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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1532 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 2, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What's the deal with the social media features of this site? WIP or defunct feature?

I noticed profile pics/avatars a long time ago, but only recently noticed the following/follower features on the user profile page. I "followed" some people to see what would happen. I expected a deluge of orange bell icons which would have me revert, but nothing happened. Am I blind and this is an old, half baked feature I missed (very possible) or is this an ongoing development for the forum to finally unseat Myspace as king of social media (very possible)?

Vestigial limbs from the rdrama codebase. They’ve also got a bunch of gif and css support that didn’t make it over, I think.

The only ongoing features we’ve got are related to moderating, like the volunteer system.

I believe the follow feature only posts notifications when the person you've followed makes a standalone post on the front page. Even top level comments in the main CWR thread are technically subposts.

As mentioned below, there are things from the rdrama code base that aren't fully implemented, such as themes. They probably work fine for a normal user, but using anything but the default breaks things in annoying ways if you're an admin like me.

My guess would be that it's something from the rdrama code base which either was not fully implemented there, or it got broken when we removed various other features (there were a lot). And in either case was never fully excised.

Who is the best, most sane, and intelligent, centrist or left-leaning commentator/podcaster you can recommend for me to listen to? I'm a bit worried that as the Motte trends further rightward that I'm in too much of a filter bubble, and most of the stuff I naturally listen to is right-leaning, because the stuff that's explicitly leftist is braindead and infuriating. I don't want someone ranting about how Trump is Hitler, I want people good, calm, and reasoned defenses for their positions that I don't already agree with so I can understand their position and maybe find some insights that I previously dismissed as braindead because I only heard the stupid version of it before. I used to like Sargon of Akkad for this, because he was in a nice centrist zone: left on some issues but right on others, but every year he drifts further right and I don't think he serves this purpose anymore.

I like to listen to people talk about stuff while I'm playing casual games that don't take up too much brain power or require audio themselves, so multi-hour broadcasts with a lot of backlog are ideal. I do read things sometimes, obviously since I'm here, but I'm mostly looking for audio right now.

most sane (...) centrist or left-leaning

Underdefined. These days even the boring centrists seem certifiably insane, and who even counts as "left"? I like Angela Nagle and Aimee Terese, the Red Scare girls are ok as well, but this is because our worldviews aren't in that much of an opposition, so... are they "left"? Am I?

I would have recommended glenn greenwald (System Update), max blumenthal & aaron mate (The Grayzone), and matt taibbi (Racket News) as leftist journalists with good video/audio backlogs. But that may not be what you're looking for here, as these are the types who feel the modern left moved away from them over the last 10 years, and don't necessarily have many takes that the motte disagrees with. So it's largely critical of israel/neocons/neoliberals, and often defenses of trump against the establishment.

Aside from what has already been suggested, I listen to Derek Thompson's podcast, which while not always political, when it is, it's solidly center-left blue.

Yglesias, as long as you follow closely enough to catch all his "haha I was actually lying to you about that the whole time, aren't I clever" admissions. He embodies the zeitgeist better than anyone.
The Economist used to be ok, although it's gone downhill. (And wow they've even paywalled the front page, that's crazy. Never mind)

Can't recommend podcasts because I'd rather read with focus for five minutes than absent-mindedly listen to someone's propaganda for five hours. That seems absurdly dangerous for your mental hygiene imo.

Contrapoints and PhilosophyTube are great places to start.

Is Contrapoints still relevant? They seem to put out maybe 1 video per year for the past 4 years. The right used to feel obligated to respond, but the last time I even heard about Contrapoints is the cope response to the Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.

The Ezra Klein Show and Noah Smith's Econ 102 are two that I listen to occasionally if I want to get the liberal technocratic elite's position on things.

Can someone help me understand the 1000 IQ move behind 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico? Apparently "fentanyl deaths had not fallen by enough" to satisfy the administration.

More broadly: does anyone else feel like Trump was handed the country on a platter after four years of Democratic disaster, and is squandering that goodwill? Whether it's hitching a ride to the increasingly embarrassing and unpopular DOGE, lacking empathy for federal workers (you can fire them without being gleeful about it), claiming to care about slashing the budget but promoting a huge spending bill, and ignoring + likely exacerbating inflation, which swing voters (the people who defected from Obama to Trump in 2016 and also helped him to carry as many states as he did in 2024) seem to care more about than anything else, I suspect that the midterms will not be kind to the Republicans.

No doubt there are good things that have been done, but it seems like things can be handled so much better.

I'm still unsure that Trump is paying very much attention to Canada. The timing of the first delay in response to Canada offering basically the same thing they'd already started doing in December really made it look like someone had to remind Trump about Canada after already delaying the Mexico tariffs.

What I've seen of the meeting with Zelenskyy similarly just reinforces the impression that Trump is governing on broad emotional direction and really doesn't keep any particular details in mind at all.

I end up coming back to what I said last month. After decades of the left talking about the "American Empire," Trump is embracing that view and demanding fealty from his vassals. In Canada, at least, the incumbent thinks they'll do better in the upcoming election by leaning into the anti-Americanism, so the best hope for delaying or canceling the tariffs seems to be that Trump forgets he's mad at Trudeau the way he forgot he called Zelenskyy a dictator.

Stefferi’s explanation fits my mental model of Trump. He rewards his friends, and he doesn’t think those countries have been very friendly lately. Thus, they deserve the short end of the stick.

As for goodwill? Mine lasted from the election until about 90% of the way through his inauguration speech. You can identify the exact moment my expectations started sliding.

I personally resent the guy, and I despise the way he encourages political tribalism. I’m sick and tired of listening to smart people jump through hoops to explain how he’s actually totally aligned with their principles. FCfromSSC has suggested that the last decade is something like a distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup; while I don’t want to believe it, no one exemplifies the idea better than our President. He will continue to trample the commons and loot the treasury, sometimes literally. He will collect immunity to the various consequences which apply to us little people. And he will be praised for any damage he does so long as he hurts the right people.

The Republicans are going to do fine in 2026.

And I'm a little sick and tired of certain people ignoring the last four years of blatant looting, forgiving or just denying leftist violence and tribalism as you did in that linked post, and then smugly acting as if they're principled and above it all rather than active partisans.

I think that the best way to see it is like: Trump likes tariffs. In the ideal Trumpworld, there's basically a high tariff against most every country, with lower and nonexistent tariff rates being a special favor for pliant loyalists, not the basic starting point. He can't implement this right now in its entirety, since it would still be bit too harsh a hit on economy, but he can start implementing it against those whose negotiating position isn't particularly good, ie. weaker neighboring countries much more dependent on US than US is on them.

Is Anthropic (Claude) the most overvalued AI company today?

Despite being a customer of Anthropic, I'm not really sure what the place of Anthropic is in today's market. They don't have the mindshare of OpenAI. They don't have the cheapest API. They don't have the biggest cluster.

They feel very much like an also ran, the Lyft of AI, doomed to be either subsumed or ground down by bigger rivals.

And, at least in one way, they are very badly run. Let me explain.

Anthropic charges me $3 per 1 million output tokens. But I am rate limited to 8000 tokens per minute. It would take me 2 hours just to spend $3 on their API. And if I want a bigger limit I have to "contact sales". This is just 💀 for people who are trying to build real things. I don't want to contact sales, I just want a bigger limit. What I think this means is that they are resource constrained, so they trying to pre-filter their customers to find the ones who will deliver the most long-term value and ignoring ones that won't. This is a fool's errand. It's better to make a self-service platform that scales. Startups start small, but grow until pretty soon they are paying millions a year to AWS. Claude is stopping this process before it even gets going.

