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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3812 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 11, 2023

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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Recently this community was asked about its overal opinion on Edward Dutton in a now-deleted comment. I didn't chime in since I don't have a firm view of the man one way or another, but I did happen to check out one of his latest media appearances a couple of weeks before I saw the comment. Now that there's a new small-scale question thread, I decided to re-listen to that particular segment on the Stark Truth Radio.

Roughly at 47:04, Dutton starts making an argument about generational hormone cycles and references Peter Turchin, and then claims that William Strauss and Neil Howe argued way back in 1997 (in their book The Fourth Turning, presumably) that the 2020s will be a decade of appalling conflicts, because young people will be high on dopamine or something. I find this somewhat surprising, and if Dutton happens to misrepresent or falsify their scientific argument, it's obviously not a sign of his credibility or integrity. I've never read that book so I can't tell if this is the case, but I'm sure at least one regular here has, because generational theory appears to be a popular subject here overall, for good reason, I should add.

So can anyone comment on this?

Has the popularity of “prank” shows, starting with Candid Camera and *Punk’d” and then on to the massively popular (and utterly garbage) Impractical Jokers, contributed to a lower-trust society? Or is it merely a reflection of the decline in social trust?

It seems, naïvely, that prank shows like these could not have existed in (at least American) 1940s or 1950s society; the overall sense of propriety in public spaces, and the general expectation that one should be what one purports to be and deal forthrightly and in an upstanding manner with others, seems like it was far too high to permit would-be pranksters to operate without scorn.

It seems to suggest something ugly and mean-spirited about our culture that so many TV watchers apparently enjoy watching pranks played on others, and enjoy watching grown men walk around in public creating mistrust and confusion. I don’t like the idea that people are being rewarded for helping to foster an environment in which one can never truly be sure if the guy they’re dealing with is someone totally different from who he purports to be. If I go to a restaurant or a grocery store, I want to be pretty much 100% certain that I’m not going to be forced to participate in tomfoolery instead of just getting what I wanted and expected based on normal societal functioning. If I get asked to a job interview, I want to be damn sure it’s a real job interview and not some farcical joke.

Am I just being a massive fuddy-duddy? Is my obviously-escalating cortisol level turning me into a dour misanthrope? Is the existence of popular prank shows actually helping to strengthen our society’s inoculation against actual con-men, by cultivating people’s healthy suspicion of the motives of others? Is all of this just totally irrelevant and it’s not that deep?

Technology allows us to quickly discover revealed preferences. In terms of TV you might think that most people would like X, but the ratings reveal there are some people that really have a preference for prank comedy.

We don’t know the exact motive for why people like prank TV shows, but it could partially be a social signaling behavior. It signals to other people that they aren’t a fuddy-duddy if they like a watching show about pranks even if they personally wouldn’t want a prank to played on the people they care about.

The same is true of social media. The algorithms show that prank videos will get you a good amount of engagement.

How much of the desire to watch prank comedy is driven by innate desire vs. it being an easy way to socially signal? I don’t know, but the demographics might provide a clue. The prank shows are generally more watched by younger demographics. To me this is an indicator that the revealed preference for prank shows is really more of a preference to socially signal and distinguish yourself from older generations and uptight rule-following people.

Hasn’t it gotten much, much easier to produce such content? And even easier to distribute it, thus allowing gentlemen such as ourselves to partake?

I am reminded of some of the old Chaplin or Keaton films, relying on set-based stunts and slapstick comedy. The work of dozens or hundreds of people, all to get this man and his silly costume on camera. Now an amateur can produce his own comedy without even paying another actor. I think this lowered barrier alone would increase the supply of prank comedy, just like reality TV will always have a cost advantage over high-concept dramas with elaborate wardrobes.

Decent probability this is fake, but there was a short viral video recently of a "social experiment" where you see the target pause, consider what's going on, and conclude that "no. There's no possible way this is genuine, not even as a real pick-up line. I must be on camera."

Funny, sure, but also a bit sad.

I feel the same way about most unprovoked social interactions in public, except it's almost always about money, not entertainment. One time, someone waved at me, gave a smile and said they liked my hair. This is extremely rare. I never get compliments, and this one brightened my day. Immediately, my brain screamed "scam. They're lying. They want money. It's not real", and I told my brain to shut up. Just this once, we will give this person a chance. They said something nice. There are nice people in the world. Reciprocate. So I stopped, we introduced each other. They were about my age, seemed interesting. We talked about school or something for five minutes. It was pleasant.

Then they got to the part where they just needed fifty bucks to pay cab fare across town to meet their sister. They normally wouldn't ask for money but..

I walked away mid-sentence.

I strongly suspect that some the low-tech equivalents of prank shows were existed in the 1940s and 1800s, whether that be individual groups of young people pulling pranks. Can't think of any examples off the top of my head though. Also pretty sure scams were widespread (although likely less than now, internet makes finding good marks easy and the current grant of anonymity to internet users (which could rescinded should a govt choose!) makes punishing scammers harder).

If humor is about exploring contrast or confusion, pranks serve the function of playing around with situations that are socially marginal or bad, informing individuals of what happens within them without actually causing the potential harm. So a prank where you steal a friend's trinket might help illuminate the routes by which an actual thief could steal something important. Obviously that literal prank serves no such function today, but you can imagine how something something evolution and how humor might serve that function in some ways today.

And that doesn't mean prank shows are good - it's still a simulacra of something that once had purpose but no longer does - but it's not really reducing trust as the thing it mimics normally builds trust, in the same way that fucking around with your friends builds trust.

Okay, a quick google found this. Which, after I googled, I noticed was in your OP! But wikipedia describes it as a popular TV show beginning in 1948. So, clearly, they did exist in the 1950s? "it often featured practical jokes" ... "The show involved concealed cameras filming ordinary people being confronted with unusual situations, sometimes involving trick props, such as a desk with drawers that pop open when one is closed or a car with a hidden extra gas tank. When the joke was revealed, victims were told the show's catchphrase, "Smile, you're on Candid Camera." The catchphrase became a song with music and lyrics by Sid Ramin."

I've also never been 'pranked' in a grocery store, or a job interview, and don't think many randomly-selected americans have been either. I haven't met anyone who has. I think in at least half of all pranks (e.g. on youtube or tiktok), the supposed victims are in on it, and the other half are infrequent enough that pranks themselves aren't an issue.

I had no idea that Candid Camera was that old!!! I’ve only seen episodes from like the 80s onward. That certainly does poke a significant hole in my theory.

It is certainly true that scammers were widespread in the 19th century and earlier, and even that fairly benign flim-flam artists and carnival barker sorts, like P.T. Barnum, were able to secure significant financial gain and celebrity even from people who acknowledged their dishonesty. Perhaps it’s just the ubiquity/saturation of “prank” content now, and the particularly grating and lowbrow aesthetics of the ones that seem popular, that have unjustly triggered my snobbish instincts.

I highly recommend the candid camera movie spin off "What would you say to a naked lady" which I believe is still on Amazon prime. It's the basic premise, but the hidden camera just films people confronted with a naked young woman in various quotidian circumstance. Some laugh, some ogle, some try to cover her up or help her, some proposition.

