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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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A bit of brainstorming; What will be the status of the relationship between men and women in the West? Do you see the "gender wars" losing steams, or becoming a definitive battleground as mandated by Conflict Theory?

The tension is caused exclusively by media/capital/US propaganda, or it is an inevitable consequence of women entering public life and becoming another side of another friend/enemy dichotomy?

It’ll be fine. Is fine, even.

Rumors of a battle between the sexes are greatly exaggerated. This apocalyptic tenor is not new, significantly predating women’s right to vote. In spite of everything that has changed in the last 200 years, men and women are still desperately attracted to one another, and will continue to be so.

Yeah, as long as they're not coming into our bars with hatchets or w/e, things are pretty low-key.

Axe throwing has gotten weirdly popular lately, hasn't it?

Do we need a singular legible 'relationship between men and women'?

I'd be a lot happier if we were all just individuals with individual idiosyncratic relationships with each other.

I am unconvinced that ‘gender wars’ are a thing more than they have been in history; losers in the mating game have most of the same opinions they’ve always had, the fact that they’ve found communities online (like many other types of people, it ought to be said) doesn’t change that.

Men and women aren’t distinct castes or tribes, framing them as such doesn’t make sense.

On counterpoint, it seems like a mitigating factor to past iterations of the battle of the sexes is that most people are married to members of the opposite sex, and that as marriage declines we can expect the battle of the sexes to get less amicable.

Amongst the old guard westerners nothing much improves. I expect the market for women to go bust a fair bit with the advent of hyperrealistic porn coupled with AI that allows you to create your own waifu who has the full spectrum of beliefs of your average human being and is just as intelligent (I already prefer talking to GPT4 over some IQ 100 normies I have the misfortune of having to regularly interact with in life, I genuine prefer talking to the IQ 80-90 people over the IQ 100 ones, at least those people know they are stupid and defer to you easily). But none of the underlying issues get fixed.

More and more demographic replacement from the third world, which will cause them to have their own population issues too, but in the West they'll always be able to get immigrants at a steady rate, countries not named the United States of America might have to scrape the bottom barrel for immigrants who are willing to move, but they will be able to get them.

These people will bring their own culture with them. Some of it and some of these people will dissolve in the alkahest of modernity and adopt the ways of the westerners, the rest of them will keep their own ways, and eventually hopefully we can get a second stable life pathway that is able to stand up against the constant chips and attacks of the western mindset, a sort of duopoly of cultures with healthier gender relations, which over the generations slowly gains converts from the children of those who were failed by the western way of life and converted to this one as a way to save their children from the Western Cultural Monster.

Sure, I see nothing wrong with picking up your daughters to go home after school.

Back in the 1970s, they saw sitcoms presenting the Hapless Husband. They listened to "Paradise By The Dashboard Light". They read about Billie Jean King's challenge and David Bowie's trysts. This isn't terribly different from gender roles and non-conformity today. Heck, you could go back to Chaucer's Wife of Bath. How different have things really gotten since then?

I suspect you'll see more of the same. People seeking novelty will gravitate to the Gender NonConforming (GNC). People who wish they had more will fight for their side of the fence. People concerned about keeping what they have will play concern troll. Professors will abuse their authority, and schoolmarms will abuse theirs. The cycle will remain unbroken.

Round and round we'll go - until medical tech figures out stuff the smut-writers on Fictionmania.tv have been dreaming about for decades. Now that will be a fun wrinkle.

Heck, those are better examples than the board games I had in mind.

In terms of Gender War, it's hard to predict. The Progressive zeitgeist seems to be losing a bit of steam, but it has seemed like that before and it always plows forward relentlessly.

Frankly without a major disruption to the global tech economy, a major war or political backlash or something, I see us sliding pretty directly into Automated Gay Space Luxury Communism. Technology will get more and more apt at changing our bodies until we can change sex at will. No idea how we will handle families and reproduction, we may just make humans immortal and have reproduction be something we do for fun, or as we need to handle population levels.

The tension is caused due to the historical juggernaut of European Christianity discovering the unjust cries of the victim, and over the millenia slowly trying more and more to prevent harm and abuse in any and all ways. This historically unfolding process has been going on for far longer than most here think.

