domain:traditionsofconflict.com?page=2
JarJarJedi
4hr ago
So when Musk took over Twitter (using the old name since it was the name back then) he famously fired about 3/4 of Twitter employees. Pretty much everybody who knew anything about anything predicted Twitter will fail catastrophically very soon after. Of course, now we know it didn't happen. My question is - does anybody have any evidence of Twitter service becoming worse at all in any way since then? I don't mean worse like "people can now post things I don't like" but objectively worse like site is not loading, or search not working or any of the stuff like that.
Folamh3
4hr ago
I think this probably comes back to one of the points Scott made in "Can Things be both Popular and Silenced?". If you're a woke person or a leftist and want to hear woke or left opinions, you have an entire media ecosystem made up of hundreds of thousands of extremely qualified writers, journalists, academics etc. If you have more unorthodox opinions, you are not nearly as well-served, and so the bar is lower for a writer or journalist trying to gain a foothold. A woke person trying to make a living as a blogger or journalist is going up against The New York Times; an anti-woke person trying to make a living is going up against a bunch of other small fries with Substack accounts.
I think this argument is applicable not just to honest people acting in good faith but also to "grifters", broadly defined. If you want to make a living by cynically parroting woke opinions or selling obvious woke-inflected bullshit you don't really believe in, the competition is so stiff that you have to be really good at it to do it at all, so it tends to be a long con (perhaps as much as ten years' training in academia before you set up shop as a "corporate diversity consultant" or whatever). But for anti-woke grifters, the demand for comparable content is just as high but the competition isn't as stiff, so just about any idiot who can string a sentence together can start a podcast and be inundated with Patreon subscriptions within the year. Candace Jones can literally wake up one morning and announce "hi everybody, I'm black and I hate wokeness!" when she was a woke person quite literally the night before. That option is not open to Ibram X. Kendi - he must put in long hard hours in postgraduate degrees and speaking engagements before people are willing to throw money at him for doing nothing.
anti_dan
4hr ago
We'll probably move out to the burbs when we have out kid of school age for the better schools, not because we fear the area.
This is exactly the kind of problem Democrats need to solve if they want to win people back. People dont want long commutes and to move out for schools, but the reality is that if a default place requires very close oversight of a 2 year old, its not really fit for humans. If there is glass on the ground or shit, perhaps you have a dog and have had to pull them away in your neighborhood. Kids shouldnt be on leashes, they are humans that need to learn, but learning not to step in the dog shit is not so valuable a lesson for a 2 year old. Particularly when that dog shit is mixed with glass in a kids playground where, in more normal places, you can trust to just let said 2 year old march around while you enjoy a coffee.
Plus the playground bullies are out of control ATM in cities. Many biters. Cops will charge YOU if you discipline or physically separate a kid while defending your own. Particularly if the stack isn't in your favor.
And you know all this. You know "better schools" is a euphemism for better peer students and peer parents. No amount of Stuyvesant and Stevenson teachers would make Haitian kids learn. And I sure as heck know the Stevenson kids dont have any broken glass on their feeder campus.
People who seriously identify as left-wing would often dispute this. Many on the left see the Democrats as a right-wing party, and the mainstream media as centrist, liberal, centre-right, or something else other than left.
This is certainly true, but I think when Democrats are talking about this in the context of losing the election they literally believe that the Democrat-aligned media is lacking, not communist-aligned media. I see this all the time on Reddit.
I believe your average non-communist Democrat sees it this way. Republican-aligned media like Fox puts party support above all else. They put no value on truth, morality or fairness and just spew misinformation 24/7, anything to help Republicans. Meanwhile the NYT is primarily concerned with Truth, Justice and Objectivity. If this shakes out to favoring the Democrats that’s just because “reality has a liberal bias” and “it’s not politics just basic human decency”, the NYT only favors the Democrats by this convergence of their values but they would not lie, cheat or steal if it helped the Democrat cause. So the NYT doesn’t count as Democrat aligned in their mind
I’ve seen many Dems on reddit lamenting the whole “when they go low we go high” strategy and wishing they could fight dirty as they perceive Republicans are.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
4hr ago
Ideally energy should be very cheap.