Is is a consequence of shitty behavior no longer being unacceptable. These shows are the symptom of the enshittening of the culture. Which, I suspect, is a consequence of post-modernism, ultimately - if nothing has any meaning or value, then everything is equally shitty, so why bother not being shitty? Some people find their answers to that question, but many don't.

I think you are on to something, of all the entertainment genres comedy seems to be the most dependent on the mood of the times. Standup, comedy films and TV shows rarely age well (there are notable exceptions).

But there's another element, people today enjoy cringe which also seems to be a more recent phenomenon. People like seeing others humiliated. Schadenfreude is a natural human vice, but enjoying that feeling you get when you watch a video of someone be humiliated? I don't recall America's Funniest Home videos featuring cringe to that extent, really /r/cringe on Reddit portrays a genre that doesn't seem to have a pre-internet equivalent.

I think the rise of cringe humor is mostly due to the popularity of The Office and its various copycats. I also feel like cringe humor was more of a 2010s phenomenon (the way "random" humor was a 2000s phenomenon) and this decade we're seeing more of what I would call "saccharine" humor in shows like Ted Lasso where the goal is to making jokes that no one could possibly find offensive (and I therefore find totally unfunny).

It really is incredible how quickly the reddit tier comedy memes come and go, and you look back and wonder how anyone found them funny. Comedy seems to be a very communal form of entertainment where everyone is on the same wavelength through some sort of psychic powers. Other genres seems more individualistic and timeless, like romance or adventure. Comedy ages like milk.

I don't know if comedy always ages like milk, even if it's very "of its time." For example, Beavis and Butthead is very characteristic of 90s "dumb idiot" humor (Homer Simpson, Adam Sandler movies, Dumb and Dumber, etc.) but has stood the test of time quite well IMO.

Unz goes through a litany of historians who (seemingly?) confirm the authenticity of the papers. Whereas the JTA link you posted reasserts the denial of the Polish ambassador who would have surely said the same thing no matter the veracity of the documents, as the documents were embarrassing to Poland’s relationship to the Allies. In any case I am also interested in your question.

As someone who used to listen to Coast to Coast AM all night every summer in my, er, late youth, I'm curious to know if there are any interesting developments in cryptozoology or paranormal activity over the past few years. I kinda lost the plot on the UFO stuff, the conversation always feels so masturbatory ("The government says [something exciting]!" but the [something exciting] always seems to be something, um, not exciting, to me...)

No one responded to you so I am going to give you something tangential to what you are asking, the Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World podcast.

His coverage seems fair, though his metaphysical assumptions might be different from yours. Example episodes:

UFO: https://sqpn.com/2023/04/the-cash-landrum-ufo-incident-radiation-government-experiment-cover-up/

Loch Ness: https://sqpn.com/2022/12/analyzing-the-loch-ness-monster/

Time Slip? : https://sqpn.com/2023/02/the-versailles-time-slip-moberly-jourdain-incident-an-adventure/

Thanks for the recommendation! I'll give it a listen.

Why are there so few modern surveys of what IQ researchers think? I was reading a comment on Reddit the other day which was citing surveys from the 1990s.

This is just off the cuff but honestly I’d expect the 90s research to be better not worse. My impression is online IQ tests with heavily self selected populations are too influential and hurt generalizability.

Fasting like exercise are hormetic stressors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis

Your claim about universal paradoxal evidence about nutritional science is erroneous because exercise and fasting are special cases, few things are simultaneously toxic and beneficial.

Humans lose their scarce attention span on weak nutraceuticals while ignoring the real landmarks of the ageing process and its potent solutions such as MTAs AKA skq1

note if you have diabete I would look into ALCAR given that it significantly reduce reliance on sugar for energy production as it shift the ratio towards lipid beta peroxidation, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10877193/

A lot of it comes down to just experimenting and tracking your results. Change 1 variable at a time and measure vitals and how you feel.

Even if you have the science right there are still many variables between people and confounding interactions that won’t be explained. Some people will respond to a nootropic very well because they are deficient in something, some will need a higher dose, some will have no effect, some will get an atypical reaction due to genetics or something in their diet.

You can use the science and anecdotes to find a good hypothesis to test, but the only way to know for sure how something will impact you is to try it while holding other nutrition variables consistent. Try making 1 change at a time while keeping diet/exercise/supplements the same so you can isolate the effect of each change.

Also, if you’re dealing with supplements make note of what deficiency symptoms or excess symptoms are typical to give you potential indicators that you have too little/much of something. For instance, I sometimes get restless legs after long workouts and I found out that might be caused by a magnesium deficiency. I also know that excess magnesium has a laxative effect. So I started taking a magnesium supplement after workouts and I stopped getting restless legs. I also know I wasn’t taking too much magnesium because I didn’t get the typical symptoms associated with too much magnesium.

IIRC some forms of magnesium are less laxative

I don't think you can screw things up too badly doing a 16:8 diet. The alternating days diet seems more sketchy to me, but maybe I'm wrong. Cut sugar out of your diet as well as processed grains. Drink enough water each day. Make sure you get all your electrolytes. Get high quality sleep. Don't eat or drink 2-3 hours before going bed. Don't look at screens or artificial light 1-2 hours before bed. Get a sleep study done. Get an oral appliance and/or CPAP if needed. Exercise and not too intensely before bed. Blah blah blah.

Unfortunately, you can’t outsource epistemology. Nutrition “science” is particularly bad because it’s chock full of motivated reasoning and profit motives. Everyone is looking for the next big thing to make a quick buck.

The only thing that will reliably work is to build a gears-level understanding of biochemical processes from the ground up.

I'm pretty sure research/epistemology as a service is a viable untapped market.

The reality though is that people are not looking for the next big thing, people might pretend they do but they don't, MTAs and thymus involution for example are very little talked about the same goes for KEAP inhibitors. Humans are simply too scientifically illiterate to discover them and meta-researchers like me are an almost extinct specie

See, they tried this with MetaMed. The problem is that anyone clever enough to figure out that service A is legit while service B is worthless trash is smart enough to just do the research themselves and save the money.

Are Nazis or neo-Nazis a problem in the United States, or is it just fear mongering?

I have trouble pointing out exactly what they're actually achieving, but also it does seem like they've been a lot louder recently. Is that only because the fear mongers are giving them more attention, or is it because they are more brazen and have higher numbers?

Are they only a problem if they actually get some sort of power, or cause some sort of harm? Or are they a problem for simply expressing that they want to cause harm? Is that what they're even expressing?

The only Nazis that are a problem in the United States are a fairly small number of gangs which use Nazi symbols, call themselves white supremacists, and otherwise engage mostly in typical criminal activities. These are not really any bigger of a problem than other criminal orgs, and in fact are all together probably much less of one than several explicitly non-white groups are individually.

The rest are just larpers that have trouble getting ten people into a room.

I think they effectively don't exist. There aren't literally zero, but they're smaller and less significant than alien abduction believers, flat earthers, moon landing deniers, and any other ultra-fringe ideologies.

The actual Nazi party was very much a creature of 1920s Germany. Their full ideology and goals are pretty much about that time and situation. Pretty much nobody pays much attention to all the details of it now.