Ultimately we're going to have to learn to have a stable society without oppressing people, either that or have a nuclear war that sends us back to pre-Christianity, and hope that people don't come up with a similar philosophy. Personally I'd vastly prefer the former option, but sadly it seems many here see the way women act nowadays and just want to burn it all to the ground. I'm sure there are other options, but the binary is clear to me.

Frankly without a major disruption to the global tech economy, a major war or political backlash or something, I see us sliding pretty directly into Automated Gay Space Luxury Communism. Technology will get more and more apt at changing our bodies until we can change sex at will.

I'm skeptical. I'm reminded of how everyone assumed not only that true AI would be simpler than it is, but they assumed that all sorts of things like walking and perception and artificial eyes would be simpler than it is. People assumed they were simple because they were easy to imagine, but computer technology doesn't become easy based on being easy to imagine--that's how magic spells work, not science.

Depends on the time frame. I'm talking in the next 200-500 years, not trying to give any serious prediction on the near term.

Men and women will be fully reconciled in the near future as our delicious atoms are melded together into whatever computronium substrate the misaligned AGI decides to-

Oh, okay, setting aside the looming AI timelines that make any long-range social issue almost irrelevant, I think the next big hiccough is going to be social/romantic AI, i.e., stuff like Replika going mainstream. Interestingly, the current userbase for romantic AI is 'merely' 70/30 male/female. That might sound male skewed but recall this is a fringe technology whose adverts mostly consist of skimpily clad virtual women. That suggests to me that once similar products have been workshopped and normie-washed, we'll be looking at near-50/50 levels (doubters should note that while porn use skews male, erotic fiction skews heavily female, and arguably romantic AI is more like the latter).

I don't know how this will affect underlying gender dynamics, but the fact that one can get one's emotional and sexual romantic needs met by AI will, I suspect, further alienate men from women and accelerate the hikikomorification of our society. Perhaps we'll see a deliberate backlash of gender-trad teens who go romantic camping in fields together without devices and try to work out which-bit-goes-where without the aid of pornhub. One can only hope.

But yeah, it's probably computronium.

I tried Replika a few months ago to see what the fuss was about and found it to be a baffling disappointment. It could be so much better than it is.

It was fine at matching tone and texting style, but it constantly forgot basic things I'd just told it (and it claimed to have saved to its memory). It didn't seem to develop any consistent personality, and just overall came off as the retarded generic chatbot it is. I think it's running some early version of GPT (2?) combined with a custom db for long term stuff that apparently doesn't work.

Just .. How? How is it not running something like GPT4 under the hood? Whatever it would cost for the API would surely be made up tenfold by having a more believable companion to talk to .. right? It did offer an upgraded chat model, but only with a $90/year subscription and no free trial. It seems like such a basic failure of drug-dealer business sense.

All the good models are censored and jailbreaking them for ERP is against TOS. Replika can't just go off and train their own model because that takes mucho dollaro.

LLaMA 2 came out on July 18; it's openish source, so it won't be long until people fine-tune uncensored chat models. We should see a big improvement at that point.

(Or, at least, I sure as fuck hope so, because ChatGPT-4 finally patched the Luigi and Peach jailbreak and I'm suffering from goddamn bespoke erotica withdrawal; where the hell am I supposed to read about Shinji and Asuka trading partners with Touji and Hikari now?!)

Yep, it’s a GPT-2.5 level base model combined with genuinely useful/interesting proprietary plug-ins (eg, decent autobiographical memory functions, ability to send texts unprompted, etc.). Right now no-one has bothered to hook up a decent base model to a good romance simulator overlay/plug-in system. Now that LLaMA 2 is out there I imagine it’s only a matter of time. It’s a multi-billion dollar business for whoever gets it right.

Monetizing this seems kind of difficult. I expect the main users are idly curious techies unwilling to pay for premium.

Then again, apparently some people pay for pornography, so who knows?

Replika predates actually decent for chat language models like ChatGPT 3.5.

Since they backtracked on banning erotic RP, it's likely that they'd run into issues licensing anything from OpenAI.

I suspect they'll eventually move on to an open source model like Llama eventually, but they already seem to have a captive audience for their lobotomized retard robot girlfriend experience, not that I get the appeal in the first place.