So why do I still use them? For now: inertia. But I can't build with this 8000 token limit and I don't do sales calls so long term I'm going elsewhere.

It says rate limits rise automatically as you deposit more money:

https://docs.anthropic.com/en/api/rate-limits

Your organization will increase tiers automatically as you reach certain thresholds while using the API. Limits are set at the organization level. You can see your organization’s limits in the Limits page in the Anthropic Console.

But I am also trying to build with them, I pressed the contact sales button and they apparently don't accept gmail email addresses, it has to be businesspeople. Their customer service takes ages to respond to you. Their service was been down for about an hour. Everything they do outside AI research is a clownshow.

I don't have stats to hand but they serve a lot of enterprise customers now. Maybe they see serving end users as a sideshow.

I recall similar, a graph in one of TheZvi's roundup's showed they were rapidly gaining on OpenAI's enterprise marketshare and were comfortably second place. The Lyfts are more like Google and Facebook

Claude, at least past the 2.0 models, has been excellent. 3.0 Opus was good, 3.5 Sonnet was great, and 3.7 Sonnet only continues the hot streak. Given that GPT 4.5 is a resounding meh (look at those prices dawg, they're back to early GPT-4 days and don't beat even OAI's reasoning models in price or performance), I don't think Anthropic is doing poorly. They've released a reasoning model (3.7 can do it and standard output), and have plenty of good talent.

That being said, the way they treat paying users, both through subscription and the API, is terrible. I can only hope that they're simply strapped for GPUs, especially for inference, and are using the bulk of their compute on the 4.0 models they're cooking. Hopefully they take a page out of DeepSeek's book, those buggers aren't GPU poor, they're GPU beggars in comparison, but outside of when they're being DDOS-d, they practically throw tokens away for free.

I can only hope that they're simply strapped for GPUs, especially for inference, and are using the bulk of their compute on the 4.0 models they're cooking.

This is somewhat unlikely. The GPUs that you need for training cost a fortune (or rather, NVidia can charge a fortune for them since they have almost zero large scale competition) while much cheaper ones can be good enough for inference.

In the mean time, I just swapped out my API to use DeepSeek v3 via together.ai. It was easy. So add that to Anthropic's problems. Low switching costs!

For me it's an easy win. I get lower costs, good enough models, and no limits. Death to the sales call! Death to "call for pricing"!

Claude is the best coding LLM. Perhaps not by far, but noticeably enough that I almost always use it exclusively at work. This is not very controversial for most devs.

i've heard claude is good at coding but i don't understand how people are using it

what programs are people using to feed context to claude?

If openrouter's top usage charts are to be believed, Cline, Roo-Code (itself a fork of Cline apparently?) and Aide (before 4chan unsustainable pricing killed it) are/were the most popular choices. I haven't tried those because those seem like a bottomless pit of token usage and I'm too poor, but I believe how those work is that you integrate them straight into your IDE, give them file access so they can "see" and edit your entire project, and prompt accordingly from there. Curious if anyone has experience with those.

If you need a simpler frontend, big-AGI is a good general-purpose one despite many superfluous bells and whistles.

"Nobody goes there, it's too crowded".

It's not that they have too much demand, it's that they can't serve even the limited demand they do have.

Claude name recognition is basically zero compared to ChatGPT or even Deep Seek.

For the parents: How do you introduce/talk about yourself and your spouse to your kids friends? Are you on first name basis? Do you go by Mr/Mrs so-and-so?

My sense is that Mr/Mrs so-and-so makes it easier for young kids to understand their relationship to you and that they need to respect your decisions. Some of my peer group, however, goes by a first name basis. Most parents never even broach the subject with their kids' friends, and so the friends are in an awkward limbo where they don't know how to address parents.

Mr so-and-so, with wide tolerance, particularly for older siblings.

"Hi! I'm [insert your own kid's name]'s dad. Who are you?"

Hello! How do I go about deleting my account and everything I ever posted? Is that possible? I’m done with the Motte and want to wipe my account.

  • -21

Your perception is so wrong it's a bit comical, pardon me saying. I don't participate on other debate forums and I certainly have never typed that sentence anywhere on the internet.

This is such exquisite bait that I will bite it.

What is, exactly, the point of this post?

Ostensibly you've asked a normal question, but tb entirely h I don't buy it, not considering your bio/poasting history - especially now that you've voiced your actual complaint downthread when prompted. At a glance it really scans like you recently entered a thread full of things you do not like (discussion of the recent Trump/Zelensky cockfight, I assume), got annoyed, and now took to vagueposting to bait people into asking for the reason (as sensible people are wont to do), so you can express your perceived ick without actually having to engage with pesky chuds Russian shills directly.

I'm not usually that much of a conflict theorist, but this is such a lazy, passive-aggressive and - yes - stereotypically female mode of engagement (I'm mad and no I won't say why, except actually I will, you just gotta ask properly first) that I can't possibly think of it as being done in good faith, much less a point made "reasonably clear and plain". Functionally indistinguishable from trolling, even.

I don't see what's so bad about it, and it's certainly less annoying than your making accusations and using them to paint half of the entire population with a broad brush. I'm not a huge fan of people announcing their exit, but this is certainly preferable to past users who have decided to end their time here with a long whinge about why they're leaving, complete with accusations about the mods not acting fairly since most of them were skirting perma-bans anyway.

I don't see what's so bad about it, and it's certainly less annoying than your making accusations

What's bad about it is that telling people "you have icky opinions" on a forum devoted to discussing ideas is going to be annoying when told directly, and it's doubly so when vaguepisted. No, it's not more annoying than what he did (you basically conceded the substance of his accusations).

and using them to paint half of the entire population with a broad brush.

Are you saying there are no broad differences in behavior between men an women?

Generally we don't delete accounts. You can leave if you like. If you want to delete all your posts (we'd prefer you didn't) we won't do it for you.

Except Ra****y_An***m?

(Name partially removed lest there's some reason they can't be spoken about)

Seconding grognard in suggesting "leave your comments and just stop reading or posting here".

If you decide that you really do want to delete all your stuff, there is no special tooling for that. That said, LLMshave gotten really good at writing code lately, and if you ask an LLM for a javascript snippet which will press the "delete" button on every comment you wrote, ChatGPT or Claude can probably provide that to you.

I really appreciate you informing me of this. Pardon the newb, but what is an LLM? And how would I execute the javascript?

On the tiny chance this is not bait, LLM stands for "large language model" and is the sort of thing that ChatGPT and Claude are. It's an AI you can ask questions to, like "what is an LLM" or "how would I execute a snippet javascript on a web page". It will often (not always) provide useful and accurate answers, and you can ask follow-up questions.

If you build a habit of reflexively asking your LLM of choice to explain anything you don’t understand in plain language (e.g. contracts, legalese, poorly written comments from the internet) I think you will find it's pretty nice for your quality of life.

what is an LLM?

HUUUHhhhh ????????

Never presume that knowledge is universal. Someone always manages to live on the far side of the moon somehow.

If you're posting on an obscure internet forum, it's trivial to open a browser new tab, go to google.com, and search "what is an LLM?"

taps sign

What upset you?

Why can’t you leave your posts up so threads you participated in make sense? You didn’t use your real name.