Good thing Australia has a bunch of uranium lying around!
curious_straight_ca
4hr ago
People currently take a variety of things that don't hurt them
They have a lot of comically false beliefs about the benefits of the things they currently take, demonstrating they're not able to correctly identify the effects the supplements have. If unscrupulous firms are allowed to market real drugs in the same way, that market will similarly not be able to discern that the real drugs don't have the claimed effects, and they'll take a lot of the real pills and hurt themselves!
But if that alone were enough, we would surely have a better world than we do now
Society doesn't work in a way which supports human well-being. Advertisement for instance attempts to create a need that it then tries to fulfill. And it's possible that even if we managed to make all of a society enlightened, they would cease to exist in a single generation as they either renounced marriage, or became so uninterested in conflict that another country could easily conquer them. I also believe that Postmodernism has made society worse, even though it has correctly identified that some things are social constructs (and incorrectly made human nature out to be a construct). But yeah, Chesterton's fence applies here. Many bad things have good second-order effects, and maybe good things have bad second-order effects.
Teaching these things is difficult, but only because we're so corrupted by societies teachings. I believe that a child would grasp them more easily.
so nothing mind-blowing
There's a small possibility that we all have weak reality-bending powers in that our subconsciousness can affect the universe, and there's a chance that one can make this power stronger. I once visualized that I got an A in a class that I had barely studies for, and I somehow did. How? My presentation was mediocre at best. The situation with my brother is also not understood by neither science nor old books (except those which cover mind-blowing things).
John Wheeler was an extremely intelligent scientist and won many awards, and he arrived at a "participatory universe theory". And the general ratio of highly intelligent people who believe in strange things is quite high. There's also some research by the CIA like the gateway process: https://www.vice.com/en/article/found-page-25-of-the-cias-gateway-report-on-astral-projection/
And it's possible that beliefs influences reality in a way such that reality is the superimposing of all beliefs, which means that the doubts of many can cancel out the beliefs of few (which may be why many cultures warn that one should not say their wishes out loud). Another theory of mine is that things cannot change state while they're observed (the Quantum Zeno effect?), which means that they need to be unobserved in order to be malleable. Lets again use Tarot cards as an example, but shuffling the cards while you're not observing them, you create unobserved states, and the cards become "undecided". Now, as you observe a card, it's decided, and your subconsciousness (or your past and future trajectory) somehow influences this choice. Some call the set of unobserved/undecided things "Chaos". For chaotic things, very small inputs can result in vastly different outputs, but this means that the energy of the human brain is enough (as the future trajectory of events can be altered by spending a few calories worth of energy). Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kia_(magic)
But isn't it more fun to find these truths yourself? If you figure everything out, you will be bored (this seems a bit like your current problem actually) And if somebody discover a "mind-blowing" secret before us, and gets access to a higher power, we may be in trouble. Especially if some government gets their hand on said knowledge.
There's clearly some rules in effect here
Your quote by Aristotle seems to be the same thing I wrote earlier about there being no true language and no true axiomatic system, but that "You must choose one". It's like when we talk - we have to choose a language in order to talk. Any language will do, but we cannot speak of anything which does not have a word in that language, trapping us.
There's a rule in effect, but it's difficult to construct a rule which explains all examples. I think that submission to a higher power vs making oneself out to be the higher power is the difference between white magic and black magic. There's many warnings that black magic can destroy you or make you go insane. It may just be that being humble has a lot of benefits for the psyche - after all, basically ever culture to ever exist has spoken positively about humility. It's possible that herd morality is to blame for this virtue of humility (an aspect of human nature in normies say "The nail which sticks out gets hammered down") but even non-conformists tend to come up with a saying similar to "Those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted." It's possible that "authorities" just have higher, well, authority over the programming of the mind. After all, most socities have leaders whose words are absolute. Just like humans crave external validation and overestimate the importance of others opinions, our brain may value the worldview of authorities very highly.
A set of rules to perception and feeling that we currently don't know
I know some of them. One is that contradiction works differently than you'd think. Trying to be positive, and trying not to be negative are not the same. You can be positive, but the more you try "not to be negative" the harder you will fail. This is related to "Do or do not, there is no try". Also sometimes communicated like this: "When you try to be happy, you reinforce the idea that you're not already happy, which makes you stuck in the unhappy stage". The Tao Te Ching also has a bunch of rules which are just the opposite of what one would expect.
Could we create a methodology to produce the perfect LSD trip?
I think I've seen something like that over at https://qualiacomputing.com While I don't think you can solve reality or human nature with mathematics, these are the guys who have come the closest to being able to do this so far.