There are some fools who like to fly Nazi flags and basically LARP as them. You can look around at their channels. They never seem to manage to gather more than 3-5 people in any place at once. They don't seem to have much interest in actual Nazi ideology, they more seem to just want to wave the symbols around because it really pisses off liberals. They don't really seem to do much except post stickers around their towns and drop banners on highway overpasses once in a while.

The paths to actual political power in the US are pretty clear and well-known. Participate in local party politics, volunteer for stuff, work hard, try to climb the ladder, buddy up with other up-and-comers who are further ahead, etc. It's by no means easy to make it past the entry-level, but it's all pretty clear and mostly above-board. Nobody who flies Nazi symbols is making it past the front door of any actual political organization. Even if the ideas and behavior weren't rejected entirely, the people who do it are mostly trying to declare that they're "too good" for actual politics and have no interest in or ability to work within any particular system, which mostly involves a lot of compromise and sucking up to people before anyone will even listen to any wild out-there ideas you might have.

Of course, revolutionary politics tries to bypass that sort of thing. But very rarely with any success. To have even a chance of success, you have to be a lot bigger and a lot more organized, and you need to have a crisis of faith in the current institutions. Okay, we might be in shouting distance of a crisis of faith, but nobody outside the mainstream political parties is organized anywhere near well enough to have the slightest hint of a chance of taking advantage of that, certainly not any Nazi flag-fliers.

I think they do exist and have a measurable influence, but that influence is about as small as possible while not being non-existent. I would agree that alien abduction believers are more influential.

https://twitter.com/RichardBSpencer?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Richard Spencer does have 70k followers on Twitter, and while he does seem smart enough to avoid putting any blatant "Blacks are dumb beasts and Jews want to control us" on his actual Twitter, his podcast is a bit less veiled and does get at believing blacks are worse than whites.

My opinion is that people panicking about Nazis being on the verge of taking over are fools. But that it is a good policy to do stuff like ban open Nazis from social media platforms, because spreading that rhetoric isn't good.

because spreading that rhetoric isn't good.

This may be the stated reason, but the real reason is simply that most people do not want to have to scroll past swastikas on their way to NBA updates, radio station contest announcements, cat pictures, memes, and personal life updates, and consider this significantly worse than advertisements.

I don't think Richard Spencer is very significant. Yes, he has 70k-ish followers. But I don't think that alone means much - some may be fake, some may be hate-reading, or just wondering what he's going to say next. If you flip through his most recent dozen or so tweets, engagement is pretty low - replies and retweets mostly in the single digits and likes in the low double digits.

I agree that panicking about them taking over anything is foolish. I disagree that banning them is good policy. Fundamentally, actual Nazism is stupid and annoying. Why ban them unless you think their arguments are extremely persuasive? They're not. Banning them just gives them a persecution complex and makes people think they are cool and dangerous - their ideas must be really great, or they wouldn't bother silencing them! Wanna rebel from the system? Wave a Nazi flag, it's what the system really hates! Instead, give them all the rope they need to show everyone exactly how stupid and annoying they are. That's what we do here, and it works. We have some posters writing Nazi-adjacent ideas. You can read the threads, it's pretty clear that they aren't convincing anyone that their ideas are good. The only thing I would ban or block somehow is aggressive abuse of random users.

They are not. Neo Nazis that exist are a joke.

Are they only a problem if they actually get some sort of power, or cause some sort of harm? Or are they a problem for simply expressing that they want to cause harm? Is that what they're even expressing?

What else are they going to do? For all that it is considered legitimate, never forget that democratic violence via law is still violence. You can't send a nice letter to a non-white family telling them to evacuate the premises without the law being willing to beat them into submission literally.

Are Nazis or neo-Nazis a problem in the United States, or is it just fear mongering?

For any reasonable definition of "a problem in the United States", they are not. It's not even fear mongering as such - except limited number of feeble-minded students of liberal arts colleges, I don't think many people seriously believe there's a threat. It makes sometimes very convenient though to pretend there's a threat, as emergency situation allows to demand emergency powers, and if we're under the threat of Nazi overwhelming Our Democracy (TM), then we can carpet bomb anything right of the center and feel good about it - if somebody innocent got hit, well, the exceptional situation left us no choice.

Otherwise, there are a bunch of sorry fucks that play with soon-to-be-100-years-old symbols and thousands of years old hate, because they couldn't figure anything better to do with their sorry lives. There are a bunch of different sorry creatures - somewhat represented right here in this very forum - who think it makes them cool and insightful to blame The Joos in everything bad that ever happened and inhabit the role of a person being persecuted for revealing The Terrible Truth. The former can be dangerous as any criminal or insane person can be dangerous - people are capable of hurting people, and the Nazi people specifically associated themselves with the movement that murdered millions, so their barrier for hurting other people is pretty low, and so is their level of rational consideration. But since they have neither power nor numbers, outside of their immediate vicinity, the danger of them is minimal. The latter are toxic but mostly inconsequential and the best is just to ignore them.

Weird question. When I was in 4th grade, in the early 90s, we did a multi-day segment on AIDS, where they just went and scared the shit out of us.

So in my 20s any time I did something remotely risky, I'd freak out and go to the doctor. And they'd always ask if I was gay. And when I said no they seemed like they stopped taking seriously the possibility that I contracted it.

And looking back on it it finally just hit me. Was the whole program I went through in 4th grade a massive psyop aimed to stop gays from being stigmatized?

If so I feel honestly betrayed. It feels extremely wrong to use children in that way, even if the end seems like a good one.

Was the whole program I went through in 4th grade a massive psyop aimed to stop gays from being stigmatized?

No. It was a regular panic, which has happened dozens of times before or after. Exhibit one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reefer_Madness This kind of ham-fisted propaganda exists about every topic the government ever wanted to propagandize, and in every language which any government speaks. And, as you witnessed on yourself, it worked - that's why they keep doing it.

I don't even think they thought of the gay angle - in fact, when AIDS was considered the "gay disease", the approach to it was quite dismissive, and the panic came later, when it turned out it's not, actually, exclusive to gays. Still, male gay penetrative sex has much more probability for AIDS transmission than hetero sex, and gay sexual mores are more promiscuous than among straights, which means for the doctor makes sense to take this factor into account, and evaluate the likelihood of the disease in that light.

Don’t think so.

Magic Johnson announced his diagnosis in 1991. So did Freddie Mercury, dying the following day . AIDS deaths peaked in ‘95. New cases peaked a bit earlier. You were living through the culmination of a decade of health panic.

Condoms substantially reduce the risk of transmission of chlamydia, gonorrhoea and trichomoniasis. However, since all the above are very much curable diseases, and since teenagers are infamously horny, impulsive and reckless, warning teenagers against them has little impact on condom usage.

Consider that before the HIV/AIDs pandemic, gonorrhea rates surged in the US. That was the sexual revolution and its aftermath. The only way to convince young people to use condoms was to put the fear of death into them. Accordingly, as it has become widespread knowledge that HIV is no longer a death sentence in almost all cases, STD rates (among heterosexuals) have shot up.

