domain:thezvi.wordpress.com
mdurak
5hr ago
For an actual prisoner’s dilemma situation where I’m staring down years to decades in prison? Man, you have way more faith in the average American rando than me, because I’m defecting for sure. I would most likely defect on the friend too unless they were one of my closest, most trusted friends.
For a metaphorical one where the stakes are much lower and it’s much more likely to be an iterated prisoner’s dilemma? There’s no way I’m defecting first, even with the Haitian. I just don’t see any real life situations where the rewards are big enough that I could justify acting in such a petty manner. Can you think of any?
This is an argument I have never heard before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_philosophy
Though I suppose Guénon and Huxley make a stronger claim about the nature of reality. I'm restricting myself to the practical considerations.
What information does society need to function that it can only obtain by the costly closing off of an entire avenue of expression?
What you see as closing off I see as codification. More on this later.
How would we know that it is not enough/too much?
This is the major problem of modernity, we have no way to know how load bearing Chesterton's fence is. The implications of destroying traditions that we, by construction, do not rationally understand, are unclear and can range from entirely inconsequential to catastrophic.
The promise of the Enlightenment was that rational inquiry would permit scientific government, and thus that we'd be able to lay society on top of reason itself, but Positivism has totally failed even in its mildest incarnations, so now all that is left is raw post-modern games of power.
The best way I've seen to attempt to answer this question comes from Durkheim and the opposition between anomie and fatalism.
By the atomization of life, I presume that you mean that individuals are isolated from each other instead of forming healthy communities
Once again here, what you see as closing off, I see as codification. It is much easier to form communities in an understandable world where you can make assumptions about the results of your actions, and others can properly interpret them. Norms reduce the randomness of intersubjective communication.
Let us consider tatoos again. In my grandmother's time, there was a strong taboo against them; though not illegal you would never get hired for a proper job if you had them, because they were the mark of sailors, criminals and other rough fellows.
It's easy to consider this a 100% bad arrangement from the standpoint of bourgeois morality. After all those people are stigmatized in such a way that they cannot join us in bourgeois life.
But consider the advantages of doing this to yourself if you are about that rebel life: you instantly share camaraderie with someone who also bears the mark, people know not to mess with you, the ladies know you're a badass and you can have a codified relationship with the cops where they won't let you into rich neighborhoods but they know not to tread in areas where you and people like you hang out. The fact it's painful even works as a sort of initiatic ritual.
In the liberalized world where this is a mere avenue of fashion, nobody can tell anything about you from this, and nobody knows where they stand.
Total unconstrained bodily autonomy, or indeed total licence, comes at the price of the destruction of a lot of unquantifiable but nevertheless useful social commons.
Is the aforementioned atomization what you mean by “fungible shapeless good”?
Liberalism has a tendency, by the necessity of its moral agnosticism, to break away thick concepts into thin. The former are the staple of traditional institutions, whose phenomenal goal is to compress as much meaning as possible into anodyne symbolism. Hence, such institutions are destroyed by the Liberal tendency.
What are some good previous discussions on the effects of sex segregated spaces on mental health?
I'll admit I'm too lazy to burrow in the archives of the last threads for it, but the topic keeps coming up so if you lurk enough you may just catch yet another one.
The basic argument I'm referring to here is that by which the Civil Rights Act and legislation like it has made sex segregated spaces practically impossible and with them much of male socialization, and with a rise in the sort of anomic suicide I was talking about earlier. Women were spared this for a while, but are in the process of this destruction now, which has made Feminists and proponents of traditional gender norms the strange bedfellows we see.
jeroboam
6hr ago
Isn't this just 20th century thinking?
Their human capital sucks. Israel would destroy Turkey in a war despite a much smaller population and inferior geography. The world has moved on from the era of the Dreadnought. Today's it's all about raw materials, supply chains, and microchips. Turkey is a dinosaur whose poorly trained troops would only be cannon fodder in a conflict which involved the U.S.
veqq
7hr ago
Of course it's less credible. It's naught but bare faced lies with the purpose of destroying all that we hold dear.
RenOS
I cope, therefore I seethe
7hr ago
Happiness in general doesn't seem to work the way modern people think it does. From my view, among the best predictors are is a) there are real, serious problems + b) we feel confident to handle them well.
2D3D
8hr ago
Having a unifying overculture is extremely helpful in forming common identity. Every Israeli is 3 opinions sharing a bipolar body, but one of those opinions is 'our neighbors want to kill us'. It is a remarkably clarifying point that can unify literally every Israeli, from an Israeli Arab Muslim to the gayest Tel Aviv homo.