In my perspective there’s a lot of Russian propaganda talking points popping up in the Culture War chat and it’s kinda made the whole thing boring for me now. I’d like to keep my personal syntax on the internet down to sites I actively use.

  • -10

I would offer you a different viewpoint. This is just Ethiopia all over again. A clash between Realpolitik and Wilsonian's views.

Realpolitk says that Putin is entitled to half of Ukraine, because saving it whole is not worth it.

Wilsonian's says it's immoral so we should go all in.

Russian propaganda in its core is closer to Realpolitk so a lot of opinions may be viewed by this lens.

Also the European equivalent of woke have put so much of their capital and emotions into Ukraine side. And their foaming at the mouth alone is making the loss of Ukraine worth it.

I don't want Putin to win. I want Brussels to lose badly.

If Woodrow Wilson were drawing up a new Fourteen points for today, he would emphasize the right to self-determination of the people of Crimea. Western war aims include conquering Crimea to annex it into a Ukrainian land empire, perhaps as some kind of successor to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Wilson would denounce that as immoral.

I have no idea what Ethiopia, Realpolitik and Wilsonian's views are, sorry lol.

Well, see, Russian propaganda at it's core is just straight up lies, in my opinion, and that's just not fun to argue with. There's no winning to be had, alas.

I have no idea what Ethiopia, Realpolitik and Wilsonian's views are, sorry lol.

Invasion of Ethiopia - when the league of nations bickered, so the realistic realpolitik plan - Italy to get the plains and Haile Selasie to keep the mountains never got traction since the LON was brainchild of then president Woodrow Wilson so Italy got all of it.

Realpolitik is the notion that nations should chase their own interests, be indifferent towards the internal structure of the other players and that morality moves to second place.

And well Woodrow Wilson thought that we should sing kumbaya and if we create a league of all nation and outlaw war then all the world will be at peace forever.

So from Realpolitik view invasion of Ukraine from Russia makes sense. How much support should US provide depends on US interests and it is irrelevant what Ukraine wants of needs. And Trump sees probably Ukraine as a chip to gain some favors from Russia or a proxy that just needs enough support to lose the war slowly as to bleed Russia dry.

So saying that Ukraine should take a bad deal now to avoid taking worse one tomorrow is grounded in reality. This could also be said about Palestinians after the US firmly backed Israel during the 20th century. It is Russian propaganda I guess, but it is not a complete lie the way the war is going.

Ethiopia is a country in Africa. No idea what the reference being made is, but I assume some past political event. Realpolitik is the philosophy that in politics, one must deal with cold hard reality. In this case, whether one believes Ukrainians are entitled to get their land back or not, they aren't able to take it themselves and nobody seems inclined to fight on their behalf to get it back for them. So like it or not, they should (according to realpolitik) deal with the situation that exists as best they can, not cling to vain hopes of getting their land back, because they are just going to annoy people and wind up with an even worse deal in the end than if they gave concessions now.

Ahh, thank you for the clarification.

There really are a lot of Russian talking points, aren't there? But don't you find it interesting to see how badly many quite smart people here want to believe in them? It's an endless task to try to engage with or counter all of it, nonetheless, I feel that the more misinformation and distortion I read here, the more I learn!

My reaction is the total opposite of yours. I don’t find it interesting; actually I find it quite boring, and I’m afraid all I’ve got left in the tank is disregard.

You don't have to read it. I often don't, beyond skimming through for posts that show more consideration than simple partisan reaction. If it feels like I've read enough and there's twice as much again left to go I collapse the thread.

Discussions here would be stale without two sides, which is what makes your own presence here worthwhile as someone who often brings a measure of balance to gendered topics, so I encourage you to consider staying on.

For me, discussion here became stale when Russian propaganda began to be seriously debated. I just can't take it seriously; it's like being at a pool party where someone poured that mythical urine-indicator dye and seeing exactly how many people are pissing in the proverbial water.

If you don't mind me asking, how did you even find this place? This site is a quarantine site to contain the often toxic political discussions that would otherwise happen elsewhere, and the people who enter the quarantine tend to be those of us who enjoy such things for whatever reason. The site isn't really advertised anywhere, and so usually the only people who come here are the proverbial pissing in the water club.

Coming here and complaining that there are too many bad political takes feels like signing up for a poker strategy forum and complaining that they talk about and glorify gambling an unhealthy amount - arguably not wrong, but how did you even get there?

I read that famous Harry Potter fanfiction by Yud and slippery sloped all the way here.

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So now that you know what realpolitik is, how confident are you in your ability to distinguish it from Russian propaganda?

That's not my problem. My problem is I think Russian propaganda is a pretty boring topic to debate about and I can't take it seriously. I don't know how else to say it without accidentally coasting into "boo outgroup" territory.

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I'm just waiting for it to pass, it's currently hot in the news cycle, but we will soon be able to get at each other's throats for something else

I wish I could carry on like that, but for me, it's like a bunch of people in the geography debate club became flat earthers overnight. I just can't get the taste out of my mouth.

So, what are you reading?

Still on a bunch of stuff. Picking up Rawls' A Theory of Justice. Scott Alexander's claim that the book converted a lot of academic Marxists to left-liberalism has intrigued me.

Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery. A popular nonfiction book written by a practicing brain surgeon, that explores the profession from a medical, historical, and social perspective. Who knew that the surgeons, in order to access the brain, literally drill four holes in the skull, slip a cutting wire through two of them, and saw back-and-forth, repeating on all the holes until a square is cut out? It's a glimpse into a field that is usually inaccessible to outsiders. I'm only about a quarter of the way through but I would highly recommend it.

Last week I finally finished Montaillou. Took me the guts of a month to get through, what a chore.

Onto Orbán: Europe's New Strongman by Paul Lendvai, as reviewed by Scott. Another book I'm reading for research purposes. About a hundred pages in and it's a very easy read, I'm learning some interesting tidbits about the man himself I can use.

Last week I finally finished Montaillou. Took me the guts of a month to get through, what a chore.

Was it worth it?

I wouldn't say so. The only reason I read it was to gain an insight into Catharism, but that only takes up a very small portion of the book. The rest of it is dedicated to describing life in the titular fourteenth-century French village in minute, exhaustive detail: how the villagers worked, ate, formed relationships etc. Some of this was interesting, but it wasn't really relevant to the purpose I was reading the book for and hence felt like a bit of a waste of my time.

Understandable. It's exactly what I hope to get out of it, though.

Is there a first world country that has managed to avoid building a domestic welfare state? Even East Asian countries have pensions.

I'm with thrownaway. Pensions are compensation: if you don't pay in you don't get something out. A couple of them (Singapore) don't even do the usual medical pooling stuff.

Why do you consider pensions to be welfare rather than compensation?

Because they quite literally are welfare.

How so? Welfare is typically defined as "financial support given to people in need" whereas pensions are paid out to those who contribute (and/or their dependents) based on their contributions.

I can't speak to other countries, but social security is heavily redistributive in the US. If you are rich, you get much much less than you put in. If you are working class, you get much more.

