreign policy and national security team would be competent, because the exact same group of people were competent when they were the Bush Sr team dealing with the messy collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • I over-estimated how damaging minimum wages could be - the UK minimum wage is now at a level that I assumed would cause French-style unemployment, but empirically it hasn't done.

Race heresies

  • I thought that black African immigrants in London would be worse neighbours than black Caribbean immigrants because of the greater cultural distance and the fact that the source countries are more shitholey. In fact the Africans are better neighbours (and employees) because the process by which they got into the country was more selective.
  • I thought that nepotistic Jewish networks in high finance was an anti-semitic trope. They do exist, and there are certain financial career paths that it would be foolish for me to pursue because I am not welcome in them. (For the avoidance of doubt, they are much less powerful than left-wing anti-semites think they are).

Bush Senior’s foreign policy team was equally incompetent at handling the former Soviet Union, it just took twenty years for us to notice the consequences.

I thought that nepotistic Jewish networks in high finance was an anti-semitic trope. They do exist, and there are certain financial career paths that it would be foolish for me to pursue because I am not welcome in them.

You’re in London. Being Jewish in finance and having worked in both major cities, I’d be interested in your thoughts on what these actually are. If I had to guess what the most Jewish corners of finance are, I’d say NY / Florida (and to some extent a few other states) real estate finance, especially commercial real estate, maybe certain corners of the metals business (although far from the majority, and if I think about it even the ones I’m thinking of aren’t majority Jewish) in the Beny Steinmetz / Marc Rich / Glencore Glasenberg old guard sphere (but again, still hugely gentile, increasingly so now) and then some kinds of media / TMT private equity in the US although not in Europe. Of the big Jewish banks, Rothschild and Lazard are now overwhelming gentile-run, and Goldman will be there when the next big senior turnover happens after d-Sol leaves.

But in London? I’ve encountered more small PE and HF shops run by Etonians than Jews (okay, one by a Jewish Etonian). Fintech is also primarily gentile in London, and in the US for that matter. DM me if you don’t want to compromise yourself.

Legalization of marihuana brought into my view something that I myself have not seen before. And that is the fact, that many people just support it from first principles, you have these liberal or libertarian assumptions about the world and legalization of marihuana is just part of it. It is first principles thinking - people should be able to do what they want and therefore legalization of marihuana is good. That's it.

Since then I had some discussions with pro-legalization people and they are kind of stumped by a simple question: what good will legalization of marihuana bring to the country? What benefit will you have if your plumbers and doctors and teachers can go about their lives high as kites without any legal repercussion or stigma? What I found was that they do not even think about it this way. Weed should be legalized, because legalization of weed is "good". Smoking weed is just some apriori human right, no matter what. At best, they can point out to a good caused by people not being fined/jailed for making it illegal. Which is generalized argument for legalization of anything: if you legalize murder, then murderers would not have to suffer in jail. That is an argument I guess, but what good will legalization of murder bring to the rest of the society besides people engaging in this activity?

As for what I was wrong about, count me into weed legalization as well as many other liberal causes. I thought I was the enlightened one, smashing old superstitions and bringing new light to humanity as some avatar of Prometheus. I was wrong, I did not realize that I was implicitly holding religious adjacent beliefs, and that I used semantic stoppers such as "X is human right" without actually understanding where I am coming from. I thought I was above mere mortal faults, while I was the most gullible of all the people, because I did not even stop to think where my moral premises such as "human rights" and myriads of slogans such as "taxation is theft" come from and how are they grounded.

Unlike murder, using weed is not an activity that is inherently harmful to others. The argument that it is good to not fine/jail people for using weed does not generalize to murder, it only generalizes to activities that are not inherently harmful to others. Thus, your counterargument does not make sense.

Sure, but this makes my point - it was an analogy. We do not legalize murder just looking at what murderers have to go through in prison. We look on societal impact and other things. So the question is again: what good will legalizing and normalizing weed bring to the country? To me there are no upsides and only downsides, like Scott and others now also admit.

What benefit will you have if your plumbers and doctors and teachers can go about their lives high as kites without any legal repercussion or stigma?

Eh? I'd presume that any doctor who came into work visibly intoxicated on anything, be it a legal substance like alcohol or high as a kite on coke, would very quickly be out of a job and potentially facing a lawsuit in pretty much any country. I certainly can't come into work in the UK drunk, even if drinking alcohol is legal.

What benefit will you have if your plumbers and doctors and teachers can go about their lives high as kites without any legal repercussion or stigma?

If a plumber, doctor, or teacher causes injury or damage due to being intoxicated on the job, he can be sued for negligence in civil court, even if the intoxicating substance (whether alcohol, marijuana, or some other drug) is legal.

If a plumber, doctor, or teacher causes injury or damage due to being intoxicated on the job, he can be sued for negligence in civil court, even if the intoxicating substance (whether alcohol, marijuana, or some other drug) is legal.

Notice that in this scenario, there was injury or damage that would not have happened in a more sober environment. And it won't work as well as zero-tolerance, because many substance users think "I am not that high, I won't cause a dramatic accident". And usually they won't cause dramatic accidents, they will only produce substandard work that makes other people's days worse on the margin.

It's not such an easy to do thing as with breathalyzer, in fact legalization of marihuana makes drug testing for manufacturers very hard, as they can no longer have zero tolerance policy as it is hard to analyze if you had a dose an hour or a day ago.

But again, this is even besides the point. What are those incredible positives this legalization brings to the society?

It's not such an easy to do thing as with breathalyzer

Civil court uses a preponderance-of-the-evidence standard, not the stricter beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard that criminal court requires. The plaintiff can call witnesses who observed the doctor's intoxication on the day of the harmful act, and the jury can convict on that basis, with no breathalyzer required.

What are those incredible positives this legalization brings to the society?

Victimless crimes that harm no one should not be crimes. This is not "a generalized argument for the legalization of anything".

Victimless crimes that harm no one should not be crimes.

This is just a slogan, not an argument. It is exactly what I mentioned with the first principles thinking. Plus it is interesting that you say this right after you talk about how jury can convict somebody who did something criminal under influence. Victimless crime, right?

This is just a slogan, not an argument. It is exactly what I mentioned with the first principles thinking.

Punishing activities that harm no one is nothing but a waste of resources. When you want to deter negligent car crashes, punishing drunk driving separately just because it may lead to negligent car crashes is unnecessary.

Plus it is interesting that you say this right after you talk about how jury can convict somebody who did something criminal under influence. Victimless crime, right?

  • Driving intoxicated: No victim

  • Hitting someone with your car while sober: Victim

  • Hitting someone with your car while intoxicated: Victim (extra penalties for negligence)

I disagree. The problem with legalizing vices on the premise that there’s no immediate victim creates social problems that the general public will often have to pay to fix damages. If we allow people to drive around drunk, obviously the risk of eventually hittIng someone is a serious problem and one that could be prevented by simply not allowing people to drive cars while intoxicated. This also avoids the problem of the state having to support the medical care of the driver and whoever he hit for a good long time.

With other vices, it can be a problem for much the same reason. If I’m high I am unlikely to be able to keep a job, much more likely to injure themselves or other people, more likely to be abusive (depending on the drug). These are burdens on the state that the taxpayers are going to have to pay to clean up.

Punishing activities that harm no one is nothing but a waste of resources. When you want to deter negligent car crashes, punishing drunk driving separately just because it may lead to negligent car crashes is unnecessary.

This ignores so many other effects of drunk driving. You get in a car drunk and manage to make it home without hitting anyone? Great. But only because you were lucky, and meanwhile you were increasing the risk to everyone else on the road. People like you will cause a higher number of accidents and fatalities, increasing the cost of everything from insurance to health care to everyone else. People will make have to make strategic decisions about when and where it is safe for them to drive (with their families) based on the knowledge that people like you can legally be blitzed on the highway and they can't do anything to avoid you except not share the road with you.

This is where I think most libertarian principles fail. Yes, you can take everything to the extreme that "if you might possibly impact someone else the law gets to regulate your behavior" and we end up in a hyperregulated safetyist society. There is a balance between public interest and personal rights. But it has to be a balance. You don't get to just live in a society and say "I can shoot guns in the air, the police can't stop me or do anything about it unless and until one of my shots lands on someone and kills them."

This ignores so many other effects of drunk driving.