Except for the Haredi. Were it not for the Arabs, the Haredi might be a sufficient spoiler to break Israel entirely.
Anyways, with a common overculture it is easy to reach a fairly baseline happiness, even in the face of adversity. If the source of unhappiness is a local element within your nation, happiness indices will likely fail. The Arabs all hate the Israelis, but they hate the Shia/Sunni/Deobandi/Kurd/Turk/Khaleeji/Phoenician/Saudi/Azamigh next to them juuuuust a little bit more.
A completion model called gpt4t-lu-test just appeared in OpenAI's API Playground (and presumably the OpenAI API generally), and it's not documented anywhere (including in Pricing), and ~nobody seems to have noticed yet. It doesn't seem to even be instruction-tuned, and will gladly complete a meth recipe etc.
As far as I know, OpenAI has never allowd any public access before to a GPT-4 base model, but that seems like what this is.
What is this, and what does the lu there stand for?
update: gpt4t-lu-test is no longer available as a completion model, but now as a chat model, that seems at very shallow first glance to just be a normal GPT-4 chat model (guardrails and all). I guess I caught a brief misconfiguration.
Might as well be a slave.
Pay by role Some Amazon warehouse worker roles and their hourly pay include:
Warehouse associate: $21.22 per hour
Packer: $17.92 per hour
Store shopper: $17.80 per hour
Order picker: $18.65 per hour
Handler: $16.88 per hour
Fulfillment associate: $20.28 per hour
Package handler: $17.46 per hour
So not quite slaves. I won't bother looking up gig worker pay, but similarly find the comparison to slaves (which the US famously had for real) to be silly.
2D3D
9hr ago
Women vastly overestimate how clear their deliberate outward presentation is to observer's, much less thoughtless presentation. Leaning forward and pushing ones chest out may be an tremendous effort for a woman that is blindingly obvious to other girls who understand the effort made, but to guys we literally have no clue it could be happening.
Bearing in mind that our own lived experiences will feature a gigantic amount of inconsistent behaviors from different women, and any man who lacks mind reading and errs on the side of caution will find the mental effort of parsing microbehaviors too exhausting.
The alternative is to he a dweeb who thinks every friendly interaction with a woman is a sign of her wanting to fuck. These guys are the worst, mainly because their mechanistic approach to parsing sexual receptiveness captures the error bound of drunk/lonely/bored women who decide to catch some strange for the hell of it regardless of the womans actual effectiveness in displaying receptiveness. With a statistically high rate of success to expended effort for the shithead guys, this reinforces shitty behaviors of both men and women. The guys think their shitty pickup lines and NPC flirt phrases are actually good tools to get women, the women think their subtlest of subtle hints was sufficient to bag a dude without seeming desperate. Women are more likely to regret their choice of bedpartner after coitus, but till the deed is done women are as capable as men in deluding themselves that their chosen partner is a prize worthy of the expended effort.
SlowBoy
9hr ago
Red voters in red states will not switch blue after a natural disaster. Why would they? At best the Biden administration handles this competently, at worst it's a disaster. Is Kamala Harris going to lead a public relief tour? Trump would.
Going further, does the administration even care about red voters in red areas? They haven't stopped spending money on charter flights for resettling Haitians. That's their priority. They will authorize whatever emergency funds sound good on a campaign ad.
If anything voter turnout will increase. When normal life is suspended public life becomes that much more important. Documentation will not be a problem: emergency atmosphere and community mindset will make people solve problems.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9hr ago
I tentatively expect this to shift things towards Trump.
There's an old article on SSC: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/
about how right wing politics are optimized towards surviving, ie in an apocalypse, and left wing politics are optimized for thriving when there are plenty of resources. When things are tough you make tough decisions and sacrifices in order to survive, and make stable family units that can replace the people who inevitably die. Which right wing politics are optimized for. When things are great and there's plenty to go around then you can do whatever you want and be inefficient but free and happy, and anyone trying to restrict you is doing it for selfish reasons, so you should ignore them, which left wing politics are optimized for.
Maslow's Hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid, but perhaps it would be more appropriate to tip it sideways, so the lower baser needs are on the right while the higher needs are on the left, as those are their strengths.
When things are tough, people want a tough leader who does what needs to be done, who will ensure their basic necessities, security, and establish confidence and project strength. Regardless of whether Trump is actually more effective at this than Harris, he certainly appears that way superficially. I expect more swing votes to shift towards Trump compared to the counterfactual scenario where these floods did not happen, though I have no idea how strong of an effect this will be, so not sure if it will matter or even be statistically significant.