Source for inflammatory claim (table 2):

Assumptions:

  • Mortality: Standard
  • Lifetime earnings basis: Individual
  • Lifetime earnings measure: Actual
  • Discount rate (%/a): 2
Income quintileSocial Security tax rate (%)
1−21.9
2−1.0
3+3.6
4+6.4
5+6.8

The researchers appear to say that, if you adjust for a zillion variables, the redistributive effect basically disappears:

Assumptions:

  • Mortality: Dependent on income
  • Lifetime earnings basis: Household
  • Lifetime earnings measure: Potential estimated based on income(?)
  • Discount rate (%/a): 4
Income quintileSocial Security tax rate (%)
1+4.1
2+5.2
3+6.0
4+6.0
5+5.5

I don't know how much I believe that claim.

Interesting.

Like you, I'm immediately suspicious.

First, as we expand the definition of income to use more comprehensive measures of well-being, we find that Social Security becomes less progressive. Indeed, when we use an "endowment" defined by potential labor earnings at the household level, rather than actual earnings at the individual level, we find that Social Security has virtually no effect on overall inequality.

That is some grade A bullshit right there.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, I'll admit that Social Security is somewhat less retributive when we adjust for life expectancy. But this is not going to gratify the biases of the paper's authors since it is primarily unmarried men that are getting screwed. They seemed to need a lot of twisting and turning to arrive at the conclusion they wanted to.

Yeah, I did the napkin math once, and it's mostly sex. Between women living longer, working fewer years, and inheriting their husbands' payments, they get a much better deal, even at the same yearly salary.

Race does make a bit of difference too, but not always in-line with actual life expectancy (technically a guy who died of a stress heart attack at 64 got a worse deal on SS than a guy who got shot at 19, because he paid in for 45 more years and still got nothing). It's the groups who regularly make their 90s that really get the best deal, which is rather unfair.

(tagging @jeroboam as well)

It gets even worse when we consider nerdy economist concepts like marginal utility and opportunity cost.

Those of means who contribute more to social security than they will receive from it are also not using their monthly payroll contributions to social security to invest in other areas. Likewise and conversely, those who do not contribute much to social security during their "careers" but then receive disproportionate benefit should they make it to 65+ are often - date I say - engaged in activities that may be net socially negative. This ranges from the pleasantly degenerate (drinking to excess, casual illegal gambling with friends, other high risk activities) to the actively and proudly felonious (violet semi-organize criminal activity).

We take meaningful amounts of money out of the hands of the pro-socially engaged and demonstrably more capable in capital allocation during their highest earning years in order to subsidize the poverty-lite elderly years of people who have had a rocky relationship with society and community for, perhaps, decades.

I'll admit I'm painting with broad strokes here and will further confide that I spent too much time this past weekend looking at how taxes, transfers, and social programs actually shake out in the US. I, therefore, am still riding a hell of a rage high on this particular topic.

Still, the basic (and good!) arguments against social security still fail to adequately capture just how perverse it has become. It is no longer a "help out the small amount of old folks who make it to such an advanced age" program. It's a multi-generational ponzi scheme complimented by a massive DEFECT, DEFECT, DEFECT incentivized prisoner's dilemma. Throw in the deadly sisters of housing, education, and healthcare costs and the picture gets even more grim.

The economic tragedy in America is that, today, the dutiful "middle class" career person or family who pays all of their taxes, saves responsibly but without being monkish about it, and tries to setup a self-sufficient future is actually the RUBE. The equity owning elites use the various tax loopholes to keep cash that isn't income but "dividends" and the devotees of social degeneracy simply enjoy a taxpayer subsidized orgy of irresponsibility from their earliest adult years all the way through silver years' death, if violent calamity does not land on them in the intervening decades. The government pursues monetary and fiscal policy that inflates the dollar to oblivion and takes yet more of those dwindling dollars out of the hands of the earnestly, albeit naively, pro-social.

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Mean girls, how do they work?

@RobHenderson tweeted this:

wokeness...is much more popular with women (specifically young women)...using tools that we are all by now familiar with: social ostracisation, name calling, rumour mongering, and other 'you can’t sit with us' mean girl behaviour

Which I think is a common and accurate statement.

But how exactly do mean girls arrive at consensus? Is it through one queen bee like Regina George? And, if so, how is that queen bee chosen?

To me, as a man, it is mystifying. Men tend to automatically arrange themselves in hierarchies, with "rule by the best" being the standard organizing principle. By default, best equals size and strength. But, depending on the activity, the hierarchy might be based on charisma, intelligence, wealth, musical ability, etc...

With women, this doesn't seem to happen. In fact, in female social hierarchies, the tall poppies are often ostracized leading to women constantly downplaying their abilities. Women who draw credit to themselves get shot down. So who, then rules, the roost? Is it a person who is uniquely able to play the false modesty game? Or is consensus arrived at organically, with a hive mind deciding who is "in" and who is "out".

Let me say that I'm glad to not have to play these games.

In my analysis, the core of the difference between male and female social status arrangement is the locus of the evaluation rubric.

For men, it's an external, verifiable, and discrete measurement - performance. Who scored the most points? Who brought in the most dollars? Who got everyone to show up for the party/vote/heist? While there is certainly haggling over who should get what percentage of "credit" for a particular success, there is still a "thing" that happened and that everyone can point.

For women, it's the constantly in flux consensus mechanism for status. You're "cool" because enough other people decided you were. Why or how did they decide that? Irrelevant they just did, and at a critical mass that those who disagree with the coolness assessment are necessary in the minority (perhaps not in number, but in social capital within the group). I think you see this in a lot of female coded activities - fashion, art, food, entertainment. Anything that is governed chiefly by the hard to define concept of "taste." There's no discrete external rubric for what makes this year's pants/tops/shoes "in" yet, somehow, everyone seems to know (or is forced to accept) what is "in." Interestingly, this creates a constantly updating mechanism wherein whatever is current in terms of taste sets up its own demise by creating the opportunity for an opposition to develop. You can't get whatever is "in" right just once, you have to update lest you fall "out."

This, to me, is why you have the infamous gender specific difference in neuroticism. Why bitches be so crazy? do women, as a group in general, exhibit higher neuroticism? It's because their constant task is to covertly poll their social groups for the days' social standings which are, in turn, based on subtle expressions of taste (fashion, style, memetic currency etc.) without explicit voicing of opinions by the group members. Male or female, if this was your life, you'd be a little stressed, no?

I'd implore anyone reading this to avoid plunging into normie-feminist rage responses. I tried to describe what I see as differences while doing my best to avoid any implicit value judgements. The female means of determining social status is critically and necessarily important to human families, communities, and societies. A world without women? The closest approximation we have to that is roughly prison. I'll take a daily "mean girls status market" over a daily "avoid random lethal violence" roulette wheel. Furthermore, I do believe women have outsized importance in building and maintaining culture. Politics flows from that, and laws from politics. Many societies have tried to sequester women away from culture and politics - universally, I would say, to their existential risk and eventual death.

But the problem of our time, I'd argue, is that the west has, for 30+ years now, actively fostered cultural developments that try to maximize female styles of behavior, communication, and social status regulation. In the past 10+ years, it has risen to the level of doing so in explicit opposition to all male styles of behavior, communication, and social status regulation. But, wait, please don't think I'm saying "What about men?!". Far from it. The insidious and tragic result of the rise of extremist feminism has been it's disastrous effects on social order as a whole and women specifically. We eat our own with the best and most earnest of intentions.

The closest approximation we have to that is roughly prison.

I don't disagree with the embedded implications of that concerning masculinity, but I find that example somewhat dishonest since prison 1) is not a voluntary or free environment and 2) is filled with people by and large not representative of the average male member of society. You could also have named the military, industrial seafaring, boy scouts or oil rigs, which all paint a much more nuanced view while still containing the same male traits of socialisation that impact prison life.