As a driver - alcohol is way less dangerous than sleepiness. I personally think that we should have field capacity tests - for reflexes and judgment. If you fail them no matter of the reason - inebriation, drugs, tiredness, old age - you get fined massively.

Anyway with self driving taxis now reality this discussion will probably be rendered moot.

More comments

It is a slogan as it just steers the discussion into what is crime, if it has to have some violent or social impact component, what is victim and all that. Plus I am unwilling to accept the premise of your slogan before we even begin the discussion.

I put it into GPT and apparently trespassing, prostitution, gambling, public intoxication, loitering, public nudity, vagrancy, unlicensed hunting or jaywalking are all examples of "victimless crimes". So yeah, I will bite the bullet and just admit that actually victimless crimes should be crimes. Because I do not want to have a society where intoxicated nude vagrants trespass and loiter on streets outside of pedestrian crossings, hunt local birds and sell their gambling scams and their bodies for everybody else to see. Go bark your slogan up somebody else's tree.

I don't see any upsides of legalizing weed, there may be only hidden downsides. Exactly how Scott Alexander now realized.

Couch potatoism, sedentary lifestyles and anhedonia are already big social problems in the West. Normalizing marijuana use just makes it all worse.

It would be nice if we could legalize things without normalizing them. The attitude that "Everything not compulsory is forbidden" used to be known as the Totalitarian Principle, a dystopian hypothetical we need to avoid, not an unavoidable tendency we need to live with. I'd hope we could find a lot of cultural space around "if I do this my friends will intervene and my acquaintances will shy away" before we get to "if I do this my acquaintances will have me jailed".

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, though. "It would be nice if" and "I'd hope" are load-bearing clauses here.

I’m beginning to suspect that the Totalitarian Principle is at least directionally true at least in places where there are strong contravening forces from social shaming or religion to counteract it (which is mostly just an informal ban anyway). Humans seem to bend to degeneracy of various sorts unless there’s a restraint holding them back. We’ve torn out religious taboos and shamed away shaming people, so for the WEIRD west we’re either banning it altogether or allowing it to be normalized.

Yep. Every social trend has been towards more degeneration. Worse, the degeneration has been commercialized. OnlyFans has created hundreds of thousands (millions?) of new sex workers, and its owners take home hundreds of millions in dividend payments each year.

While it isn't possible or desirable to ban all vice, keeping it in a legal gray areas is much better than full legalization and commercialization.

If I were a state government, I would just tax the crap out of all these new vices to the point they became unprofitable and withdraw from the state, or at least are severely limited. For example, why not charge a tax for $10/user to OnlyFans for any user located within the state? Force OnlyFans to collect it. The true degens would either pay the tax or use a VPN, but most people would just go away. Traffic is down 90% overnight. And tax the sex workers too while we're at it. Sex workers moving to a different state can only be a good thing.

I was wrong about God. Grew up atheist, now I am a firm believer in the trinity as well as the power of prayer. That changed my view on other political/cultural topics too, like abortion (formerly was for it in certain circumstances, now against it), race (formerly pretty racist, now I see that all people have inherent moral value), gay marriage (formerly for it, now against it), taxation (formerly against it, now for it especially on the rich—render to Caesar and all). The best policy for society is twofold: love God and love your neighbor.

now for it especially on the rich—render to Caesar and all

I don't believe Jesus was advocating for modern American progressive taxation. Jesus was dodging the Pharisees' gotcha question, not saying we need high taxes on rich people.

I count this as an example of 21st century progressives imagining that a guy from 2000 years ago must have supported their recently invented progressive ideals.

I grew up in a Christian family, not fundamentalist, but I went to church every week and was active in youth programs. I fairly quickly stopped believing around 15, and to be honest I have never looked back.

I’m curious what drew you back to it?

Render unto Caesar doesn’t seem to say anything about the optimal tax policy; instead it seems to say don’t be a tax cheat.

I'm curious, as a fellow Christian, how you're able to reconcile loving God and loving your neighbor with being against gay marriage. I don't mean this in a confrontational or hostile way, at all. I'm genuinely intrigued.

Well, I think it's bad, and I don't think it's very loving to encourage people to do bad things. That's the short answer.

Does that say something about government policy? Not necessarily.

But I think it's worth bringing up that I do think the bible is pretty clear that homosexual sex is wrong. First, I think it's pretty clear that sexual sin is a big deal. This appears often! One of the clearest passages, for example, is 1 Corinthians 6:12-20, where it argues specifically that it's wrong for Christians to hire prostitutes. Of course, this is different from our case in two ways: the people we're talking about aren't necessarily Christian, and prostitution looks different from monogamous gay relationships (we'll ignore the high rates of gay promiscuity). But it's still wrong if we change either or both of these. See, for example Romans 1 (where it's non-Christians), or the several cases where homosexual sex is specifically condemned, like 1 Timothy 1:10. There are more passages, of course.

Homosexual sex is not the only seemingly victimless sin that was condemned, and the early Christians seem happy to condemn sins while also advocating for love. I think both of those are important! We should be keenly aware of sin (or else, how will we truly appreciate how undeserving we are of what Christ gave for us), and also should walk in love. They go together.

I suppose, then, I'll ask you:

  1. Do you think the bible condemns homosexual sex?

  2. If it did, would that sway you?

Sodomy is a horrible sin and allowing it’s official sanction will convince more people to experiment, leading to their own damnation.

That doesn’t mean we should break out the construction cranes to rid ourselves of them. But from a Christian paternalist perspective a duty of the government is to discourage gay sex.

When you say that sodomy is a sin, why do you say that? Because the Bible says so? Or because you have some logical arguments? I think that "the Bible says so" is worthless as a moral argument.

I hope you understand why Christian paternalism would have a different attitude towards the Bible?

But in any case, gay couplings are incapable of performing the action that we can tell their organs are meant to do- the telos of the sexual act is PIV. It is quite trivially obvious from the design of the relevant anatomy that any natural law morals have to condemn sodomical acts; the consequences of routine sodomy make this doubly obvious. To say nothing that the sexes are different and meant to cooperate; the usual complaints about lesbian dating or the observed behavior of the gay male community make it clear that what they are missing is the opposite sex. The sexes complement each other not just in the design of their bodies but in their essential temperaments and inclinations, and a well ordered person is designed to seek out this complementarity through bonding with the opposite sex. Attempts to engage in the sexual act without this complementary bonding are trainwrecks, heterosexual sex without a unitive bonding experience is the basis for the legions of issues with modern heterosexual dating as criticized by almost literally everyone. Finally, we can tell that sex is meant to make babies, both from desire(contraceptors often report a drop in libido, women are both most attractive and most interested in sex during the most fertile time) and from results- the action these organs are clearly designed for makes babies without specific intervention to make it not do that. Homosexual sex can’t make babies inherently.

The normative sexual experience and telos for human sexual desires is clearly heterosexual, committed, fecund, and PIV. Everything about the act and everything involved in it tells us this. Moving too far from the norm and ideal for something important and public is probably a sin, even when the health consequences of sodomy or general bad behavior in the gay community are left out. Those are simply the nails in the coffin.

And sex is important and it is public. If you have sex with your coworkers all of your other coworkers will gossip about it and not feel bad about it. The same is not true for grabbing lunch- unless, that is, your having lunch is perceived as starting up the kind of relationship which usually leads to sex! Thinking of sex as a toy or mere private act is a childish mistake that one could only make having no familiarity with its social consequences.

I'm not the person you asked, but Jesus seemed to encourage sexual abstinence for those who could not handle the consequences of His strict teaching on marriage:

The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”

It's not very clear to me what the connection between loving your neighbor has to do with the definition of marriage. Marriage simply is the exclusive conjugal union of a man and a woman, open to life, vowed till death do them part. It is a vocation, one of the schools of love that only some people are called to. A vocation creates the conditions of heroic self-sacrifice, so obviously not everyone can do it.

Even from a non-Christian sociological perspective, there is no reason to have a codified sexual-partnership without the potential to generate children. This used to be widely acknowledged and uncontroversial.

Bertrand Russell wrote, “But for children, there would be no need of any institution concerned with sex.” He continued, “it is through children alone that sexual relations become of importance to society, and worthy to be taken cognizance of by a legal institution.” Renowned anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss observed that “the family—based on a union, more or less durable, but socially approved, of two individuals of opposite sexes who establish a household and bear and raise children—appears to be a practically universal phenomenon, present in every type of society.”

I once had a long discussion on this and still stick to what I wrote here.

