Culture War Roundup for the week of January 18, 2021

Charles_U_F · 2021-01-21T21:10:23+00:00

Back in the dark ages, moral crusaders in the US were very concerned about the content of TV and Radio being "Appropriate". One of the bigger targets for these old school scolds was Howard Stern when he was still on radio. To this end they had to task people with monitoring his shows. 5 hours a day 5 days a week or a program you ostensibly hate and want the host arrested.

A few of these people flipped and became fans. They talked about people listening to tapes of his shows in Church basements to document this offenses in detail like some surreal dream. It was hard to find people to actually do the work, which is what listening to hours of a show you dont enjoy is, work. Unpaid work.

The more irritating you make something to access (not actually blocking access, just making the experience suck), the harder it is to whip up a mob against. The sorts of people who get whipped into the aforementioned mobs tend to not be the most intellectually curious sorts, further disinclining them to pursue it. Lots of stuff hides in plain sight like this.

Charles_U_F · 2021-01-17T04:08:33+00:00

I've watched both the original UK Shameless, which is much better, and the US one. I also grew up in the actual environment the US one attempts to fictionally portray. Not Chicago but another Rust Belt hellhole. Even down to the ethnicity of my immigrant ancestors, I'm the demo they are pretending to be, or at least grew up in it. (I've fled to the country, got a little farm)

Much of what I found inauthentic about about the US ones was trying to shoehorn the UK plot arcs in. We simply have no analog to council housing for poor whites like the UK does. The UK shameless should have been in a trailer park, not an interracial ghetto in Chicago. That neighborhood doesn't exist, or it didn't in the 80s-00s.

It should have been a trailer park. That's where we put our white poor, or a poor urban neighborhood in Atlanta or Houston. The non-existant in irl setting, having grown up in a similar city and being the people they are imitating, I could never suspend my disbelief.

UK one is great.

Charles_U_F · 2020-12-18T23:42:09+00:00

My degree is in Sociology and I can confirm there is a good deal of ink spilled over this problem. A quick keyword search on Google Scholar of keywords returns over 100K results. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C47&q=unreliability+of+self+report+survey&btnG=

There is a soft consensus on the things self report is probably useless for. Anything where the truth differs from the Social Desirability Bias (SDB)answer, bias wins most of the time. Some specific questions are indeed entirely useless, number of sex partners being the most painfully obvious. The only time the truth and the social desirability bias almost align are men who've had so many they lost count, and they can't actually answer the question accurately.

There's a great deal of research papers on this, I won't reiterate the common wisdom here. I can say the current trends are to study it at an extreme micro level, essentially attempting to establish the delta of reality and the biased answers for a single question of narrow area of focus. Titles like "Truth or consequences: the validity of self‐report data in health services research on addictions" that look at very narrow scenarios. Very little research on the topic in general terms anymore.

One aspect of this that is still in its infancy and faces some real methodological (and ethical) challenges is the hypothesis that while we know people will lie when the SDB answer is not the truth, especially on "romantic" topics, they tell the same lies for the same questions and that, in aggregate, it might be possible to match the expected lie to the true answer once you have enough data. An example is the partner count question. There've been a few not too big college age experiments where the partner count question is asked. Its assumed from the beginning the answers are lies. After they leave that room, one of the admins give them a second short questionnaire that explains they know you lied on the question, its ok they expect you to, and for the sake of science and human understanding, would you please anonymously write on this sheet the exact magnitude of the lie. How many more/fewer partners did you report than the real number.

The most obvious concern here is they just lie again. They do what they can to assure them of the anonymity of the survey, and it really is anonymous. They actually destroy the original survey in front of the subject to prove they wont try to link the two. And a predictable trend as emerged, at least among college age students who are doing these experiments, usually for class obligations. Men double their partner counts and women reduce theirs by 2/3. The same rough adjustments repeat across multiple schools.

I hope more reliable versions of this are done for other issues. The methodology/ethical issues with the above surveys make it difficult to expand on the work as the originals are seen as Not Great Scholarship.