See my response later in this thread

I'd implore anyone reading this to avoid plunging into normie-feminist rage responses.

wheredoyouthinkweare.jpg

A world without women? The closest approximation we have to that is roughly prison.

Not so much recently, but maybe the army?

Social interaction in groups of women can involve feelings of like and dislike, love and hate at the same time and often towards the same person. Friendship between men and friendship between women isn’t and can probably never be the same. That isn’t because male friendship is particularly deeper; women and men can both have lifelong friends and casual acquaintances and everything in between. But the nature of close female friendship is different.

This is true even within families. For example, sisters who are close to each other will often argue viciously, be nasty and vindictive, but also be very close to each other, speak all the time, be very supportive, be best friends. Brothers are usually very close or very distant. There is either bad blood, good blood, or not much of a real relationship at all.

It is true that men are quicker to forgive their friends than women. But that is in large part because the boundary between friend and foe is more strictly delineated for men than for women. The concept of male camaraderie doesn’t really have an equivalent for women. Women have community, a form of female identity and collectiveness that is no less powerful, that extends in many cases to risking time, effort, disgust to care for another girl throwing up in a bathroom at a party who you’ve never met before out of a shared womanhood, but then also bitching to all your close friends about each other (and the drunk girl at the party) in a way that men, or at least most men, don’t really do.

On one point I disagree. Men join groups and then subordinate themselves to an oft unspoken and yet entirely real hierarchy. So do women. The grounds are no less material though; on both counts usually beauty. That both sexes have in common.

Some men laugh at women online in memes that amount to ‘how can you claim to be a ‘girl’s girl’ if you constantly gossip about each other behind your backs’. True, and indeed intolerable in a male friendship group, presumably. But women can both love and hate their friends, bicker about them in front of some mutual acquaintances and stand up for them in front of others.

One thing that make male hierarchies different than female ones is instability when exposed to the other sex.

Let's say there is a group of boys. One boy is the leader. He's best at sports, and he has natural charisma. When the boys meet the other sex, the girls will be attracted to the male leader. The hierarchy is stable.

Now let's take a group of girls. One girl is the leader. She's charismatic and smart. But when the girls meet a group of boys, the boys all ignore her and pay attention to the dumb blonde instead. The hierarchy is unstable.

This is obviously an oversimplification, but women generally respect male hierarchies more than the opposite.

I appreciate the well thought through feedback. I think it adds a lot to the discussion of the topic.

But women can both love and hate their friends, bicker about them in front of some mutual acquaintances and stand up for them in front of others.

May I request you go into more detail here? A lot of men would see this kind of behavior, in a male group, as sowing dissent and/or destabilizing the group. This could prove fatal in a situation in which group cohesion is necessary (i.e. some sort of intergroup violence). Thus, "talking shit" in male groups is dealt with severely.

Why is this not the same in female groups? Genuine question, not trying to lead anywhere.

A world without women? The closest approximation we have to that is roughly prison.

I appreciate your attempts to be fair and not just turn this into a rant about women. But this strikes me as off the mark. Perhaps prison is the closest approximation we have, perhaps not - but it's not very close if so. The people who get sent to prison are (by and large) bad people. They act in horrifying ways because they acted that way on the outside too. It's kind of like pointing to the most manipulative, sociopathic of women and going "see, this is what women are like without men to moderate them".

A better (though still not perfect) model of a man's world might be fraternities. They do act very badly indeed sometimes, but not on the level of prisons. The main flaw with using them as a model is that they're still very immature young men, so again they aren't necessarily representative of what a true world without women would look like (because that world would have mature as well as immature men and the former would moderate the behavior of the latter). Another model might be young businesses where they only have men on the payroll. These don't tend to be hellscapes of bad behavior as far as I'm aware. They seem to be just focused on getting shit done. This too is probably an imperfect model, albeit the flaws don't stand out to me. But regardless, I think prison is a pretty flawed model and we have better available to us.

I think the male culture within seafaring could be a more accurate example - it's in large part a totally confined social space that developed over the course of millennia with next to zero female influence. We find strict hierarchies - but camaraderie is a given and mutiny an ever-present possibility should the captain fail his crew. It's also a very fratty environment in the sense that hazing is commonplace and there's usually a whole array of crew-specific rituals an shibboleths meant to confer a strong sense of shared identity.

I'll admit imprecision here was a mistake.

I should've said that the group organization mechanisms present in prison are what "pure" or perhaps "raw" male organizational systems look like. You are correct that the general character flaws of most prisoners are not representative of society at large.

Widening the aperture to the military, we see the patterns continue; explicit hierarchies with unambiguous leadership. Strict behavioral codes that, when transgressed, are met with physical violence or, at least, extremely high tension verbal intimidation. College fraternities reduce the propensity for physical violence (mildly) because they still exist in the context of civil society - if you beat up your Frat Bro, you're still probably getting arrested.

The point is this is how men organize themselves when female organizing principles are absent or extremely muted. I'm not an expert on how, say, the eastern Saudi tribal folks organize their extremely patriarchal societies, but I'd be willing to guess we can see some continue through lines there as well.

It's interesting to note that patriarchy is usually conceived of all wrong by westerners for whom patriarchy was not even in living memory when their grandparents were born- it's patriarchy, not andrarchy. Rule by the fathers, who often harshly suppress younger men as much as women. Patriarchal societies are of necessity clannish because ruling over adult sons is the sine qua non. These societies have age gated authority rather than gender gated; yes, men rule over women at the same level, but that's as close to a universal rule as even exists. Intensely clannish societies give older women quite a bit of power and influence because they do the social work to maintain this intense clannishness; the networks of controlling arranged marriages and intense reciprocity structures which maintain the clan as a social unit are done by women even if men theoretically have the final say.

I remember speaking to a woman who fled a particularly strict family in Saudi Arabia in adulthood- she was married off at fifteen but her husband wasn't permitted to see or speak to her beforehand. Instead his mother picked which of the sisters in her family he was to marry. She doesn't know how 'this guy marries a woman from family X' was arrived at. This example is a bit trite, but it illustrates key facts about ultra-patriarchal social structures- unmarried men are tightly policed to bind them into the clan structure, no less than women(albeit in different ways), and authority is exercised by elders over the young. Our resident Indians can probably confirm that their arranged marriages are made by women as well.

This is, despite the name, not a particularly male-oriented macho man environment like, say, VDV barracks or a frat. In fact intensely patriarchal societies mostly lack these kinds of institutions because they separate young men from the controlling power of clan elders.

VDV barracks

A deep, yet topical pull.

I appreciate the important addition of age as more than an additional variable, but a whole new (and indispensable) axis in the very rough model my first post attempted to sketch out.

It leads, I think, to some uncomfortable confrontations with reality in today's world. We just had an election where the sitting president knocked himself out of it by being himself at the first debate. One of the internet's most famous Guys Who Says Stuff asserts "many of the problems of Western society are caused by ... privileging the old over the young.".

The classic RETVRN concept of a patriarchy fails to reconcile the fact that, for most of human society, men reached their wise and philosophic years starting at 40 or so. Then, they were expected to move their talents to the afterlife in their 60s - and this for the luckiest!

Most of us reading this forum will probably live to see extreme scale issues of care for elderly folks in their 80s and 90s with tragic yet real cognitive decline. Obviously, we should not be deferring to their collective "wisdom" in any domain.