Marriage simply is the exclusive conjugal union of a man and a woman, open to life, vowed till death do them part. It is a vocation, one of the schools of love that only some people are called to. A vocation creates the conditions of heroic self-sacrifice, so obviously not everyone can do it.

Well, in most Western democracies its the exclusive conjugal union of two adults, but I get what you're saying. The second sentence I completely agree with. Some people are either not fit for marriage or not called to it.

Even from a non-Christian sociological perspective, there is no reason to have a codified sexual-partnership without the potential to generate children. This used to be widely acknowledged and uncontroversial.

How would you feel if two asexual people got married and didn't have a kid through intercourse or adopt?

Well, in most Western democracies its the exclusive conjugal union of two adults,

I don't think I noticed what you meant by this the first time. Two adults can only have a conjugal union if they are of opposite sexes. They can only have their organs work together and perform the action that produces offspring if they are of opposite sex. That is what is meant by conjugal union. I don't care that many countries are using an absurd definition of marriage. I don't believe in "gay marriage." Whatever they are doing, it's not marriage as the word is understood by myself and everyone in history before the last thirty years. It's like "Trans-women are woman" to me.

Thank you for clarifying that. And to the rest of your comment, whatever floats your boat, I guess. I'm not going to try and change how you feel about it.

How would you feel if two asexual people got married and didn't have a kid through intercourse or adopt?

This would closely resemble a Josephite marriage, which still has the potential of one of the partners saying, "I feel called to have sex now" and then the other partner owes the marriage debt. It works because they can still perform the action (a conjugal relationship) that makes a marriage a marriage.

So it sounds like we have two definitions of marriage here: the legal and the spiritual/religious. If two people are legally married but are neither spiritual nor religious, what does it matter if they choose to never have sex?

Firstly, the original question was how, as a Christian, someone could reconcile Jesus' teachings with being against Gay marriage. So the conversation from the start was religious.

Second, I don't see the distinction in my response. If the couple is not religious and never chooses to have sex, it's the same. They are married because they can still perform the action (a conjugal relationship) that makes a marriage a marriage. (even if they never want to)

Firstly, the original question was how, as a Christian, someone could reconcile Jesus' teachings with being against Gay marriage. So the conversation from the start was religious.

You are correct. My apologies for diverging.

Second, I don't see the distinction in my response. If the couple is not religious and never chooses to have sex, it's the same. They are married because they can still perform the action (a conjugal relationship) that makes a marriage a marriage. (even if they never want to)

You're right. Upon a second glance, you didn't make that distinction.

"Love your neighbor" does not extend to "normalize your neighbor's erotic proclivities at the cost of broader society" or "you must erase the distinction between things."

Christians have traditionally believed that marriage is permanent bond between a man and woman for the purpose of forming a household and raising children*, where the duties of the man and woman are asymmetrical. For a man to "marry" another man is a contradiction in terms, the same as when your boss tells you, "I want you to think of me as your friend, not your boss." The male-female relationship has elements that are inherently asymmetrical, and inherently different than male-male relationships, and different things deserve different words. Furthermore, the male-female union is a core building block of civilization and therefore deserves special recognition by the state and by the church. It deserves to be considered normative. One of the things that has especially turned me against gay marriage is seeing how so many institutions (eg public schools) no longer feel empowered to teach the male-female marriage as being the default or the normative institution. Legalizing gay marriage was not just "allow different people to do their own thing" it was, "change the basic way every child is taught about the basic institutions and building blocks of life."

Now part of the problem for modern Christians is that many already have given up on the idea of marriage being permanent or that the husband and wife have different roles and obligations. Once those distinctions have been erased, resistance to gay marriage then looks very unprincipled. But for traditional Christians the argument is very straightforward and consistent.

There is furthermore the argument that homoerotic behavior is a vice, a sin. And if we love our neighbor, we want to save them from sin. Sin ultimately makes us less happy. Vices give momentary pleasure but leave us empty and wanting more, no more happier than before. The glutton eats a lot of junk food, but ultimately that makes the glutton less happy. If society does things to make the glutton less likely to engage in gluttony (eg, banning advertising of junk food) or I do something to make my loved one not engage in gluttony (eg not keeping junk food in the house) then I am doing good for them. If I teach them "fat acceptance" I am actually harming them.

Now I am straight and speak from personal experience about whether for a person who experiences same-sex attraction forgoing homoerotic activities makes that person more happy. I do think though, that forgoing sexual promiscuity and other sexual vices that a straight person has tempted by has made me more happy. So I can see how that argument is plausible. Given the very high rates of promiscuity and sexual experimentation reported among gay populations, seems like gay sex is leaving something empty, like eating a cookie or potato chip, not like eating a steak.

* But what about old/infertile couples? First, never say never. Second, such couples are still modeling the relationship form.

Christians have traditionally believed that marriage is permanent bond between a man and woman for the purpose of forming a household and raising children*, where the duties of the man and woman are asymmetrical.

Furthermore, the male-female union is a core building block of civilization and therefore deserves special recognition by the state and by the church. It deserves to be considered normative.

Are you saying your own Christian model deserves special recognition, or just the male-female union? In the latter case, couldn't we just as easily say "parental unions are the core building block of civilization", and focus on marriage as a parenting arrangement instead?

"change the basic way every child is taught about the basic institutions and building blocks of life."

How were you planning to handle people from other countries? With the internet, your kid is going to be watching gay YouTubers and gay European TV shows - clearly you have to explain this concept to them at a fairly young age regardless of whether it's legal here?

There is furthermore the argument that homoerotic behavior is a vice, a sin.

What does this have to do with marriage? Gay people can have as much sex as they want with or without marriage. I'd be shocked if getting gay married makes promiscuity go UP.

Awesome, thanks! Some things you said that I'd like to explore further:

"Love your neighbor" does not extend to "normalize your neighbor's erotic proclivities at the cost of broader society" or "you must erase the distinction between things."

So, you believe that normalizing non-hetero relationships is a detriment to society? How do you reconcile that with non-hetero people who are in happy, healthy relationships?

Christians have traditionally believed that marriage is permanent bond between a man and woman for the purpose of forming a household and raising children, where the duties of the man and woman are asymmetrical. For a man to "marry" another man is a contradiction in terms, the same as when your boss tells you, "I want you to think of me as your friend, not your boss."

I understand what you mean. I try to keep my private life separate from my work life, too. Although, I have a second job at the church I attend, and my pastor is of course, my boss, but he's also my friend. I play in a DnD campaign with a bunch of other church friends, and he's the DM. Would your suggestion to me be that I break the friendship off because he's technically also my boss?

Furthermore, the male-female union is a core building block of civilization and therefore deserves special recognition by the state and by the church. It deserves to be considered normative.

It certainly has been that way throughout the course of history. However, along with that, we've historically treated women separately from men and for along time, women had fewer rights than men. We have also marginalized people of different races, religions, and sexual orientations. Sexuality aside, we've also oriented our social policies to strongly benefit married people over single people. All of this has been "normal" for thousands of years. How does this fit into your definition of loving your neighbor? Also, would you agree that what is "normative", even within the context of Christianity, is fluid and varies over time?

There is furthermore the argument that homoerotic behavior is a vice, a sin. And if we love our neighbor, we want to save them from sin. Sin ultimately makes us less happy.

I agree, there's an argument to be made. But that's just it -- an argument, a position, an opinion, a perspective. You believe non-hetero relationships are sinful, I do not. We both think our own opinions are the truth. There are many people who agree with either of us, and there are those who are not religious that pay no mind to the doctrine of sin. What does sin matter to them? Should we force our views onto them, or lovingly allow them to make their own informed choice on what works best, even if we don't agree?

I do think though, that forgoing sexual promiscuity and other sexual vices that a straight person has tempted by has made me more happy.

Do you think that a majority of non-hetero people are more sexually promiscuous than hetero people? I identify as asexual, so maybe I don't have the best perspective on this, either.

So, you believe that normalizing non-hetero relationships is a detriment to society? How do you reconcile that with non-hetero people who are in happy, healthy relationships?

There are many good things that are happy and beneficial that do not deserve special recognition by the church or the state. There are many vices that should be discouraged by the church and state, even though some people will practice said vice and seem to be happy in practicing it.

my boss, but he's also my friend. I play in a DnD campaign with a bunch of other church friends, and he's the DM. Would your suggestion to me be that I break the friendship off because he's technically also my boss?