Yes. That's exactly what happened.

We saw it again with Monkeypox, where no one was willing to say "hey, this is mostly in a subset of the gay population, they should probably take precautions and it won't spread". This wound up costing some number of gay lives, but it was worth it to the powers that be to avoid a rando right-winger on the internet fulminating about gay diseases.

Public health is just political arguments as soldiers.

This is a weird argument to make given that, in my recollection, this:

"hey, this is mostly in a subset of the gay population, they should probably take precautions and it won't spread"

is exactly what happened. All my gay male friends got the vaccine (which was targeted at gay men and was pretty much never even promoted to straight men or women).

From the first New York Times article about monkeypox that shows up when I google it (from June 2022):

Nearly all of the cases outside of Africa have been in men who have sex with men. In New York, only 1.4 percent of monkeypox patients self-identified as straight, with the rest describing themselves as gay, bisexual or declining to say, according to city data.

They did come around, luckily before the thing metastasized. But before that, there was a month or so of disinformation during which a lot of people caught a very nasty disease.

Relevant - https://youtube.com/watch?v=mKc32jQIY0w

the trouble is that some children are timorous and some children are reckless. In order to save the lives of reckless children, warnings are calibrated for their safety, the result of which is that the timorous live in a state of perpetual terror. What I needed to be told is, "Do you know what? Most days you won't die. It's fine," you know?

The story of my life, and it's a great recipe for developing health anxiety. Mass media stories about health conditions are the worst. Oh, women's heart attacks sometimes just present as back pain? Guess I'll freak out every time my shoulder hurts then!

No. The people pushing that aids is a very likely outcome of sex were trying to push abstinence. The liberal line for a long time has been aids actually isn't that bad anymore, or it isn't super likely if you take basic precautions. Std education between 92 and 2016 was dominated by compromises with abstinence only groups.

Psyop but by the other side, if anything.

Bootleggers and Baptists situation. One group wants people to believe that sex is super risky and should definitely be avoided, the other wants to convince normal people that they're at just as much risk as puppy-play, orgy-having, junkies. Together, they can agree on a curriculum that convinces teens that HIV is basically spontaneously appearing for no particularly specific reason or mode of transmission. There isn't exactly a huge constituency for telling teens that they're probably fine to have fun with their partner, but don't get too carried away with the promiscuity and that condoms or birth-control are still important.

Wrote below on some factors in the early 90s, but for my experience in the early 2000s your story sounds more plausible. We didn't linger especially on HIV/AIDS, other than still treating it as a death sentence, but we did also go over the worst case scenarios for every single STD as well as worst case scenarios for birth.

For the birth part, I do wonder if they really thought that part through? It certainly made the girls in my class not want to get teen pregnant, but it wasn't like the worst case scenarios they highlighted applied only to teens and I'm sure it turned at least a few off having children altogether, which I very much doubt was the goal of most abstinence-only groups.

Edit: I'm sure there's a longer post that could be made on how much of the propaganda spread to bring down teen pregnancy rates was too broad and actually served to make pregnancy and childrearing appear unappealing in a general sense.

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Correct, straight men who aren't junkies basically just don't get HIV at all. The exceptions are rare enough that it isn't even worth thinking about for straight men. Women that only have sex with white and Asian men rarely get HIV as well. HIV really is entirely trivial to avoid for most people. My impression is that the public health people did the same sort of routine we saw with Covid, which was a combination of them being sincerely histrionically risk-averse with telling noble lies to get people to care about a disease that is basically irrelevant to their health.

Straight men don't tend to get HIV unless (as in the worst-affected African countries and in Russia and Brazil) a large population of prostitutes becomes infected and acts as a reservoir (even if only a small percentage of interactions between an infected prostitute and a john result in transmission, it adds up):

In 2015, the [Russian] Federal AIDS Center officially registered 1 million HIV-positive people. Of these, approximately 53% of infections were related to drug use, 43% to sexual contact between men and women, and 1.5% to homosexual contact

Sure, Russia in 2015 was perhaps a moderately homophobic country, but it's clear heterosexual transmission in Russia was and is a problem, as it is in South Africa, Zimbabwe and elsewhere.

AIDS center can't check actual source. Even worse, the 43% you citing in bold refers to subset of people who answered the center's question about source of infection (more than half of people declined). So, proper way to present numbers is something like:

60% declined to answer

22% said IDU

17% said heterosexual

0.6% said homosexual contact

Heterosexual transmission as main way of infection manifests in that there are more HIV+ women than HIV+ men, South Africa and Zimbabwe have it, Russia doesn't.

According to polls, homophobia in Russia is still increasing since ~2005.

It needs to be added that Russia doesn't have methadone replacement therapy and IDUs are more problem.

Unless you went to an all-boys school, I assume that half of your classmates were female. The risk of male to female HIV transmission is much higher than the risk of female to male transmission.

As ever, the multipliers on these are wild:

An advanced stage of HIV infection in the index patient (odds ratio 17.6; 4.9 to 62.7) and sexual contacts during menses (3.4; 1.0 to 11.1) increased the risk of female to male transmission and stage of infection (2.7; 1.5 to 4.9), anal sex (5.1; 2.9 to 8.9), and age of the female partner (3.9; 1.2 to 13.0 for age > 45 years) increased the risk of male to female transmission.

Just applying as simple of heuristics as "don't screw people that are dying from AIDS and currently bleeding" prevents the vast majority of infections. The number of heterosexual teens getting HIV from hooking up at parties is just absolutely trivial.

But the question is not how many heterosexual teens get HIV from hooking up at parties. Rather, it what the lifetime risk of getting HIV is from heterosexual sex when using condoms versus when not using condoms. Because sex ed is not just about "what to do at parties."

That's 12% and 20% of people getting infected after regularly having unprotected hetrosexual sex with an infected person. Yes 20% is higher than 12% but those are both pretty low in the context of the parent post's point.

Those are actually very, very high numbers from the perspective of an educator who is concerned with the long-term health of his or her students.

That's after the 1 in 200 chance of picking someone for a long term relationship who has an active HIV infection.

Most of whom are not in normal people dating pools because they’re sex workers/gay/drug users/etc.

Looking at this graph, I could see where concerns about AIDS spreading from things other than men having sex with men would be high in the early 90's, though obviously men having sex with men would still be the main concern.

Between the slope on that graph at the time and the fact that this would be pre-HAART (which led to a dramatic decline in the death rate from AIDS) I think it was likely out of genuine, if perhaps out of proportion to the risks, concern.

Where do you go on the internet to have fun in 2023?

I used to frequent the chans back when there were many small ones, read a lot of SA, Fugly, iMockery, even early Cracked and some Maddox, among dozens of other small sites. Then there was Stumbleupon which was like magic to me when it came out, and I came across all kinds of weird and interesting sites while using it.

I've outgrown a lot of those sites now -- they were a lot funnier when I was 15 -- but I haven't really found any new sites or communities that scratch the same itch. I usually check this place first for interesting bathroom reading, then if there's nothing new I check a few subreddits, and if I'm truly desperate I'll open 4chan, although the noise/bots/spam seem to finally have killed any originality that was still lingering (except for during the rare major Happening).