I don't have good answers. As much as I have emotional sympathies and inclinations towards a kind of traditionalist social redoubt, the world only moves forward and you have to live in it (but not of it) the way it is.

In practice, the Saudi royal family(which runs on this kind of patriarchy) does a better job of avoiding 'all power to the senile' than the US gerontocracy. I'll wager it'll do a better job than the British monarchy does, as well. We really don't know much about the influence of aged, high status female Sauds(and Saudi Arabia is a personal possession of the Saud clan), but it's a good bet that it exists, given how clan dynamics work. The Saud clan also has super-opaque internal dynamics we only get glimpses of when people are purged, exiled, or murdered, which seems more like a female dynamic to western sensibilities.

I'd point to the privileging of the old over the young which afflicts the west- as in the specific gerontocratic model we see in the anglosphere- as the sort of explicit thing that can only happen when patriarchy is broken; the patriarchal answer to social security is for children to have legal obligations to take care of their aged parents, China had this sort of patriarchal society before Mao and is experiencing issues of relations between the generations running on dynamics which seem inscrutable to westerners. A patriarchal society prefers to keep major social functions within the clan so they can remain under the control of elders rather than the state. This of course means that when natural faculties start to fade the next generation(still quite old, of course) rises in influence because there's no one to stop them.

I don't have good answers. As much as I have emotional sympathies and inclinations towards a kind of traditionalist social redoubt, the world only moves forward and you have to live in it (but not of it) the way it is.

De Maistre wrote about this- 'the counter revolution is not the revolution opposite, but the opposite of the revolution'. In the modern west we see some parallel society movement among social conservatives who nevertheless participate in society- think the Knights of Columbus benefits for their members, or the LDS... everything, or generically Christian health sharing initiatives, or the homeschooling movement. These things are exactly what he's talking about; the establishment of folkways/institutions which accomplish the things needed by a healthy society in a time of chaos is the traditionalist social redoubt, in a form which grows because it is healthy, crowding out the dysfunctional revolutionary folkways until it reaches a position of dominance at which it can calcify into tradition. And the decline in Christianity has halted, per the latest pew poll. Parallel institutions steadily grow. It's the opposite of the revolution, it proceeds agonizingly slowly but steadily, almost unnoticed until the tortoise overtakes the hare's fits and starts and from the perspective of the normie becomes just the way it is.

Surely men are constantly cut down for being tall poppies, it just depends on what dimensions you focus on. Threats can come in many forms – small but too smart would be an example of someone who might get ostracised. Certain social skills just happen to be more weighted dimensions for women than men. That's more complicated as harder to measure, but in large groups where higher status is not dependent on size and strength, equally complex games are going on with men (e.g. in politics).

Surely men are constantly cut down for being tall poppies

This hasn't been my experience.

Men genuinely admire their betters. That guy can jump really high. He can play the guitar well. He is smart. He is tall. These are all good qualities that I admire him for and wish I had.

Conflict among men comes when there are status uncertainties. I think I'm better than him, he thinks he's better than me. Now we have to fight about it.

There's also the case where natural hierarchies are upset by outside forces. I'm better than him, but he got promoted because his dad's the boss/he's black/he kisses ass/etc... Now I hate him for his unearned status and he hates me for my superiority.

small but too smart would be an example of someone who might get ostracised

This is an example of status uncertainty, not tall poppy syndrome. The bully's logic is "I'm big and strong. That means I'm better than this weakling. But he won an award from teacher. Why should this inferior specimen be above me?".

This status confusion is imparted by a third party, the teacher who rewards boys based on an alien value system. None of the boys actually think the "small but smart" kid is a tall poppy. Quite the opposite. He belongs at the bottom of the hierarchy.

On the other hand, in a clique of boys who are on the math team, then the "small but smart" kid might actually be a tall poppy. He is the best at what they do, and he will be admired by the other boys for his skill.

What is happening if a woman is an excellent singer? A perfect mother? A physics professor? Isn't it the same thing, they are claiming status on some dimension but other hypothetical women want status to be primarily based on another axis. Status uncertainty.

If we stick to a situation where a group all share the same preference for what dimension should count most, like I dunno a hockey team. I think everyone respects the best player regardless of gender?

Not exactly sure how to isolate the difference you are talking about here. Perhaps you could give a clear example of a tall poppy situation with women where it is not a case of status uncertainty?

Yeah, thinking about it more, I think it's status uncertainty for both genders. It's just that female status is complicated.

Women are attracted to the top men in male status hierarchies.

Men are attracted to beautiful women, largely ignoring female status hierarchies.

So women have more opportunities for conflict based on status uncertainty. "I'm the best opera singer, but all the boys want to date her instead. It's not fair! Girls, let's sit somewhere else for lunch today".

Women have twin status hierarchies, one based on physical beauty and one based on merit. Men just have one.

Well, there's something in that especially in a school type scenario where attractiveness and status are perhaps most correlated, but I dunno if status is ever really simple. Venkatesh Rao has great material on this and the idea of keeping status deliberately illegible among a group:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/14/the-gervais-principle-iv-wonderful-human-beings/

There are cultures famed for “tall poppy syndrome” like Japan and Scandinavia that were run mostly by men until very recently.

Women take social cues from the women around them. When they perceive a thing to be common in their little sub-society they start doing it. Status comes from a lot of things(including being in a good situation by whatever metric- economically, relationship-wise, etc), but correctly predicting what will become common is a big source(yes, this is a self fulfilling prophecy).

So yes there's a hivemind, and wokeness is good at gaming the hivemind. Think about the woke articles along the lines of so-and-so did X and people on twitter are saying Y. It's stupid but it's creating the illusion of commonality for these beliefs. Or the woke ostracism and cancellation campaigns- when you can signal boost early adopters hard enough you can get people to think they're late adopters and they'll jump on the bandwagon hard.

When they perceive a thing to be common in their little sub-society they start doing it.

You just described the entire nation of Japan.

Is it possible to run Windows 11 without its inherent spyware and your personal data being vacuumed up by MS (or other big tech they might let in or share data with)?

I've never been too keen on 'upgrading', because 10 has been pretty good to me, and 11 introduces few new things, other than a new start menu that most nerds hated, and some added latency, I think. And the TPM requirement that comes with some issues on some mainboards.

But the Win 10 support cycle is coming to an end in half a year. And 11 does offer better window management, for multi display users, so I've heard. 10 does tend to mess with sizes and positions when the display has been switched away from or turned off. And 11 has auto-HDR so that you don't have to remember to go into display settings and enable HDR before launching a game that has HDR...? That's about all I can think of that I want.

Edit: Found this: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

never had problems with win10 LTSC. "support" won't end until 2037 of you care about such things

I just used this when I got a windows 11 laptop, ended up basically identical to old windows 10 builds with it: https://community.spiceworks.com/t/windows-10-11-decrapifier/975250

I'm just going to keep using 10 for whatever hobby stuff I need it for (mostly Photoshop tbh). I've never once had a security issue with any PC, despite always delaying and often turning off updates.

How many security threats are there for your own home system? Most of the issues I see patched are things where software already running on your PC can bypass permissions to do things it shouldn't. How many threats are there where attackers can sneak through your modem and install a keylogger whenever the PC was turned on?

It's time to switch to Linux. There were some good threads on here recently.

I use Linux and fucking hate it. There's no clear instructions on how to do anything. I have hardware encoding and decoding working perfectly... Except in any chromium-based browser, and no amount of troubleshooting has gotten me any closer to figuring it out.