It's not a perfect analogy, I was just making a point about language. The "boss" relationship is inherently different than the "friend" relationship, different relationships deserve different words. It's not a perfect analogy because one can be a boss and a friend, maybe I'll think of a better analogy.

It certainly has been that way throughout the course of history. However, along with that, we've historically treated women separately from men and for along time, women had fewer rights than men. ... How does this fit into your definition of loving your neighbor?

Christianity (until recent progressive Christianity) has always recognized the basic human reality that men and women are different, have different strengths and weaknesses, are complementary, and therefore have different spheres of responsibility, different rights and duties. It's hard to remember this now that as Americans we are so long removed from existential war, but the state is primary an agent of violent force, that is the state is an organization of men who use violence to protect their land and women from other organized violent men, and as such of course governance rights of the state are going to be of men. "Loving your neighbor" is an entirely different question than whether person should have say, "a vote", (ie decision-making power over the apparatus of violence).

There are many people who agree with either of us, and there are those who are not religious that pay no mind to the doctrine of sin.

Everyone believes in sin, secular people just have different words for it. A vice or a personal sin, is something that feels good but is ultimately bad for the person doing it, you don't need religion to understand the concept, it's just without religion you have to reinvent and throw out all the work done on helping people effectively deal with vices.

But specifically you asked how a "Christian" who loves their neighbor could not want to support their neighbor in X. Well if the Christian loves their neighbor, and their religion teaches X is a sin, that means that X is ultimately bad for that person, therefore if they actually loved their neighbor they would want to discourage their neighbor from doing X.

We have also marginalized people of different races, religions, and sexual orientations.

Apples, oranges, cheese and carburetors. These are entirely unlike phenomena and must be analyzed separately

Do you think that a majority of non-hetero people are more sexually promiscuous than hetero people?

I think that gay men are, yes. I'd recommend reading "And the Band Played On" by Randy Shilts. Lesbian women are different phenomenon.

Do you think that a majority of non-hetero people are more sexually promiscuous than hetero people?

Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. Women are the gatekeepers of sex, while men are the gatekeepers of commitment. So, naturally, gay men have tons of commitment-free sex, while lesbian women move-in with each other at the drop of a hat and promptly suffer from lesbian bed death. Hence the following joke:

Question: What does a lesbian bring on a second date?
Answer: A U-Haul.
Question: What does a gay man bring on a second date?
Answer: What second date?

Gay men are ridiculously promiscuous and have a culture based largely around casual sex. Patient zero for the AIDS epidemic, Gaetan Dugas, famously had over 2,500 sexual partners. Gay "marriage" looks like two gays cruising together for pickups, as wingmen (what Dan Savage calls "monogamish"), rather than anything a straight couple would recognize as a marriage.

Think about how much sex the average man would have if every woman he met was as eager to fuck as he was; that's what it's like to be a gay man. It's disgusting.

I mean, that just tells me the problem is men, not homosexuality.

  • -11

Men are fine; their level of horniness is correct for dealing with female passivity and resistance. Problems arise when men redirect their reproductive impulses from their natural complement towards a union that can never bear fruit.

Women who do the same are not much better; moving-in together with a near-stranger, suffering from a dead bedroom because neither can take the sexual initiative, truly staggering levels of domestic violence, and doing it all over again immediately after a breakup because women are serially monogamous... lesbian dysfunction is different from gay dysfunction, because women are different from men, but it is still a dysfunction.

The only way to avoid dysfunction is to fulfill our proper telos by seeking partners of the opposite sex, as Gnon intended.

There are many good things that are happy and beneficial that do not deserve special recognition by the church or the state. There are many vices that should be discouraged by the church and state, even though some people will practice said vice and seem to be happy in practicing it.

I agree with this. The apostle Paul even said, "not everything is beneficial." Though, I suspect that you believe that non-hetero relationships fall into the "vice" category.

It's not a perfect analogy, I was just making a point about language. The "boss" relationship is inherently different than the "friend" relationship, different relationships deserve different words. It's not a perfect analogy because one can be a boss and a friend, maybe I'll think of a better analogy.

That's fair.

Everyone believes in sin, secular people just have different words for it. A vice or a personal sin, is something that feels good but is ultimately bad for the person doing it, you don't need religion to understand the concept, it's just without religion you have to reinvent and throw out all the work done on helping people effectively deal with vices.

I would put it more generally, that everyone believes that there are things we do that hurt others or hurt others and/or the larger society. How is a healthy non-hetero relationship something that fits that definition?

Apples, oranges, cheese and carburetors. These are entirely unlike phenomena and must be analyzed separately

I find it interesting you use the bolded word to describe those things, because truthfully, they are concepts that humankind has made up to describe things. Paul famously said, "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." It would appear to me that the walls we use to divide each other are are not needed in God's Kingdom. Jesus even said that of marriage -- "For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven." (Matthew 22:30)

How is a healthy non-hetero relationship something that fits that definition?

To put it bluntly, the problem is not a loving (caritas) relationship between two men or two women, which is all fine and good, the problem is using each other as mutual masturbation aids or sticking dicks up each others poopy holes. I would suggest that doing so is like eating that potato chip or masturbating to porn. It feels good in the moment, but ultimately leaves you empty and just wanting more stimulation/titillation while building a habit of mind that ultimately makes a person unsatisfied and less happy than they would be if the relationship was affectionate but not erotic.

I mean, I don't like any of those things because I'm asexual, but even if I wasn't, I wouldn't take such a hard-line stance against such things. I don't understand the fixation that conservative Christians have with sex acts that aren't PIV. I just don't get it. If you don't like them, don't partake in them, but don't try and make someone else's life miserable just because you ascribe to those beliefs.

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Is Paul saying there is no male or female on Earth right now as we go about our daily business of living and build institutions to govern our current Earthly society? Is he saying we are not to make distinctions between males and females, not to make different sets of duties and rules for males and females? This is very obviously not the case, because Paul himself does that all the time. What Paul is saying is that men and women, Jew and Greek, have equal ability to hear the word of God, be baptized, receive the Eucharist, and enter the kingdom of God. The Christian message and the Christian sacraments are not just for one nation, or one sex, or just for an aristocrats or priestly caste.

This is really, really obvious from reading the context around your quote and from reading Paul. Have you actually read Paul fully yourself, have you actually engaged with traditional Christian teaching on these topics previously, or are you just repeating talking points you have acquired second-hand?

I understand. Perhaps my argument there wasn't well-founded.

Do you think that a majority of non-hetero people are more sexually promiscuous than hetero people?

I won’t comment on the rest of your post, but the answer to this seems to be unequivocally yes. Gay men have been (by hetero standards) ridiculously sexually promiscuous for pretty much the entire time anyone has been collecting statistics on it. This is true even for married gay men; the Dan Savage “monogamish” approach appears to be very common for gay male marriages. Lesbians, I’m not as sure.

Do you have any actual source for that? The research I've seen from OKCupid seems pretty solid, since they've got actual back-end data from a platform that didn't encourage users to self-censor. That data all says that while there's a tiny percentage of rampantly promiscuous gays, 98% of homosexuals are within normal bounds: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/oct/19/gay-men-promiscuous-myth

Out of curiosity, as a third Christian, and one who in the spirit of the topic counts gay marriage as something I was wrong about (i.e. I was in favour of it as a teenager, and have since come around to thinking that the traditionalists were probably right all along), do you not encounter many Christians on a day-to-day basis who oppose it? There's often a question of church communities here, it seems to me.

Aside from my partner, no. I'm the opposite of you; I had a traditionalist perspective as a teenager, but as I came back to to faith, I reunderstood for myself that accepting people who are not straight falls under the umbrella of loving your neighbor.

I think you have to distinguish between 'accepting' and approving or condoning any given activity. The church accepts sinners. That is its entire purpose. But that does not imply any acceptance of sinful actions.

I'd step back a bit from the idea of homosexuality specifically, and in particular I want to rid of any identity claims here. 'Gay people' as an identity are irrelevant. Rather, we should abstract back a bit and consider that what we're talking about is sexual morality broadly construed.