Help me avoid reading books and going outside by recommending a few fun, funny, and/or interesting sites to read.

rdrama.net

The modern internet feels very small and uninhabited.

I don't actually go there to have fun but that's definitely an excellent meta resource https://explore.marginalia.nu/view

e.g. I just found https://watcher.neocities.org/

You get an invitation.

Can't have normies come in.

Have your tried the edgier part of Mastodon?

I think Kiwifarms is like the last place that carries that 'old internet' vibe forward, complete with the crude sense of humor and disdain for social norms of civility.

Twitter is still pretty fun in certain spots if you follow a good combination of people. That is, after Elon loosened the thumbscrews off the spicier posters a bit.

The true 'fun' stuff really has been relegated to discord/telegram/slack or other groupchats.

If I want entertaining reading material then usually something like /r/hobbydrama or /r/bestofupdates / /r/bestoflegalupdates, as they tend to be fairly longform, varied in subject matter and end at a conclusion. Theonion is still funny, and there's McSweeny's if you like your humour dry and literary and sympathetic to the blue tribe, but it's easy to burn through a month's worth of new posts on both of those sites in less than an hour.

I think all the cool kids moved on to discord and telegram. The problem with the latter is that you can’t sign up for an anonymous account; it requires a phone number.

The problem with the latter is that you can’t sign up for an anonymous account; it requires a phone number.

Discord also requires a phone number for new accounts.

I thought telegram is a messaging app like Whatsapp

I think all the cool kids moved on to discord and telegram. The problem with the latter is that you can’t sign up for an anonymous account; it requires a phone number.

Telegram has giant chatrooms. It's a huge thing in the open source intelligence world right now. A ton of information about the war in Ukraine gets posted in telegram first, and then makes its way out to more normal news channels.

Besides this place, mainly 4chan. /pol/ is a shadow of what it once was but other boards are good. I frequent /lit/ and /ic/. /vg/ for certain video game topics. There are surprisingly good discussions to be had on /d/ if you’re interested in, well, /d/ sorts of topics.

I’m spending less and less time on reddit because most of the subreddits I used to frequent are naturally slowing down and dying over time.

I don't. I quit. It's all trash. I check the motte, read some newspapers, but even those are activities in decline. I use the internet to get specific pieces of information I'm looking for, but I no longer ask the internet "what's new"?

Edit: To be fair, it was all trash back when, too.

I and HalloweenSnarry have used it, referencing in part a Kontextmaschine tumblr post from 2015. I want to say there were some references back in the Web2.0 fora era (maybe 2010-2012ish?), but if so I don't know if any records have survived; it was well before I began my archiving binge.

Definitely obscure, and a lot of the things that drove it as a category (the Moral Majority and more controlled focuses from the progressive branch, most obviously), though the underlying trends are pretty common if you look for them.

Can't say I am familiar with it. What does it mean? Liberal, as long as traditional masculinity isn't challenged or vilified?

It used to be popular among liberals who didn't keep up with the progress train, but it turned out to be a pretty lonely spot to occupy. Some might have also decided there's more to life than tits and beer.

It means something more like "live and let live" liberalism, or "let people enjoy things, even if you find it offensive" liberalism.

I've never heard it, but I assume this is just describing people with laissez faire attitudes about social issues that want politics to be less central to their lives?

Probably more in vein with those who reflexively dislike prudish and puritan religious types (usually right-coded) who want to ban and/or restrict fun things and force everyone to be sexually abstinent teetotalers, so of course in order to stick it to them you transgress against their rules by being lewd, vuglar, and libertine as possible.

What does it mean?

Wasn't it applied to fans of "The Man Show?" So it's probably around 20 years old. Maybe it (or a sanitized version of it) started offline?

Edit: Since people seem unfamiliar with the term -- my understanding is "person (usually a guy) who leans left not out of pure devotion to the progressive cause, but because he enjoys fun deviant stuff like booze and porn that the prudish Christian Right would try to restrict or ban."

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/19/politics/led-cfl-light-bulb-rule-biden-climate/index.html

What act of congress gives the Biden administration the power to ban CFL lightbulbs that were made mandatory only a decade ago? Standards for everything keep getting incrementally and arbitrarily worse, and congress hasn't ever lifted a finger.

The same thing is being done with the gas stove ban that's both a ridiculous conspiracy theory and also happening and good.

This thing drives me crazy. LEDs are better than the other alternatives in every way except price.

So why don’t they tax them instead of ban them? Just seems idiotic to not let people who want the worse thing to pay for it. And the whole point is to avoid the tragedy-of-the-commons inherent in climate change, so figure out what the diff is in switching, then set the tax at that rate. Bam, now you’ve properly incentivized everyone to do the right thing.

I just don’t get why the govt refuses to make use of the economic engine we have at our disposal.

If the politics were good I think there would be a move towards carbon taxation as a primary tool to fight emissions among left and centre-left (perhaps also centre-right) legislators but unfortunately they are bad so we're reduced to this kind of ad hoc policy.

I just don’t get why the govt refuses to make use of the economic engine we have at our disposal.

Carlyle called economics "the dismal science" out of disappointment that it wasn't providing a defense of slavery, but instead was "reducing the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone". Modern government would never go so far as to defend slavery, of course, but the repugnance felt at "letting men alone" doesn't seem to have decreased. It's easy to understand the feeling, even if you know the feeling is wrong, isn't it? The idea of being one of the ones who calculate whether a Pigouvian tax on coal power should be 5 cents per kwh or 6 next year is almost emasculating compared to the idea of being one of the ones who dictate "The Time Of Wasteful Light Ends Now. I Have Spoken."

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/chapter-77/subchapter-III/part-A

(6)Standards for general service lamps.—

(A)Rulemaking before january 1, 2014.—

(i)In general.—Not later than January 1, 2014, the Secretary shall initiate a rulemaking procedure to determine whether—

(I)standards in effect for general service lamps should be amended to establish more stringent standards than the standards specified in paragraph (1)(A); and

(II)the exemptions for certain incandescent lamps should be maintained or discontinued based, in part, on exempted lamp sales collected by the Secretary from manufacturers.

They were empowered to do it once, with a final date no later than Jan 2022. Now they keep changing the rules every few years based on what power or rule?

The normal remedy for an administrative agency's failure to enact a rule by a statutory deadline is a mandamus lawsuit to compel it to act. If delay instead deprived the agency of the ability to act, then administrative agencies -- the deep state, if you will -- could frustrate the will of Congress by dithering. See discussion in the Congressional Research Service reports here and here.

I noticed my new suggestion is implemented! Huzzah! Thanks to zorba an the team for that QOL improvement.

Now for my next question, is there a way I can make that carry over from computer to computer when I am using the same account?

It's a great addition. There is a bug where every time you click on expanding a response or loading more comments it adds another new to the post, so after 5 times it says newnewnewnewnewnew~

Any reason that we can get more than one of them on a single comment?

Why would you not say what your suggestion was?

Because I messed up the formatting. The "new " you now see was my suggestion. Stolen from the old SSC forum.

Surround it with backticks (`).

If you do it will say new.

Edit: lol never mind, that's probably a bug.