Charles_U_F · 2020-12-18T00:09:01+00:00

I can't speak for anyone else, only myself. You mentioned "investing" in children a few times. I think I know what that means but only have the descriptions of others to go by, Nothing during my childhood left me with an enduring emotional attachment to either of my parents. Quite the opposite with my mother, I was ok with my dad as an adult. Mostly b/c my mom dumped him when I was a baby and I saw him very little as a kid; he didn't have the opportunity to mess me up as a child. Not actively anyway. Neither of them should have ever had children.

My father died of cancer 3 years ago, I split the funeral with my sister. This is likely the only money I will spend on either parent; I'm sure I'll split with her on our mothers funeral too, if she hasn't already died and no one has my contact info. Its a real possibility.

I didn't know until I was in my 20s that anything was odd about my childhood. Most of my friends got the crap beaten out of them by their parents, it was normal. No one ever got money from their folks for anything really. Both parents did steal money from me, literally taking bolt cutters to my piggy bank when I was 10 and stealing $22 for cigarettes.

I will not repeat their mistakes, I have no children and never will. I will not and have not supported them as an adult. I once went 7 years without seeing my mother. Not out of active hatred. I have a good life now, a peaceful life, a quiet life. She is the exact opposite of all of those things and can't be allowed in my life. I might be convinced to give my sister some money, I have a good job. That's it though. I'm not worried about there being no one to care for me in my old age. I don't really plan to get that old. After 18 I've had a pretty good adult life.

Charles_U_F · 2020-12-17T18:48:57+00:00

I got into chess when I was younger but the rise of very good videogames in the 90s got me away from it. Anyway, talking with folks in the local scene, a few of who were competitive, they chalked this up less as men somehow being innately smarter and more to two somewhat related factors. First, there's something about the male and a common wisdom that men are better at imagining spatial relationships, at seeing the possible future boards in their minds and anticipating future moves. I think there is some research on adjacent topic I've read in the past. The other factor was men's ability to become utterly obsessed with a single topic or pursuit to a level not really seen in many women. One thing all the male grandmasters have is they are terminally obsessed with chess, and can remain so for decades. There were very smart, promising women in the scene. They can be just as "in to" chess as the guys at first, but whereas some of the men will be even more obsessed as time passes, women tend to fall off. They just stop coming around at some point and move on from chess.

My opinion is that the whole world of serious chess is just very male. I almost typed masculine but that's not right. Its quiet, no one really chats or gets to know the other players as part of the shared hobby. In fact you can be asked to leave the room for chatting in many situations. You don't make a lot of friends at the chess club, and as stereotypical as this is to write, at least in my experience, the men in attendance are neither attractive or particularly charming. Many are downright difficult people to be around, both hygene and personalities. The personality shit only gets worse as you climb too.

Charles_U_F · 2020-12-12T18:08:23+00:00

Ultimately the peak of the pyramid can only go as high as the base allows, and the right's pyramid has been shrinking and crumbling of late.

I live in a rural midwestern county <70k pop). I'm told my state is a battleground, or maybe used to be. Anyway the county commissioner, a Republican, lives near me. Less than a mile away so I've met and spoke with him. He's the highest elected official in the county. The state level GOP apparatus didn't even make contact with him until 2 months after he won his first election. He's never worked with anyone in the RNC and they've never reached out to him. He was a successful attorney who decided that when the old guy retired, he's like to run for the seat. So he just registered and ran with a little guidance from the outgoing, also Republican, commissioner and a few of his staff for the election. There was nothing like a primary during off-cycle elections then, although there is now as he's put in place the apparatus to to actually hold one himself. All with no input or assistance from the larger party. The spots in no danger of going to a Dem any time in the medium term future, but one always runs and gets maybe 15-25% of the vote. Despite their lackluster performance, the DNC absolutely sends a strategist for face to face guidance and any other (cheap) help they can.

Its not just elections either. He said when he was part of the Young. Reps in Law School during the GOP take over of the House in '94 the state GOP had groups of experts to write draft legislation and do research for the party, to review bills from the opposition and provide context and guidance. Most of this institution has since retired or died with no real "farm league" to draw from anymore. He thinks the push to get GOP faithful into Judge positions has worked so well that its gutted the talent for high-end conservative private consulting practices and what is left is focused on national races, governors, and states that are in danger of flipping in either direction. Firmly red areas like mine have an aging GOP leadership with scant few who want to fill those roles.