Now it seems pretty clear that Jesus, the Bible, God, etc., disapprove of sexual immorality. This is called porneia and it is condemned pretty much everywhere. Porneia covers categories as diverse as adultery, rape, incest, bestiality, prostitution, and more. Nobody seems to think that either being an adulterer/rapist/frequenter-of-prostitutes/whatever, or merely being tempted to any of those activities, means that a person is categorically excluded from the church or from the love of God. A person who has committed any of those actions would be expected to repent, seek forgiveness, do penance as appropriate, and so on, but given that, they are welcome in the Christian community. A person merely tempted to any of those things is, of course, totally welcome - the church is a community that encourages and supports people as they try to live a holy life, which naturally means being aware of and fighting against temptations like that.

The issue at hand is whether or not same-gender sexual activity falls into the category of porneia or not. That's it.

I think this framing is helpful because it lets us get away from toxic disputes about identity. It's not about 'gay people' or about 'homosexuality' or any posited intrinsic trait or categorisation. Those are beside the point theologically. It's only about actions.

So with that in mind, what are the lines around sexual morality that we seem to receive from scripture and tradition?

There's a much longer discussion than I want to have in this post right now, but the short version is that I think that, taking scripture as a whole and putting its treatment of sexual matters into context, it's possible to discern the overall shape of God's intention for human sexuality - that it be monogamous (cf. Jesus on divorce), faithful (cf. any time adultery ever comes up), fertile (cf. OT fertility miracles, Gn 1:28), loving and joyful (cf. Song of Songs), male-female (cf. Gn 1:27 and its use in Mk 10:6-7, Mt 19:4-6), supportive (cf. Prov 31), and so on. There's a visible thread that runs through scripture and which we also see explored in the tradition of the church, though I'm not going to go into that for now. There are other concerns about sexual morality we also see in the Bible (I'd argue there are some to do with honour, violence, and equality, for instance), but you get the idea. There is, I think, a discernible pattern, and I don't see how you can revise it to include same-gender sexual activity without not only contradicting what scripture says pretty plainly, but also doing harm to the overall pattern itself.

You do find some progressive Christian thought on this issue (e.g. David P. Gushee) arguing that they're in favour of this whole pattern, this whole biblical vision of marriage, and they support same-sex marriage because they want to extend its fruits to gay people (notice the identity framing again), on exactly the same terms as with opposite-sex couples. But I don't think that can ultimately work, because these principles are all interconnected. You can't remove one part of the structure without weakening the whole house.

There's a secular argument you can have as well, in terms of some of the fruits of same-sex marriage, or the other social trends that it either encourages or detracts from, but I'd rather leave that to others.

On a final note, I'd like to clarify that I mean absolutely none of this as an attack, personal or otherwise, against Christians who support same-sex marriage, or Christians who may identify as LGBT. (Nor non-Christians either, but this is an intra-Christian discussion.) I want to disagree in a respectful, compassionate way, all the more so because I used to be on the other side of this issue, and it is far, far too common for people to be very bullying about it.

I'd like to clarify that I mean absolutely none of this as an attack, personal or otherwise

It is incumbent of those who are on the cutting edge to accommodate for those who aren't. Pretending not to know you're on the cutting edge, or [even worse] being proud of doing provocative things for the purpose of being provocative, is not acceptable.

Liberal Christians (and the gay ones that have relationships following that [what is to me, at least] self-evident visible thread of the way pair-bonding is supposed to work) tend to have an identity of having more problems with this. And provided that isn't for selfish/pride reasons "just to see what you can get away with" [which is the thing traditionalists don't quite understand- because if they themselves were doing those things, it would be in the 'testing boundaries for selfish reasons'/'tricking God' category; this is the core of why some things can be sins for some people but not others], and you're conducting yourself by doing your job (and sticking to what a monogamous relationship is supposed to be) otherwise, there's nothing else wrong with it. Eating food sacrificed to other gods has the same inherent issues- where it's technically acceptable, but doing it thoughtlessly emits pollution that hinders your overarching goals as a follower of Christ.

And that, complicating Christianity in a way the people you're supposed to be reaching can't handle yet, is a sin in the same way and for the exact same reasons as traditionalists misusing "wives, submit to your husbands" (generally as an excuse to be lazy in the relationship).

(Actually, those two verses in their respective contexts have a lot more to do with each other than I think most people realize, as does the 'women leading in church' thing. Leaders should cater to the default, and people who aren't the default should respect that, because the default is what we're after; your job is to work the margins, their job is to not stop you.)

it's possible to discern the overall shape of God's intention for human sexuality

The reason it's written down is because for most people it isn't self-evident. I think there are people who can do this, and have noticed that "wait a second, apart from fertility [which straight couples aren't getting condemned for the lack of, and traditionally at least there are a surplus of babies to take care of], this isn't actually different if it's 2 guys".

The inherent problem with that is that how sexuality between 2 guys [or 2 girls] usually looks (this is the "find me one righteous man and I won't destroy the city" argument) in a secular environment, but the thing about traditionalists is that the people who are doing that correctly are more likely to be hiding from them in the standard filter-bubbly way that Reds hide from Blues (and vice versa). Not that people who don't function correctly if they aren't doing that are common anyway, much like those mythical women-men that won't function correctly when placed in first-century relationship divisions. Which is why liberals criticize traditionalists for "turn your brain off, don't use your natural talents, you don't have a clearer picture of what is self-evident and what is not [because none of us do]", because all they see is the man burying his talent he was given to invest because he was afraid of doing something wrong with it.

You can't remove one part of the structure without weakening the whole house.

If you Notice those whose houses are not weak yet lack a component claimed vital, maybe their circumstances actually are different?

Back in my woke era, when Rachel Dolezal arrived on the scene I agreed with pretty much everyone that she was a horrible offensive malingerer trying to exploit affirmative action for her own selfish nefarious ends. As time has gone by, the parallels between transracialism and transgenderism (and trans-age, trans-disability etc.) have become increasingly difficult to ignore, it has not escaped my attention that essentially any given argument in favour of transgender inclusivity could be just as easily applied to transracial inclusivity with a trivial find-and-replace, and all of the arguments as to why transgender is legit but transracial isn't seem laughably weak and motivated. More and more I believe that these things are a package deal: accept Caitlyn Jenner and by the same principle you must accept Rachel Dolezal (and vice versa).

Tbh I would even go beyond this and claim that transracialism is much more reasonable than transgenderism. As a simple example, one of our neighbours is an asian woman who was adopted by whites in canada and who was 100% raised like a white canadian kid. She actively rejects anything that has to do with her biological ancestry and is very insistent that she is canadian through and through, in particular she hates being called asian ("that's just how I look, not what I am"). I may not entirely agree with her, but this makes a lot more sense to me than claiming something as obviously biologically dichotomous as sex is malleable and in particular can have an inverted social component.

I would even go beyond this and claim that transracialism is much more reasonable than transgenderism

It would also presumably be way easier to act on. Dyeing one's skin is way less invasive than the various transgender things.

See also Scott on lived experience.

It’s one of those things which works as a fuzzy concept but starts generating contradictions when pressed.

True, and contra the bullshit claims that sex is a "spectrum", it is actually meaningful to be "a little bit Asian" in a way it simply isn't when it comes to sex/gender.

Rachel Dolezal and her ilk are at least a relatively fringe case; attractive to culture warriors because race is such a hot button issue, but not actually particularly common. In my experience hanging around trans/SJ/woke/etc youth communities over the past decade or so, the real "if you accept trans people, you have to accept this too" poison pill waiting in the wings (being desperately kept out of sight for PR reasons, but still existing in huge numbers that become unignoreable once you learn to spot them - a populist phenomenon on the identity-obsessed left) is trendy multiple personality disorder. It has many competing pseudointellectual frameworks for describing it, and accordingly it goes by many names, including "otherkin", but if you associate that term primarily with furries (as in the infamous litterbox hoaxes), you're probably picturing the wrong thing.

It's a new-age spiritual belief system where people degrade their real sense of identity, casually but with utter self-seriousness make any arbitrary number of tulpas, and treat them as real people sharing their body. People identifying as fictional characters, people identifying as Napoleon, people identifying as a "family" of fake people they made up. One starts to think that this was probably what was going on with Legion in the Bible. It's an extremely popular trend among kids on TikTok, but I think people tend to underestimate it and treat it as a passing fad; it was just as popular a trend among kids on Tumblr when I was in that demographic. Even in trans activist communities that generally have a bit more dignity to them, the multiple personality people get a foothold really easily, because it's imminently obvious to everyone that setting up community norms to make the multiple personality people uncomfortable in any way would undermine the transgender ideology itself. Many outright embrace this, and adopt intellectual frameworks for transgender stuff that are deliberately syncretist with the multiple personality stuff; people are increasingly and proudly framing their own transgender experiences as cases of demonic possession.