Even triple backticks to make a code block don't work.


new

It's unspeakable.

Wait, does escaping it with \ work? oooooh

Lol, works in the preview, but not the body of the comment.

So.... Editing your comment?

no! LOL I keep messing up.

the forum now says "new" with tildes surrounding it above new posts.

The strikethrough.

I'm pretty sure it's the ~new next to new posts/replies next to timestamp, which makes desktop searching for new content very easy rather than looking for a pale blue highlight.

So, what are you reading?

I'm looking through Coornhert's Synod on the Freedom of Conscience. I'm not sure what I'm looking for, but thoughts of engagement, detachment and the practical impact of advocacy are on my mind. It's available open access.

The Invention of Power by Bruno de Mesquita.

I read his first book - The Dictator's Handbook* in undergrad and remember enjoying it. So I thought I'd dip my toe in the "Great Divergence" field again.

I dunno...not that far in but the tale seems pretty...standard for anyone who's vaguely familiar with the genre - competition between the Pope and secular rulers is why the West is the West. But he promises some empirical meat (he's a political scientist, not a historian) to justify tracing the divergence point to the Concordat of Worms specifically so I'm working towards that.

* Summarized by CGPGrey here

Mary Harrington's Feminism against Progress, it's pretty good if you can ignore the repeated genuflecting to Marx in the first half.

Hilarious how a certain class of person will agree with practically everything a conservative religious person would think about sex relations, but needs to couch it in marxist terms so they aren't mistaken for a Tory. Not like other girls or some shit.

Righteous Revolutionaries: Morality, Mobilization, and Violence in the Making of the Chinese State

When do you recall hearing the phrase "gender-affirming" start being used? Google ngrams suggests that it's very recent, my own recollection is that I don't think I heard it until perhaps 2018 or so, but now I see it everywhere in putatively neutral news writeups. The term seems massively epistemically loaded and grants fully that gender is strictly flexible at the determination of the individual, which makes it seem pretty useful to get everyone using it. I think this is a pretty good case study in the value of linguistic change to move the cultural needle on a topic.

Does it grant that premise?

I’ve seen hair implants and other anti-middle-age interventions described with the phrase. That’s sex-linked for sure. Though I figured it’s an afterthought. What’s the word for coming up with a theory, then working backwards to maximize the audience?

Anyway, it certainly has ended up a loaded term, and it has also gotten much higher saturation. I could think of a couple possibilities:

  1. A coordinated strategy to move the needle.

  2. Memetic fitness, where authors who see the phrase tend to adopt it over whatever else they were using. Could be due to thinking it’s better or just more fashionable.

  3. Random walk settling on a phrase which offends the fewest (of the expected audience).

Wild guess, I’d go for 2 or 3. Maybe DSM-whatever or WPATH released something in 2018? Either way, I expect it spread by fashion and tribal signaling rather than any particular strategy. I’d describe that as cultural change informing linguistic instead of the opposite.

I’ve seen hair implants and other anti-middle-age interventions described with the phrase.

I mean, that's totally absurd and just a way to make transition surgery sound more palatable by creating a category that includes it and wearing platform heels. Nobody on the face of the earth would describe shaving your beard or getting breast reduction surgery as 'gender-denying'.

I was actually going to use “growing my beard” as an example of affirmation in ymeskhout’s thread.

So…yes, it’s working backwards to relate the phrase to as many things as possible. Users would like to borrow that legitimacy. I think, however, that doesn’t necessarily make it invalid. More like a natural corollary from asking advocates to come up with a whole theory of “gender.”

Does it grant that premise?

Yeah, the logic seems backwards. "Gender-affirming care" does not make anti-hair loss or other such interventions supportive of malleable gender, those who want to push that view of gender decided to start calling things that cis people do to feel better about themselves "gender-affirming".

Wild guess, I’d go for 2 or 3. Maybe DSM-whatever or WPATH released something in 2018? Either way, I expect it spread by fashion and tribal signaling rather than any particular strategy. I’d describe that as cultural change informing linguistic instead of the opposite.

How would you test that theory?

Anyway, "something got published in 2018" doesn't fit the chart he posted. The last data point is 2019, and the inflection point is at around 2010. I don't really subscribe to the idea you can change culture with language (or at least not with mere word replacement), but I do think the idea these cultural changes are driven bottom-up is intellectually bankrupt, for example you can literally see the Eunuch Archive people discussing among themselves how they'd like to change another term:

The draft for the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM-5) suggests ‘Gender Incongruence,’ which I much prefer,” he wrote, “The body and mind are out of sync, with no mental illness implied!

This was also in 2010 when, as another poster pointed out recently, gamers still called each other "fag" as a matter of course. The ngrams chart for "gender inconcgruence" looks pretty similar to the "gender affirming" one, so it seems pretty clear these language changes are imposed top-down.

Good points.

“Intellectually bankrupt,” though? I’m not even trying to argue a bottom-up theory. There are obviously a small subset of people with much more investment in gender politics, and I expect new language hits then first. The question is how it propagates from them to the general public.

I’m inclined to view it as trickle-down. The language of authority figures gets adopted because followers defer to their experts. Could be due to trust or ingroup signaling. Appealing to authority is effective! People want to win their internet arguments with “well, the WPATH standards say…”

This is in contrast to the more aggressive model implied by the OP. I think it’s very tempting to assert that outgroup leaders are building a party line by force. I also think that’s unusual, given the number of more pedestrian reasons for followers to buy in.

I think both the true believers and the cynical operators of WPATH are at play. There were people who were very conscious of the need to thread the needle of, for example, taking a human rights-framing vs the need to describe it as "medically necessary" for insurance purposes, or the need to cover off liability risks against opening up the gates (removing age limits etc) It's a mix of calculated and true believers.

I mean, public opinion has been moving in the opposite direction, so it’s not as if this is a case of different terms changing the public opinion successfully.

Has it? In specifically the US? I have read some saying this but I am not privy to any reliable polling source that suggests this is so. I am not saying such a source or such sources do not exist, just hoping to be poiinted towards them.

In my country at least polls show most people disagree with the ideas of gender ideology, self-ID. But it is the cultural hegemony that matters, that sense of which way the wind blows that actually influences how people behave.

Apologies for the naive question, but I'm largely ignorant of the nuts and bolts of AI/ML.

Many data formats in biology are just giant arrays, with each row representing a biological cell and columns representing a gene (RNA-Seq), parameter (flow cytometry). Sometimes rows are genetic variants and columns are various characteristics of said variant (minor allele frequency, predicted impact on protein function, etc).

Is there a way to feed this kind of data to LLMs? It seems trivial for chatGPT to parse 'This is an experiment looking at activation of CD8+ T cells, generate me a series of scatterplots and gates showcasing the data' but less trivial to parse the giant 500,000x15 (flow) or 10,000x20,000 (scRNA-Seq) arrays. Or is there a way for LLMs to interact with existing software?

What’s the advantage over normal programming?

Imagine you have 50 samples in your experiment, each sample has 10 gates so you're skimming over 500 scatter plots and then inputting however many readouts you have into other histogram plots to represent the data you got.