It's not even clear to me how to go about finding out how to find things out with Linux. Shit ends up in random folders that can only be accessed through the terminal, unless it manages to make it into the macOS ripoff start menu

Yeah, it's still not perfect unfortunately. One upside of the impending paperclippening is that the chatbots have ingested everything ever written about how to solve Linux problems. If you haven't tried it yet, I'd recommend prompting an LLM to act like a condescending neckbeard expert Linux user and friendly troubleshooter, with permission to ask you for further info or to ask you to run commands, and see if you can get it to narrow down your problem.

I might try Linux on my backup PC but I can't see myself maining it. I paid a lot of money for a gaming rig and I intend to use it.

Proton has become astonishingly good. The main problems I think are around invasive anti-cheat systems.

https://x.com/zack_overflow/status/1894821367331332153#m

Hmm. Cool.

A rather broad question rather than a small one: do you enjoy being embodied, feeling and doing stuff with your physical body in the real world?

For me, the answer is obvious – I would leave my body behind and not interact with the physical environment at all if I could. I just don’t feel any positive emotions moving around, being present, interacting with objects that aren’t a screen of some form. I never did for some reason, even as a kid.

It is strange because I’m a fairly healthy male in my late 20s without any disabilities, nor am I terribly out of shape (although I am slightly overweight due to working a sedentary job nowadays, but I had the same feeling even when I was at a normal weight), so I should theoretically be the prime demographic for enjoying bodily sensations. Some people have described intense physical activity to me as being inherently pleasurable – I’ve played my fair share of sports at the insistence of my parents as a teenager, and never felt anything other than irritation during and after training, so hearing others say it feels like listening to an alien describing the awesome parties of Alpha Centaura.

This sincere distaste for being embodied extends to a lot of aspects of life that most people tend to find enjoyable – I don’t care much for travel, tinkering with things or the physical side of sex either. I constantly find myself actively not wanting to go places or do things with my hands, and would probably be among the first to start living in some VRMMO full-time, Ready Player One style, once (okay, okay, “if”, let a man cope) it becomes an option.

Is this some fairly unique side-effect of the ‘tism that makes me miss out on universal human experiences, or do some of you feel that way as well?

Definitely not unique, this is a component of ascetism, Buddism, Schopenhauer(ism?). You can try Nietzsche as a embodiment-affirming response to these feelings.

I think that, if I could not constantly feel assured of my own tangible existence, then I would constantly feel nervous about the continued tangible existence of whatever computer server I would be running on. But I don't think that really counts as "enjoying being embodied".

I used to feel this way, and often experienced a sense of profound disappointment when I snapped back to reality after finishing a good book, video game, or daydream and "remembered that I exist" for lack of a better term, but that rarely happens nowadays. I think accepting that you have a body, or more properly that you are a body, is part of becoming a mature human being (we are called human beings and not human experiencings for a reason) and the once unspoken but perhaps nowadays more necessary corollary of accpeting one's mortality. Not that I'd turn down transhumanist brain uploading or life extension technologies if they existed and were offered to me, but until I see proof that they work with my own eyes I will defer to the wisdom of our ancestors and not assume I'm part of the first generation that will transcend this material form.

Yes, I do. When I was younger I didn't, simply because I was weak, clumsy but healthy, so I didn't really consider my body an asset.

If I could digitally project my consciousness on and off by choice to free myself from neck/back pain so I can just read/think without concern for posture, hunger, etc. I would probably do it for >70% of my day.

But if it had to be a permanent one-time decision then no (at least not unless my physical condition deteriorates much further). There are too many real-world physical sensations that I can't imagine giving up: snowboarding down a powdery mountain, making perfect contact on a full-force tennis swing and knowing you set your feet in position perfectly and watching the ball go exactly where you willed it, cutting through the water with a well-executed freestyle rhythm.

I felt similarly to you about many things before trying out the above. I would say try out some physical activities that have that sort of instant and unique tactile feedback if you haven't. Rock climbing is another that seems popular for it, though I never really felt drawn by it. People talk about runner's high, or a sense of relief after an intense lifting session, but I absolutely hate running and weight-lifting. It'll be different for everyone.

Are you pursuing the right physical sensations? Have you dipped your feet in a cold slowly water on a hot day? Laid in the sand and moved your hand around? Wind through your hair on a very windy day? Do you enjoy the sensation of the sun on your face? Tried weighted blankets? Gone down a hall on a bicycle?

I very much enjoy being embodied and think of my body as integral to me. We are inseparable and I think if my consciousness was separated from my body I would be a different person.

I've been an athlete and been in athletic competitions my entire life and I thoroughly enjoy the physical aspect in addition to the competition. I've found driving my body to its limit to be enjoyable and rewarding. I find the physical aspect of sex with the breathing, the contact, and the smells to be the better part of it. I think physically being near people is very important for my connection to them. I've found video games to be empty beyond the competitive/cognitive nature of them or feelings of accomplishment when I complete something. I get little or no enjoyment from "flying" or "jumping" or "falling" in a video game and likewise do not particularly care about graphics or spectacles. I very much enjoy jumping, flying, and falling in my body.

I've always found transhumanism to be anti-human. How much have you or do you video game and for how long? I've found among hardcore gamers, they regularly have similar feelings of detachment from their body.

How much have you or do you video game and for how long?

My total gaming time is easily in the tens of thousands of hours, and I've been doing it since I was 4 or 5. Every year I bang out another 1500-2000 hours or thereabout. It's definitely a contributing factor, I'd say, although I was a bookish child anyway and whenever I wasn't playing, I'd be sitting down with a book or watching a cartoon, not running around. I'm not sure I would have turned out particularly different from who I am now in my preferences if video games were never invented.

The only time I've ever felt like you've described is when I tried to stay up for as long as I could and made it to about 3 1/2 days. At about the 2 1/2 day mark I started to feel disassociated from my body.

How often in your life have you felt genuine fear? I'm wondering if exposing yourself to things which I've found to cause genuine fear or physical stimulus, e.g., sky diving or rock climbing or motorcycle racing etc., would get you to re-embody, if that's something you would be interested in.

Do you get real fear, excitement, heart pounding, etc., when you're playing video games?

I'm more okay with it now than I used to be. Mostly thanks to meditation, which builds equanimity and physical presence at the same time. And I like doing cardio exercise (on good equipment!). And I like eating good food and other sensual pleasures... shrug

I don't hate my body. It comes in handy at times. It does what I ask it to, mostly, and hasn't broken down from old age even though I'm past the nominal best-by date.

That being said, I am a transhumanist, and would happily ditch it for an upgrade. I'd be more than ready to upload my mind into a computer, while relying on physical end-effectors to do things in the real world.

I’ve played my fair share of sports at the insistence of my parents as a teenager, and never felt anything other than irritation during and after training, so hearing others say it feels like listening to an alien describing the awesome parties of Alpha Centaura.

More or less the same. Never enjoyed sports much, though I did like tennis. Football was a nightmare since I wear glasses.

I don’t care much for travel, tinkering with things or the physical side of sex either

Can't say I don't like sex, but I'm not one for proactively seeking to travel. I'll go if someone does all the hard work of planning things out, and occasionally find the results enjoyable. Physical tinkering was never a real hobby, beyond it being a necessity for doing things like building a PC. I want the computer, I don't want to pay the premium for a prebuild, so I made one myself.