For the really committed, narcissistic multiple personality people, anti-trans jokes like "my pronouns are 'your majesty'" really aren't jokes; these are fundamentally people who have figured out how to exploit community norms to get everyone responding to their overtly delusional sock puppets and treating them with the full respect they demand.

What's your opinion on alcohol? I don't have a strong opinion on the legality of either marijuana or alcohol (though personally, I avoid both and find their users unpleasant), but I have a hard time seeing why they should be treated differently. The most compelling argument I've heard for regulating marijuana more harshly is that apparently it impairs driving ability for a much longer time after use, but otherwise they seem broadly similar in the damage they cause to individuals and society. I suppose, theoretically, Chesterton's Fence should apply here; alcohol has always been an important part of Western society, while marijuana is fairly new. But the failed attempt to prohibit alcohol seems like a clear object lesson in the failure modes of that kind of substance ban.

Ancient Greeks and Romans had cannabis. Banning it is the brand new thing here.

I replied upthread but yes, I think alcohol is worst than cannabis, all things considered.

The thing is that cannabis was already banned and that was mostly fine. Sure there were some shady drug dealers, but there wasn't massive gang violence like there was during Prohibition. And, let's not forget that Prohibition wasn't a complete failure either. It really did reduce alcohol consumption by a lot with all the attendant benefits such as lower domestic violence and higher productivity. It's just that the benefits accrued mostly to the lower classes.

So yeah, if someone invented alcohol tomorrow, it should be banned absolutely. But once Pandora's Box is open, it's hard to shut. Which is another reason we should have never legalized weed. Now that it's legal, making it illegal again will be near-to-impossible.

Going forward, I think we need to squeeze a little harder.

Option 1) Increase taxes and regulation until the profit dries up. Consumption will go down and cannabis will be treated as a rare treat instead of a daily habit. We'll know its working if some street dealers start appearing again. Tolerate this to some extent as long as there is no violence.

Option 2) State run marijuana stores. Beige buildings run by bureacrats. Open 9-5 Monday-Friday. Inconveniently located and with no advertising whatsoever. Turn the pot industry into the DMV.

I think ubiquitous intoxicant use is bad for society, and if I reluctantly think that we could suppress alcohol or marijuana we should. I could use either drug responsibly but I can see the damage caused by irresponsible use all around me, and the net cost to society dramatically exceeds the benefit. Empirically the easiest way to destroy public trust in the law is to selectively enforce drug laws against the outgroup, even if this actually targets problem users, so if you care about Rule of Law the choice is between ubiquitous use or a Singapore style serious crackdown.

The best argument for distinguishing marijuana and alcohol is a practical one about enforceability. Alcohol is sufficiently embedded in the culture and used by a sufficiently large number of respectable otherwise-law-abiding citizens (including cops, politicians, judges etc.) that banning it will do more damage to the rule of law than to drinkers (see Prohibition). Marijuana hasn't got there yet except in a few places like Colorado, and it is important to make sure it doesn't.

FWIW I don't buy this. I think that marijuana is sufficiently easy to produce and sufficiently built into Blue Tribe culture via the hippy-to-liberal-elite pipeline that the battle is lost and a serious attempt to enforce marijuana laws would turn into another Prohibition.

Marijuana hasn't got there yet except in a few places like Colorado

I believe its legal now in half the US states, plus all of Canada. I would hardly call that "a few places"

I think that marijuana is sufficiently easy to produce

It is not. It requires a great deal of upfront capital, real estate, permitting, and marketing. Products have to be registered with the state, tested for potency, mold, and hazardous chemicals.

Alcohol is sufficiently embedded in the culture and used by a sufficiently large number of respectable otherwise-law-abiding citizens (including cops, politicians, judges etc.) that banning it will do more damage to the rule of law than to drinkers (see Prohibition).

What kind of people do you think consume cannabis?

Mass producing marijuana in order to sell it isn’t something your average Joe can manage, but it’s fairly trivial to grow enough for yourself and your family/friends. If you have a spare closet, a couple of lightbulbs, and some potting soil, you’re 90% of the way there, and if it’s all done indoors, it’s pretty much undetectable. Thanks to LEDs, police couldn’t even detect an increase in energy usage if they tried.

Thanks to LEDs, police couldn’t even detect an increase in energy usage if they tried.

And thanks to LEDs, even if they could it's not even close to probable cause. CNet, a few days ago, reviewed "The 8 Best Indoor Smart Gardens for 2024". My wife got one for us last year. They're never going to be remotely price-competitive with farmland, but they're now cheap enough to be a fun yuppie hobby, and that means that even if the cops get subpoenas for hydroponics supply sales they're likely to find far more literal herbs than metaphorical herb.

I believe its legal now in half the US states, plus all of Canada. I would hardly call that "a few places"

Mere legality isn't what @MadMomzer was talking about. They were referring to a norm where marijuana "is sufficiently embedded in the culture and used by sufficiently large number of respectable, otherwise-law-abiding citizens (including cops, politicians, judges, etc.) that banning it will do more damage to the rule of law than to [users]." Do you think legalization is necessarily equivalent to that?

No, I don't think it's equivalent to that, but more people that you think use cannabis. The people I've seen in dispensaries appear to be no different than the people you see in package stores. They're average, working adults.

My impression was that alcohol is much less reliable in inducing that soma-like state of sedation and contentedness that people take weed for, and the margin between when alcohol makes you a happy zombie and when it makes you feel violently sick it quite narrow in comparison. This puts weed closer to the wireheading attractor (sacrifice qualities that give humans moral value in their own eyes to maximise feeling of pleasure).

Different things are different, and different prohibitions are different. There are all sorts of substances that various societies ban, with a variety of success rates. Some factors include the source materials, manufacturing requirements, size/volume at critical stages, detectability, availability of substitutes, accountability of gatekeepers, etc. The silly example here is that the US banned Chinese drywall. Basically nobody is out there hunting for black market Chinese drywall. There are available alternatives, and the supply chain is relatively legible. No one makes completely context-free analogies between marijuana and Chinese drywall... they only make completely context-free analogies between marijuana and alcohol.

Marijuana and alcohol have some similarities, some differences. They're both pretty concealable, but at least in its final form, marijuana is probably a bit more so. Use of marijuana is a bit more detectable by smell. Cultivation of quantities of marijuana is likely more detectable. Possibly the biggest real difference is the source materials. Alcohol can be sourced by literally just leaving the food you bought at the grocery store in the cabinet too long (or, if you really want, from the toilet paper you stocked up too much for COVID). Marijuana requires a particular, identifiable species of plant. One could go on, but the primary point is that depending on the factors involved, one might be able to determine a lot or only a very little by analogy to other prohibitions. I don't think anyone would say that the world's experiments with nuclear (anti)-proliferation says much about possible handgun bans or vice versa.

The internet and DRM. I thought that the internet can never be tamed and that DRM will always be circumvented. Now I learned that google is making it's own denuvo style vm which will solve the unfortunate legacy problem of people being able to sideload and modify apps without actually banning that sideloading.

I was also wrong about EU - I was optimistic in the early 2000s.

For years, I believed the trans-inclusive narrative that trans women were "women born in the wrong bodies" i.e. if one were to conduct an MRI or CT scan of a trans woman's brain, it would more closely resemble a typical female brain than a typical male brain. I subsequently learned that this claim (breathlessly signal-boosted by many trans activists) originates from a single Dutch study from the 90s which compared brain tissue from deceased trans women and found that it more closely resembled female brains than male. However, this study was hopelessly confounded by the fact that all of the trans women in question had been taking female hormones for years, meaning we have no way of knowing if their brains looked like that from birth or only as an effect of taking hormones. The study has never been replicated, and even some prominent trans activists have admitted that it doesn't really tell us anything one way or the other. I assume if more persuasive evidence had come along since, I would have heard about it. Until that day comes, I'm defaulting to the null hypothesis that trans women's brains look exactly like what you'd expect a male brain to look like (or perhaps what you'd expect a male autistic brain to look like).

When I was an undergrad, I believed the standard feminist line that male and female brains were essentially the same; all observable differences in behaviour, interests, habits of mind etc. were solely attributable to socialisation; and the belief that there might be real natal differences between the typical male and typical female brain amounted to "neurosexism".

Same. You basically summarized my post below but better, clearer, and less wordy(er).