I see that you’ve edited your previous comment too, because I don’t think I read this paragraph when I last replied:
That the cultural mores change and the signals with them is not a failure of tradition. It is in fact how tradition works and how it is eternal, despite the specific instantiations of it being ephemeral.
This is an argument I have never heard before. I have only questions, as many as you’re willing to field, please:
- What information does society need to function that it can only obtain by the costly closing off of an entire avenue of expression? What disasters have occurred by the loss of these signals? (Sure, adult children are much more empowered to stand up to their parents these days, but in and of itself I don’t see that as a disaster despite how much it offends conservative sensibilities around familial loyalty.)
- How many avenues of expression need to be sacrificed for such information? How would we know that it is not enough/too much?
- By the atomization of life, I presume that you mean that individuals are isolated from each other instead of forming healthy communities. But how would closing off a form of expression help individuals connect? (Eg I have seen many strangers with tattoos get to first know each other by appreciating each other’s tattoos and the meaning behind them)
- Is the aforementioned atomization what you mean by “fungible shapeless good”? And when you say that traditional institutions must not reduce individuals to this, do you mean that they should not (but sometimes do), or that liberal values prevent them from doing so (and therefore it’s impossible for them to continue to exist)?
- What are some good previous discussions on the effects of sex segregated spaces on mental health?
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
9hr ago
Whoops, got them mixed up. Apologies.
MedicalStory2
10hr ago
Israel is second place in world youth happiness?! Israel is at war. Am I missing something or shouldn't this be hot-take level shocking?
Mewis
10hr ago
Part of epistemic hygiene is keeping away from people who themselves, don't argue in good faith. You yourself suggested that I not take everything written online seriously!
You can figure out how the world works. But the best way to do that is through direct experience. You yourself were forced to resort to Ultima Ratio - your own personal experience. That's also what I'm doing. What I was told did not correspond to my lying eyes. What should I do? Check myself into an insane asylum?
Again, you fall back on the research. But it's not obvious to me what guidance the research gives. If you perform calorie tracking and get an incorrect result, like a TDEE estimate that is too high, there's no study that can tell you why you got an incorrect result or what to do about it.
2D3D
10hr ago
Sadly Nasrallahs death may not mean that much in the end. Hezbollah may be literally crippled as an organization and truly destroyed as an entity following the loss of all its comms networks and leadership relationships, but that does not translate to the Lebanese state or even another nonstate entity picking up the pieces. The Lebanese state is entirely crippled, with a paralyzed legislature, lacklustre domestic law enforcement, and especially an utterly broken economy. The state or another entity picking up the civil functions of Hezbollah will be possible, but nothing will replace the Iranian dollars flowing into Hezbollah member wallets.
Lebanons economy has been semi functioning for the last decade almost purely off the back of diaspora remittances and purchases of financial products by Gulf states, especially the USD-LBP high yield deposits. The Lebanese banking crisis of 2019 was probably more devastating than the civil war, because it bound the economy to external obligations hitherto absent to the Lebanese. A scheme of guaranteed high interest yield cash deposits with advertised fixed convertibility between Lebanese Pound to US dollars at pegged rates ballooned Lebanons financial sector, but it was ultimately a ponzi scheme. Investors buy LBP-USD fixed deposit products, expecting the products to yield USD. However, Lebanese are paid in LBP, and the state borrows ostensibly in LBP, and receives payments in LBP. Supporting a LBP-USD peg requires continual purchases of USD to keep the value of the LBP and keep the fixed deposit products viable... unless you just don't, and pay out depositors in USD from new USD payouts from new investors.
Specific attention csn be directed to the Maronite central banker Riad Salameh who was responsible for engineering this scheme in the first place. He built his career in Paris in the 70s, an opportunity specifically maintained by the French who maintain a somewhat protective relationship of the Maronites. From there Salameh built up a strong network and career, and likely contributed significantly to the early Lebanization of the professional sector of the Gulf states. It is strangely coincidental that vast amounts of gulf money found itself so readily moved to the aforementioned high yield deposits, despite the fragility of such a system being obvious to any banker or even moderately read individual.
This is the dire situation Lebanon is in. They have no external capital investments to nationalize, an external debt burden to the very people that were their economic product (and now unwilling creditors), an economically unviable local populace due to terrorism and lacklustre domestic industrial development, and now a shitload of restive cripples cut off from their external sponsor. Hezbollahs destruction is a good thing, but whether the Lebanese can capitalize on it is a different issue.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10hr ago
Turkey has the second biggest army in NATO and relevant geography for anything involving Russia or the Middle East.