Could we eliminate the dark night of the soul from The Path?
Like the attempt to eliminate evil and the attempt to eliminate suffering, eliminating the dark night of the soul may be naive. The dark night could be an important step in reaching enlightenment, like how getting your pulse up is an important step in lowering your resting heart rate, and kind of like how nihilism can be a transitory state between belief in the external and belief in the self. You can eliminate bad dreams quite easily, but I believe that they're just reflections of your general situation in life, or even important messages from your subconsciousness. Anyway, if you want to eliminate bad dreams, you need to tell yourself that these dreams do you no good, and have conflicting parts of yourself agree with this. Hypnosis should work as well, as long as your subconsciousness perceive the person who hypnotizes you as an authority. But again, even so-called bad things exist for a reason. There's a duality principle here as well. Or perhaps this "bad" thing is a part of something bigger. We don't like having red lights in traffic, but eliminating red lights would be a terrible idea. We only know this because we know why traffic lights exist, but some things seem bad without us knowing why they exist, so getting rid of them is dangerous.
anti_dan
4hr ago
Youtube comments sections have gotten signifigantly further right over the last 3 years. That's basically social media.
You'd still get banned for saying "you cant be a woman and have a penis" so its still far left of the center.
curious_straight_ca
4hr ago
I get printouts of most things because my work space cannot be limited to two screens.
you can, and maybe should, purchase more than two large monitors
anti_dan
4hr ago
The answer for me would be:
- Crime;
- Education;
- Immigration.
Most things that are expensive right now (and even pre-Covid) are not so because the are inherently so. Most cities and areas are not like SF/Silicon Valley. More are like Chicago and DC where a large part of the COL is caused by crime. Your groceries are more expensive because the store has 10% losses via theft and breakage, your commute is 100% longer because close to your work is a bunch of burned out homes from the 1940s occupied by squatters, your house itself is on more land that you need because property values need to be high to keep your kids safe, and because parks can't be kept safe.
Similarly education is expensive. We spend so much for so little, all you can possibly get is a good peer group by, again, paying for it with property values or tuition. And sometimes that doesn't even work (we are having trouble getting our son separated from a problem child despite all this). And that is just standard ed. Higher ed needs to be gutted. People are rightly feeling exploited. People dont understand the loans; or the degrees, and graduate feeling entitled to something they were sold but never actually deserved/earned. The people most affected want a handout, but that will only marginally help them and would make the problem worse. What we need is metaphorical arson.
And last is immigration. It causes problems with the first two, plus social cohesion. The cost of ESL in education and society is enormous. Immigrant populations routinely shelter criminals (very common crime being covered up is sexual exploitation of minors in my experience) and make policing generally more difficult by just committing so much low level crime it cant even be policed (think the 2001 New England Patriots defense, but as a whole community littering, setting garbage fires, having 100 free range cats, etc). There is then the signage, the court and other legal costs they add up.
For part 4) Id just end all transfer payments to people not injured on the job. Of course, that makes 1-3 (already impossible IMO) appear modest. The two biggest problems in the US are Medicaid and Welfare. Social Security and Medicare are a close 3/4. The only reason the feds should be cutting someone a check is if they got a limb blown off in Iraq or cut off while working in a factory. And ideally we restructure the factory portion of that so the factory is paying that shit.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
5hr ago
records of courtiers in some European country.
These guys were probably fat. I can definitely buy a sedentary fat man eating five thousand calories a day.
Trench soldiers
It's pretty believable that trench warfare has higher caloric demands than athletic training. Athletes stop training once they are in danger of overexerting themselves, while the infantry has no such luxury.
That trench soldiers maintained weight on 4600 calories a day should make us extremely skeptical of sedentary, normal BMI people eating 5kcal day in, day out unless they have some kind of metabolic disease, let alone this happening often.
campfire
5hr ago
I remember Aella or other Rationalist-adjacent person on social media sharing a word doc that compiles various controversial opinions and survey questions, anyone remember this and have a link to it?
Corvos
5hr ago
Re: 2, bear in mind that energy underlies everything we do and so energy costs propagate to everything in a way that others don’t. Ideally energy should be very cheap.
It's going to be hard for me to dig that up. It was on X and was based on records of courtiers in some European country.