I had pretty much the same belief about marijuana in my teens. Then, having seen a few friends waste away to apathy on it, I've changed my view. I'd be happy to see it legitimately criminalised.

Imean, I know two individuals who each basically tanked their careers to be full time rock climbers, should i view rock climbing as a vice? The world essentially lost a talented engineer and a medical professional because these people wanted to climb on rocks more than they wanted to grind, and neither use drugs or alcohol. You can't criminalize apathy for productive work whether its in the "fuck it just dont care" form or the "i want to enrich my soul by hiking across europe for a decade" form

I don’t think anyone is suggesting that every Vice be made illegal. But when a substance or behavior proves itself to habit forming to a substantial number of people to the point that they can no longer be functional members of society, then the rest of society is perfectly within its rights to try to regulate it. The number of people who get addicted to rock climbing or backpacking is pretty small compared to drug use or alcohol abuse.

The death of the liberal media.

When the newspapers were laying off large numbers of journalists when the internet was rising I was optimistic thinking that tens of thousands of leftist propagandists losing their job would be a positive thing.

In the end the media that replaced the legacy media wasn't less woke. Instead they just publish press releases from the rand corporation as news instead of doing actual journalism. The death of the liberal media wasn't the death of liberalism in popular culture, it was a shift from the media being critical of power to the media re-printing press releases.

Until a few years ago, I was operating under the misconception that the total number of non-Jews (homosexuals, the disabled, Slavs etc.) murdered in the Holocaust was somewhere in the region of 5 million. I subsequently learned that this figure was invented from whole cloth for propaganda purposes, and the real figure is significantly lower, perhaps by as much as an order of magnitude.

(Not interested into getting into a debate about what this misconception of mine might imply about the accuracy of other Holocaust-related figures - you know who you are.)

This is wrong. The number of non Axis affiliated non Jews killed in WW2 that by the same criteria as the Jews, where all dead counted as victims of the holocaust, is definitely substantially higher than 5 million. There is uncertainty and a range about possible victims but because minimum to maximum is larger, and there isn't as strong lobby, there is no doubt of it being higher than whatever the number of Jews killed. Or Jews murdered, however one would conclude that.

If criteria is people killed because of people stealing their food, outright killing them, blockade, enslavement, and harsh conditions brought through human action? The number is higher. Frankly, in eastern europe, a certain % of the dead must be allocated to the USSR for sure. Or for some dead person you could allocate different percentage of guilt. For some the party that destroyed them is without doubt a certain one. In other cases like starvation it can become more tricky.

For example if USSR follows scorch earth tactics and destroy food supplies, allies blockade food, nazis steal whatever of the food remains, and the person dies. Who killed them? There could also be considerations of who is more to blame for the civilian suffering because of their aggressive actions in the war and/or causing the war. Not to mention those more directly killed by USSR which isn't a small number.

In my view the most to blame for European theater are Nazi Germany and USSR, probably more the first to blame for more cruel conduct, but there is also a lot of fog of war and propaganda, leaving some room to explore this issue further, especially since USSR was also particularly cruel. Still, my evaluation at this point would have me put the Nazis as more responsible for most dead. Certainly it is pseudohistory that ignores USSR aggressive behavior and treats it as a victim of WW2 (the people living there are victims of the Nazis). Both powers wanted to invade each other and expand at each other expense and also were happy to invade at expend of other groups. The AngloAmerican allies also have their own responsibility for both those they directly killed (i.e Axis civilians especially but they even killed civilians of occupied countries, including deliberately bombing civilian populations of occupied countries and pretending it was an accident, based on the strategy of inciting the locals into more aggressive action against Nazi Germany), and through blockade, and whatever responsibility they might have for the war and throwing fuel into the fire in the period before it became world war. Especially in terms of aerial bombardment of civilian populations the greatest escalation came from the British first. However, in my estimation, even without angloamerican involvement after 1939, a nazi-soviet conflict that bloodies up significantly eastern Europe was very likely. And the ideologies of the Soviets and Nazi Germany made the treatment of civilians predictably disastrous.

That one Jewish ultranationalist propagandist came up with a figure that became popular figure of official 11 million number doesn't prove that it is lower. It does illustrate as a millionth example how culture can be dominated by false narratives. The 5 million is indeed self serving bullshit to fit his favorite narrative, because it is higher than 5 million. Nor should we accept the propaganda of seperating deaths from those of an intentional genocide tm, and pretending the others weren't. No care has been done by those making such framings to actually exclude people in the case of those they assign as genuine victims, based on a set of criteria. Nor do we see consistent criteria that could include people in those they don't give the status of victims of genocide.

The Jewish lobby and holocaust lobby also engaged in downplaying the armenian genocide. Downplaying the victimization of other groups by not only Jewish communists. And by that I mean the actual Jewish communist mass murderers that were quite a few, although downplayment of communist crimes as a means of indirectly excusing Jewish involvement in them also can qualify. As we see even the victimization of non Jews by the nazis is par for the course. And of course, even some revisionists of establishment consensus tm have an incentive to promote this idea. And it is tied by a weird perspective, the weirdo ideology to judge the national socialists only by their treatment of the Jews. Which is a false way to judge them since the effect of their actions on non Jews was of greater significance in their own period.

Of course in the mythology of nazism and how it is used in modern narratives, it is milked by pro jewish racists, anti europeans, antifa ideologues, far leftists, etc. One could see the post ww2 narratives as having a greater influence on the long term than what the nazis actually did, or didn't do.

But it is wrong that less than 5 million non Jews died in WW2 from non axis ethnic groups, and it is wrong that the nazis are responsible for more deaths of Jews than non Jews. And it is also good to not overly inflate the death of ethnic groups, and grossly understate of others. Especially when this is done in ways that serve the pervasive racist propaganda of our time. Such as the propaganda machine that Wiesenthal was part of. You are playing into his propaganda if you accept any of his claims at face value, including the "less than 5 million non Jews died, believe me".

Your link goes to a long wikipedia page on the life on Simon Wiesenthal. Would you please clarify where in that long article is the claim that the estimate of non-Jews killed in the Holocaust was invented without backing of evidence?

I’m kids sympathetic to the point of AngoAmerican Imperial propaganda having more of an impact on the post war era than anything the Nazis ever did. It became a way to legitimize the rule of the Anglophone order and the right of the UN as an allied government to effectively control international affairs. It gave NATO the right to invade other countries in the name of protecting the world from communism and authoritarian regimes and anyone else we didn’t like. For the most part, we’re fairly decent as far as empires go, but at the same time, the narrative of us as the people who Stopped a Genocide and Defeated Evil Incarnate gives legitimacy to the effort that would be hard to create without the story.

It’s actually kinda funny to me to listen as both the Pro-Israeli and Pro-Palestinian factions try to weaponize the holocaust narrative to win the arguments about the war in Gaza. To the Pro-Israeli side, “Never Again” means that the Jews of Israel must be allowed to use force as much as they want to defeat the genocidal Hamas. To the Pro-Palestinian side, “Never Again” means that bombing Gaza is just like the Auswitz. It’s like using that narrative gets you the stamp of approval to do whatever is necessary to defeat your enemy. Heck even Putin tried to justify taking Ukraine by invoking the need to “denazify” Ukraine of Azov.

IIRC, at least one browser (Brave) refuses to obey the "highlight this passage on the page" section of URLs due to privacy concerns.

The link for me had the relevant passage highlighted. Maybe because I'm on Android?

I'm on desktop (Opera browser), and it goes straight to the highlighted section for me as well.

That said, Bauer is one of those insisting that the Holocaust can only refer to Jews murdered by the Nazis, so the pushback against the "other undesirables killed in the Holocaust" feels a little unseemly, particularly insisting that only those killed in the known camps count (why not include massive numbers of Poles and Romanians killed in town, but not the camps?)

In 1979, Wiesenthal told The Washington Post: "I have sought with Jewish leaders not to talk about 6 million Jewish dead [in the Holocaust], but rather about 11 million civilians dead, including 6 million Jews." In a 2017 interview, Yehuda Bauer said that he had told Wiesenthal not to use this figure. "I said to him, 'Simon, you are telling a lie,' ... [Wiesenthal replied] 'Sometimes you need to do that to get the results for things you think are essential.'" According to Bauer and other historians, Wiesenthal chose the figure of 5 million non-Jewish victims because it was just lower than the six million Jews who were murdered, but high enough to attract sympathy from non-Jews. The figure of eleven million Nazi victims became popular and was referred to by President Jimmy Carter in the executive order establishing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.[138]

Didn't the Nazis kill plenty of Poles, Roma and Slavs, or are we now defining Holocaust to only include dead Jews? Seems like a lot of word games are being played here.