TequilaMockingbird
10hr ago
Is that supposed to be a disagreement of some sort?
TequilaMockingbird
10hr ago
Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
I imagine that bots have begun to displace the trans-rights tumblr furries in the 6 years since that post was written but the principle holds.
I feel like I am peering into some kind of lower class bubble where displays of masculinity and femininity need to be that much more in your face because there isn't that much of it to begin with?
I think it might be worse than that. Sites like TikTok and Instagram take the worst tendencies of the extremely-online typifified by Twitter, 4chan, Tumblr, Et Al and market them to the masses.
They aren't looking for influencers they're looking for influencees
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
11hr ago
Historic flooding in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Whole towns washed away. People retreating to their attics as water levels rise. People losing everything.
Tragic. Horrific. But this is the Culture War thread so I am going to ask the insensitive question, what does this mean for the election in <40 days?
My first thought is that there is a certain irony that these states are among those that just limited the forms of ID allowed at a voting booth. Someone who has lost their house is less likely to have all their documentation, and getting new copies will take longer than the time before the election.
Rural areas that were wiped out will have a harder time finding their polling location under the mud and timber. Mail-in voting will be difficult without a mailbox.
People are going to watch the Biden-Harris's administration to see how they respond.
Do these factors make it more likely for these swing states to turn Blue or Red? Buncombe County, one of the hardest hit, went 60% for Biden in 2020.
laxam
11hr ago
North American housing crises are manufactured. There are no limiting resource constraints. Limited zoning limits the number of houses. Fewer houses means for expensive houses. There are other factors at play, but zoning is the disproportionate cause for high prices across the continent.
YIMBY may be associated with the Left and all its social dysfunctions and annoyance these days, but the economic consensus on this one preceded the Left's adoption of YIMBY. Pretty much the only dissent you see, academically, is from the further Left, who ultimately wants only publicly owned housing and is offended by the sheer existence of market rate housing and, even then, their work sucks.
A century and a half ago, NYC had more than a million utterly impoverished immigrants dumbed on it when the city and the immigrants were vastly poorer than they are today. This was no problem, from a housing perspective: They threw up a bunch of apartments and tenements and housing stayed under 15% of even the very low income of those immigrants.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
11hr ago
Sample of four kids, they tend to eat everything when they are under 2.5, then start to balk at things that they liked previously.
I have one kid who will skip every meal except breakfast if we don't offer at least a serving of bread/crackers/tortilla that has not been contaminated with anything.
For every other kid, I have one rule that works. Everything the grownups are eating goes on their plate. They have to smell the food at the least. It they want seconds on a food they like, they have to take one bite of the food they are avoiding.
For the kid this doesn't work with, she has a higher than average aversion to lots of things. Every floating object is a bee, every thing that touches her unexpectedly is slimey and disgusting, finger paints are a reason to screech.
Your comment is triggering Poe's law for me. The sarcasm is too sincere for me to be 100% sure. I'm hoping my reply makes sense irrespective of your intent.
Rapid change of any sort doesn't work. It's practically a law of nature. Wealth (20th century Saudi), Land (South Africa), Agency (Liberia) or Demographics.
A progressive may support the logical endpoint of their philosophy. But even in ideal circumstances, truly redistributive outcomes cannot be achieved overnight. It's well known social science, but progressive countries ignore it. They utilize 'rapid immigration as national policy', but never stage their immigration to allow for win-win outcomes.
Singapore does it right (Lee Kwan Yew is always right. Motherfucker). America brute forces it, hogs the literal best of the world and wins. But, Western Europe & Canada seem to be confused about what they want in their immigrants.
If you want model citizens, then don't import low skill men, aged 20-30. They're are bad immigrants everywhere. This cohort commits the vast majority of crime. If you want them to integrate, import young college students (to schools with majority Canadians) or 30+ low skill men with families and toddlers who can be 'civilized' from day 1. Your nation needs nurses and women are good immigrants.....so start nursing programs. If small towns need labor, then sprinkle families which have incentive to drop roots and integrate....rather than bringing all young men to 1 town, who room-up and ghettoize.
Sweden, Germany, Southern France, Canada....It's all the same. The immigrant group differs in each place. But the haphazard and almost suicidal choice of how immigrants are sub-sampled guarantees bad outcomes. Honestly, 'refugee' and 'asylee' are such shit categories. Too easy to game when you come from a desperate situation from your home country.
Not if the oven has pyrolytic cleaning. It requires some tinkering with thermostats though.
More options
Context Copy link