Not the same, but here's the best I could do with 3 minutes of Perplexity: Trench soldiers eating 4600 kCals per day during WWI. Obviously, they were very active, but also must have weighed an average of like 140 pounds.
Even assuming extreme activity, this should only burn less than 3200 kCals per day: https://tdeecalculator.net/result.php?s=imperial&g=male&age=19&lbs=140&in=69&act=1.9&f=1
I've seen many other records of historical people eating large amounts of calories. Maybe they're dubious, I'm not sure.
MiddleAgedMan
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
5hr ago
People pay an order of magnitude less attention to you than you think. Live your life and don't worry about what other people think.
anti_dan
5hr ago
Are you talking about quantity or reach? Because the lowest quality grifter with the most reach in America is Ibrahim X. Kendi. Next you have the 1619 project, all BLM related orgs, etc. RW orgs with that much reach are people like Daily Wire and Vivek. You might not like their positions on everything, but those aren't grifters. One is a legitimate media business that has really innovated in the space, and the other is a serious politician and thinker, although odd.
jeroboam
5hr ago
There seem to be trade offs involved.
There is a "woo" explanation that goes something like this:
In all plants and animals, there is a thrive/survive dynamic. During times of plenty, the plant will blossom, the animal will expend energy and look to breed. During times of starvation, the plant will go dormant, the animal will hibernate.
But the candle that burns brighter (high metabolism) is extinguished sooner. High metabolism may lead to better health, more energy, and visible abs, but it will also age one more quickly.
This is a universal principle of all life forms.
It's maybe directionally accurate. It's certainly not very well-studied. Maybe I'm just hoping there's an upside to my vampire like pulse rate and body temperature.
Felagund
5hr ago
If you want an easy explanation of why they should be told, I know pro-trans activism likes to talk about elevated rates of suicide among people with gender dysphoria/trans people (even though suicide is a social contagion, and we elsewhere try to avoid doing that, but whatever). Do you not think that parents should know that their child is in a group with a vastly higher suicide rate?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
5hr ago
When we look at historical records, we often see even relatively sedentary men ate 3000, 5000, or even more kCals per day.
Huh? Where are the historic sedentary men eating over 5000 calories on a daily basis?
Lewis2
5hr ago
The weird creepy ads about “people can look up your voting record and won’t date you if you don’t” also don’t help with this, especially when several of these ads didn’t clarify that while whether you voted is public, who you voted for is not. The social stigma of voting Trump is still high, as people get uninvited from Thanksgiving with their own families for leaning conservative.
The Republicans were unfortunately no better on this front, though their social pressure went straight to registered Republican voters and so was less visible than the Democrats’ efforts. Here’s one of several texts I received in the days leading up to the election (emojis and text formatting are original):
🗳️Voting records are public—your friends, neighbors, and family will know if you stood with Trump when it mattered most. 🇺🇸🔥
Hi Lewis, this is [X] with the [state] GOP. Tomorrow is Election Day—your 𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 to make a difference. Whether or not you vote is public, and your community will see if you stood with Trump or stayed home. Don’t let your country down when our 𝐟𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞.
I received a few more that included variants on the same veiled threat. I wasn’t and still am not very happy with that approach, but I imagine it probably is effective, given that both sides were trying it.
Templexious
5hr ago
It's a recent move, and the Left's grift is still there, however, they've started to tone things down in the advent of the ascending accelerationists. Granted, sites like Salon and NewRepublic seem to exist to prove the strawmen visions of the Democrats correct to a degree that feels deranged, even if one were to find the American Russophiles and Sinophiles unpalatable.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
5hr ago
Yeah that will definitely have a selection effect, not just because you aren't seeing as many leftists, but also because people of all political persuasions generally hide their craziest beliefs unless they know they are in good company. So you hang out with rightists and they get comfortable with you and tell you their metaphors that they secretly believe, but are so rarely in a space that is comfortable for leftists that you don't hear their metaphors that they secretly believe.
That's a very complicated question I've spent a lot of time posting about on here - but luckily, Australia is so comically corrupt that it is a lot simpler down under. Previous government leaders signed ruinously, comically bad deals that fucked over our national economy for personal profit. We're exporting natural gas during a domestic natural gas shortage, because corrupt deals were made that essentially result in us subsidising companies which extract fossil fuels then sell them to Japan at below cost so that Japanese middlemen can profit from the deal. Destroying all of that would actually lower domestic energy prices.
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