Is this some fairly unique side-effect of the ‘tism that makes me miss out on universal human experiences, or do some of you feel that way as well?

Autism often comes with sensory processing issues and body dysphoria.

I hate VR, but I used to, maybe 15 years ago, play WoW, and I enjoyed running and flying and interacting in that world--sometimes I'd think "If this were the real world, there is no way in hell I'd still be running right now" after crossing the entirety of Eversong Woods. I spent hours playing, then one day my wife took a photo of me in my headphones staring seriously at the screen and I had a moment. I quit not long after.

But to answer your question "do I enjoy being embodied and doing stuff with my physical body" the answer is what I suspect it would be for most: Sometimes. Most of the time probably. Even after having my ass kicked and thrown all over the floor in Aikido, when I come home and shower and then get into the furo I feel sore as hell--but I feel alive. I was having this conversation with my oldest son recently: I feel most alive when I am walking in the freezing cold at 4:30 am going to the train station. If it's pissing down rain or snowing, all the more.

I am not a masochist. But you don't get to my age without having experienced a lot of physical discomfort (and I am relatively whole and healthy with all my limbs, unlike many.) You learn to enjoy the relaxing moments in the warm bed, or in the pool, or on the couch, or having a glass of wine at the kitchen table with your wife where the room is heated, while at the same time holding in the back of your head that this is only a brief respite from the freezing cold or burning heat, from hunger and fear and extreme exhaustion and a walking journey with a big pack where the end will not be for hours and hours and you have to make sure of not only your own safety but that of others, and you're scared shitless but that's your lot. That's an earthquake away. Or fill in your disaster. To say nothing of the eventual hospital or hospice bed where you may someday be in constant freakish pain without IV analgesics.

Yes I enjoy being embodied. Or more to the point, until your post, I've never questioned that "being embodied" is anything but reality, or that anything that is not that is unreality, or a Baudrillard hyperreality. Maybe when I was a kid and I watched that Star Trek OS episode Spock's Brain where his mind is literally disembodied (Brain and brain! What is brain?)

I'm intrigued at your feelings of what you're calling "severe distaste," particularly in that you say you've felt them since childhood. It makes me wonder if gaming has knocked loose something in the human brain that shouldn't be knocked loose.

Nota bene: I am old. You will get different perspectives on this.

Nota bene: I am old. You will get different perspectives on this.

That is by far the biggest downside of a baseline human body, and why I don't want to be stuck in one even if I like mine.

It will, despite our best medicines, decay and fail you. Maybe our drugs and treatments will get better, and we can keep people healthy indefinitely. But even then, I want things that no human body constrained by biology will be able to provide.

I'm not physically decrepit. Well, not yet. When I say old I mean mainly my perspective is different from that of the generation that grew up online.

Edit: As for the remainder of your comment, I'm at a loss. The human condition is its frailty and finitude. The Gift of Men, as Tolkien wrote.

The human condition is its frailty and finitude. The Gift of Men, as Tolkien wrote.

"Aging and death are good, actually" is the biggest fucking cope I have seen in my life.

I'm not as much of a transhumanist as some of the other rationalists, but I really don't think wanting to live until the heat death of the universe in an 18-year-old body is too much to ask.

I can't tell if you're calling George's words or Tolkien's "cope", but if it's the latter then I think you're mistaken. Tolkien was Catholic, and his setting reflected his beliefs. Death is absolutely a good thing in that framework, because you get to be with God, and that is such a profound joy that all else pales in comparison (even being in an 18-year-old body until the heat death of the universe).

Also, I think you're underrating how weary the world can become after even just our short stay here. Some of those problems would be obsolete in your hypothetical scenario, but not all. At some point, when you've seen a pointless genocide for the hundred thousandth time, is the fact that your body works great really that much of a solace? One thing I've noticed in spending time with old people (proper old, not @George_E_Hale lol) is that they are often quite ready to lay down their cares and rest. And the young never quite understand it because they just haven't been through enough of life to get to the point where death seems like a welcome end to things (with some exceptions, like very depressed people). But it's a very real thing, and to be honest I can understand it a lot more now at (almost) 40 than I could at 25.

I would think somewhere around 22 is more advantageous for a man.

Well I'm happy to have contributed to the biggest something in your life. I really dislike the neologism "cope" used in this way--rationalization/delusion is what you mean?

Whether aging and death are good or not is beside the point, or beside my own point. They've always been part of the human condition. Knowing your time is limited--and it will always be limited, regardless of how much progress longevity science makes--is a large contributor to what gives that time meaning.

If someone is that greatly attached to their frailty and finitude, then who am I to object? I won't, as long as they don't get in the way of me escaping mine.

There are plenty of aspects of the "human condition" that were ubiquitous and seemingly unavoidable for all of human history till they were not. I don't think most people miss 50% infant mortality rates, or heart attacks being inevitable death. They're not going to miss old age either, and if they really want that experience for themselves, that's their prerogative.

For what it's worth, the human condition seems to be a consistent trend of overcoming how awful said condition could be at times.

Imagine that tomorrow we perfect mind-upload. Your entire brain, and with it your identity and memories get cloned into an AI. You get to meet the AI, it’s really you. But the physical you, the meat you, still exists. The AI is a clone. I presume there would be no need to kill yourself, but would you no really longer have fear of death in your physical body? I doubt it. The thing about us living forever is that even if it happens in your lifetime, it probably won’t be ‘you’ living forever.

That is a strict improvement over the status-quo.

I'm not a biological chauvinist, and I think that the upload has equal claim to my name and assets. I also expect that unless things go really awry, the human version would probably end up acquiring biological immortality eventually. Destructive scans seem much easier than ones that preserve the original, but the latter isn't a bad thing as far as I'm concerned. It always leaves the option of another upload, one when the original is closer to death.

Even if that wasn't the case, I'd rest easier. Growing old and dying of old age sucks, but it is a great comfort to have seen your grandkids be born, follow in your footsteps and flourish. You can die with fewer regrets. In the same manner, if I had a backup, even one that would outlive me, I'd wish it well, and know that it would share most of my goals and desires, and would mourn my passing.

would mourn my passing.

Or feel relief about not having some progenitor who's seen as more-real-than-you hanging aroung anymore.

I suspect there will be all kinds of dysfunctions with the uploads themselves and revolving around them. The psychologists of the future will have their quackery cut out for them.

The best person to speculate about a copy of myself would be me. And I don't think that would happen.

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False premise, this isn't perfect mind upload.

The state of the art in sci-fi, last time I checked, was that you stay conscious as they disconnect your brain cells one by one (or some small enough increment) and replace them with the artificial ones, slowly so that you can fill the gaps in your memories back in Ship of Theseus style and have no doubt you're staying yourself.

Imagine if it was perfect mind upload, and you find yourself back in your meat body after the mind upload is complete. You can kill yourself, but you have to do it yourself. Now answer the question.

Refer to the edit. In the process I described, the meat body is wiped by the process, if it failed the only way I could end up is "dead".

If it was the mind upload you described, I would not undergo it as it's pointless. Or rather, I would see it as some self-fetishistic form of procreation and would do it only as soon as I wanted to bear a digital child who was a copy of me. Naturally, I wouldn't like to share my bank account with them.

You been playing soma recently?

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I am certainly not suggesting that medical science and longevity are net negatives. Looked at from your materialist perspective, again, your viewpoint makes perfect sense.

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