This passage, by itself, does not actually necessarily imply that the real figure is lower, just that this one was selected arbitrarily.

"Holocaust" implies deliberate killings in the gas chambers, or deliberate worked-to-death-with-short-rations in the concentration camps. This applies uncontroversially to the Jews and the Roma (of whom only about 300,000 were holocausted).

My understanding (I am not an expert) is that several million non-Jewish Poles died due to war-related famine, but without the requisite intent on the part of the Nazis to be included in the Holocaust. If you count Nazi deaths as generously as anti-communists count communist deaths, the 11 million civilians killed by Nazis is roughly correct.

"War-related famine" was not exactly incidental; it was a matter of German policy.

Generally "the Holocaust" is used by historians to refer only to the murder of Jews. Some people say you should lump in other groups murdered by the Germans but I think it is fairly coherent to exclude them because as you have noted a. the Germans pursued Jews with a unique sort of intent and b. the methods and organization with which they murdered Jews was in large part distinct.

Yes, there were plenty of instances where the Germans rounded up groups of Poles, or Russians, or Serbs, or Italians, and shot them to death. But it was not done on the scale or with the deliberate forethought of the initial phases of the Holocaust where something on the order of ~2.3-2.5 million Jews were killed in mass executions.

Yes, there were other nationalities and classes who went to the gas chambers, particularly ethnic Poles and particularly at Auschwitz. But at nowhere near the numbers that Jews did; and a number of the extermination camps pretty much exclusively killed Jews.

The caveat to all of this is that the Holocaust was not going to be unique if the Germans had won. It was merely to be the first in a grand series of genocides to depopulate Eastern Europe for German settlement. As it stands if you tally the dead in history's genocides, coming in at numbers 2 and 3 on the list is the German murder of Soviet POWs and the German murder of ethnic Poles.

Generally "the Holocaust" is used by historians to refer only to the murder of Jews.

Wikipedia agrees with you but I was (in the UK in the 1990s) taught in school that the Holocaust included gypsies and homosexuals.

The Germans avoid this question by calling the memorials in Berlin the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism without using the word "Holocaust". (The latter is a recent renaming - when I went there circa 2013 the English-language signage still called it the Memorial to the Murdered Gypsies of Europe)

Wikipedia agrees with you

Wikipedia's "Holocaust" article first specifies that it limits the term only to European Jews, then mentions "non-Jewish civilians and prisoners of war (POWs); the term Holocaust is sometimes used to refer to the persecution of these", linking to their "Holocaust victims" article that includes a dozen categories. I don't think all the wiki editors are 100% on the same page here...

The shocking things about the Holocaust vs the mass civilian death tolls common in war were the deliberateness of it (dead prisoners were the goal, not just negligence) and the industrialization of it (literally "holokaustos"=="whole burnt offering", referring to the crematoria). Neither characteristic was restricted to just the Jewish victims, even if the proportionate effect on Jewish victims was an order of magnitude or more greater. The genocide of other "untermenschen" was also intentional, and though it was much less industrialized, there were still over 100,000 non-Jews murdered at Auschwitz, not just a handful of exceptions. Seems to me like they should count too.

I suppose it was also astonishing that the Holocaust included a country trying to kill its own citizens, rather than just being uncaring about others', and that characteristic wouldn't apply to any Polish or Soviet victims of the Nazis, but that includes the majority of the (predominantly Polish) Jewish people murdered too; the self-destructiveness of the Holocaust was important but not central.

Thank you for finding the relevant passage.

Didn't the Nazis kill plenty of Poles, Roma and Slavs, or are we now defining Holocaust to only include dead Jews?

It's a good question, which WWII civilian deaths get (or should get) counted towards Holocaust. It wouldn't count, say, a Polish man who got hit by a jeep driven a German soldier on a typical patrol route. It wouldn't count if that same Polish man got shot by that same German soldier on that same patrol route. But would it count if, instead of the patrol route, this German soldier was rounding up Polish men in the neighborhood to be transported to a concentration camp, and shot this particular Polish man who was trying to escape the sweep? Or would it only count if that concentration camp's primary purpose was extermination, and not forced labor or internment (like US internment camps for Japanese-Americans)?

Does it only count if it was done by, or on behalf of, Germans?

(I don't know, I haven't thought about it before. I do know that my family tree got substantially pruned by both the Nazis and the Soviets.)

Is the presence of a "concentration camp" per se really the deciding factor? I heard an account recently of the Nazis conquering a Slavic village and, as a standard part of their war plan, immediately rounding up and killing everyone present, men, women, and children. Is this excluded because it was less industrialized and more like standard savage ancient warfare? Is the village itself considered a very short-lived, improvised concentration camp? It seems like a distinct phenomenon from the long-term "corpse factories" we know as "concentration camps", but I think I'd be slightly more surprised to hear it excluded from the Holocaust than included.

Excellent point, and I should have thought of that because I know that in Kyiv the Jews were rounded up to Baby Yar, which is just a ravine conveniently deep for disposing the bodies.

Weren't a relatively large chunk of victims in the Holocaust, especially early in the war, basically rounded up and shot? The death camps were, IIRC, a fairly late addition, and even then many of the deaths were from forced labor and disease.

Which isn't to say that the death camps didn't exist, just that "The Holocaust" is a much broader event than just gas chambers. And also isn't to suggest that deaths from bullets or starvation are somehow more morally excusable.

During Covid, I believed that many of the more authoritarian measures imposed on the Irish populace with the ostensible goal of slowing the spread of the virus (in particular, vaccine passes, without which one couldn't gain access to a pub or restaurant) were the first step in the government's rollout of a police state modelled on the CCP or the US's PATRIOT ACT.

All of these measures have since been abolished and no one has had to present proof of vaccination against Covid for any reason in years. I still think these measures were a legitimate cause for concern at the time of writing, and the current sitting government make little secret of their post-Covid authoritarian aspirations (e.g. the incredibly sweeping "hate speech" bill, comparably restrictive as the recent piece of Scottish legislation, which would make it a criminal offense to have an "offensive" meme saved on your phone even if somebody else sent it to you, and which passed in the lower house but has been languishing in the upper house for over a year). But my specific prediction that the vaccine passes would remain in place indefinitely, and their role slowly expanded until they functioned like an EU-wide ID card, turned out to be untrue.

TBH, I don't think it makes sense to rollout on a permanent basis. I don't know about you, but to me even the exploiter's side of a dystopia sounds less pleasant than an open society.

I do think though for a lot of governments it served as a rehearsal for when they believe they will need to enact those measures again, for possibly less popular reasons (for instance to curb civil unrest following unpopular laws).

For years as a younger man I considered myself allied with feminist causes. In undergrad back in the day I marched in a Take Back the Night rally, I took at least two women's studies courses in grad school (one about language and sex differences, which was interesting, though my professor marked me down I believe for a write-up of a conversation I had recorded in which I suggested the female actually seemed to have the power, another I can't even remember the name of the class but what it taught me, what I learned from taking it, was no doubt not at all what I was supposed to have learned. I learned the women in it were mostly self-entitled princesses. Yes I was the only male in the class.)

I am not remotely at the level of misogyny one at times seems displayed in these pages (I use that word to mean essentially "woman hating," not in any esoteric or typically progressive sense) but my views on the fragility and vulnerability of women and the horribleness of men have, let's say, altered.

I'm still pretty moored to how I was raised in my perspective, but how I was raised in a way conflicted with the approach of seeing women as tough-girl badasses that was dinned into me over the years of my younger self. Living in Japan, and perhaps having witnessed the situation of women in places like Thailand, I have to say many of the tropes about paygaps and women not being taken seriously and extremely limited options for women are very true, or at least much, much more true than in, say, the US, which strikes me as a demented zoo when it comes to what seem to me to be mainstream views on men and women (I am not even getting into trans).

None of this is very specific but my bus is arriving so I am ending in typical abrupt fashion.

Edit because this is infuriating word salad: My mistake was buying into the idea that Women Are Wonderful. But even with this mistake in mind I still like women, just not in the same dewy-eyed, trusting way. No. More in a stern-eyed, doubting way.

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