This really feels like a pair of 'for' loops instead of a flexible task. You could even go up a level and write a tool that lets you pick different axes.

Why language models specifically? From a cursory google I found a couple of papers which may make more sense to you than me

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1672022922001668

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2021.787574/full

To overcome the challenges faced by manual gating, many computational tools have been developed to automate every step of the cytometry data analysis, including quality control (5), batch normalization (6, 7), data visualization (8–10), cell population identification (11–16), and sample classification (17–20). The tools utilize a wide range of computations methods, ranging from rule-based algorithms to machine learning models.

Do you want LLMs so you can "talk to" your lab results? Otherwise it's easier to analyse masses of data without the LLM middleman.

Do you want LLMs so you can "talk to" your lab results? Otherwise it's easier to analyse masses of data without the LLM middleman.

Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of grunt work involved in flow cytometry analysis which I was thinking of more than the scRNA-Seq. Machine learning for most basic flow cytometry is slightly overkill because conceptually what you're doing with each gate is conceptually pretty simple. I tried to elaborate/clarify in this comment.

You should send the grunt work to CCP where eve denzions can do it for fractions of a cent.

You've been repeatedly warned to stop doing low effort drive-bys like this that contribute nothing.

Banned for five days this time.

Though to be fair, what little I saw of SNE, for example in analysis of single-cell transcriptomes, and what I heard from objective people familiar with the research, didn't necessarily inspire confidence that the patterns emerging were indicative of anything real.

Interesting. I've spent a lot of time staring at t-SNE plots (or more recently UMAPs took over) and they map pretty well to our underlying understanding of the biology. It got a bit hairy when we asked it to split the data into too many clusters and it was difficult to know if we were looking at some novel, minor cell type or a hallucination.

I think I asked that question poorly and also lack the vocabulary to describe what I'm envisioning. Current software for analyzing this kind of data (flow) exists and the typical workflow is just making a series of scatterplots with 'gates,' or subsets of cells that express a given marker. Here's a basic example.

Verbally, it's all very simple - Gate on singlets, then lymphocytes via forward/side scatter, exclude dead cells, gate on CD3+ and then split into CD4 and CD8 T cells. It's the kind of instruction that should be very easy for chatGPT to parse even with a single sentence outlining the experiment. But how to feed the data? Is there a way for chatGPT to interact with an existing analysis software to draw gates/generate scatterplots...? I assume you wouldn't want to feed the raw array of cells into your prompt, although I don't know.

Maybe I'll back up and zoom out a bit. Most people use flowjo to analyze flow cytometry data. It's a multibillion dollar industry, they haven't updated the software in something like a decade (and that update made it worse than the version I was using before), and you routinely draw the same gates over and over again. Imagine you have 50 samples in your experiment, each sample has 10 gates so you're skimming over 500 scatter plots and then inputting however many readouts you have into other histogram plots to represent the data you got. It's repetitive and the software is clunky. LLMs definitely seem 'smart' enough to understand everything that's going on, but I don't have the first idea how you communicate that kind of data to them...

Sorry, I think my description of what I was thinking of was exceptionally poor. I tried to elaborate in this comment.

If you get something like this going let me know. I’m exploring local LLM use-case of cybersecurity packet analysis. Loading bulk data separately from prompt engineering etc, this all is complicated by a small 2k context length. Newer open models have landmark attention tech for 10/30k+ context length, but they are less sophisticated 7/13billion parameter models compared to the 30b ones I’ve been using.

I have no useful suggestion, but that's a neat idea! Great example of the kind of thing that AI could straightforwardly do and save a huge amount of man-hours of tedious, boring labor. The AI probably still won't know why anyone would care about a particular gate, but it could make it quite easy to visualize things.

I'm no expert but have some familiarity. The LLMs have a limited context window (gpt4 is 8000 tokens) so it can't hold all of that data at once. Probably the easiest way to get it to chew through that much is to ask it for code to do the things you want (directing it to write some pygraph or R code or something). It could plausibly do it inline if you asked it to summarize chunks of data, then fed the previous summary in with the next chunk. The code would act as a much more auditable and probably accurate tool though.

Before I started reading about rationality, I used to get frustrated because I felt like people often acted ‘irrationally’ when talking about politics. Then I started reading things like, “I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup” and “The Scout Mindset”. Everything started making sense; people have a desire for tribal belonging and they need to signal allegiance to a tribe as well as establishing their place in the tribe. When someone says something, it often isn’t meant to be taken as an objective claim about how the world really it is. It is often just a social ritual.

Often people are consciously unaware that they are participating in these social signaling games. They just believe whatever they are saying is true even if they are presented with an obvious and rational explanation for why the belief is incorrect. I speculate at the subconscious level creating a ‘boo outgroup’ post on social media is releasing dopamine because the brain is wired to reward social approval from your tribe. Then people come up with a rationalization for why they have to keep repeating the tribal behavior.

Once I updated my model of the world with people having these tribal behaviors things become much more predictable. On the other hand observing the tribal model being accurate leads to a kind of depressing realization. Most people are just soldiers for their tribe and if you don’t have a position of power in the tribe it is very hard to get people to change and get people to act in a more ‘rational’ way. The soldiers have positions of power and make rules/laws/social conventions that they force on other people. Sometimes the primary outcome of decisions is just to punish the outgroup regardless of the cost to society.

Furthermore, technology allows people to exploit this tribal thinking to manipulate other people to act in their economic or political interest. A lot of the internet is just designed to make people feel like they are part of ‘a tribe’ and most people end up consuming/creating a ton of ‘boo outgroup’ content. Combined with scope insensitivity, the availability heuristic people, and other cogitative biases many people end up with an incredibly inaccurate understanding of reality.

How do you cope with the reality that these tribal incentives drive a lot of human behavior? We are destined to live an ‘irrational’ world where people are caught up in these tribal games. I feel like many people don’t have much to offer beyond their tribal behavior. If all someone does is repeat political talking points they aren’t useful. It is a waste of my time and energy to interact with these people. How do I avoid become jaded and disconnected from people?

The nice thing about our current world is that it is possible to both get along alright without being an explicit member of a given tribe and to seek out those micro-tribes that best suit your preferences.

To a large extent you learn to send the right signals to keep the major tribes off your back and arrange your affairs so you don't have to interact with them directly too often.

One of the core insights which has struck me in the past years has been that tribalism is downstream from reality.

People too often focus on the group itself and ignore the ecosystem it's part of. Any group gets modified by reputation, competition, practicalities and the need for results. It is only after this kind of modification has happened that you can understand the significance of a "social ritual."

There are risks, but groups are also the basis of pluralism and a way of learning where we all stand relative to each other.

I look at this as dialectic. For instance, by itself as an ideology libertarianism hasn't really appealed. While a lot of the ideas are quite beautiful I find it all a bit simplistic, a bit look over here, not over there and at it's worst just a rote-learned thought system, or catechism.

But as part of a dialectic to work against other prevailing ideas I think it has great merit.

I call it "directional libertarianism", the belief that there is no ideological nirvana to achieve, but that our society could use a more libertarian approach in a bunch of specific areas.

Political sophistication begins with the realization, in the words of Sowell, that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. The socratic ideal of political sophistication requires one to be able to articulate the opposing side in terms they can accept, and to state what bits of reality would need to change before one supported different policies.

So, for instance, I oppose the drug war in general, but believe there are drugs out there that are dangerous enough that they should stay illegal. At a certain probability of bad health outcomes, we kind of need to hit the ripcord.

I start by recognizing that I never had a connection with them in the first place. After that, I look for connection elsewhere.

The simulation of proximity the Internet brings us is parasocial, like the experience of watching a performer or reading an author. They don’t know me. The purpose of a tribal ritual is to reinforce tribal cohesion; interrupting the ritual would be like answering a rhetorical question spoken in a play by calling out an answer to the actors.

I would also question my desire to talk with “tribal ritual people.” If my goal is rationality, I know immediately that 3/4 of people are not interested in changing their worlds with thought like I am. I value truth, logic, and knowledge more than I do experiences, exercise, and emotion.

I would argue that obtaining rational goals and pursuing them is our tribal identity, and seeking connection on that basis is our tribal ritual! So, find people who share this and connect with them instead.

deleted

That makes a lot of sense and I have slowly been taking my life in a direction where I just cut out people if they are too politically tribal or obnoxious. I have been much happier as a result and I’m slowly rebuilding my social network with people who enjoy rational nuanced conversations.

But sometimes the “tribal ritual people” have things that you need and you are forced to interact with them. For instance, at college or work you must go along with many tribal rituals if you want a degree or to continue working for an employer.

I also have internal conflicts with just cutting people out of my life. I feel like I should help them be more rational because it will improve their life. I know I can’t help them though. In an idealistic hypothetical world everyone is nice to each other and tries to help everyone, not just their tribe. It somehow feels morally wrong to not try to help people in need. Rationally, it is probably correct to cut ‘irrational’ out of your life because the net benefit of focusing on rational goals is better for society than me wasting time/energy on people that I can’t change. It still produces an emotional dissonance where it doesn’t feel like I’m doing the right thing.

Is rateme.lv a legit photo rating site? I uploaded many mine photos (male), 3 photos of a guy who was fucked by his former high school teacher shortly after school, and 3 photos of guy who's nearly standard virgin. The photos of latter got the best scores out of three! Looks like most rates are 6 or 7 no matter what.

what's the point of this versus reddit truerateme and similar? (to be fair true rate me has a cringe craniometric notation scheme but there are other subreddits)

having looked at rateme.lv, it seems that males and females give different rates, female's is consistently higher (probably lying)

Reddit truerateme would give more prose than rates, and mixed with males and females so i would need to parse that and disagreggate, and it is limited to 1 photo at time rather than 3 (as with rateme.lv).

...and I got banned at photofeeler (yup, double incel, even photofeeler banned me), so I dunno what to use

I know this goes against the spirit and practice of the motte, but is there a case for lowering the character limit in each comment to encourage brevity? Not to twitter levels or anything, maybe 5000 or so. I find myself writing long posts that people understandably skim. I find myself skimming other people's long posts. Oftentimes the meaning of a post can rely heavily on just a few words, words that people miss in a haystack full of other words.

People should feel free to essaypost (although if it’s more than 10,000 characters I think it should usually be a full post, not part of the CW thread), but I agree we could encourage slightly more brevity. I’ve tried recently to cut down my comments significantly before posting them.

I actually said the same thing when I first arrived. I've come to appreciate there's a variety of styles that suit the long form and I've been doing longer posts on average. I still think there could be more succinct posts though.

I’m a fan of summaries, bullet points, and bolded key conclusions

Goodness no.

Frequently I’ve gone over 5,000 characters even in posts that aren’t “essays”, or at least brushed against it. If anything the limit should be increased.

The long essayposts from people like @DaseindustriesLtd are part of why I keep coming back here. I like that this community is based around original long-form writing, in opposition to everywhere else on the internet that pushes people further and further towards brevity. I’m glad there’s at least one place where people are actually encouraged to share substantive reflections on an issue.

As I’ve said in other discussions on this issue in the past, it’s very rare for me to look at even poor writing and think “that could have been said in fewer words”. I just don’t think that people repeat themselves all that often, even when their thinking is confused or unoriginal. Typically each word and sentence will have some sort of purpose, even if only on a stylistic or formal level (or simply as a record of the writer’s thought process) - otherwise the person probably wouldn’t have written it. Even pure repetition can serve a purpose, like indicating emphasis. So in the majority of cases I don’t even understand what people are complaining about.

Edit- Ok I did actually think "he didn't have to use this many words" when I was reading Foucault's The Order of Things. But that's like, the only time I can remember thinking that in the past several years.

Incidentally I've been trying to practice the virtue of brevity on Twitter. Perhaps @RandomRanger will soon come to like local longform more.

Handle? Or is it a separate identity?

The problem is that the community grants status based on writing long, winding posts, obscure references and vocabulary geared more towards showing off intelligence than legibility or appropriateness for the audience/tone of the post. I'm skeptical that a top-down approach would change any of that.

Aim for concision and distilling your thesis into smallest and most airtight argument possible if you want to avoid overly long posts. Use bullet points. Independent clauses before dependent clauses. etc. Not to imply that you don't already do these things, but it's what I try to tell myself.

Disagree, I think the community naturally attracts people who want to write long and detailed posts. I was writing paragraphs upon paragraphs on random subreddits long before I found /r/ssc or /r/themotte.

I feel like that style is spot-on for appropriateness of the audience. I'd wager that over 70% of the people here are here because of their tolerance for reading long quirky substack articles during work hours.

It kind of goes against the culture of this place. The whole reason the community exists is because of SSC, which is know for having incredibly long posts. The length makes things more interesting, accurate, and entertaining.

In order to have meaningful discussion you often have to explain the models and assumptions about reality that lead to your main point.

If someone feels a post is too long and could be summarized, they could just respond to the original post with that feedback. Maybe the poster will incorporate that feedback and make shorter posts, or maybe it turns out the excess elaboration is necessary.

This place fills a niche where you can have long-from discussions on controversial issues and has rules that facilitate that purpose. There are other places to go if you want to have more succinct discussions. I don’t think this place should try to focus more on brevity just because that is what other places do. People come here because we aren’t like those other places.

Length is sometimes a problem but readability often goes down with length as well and in turn that becomes a bigger problem. More paragraphs, more linebreaks, breaking down lists that might be in paragraph form into a numbered/dots list with a new line for each item: sure we all write too much, except maybe the_nybbler, but sometimes the length is necessary and with that in mind I think things can be long without being unreadably long.

I'm not sure if a character limit is an ideal solution, but I think there would be meta benefits (for the reader, the writer, and the overall forum) if ONE post were about ONE thing.

Similar to the idea of a code smell, where its a sign of something going wrong somewhere if a function takes in too many arguments, I think its a sign of some kind of inequilibria of incentives or whatever if a post takes on too many topics. (This is ignoring blatant wordcount padding to justify the "Effort post")

My idea is that if the above could be "enforced" then the maximum number of things that could be discussed would be discussed. Given that it's not exactly uncommon for people to single out a specific part of a post.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

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