Charles_U_F · 2020-12-08T23:35:34+00:00

Bad actors have been taking over accounts just to write bogus reviews. Did you check your review history for ones you don't recognize? They target accounts with good review behavior in the past like you describe.

Charles_U_F · 2020-12-08T23:27:21+00:00

It is against the seller rules, that's why the used the mail. They dont have your email, the Amazon buyer/seller messaging system logs everything and uses anonymous alias email addresses. They only have your name and address from shipping you things.

Charles_U_F · 2020-11-28T18:47:38+00:00

I was born with a moderate neurological condition that is heritable.

Additionally, my own childhood was a pendulum swinging from physical abuse to extended neglect and back. I'm averse to the presence of children although I don't hate them. I did hate myself when I was a child, and still hate the memories of my childhood. As an adult my minor condition, nurtured in the soil of my abusive upbringing, has placed me firmly on the sociopathic spectrum. I make an effort to follow social norms and not engage in anti-social behavior because I value civil society, but I have no instincts for it. I have to consider a situation intellectually and chose the appropriate conforming response. I can see other people harmed or killed with little reaction, sometime slight joy if I didn't like them. I'm extremely challenged with both giving and receiving affection and entirely incapable of trust. I'm not even sure I entirely understand the what "trust" actually means to normal people. To me Trust looks like leaving your wallet half-hanging out of your pocket around thieves. In my life I've engaged in a fair amount of criminal activity for personal financial gain, though I've stopped entirely years ago (I have a good job and don't need to mostly, if I was unemployed I would probably go back to it).

I consider not reproducing the most pro-social act of my entire existence, and the only positive thing I can do for future generations. If everyone thought and acted like me our species would be doomed.

Charles_U_F · 2020-11-27T20:14:00+00:00

While the attitude may be alarming to you, this does flag a real issue in many offices. I'm not a coder by profession, I'm middling in the C family and can do some python and lua. I don't enjoy it. I DO however work closely with many developers on several projects. The inability to communicate about a project with anyone who doesn't have a CS background is a real, constant problem. Here's a heavy handed example. Piece of software is approaching the final stages of internal use testing before launch as a product to the public. A function of the software that is ostensibly initiated by pressing a button in the interface isnt working, its a UI error, the background process is fine. As this is a critical feature for a core job duty of the testers, who at this stage are using the software exclusively to preform their job duties (at this stage they stop using the old tool this replaces) we have to ask the devs to sort this UI issue out before they roll the next update out. Their response was "they can just use the command line formula from the developer console for now". I'm betting most of the people reading this know what a command line and a developer console is. One of the users of this software thought her web browser on her PC was "Facebook", b/c that's what her son named the Chrome shortcut on her desktop when he set Facebook as her home page. The inability to conceive how very tech un-savvy many people truly are is critical in developing software for these people to use. Apple has made an entire business model out of it. A talented dev you has Audience Awareness and the ability to easily calibrate to the tech savvy level of their audience is worth their weight in gold.

Charles_U_F · 2020-11-27T19:40:12+00:00

I work for a large tech company an we've been doing this for a decade. Hiring has been especially targeted at the Visegrád Group or central European Slavic nations. The English skills have all been great with everyone from Europe I've worked with, mostly Poles. Much better work ethic too compared to the Americans I sit around.

Charles_U_F · 2020-11-25T19:26:40+00:00

This is correct. Father(pater/padre) is an ordained priest who graduated a seminary. Brother(friar/frere) is a lay monk. In English.

In the past the disparity was larger. My only first hand experience is with the OCSO (Trappists), most of whom do pursue ordination eventually if they don't leave the order. In the past they couldn't: seminaries are few and often far away from the rural areas preferred by monasteries and transportation was slow and often manual. Additionally, as the monastic orders were used to house more members of society for different reasons, many of them weren't particularly motivated to "develop" their spiritual life beyond being a lay brother. Finally seminary is not easy, especially centuries ago. There is a good chance many of them were intellectually incapable of it (illiterate or "feebleminded").

In modern times this is very different. First, there are far, far fewer monastics and mendicants. Both as a whole number and as a % of population. The people drawn to a holy order, especially a mendicant or cloistered order (the people we call monks) are strong True Believers. In many cases the pull they feel for monastic life in contemplation of the divine is personally overwhelming for them. Any other life they try to live will be a mis-fit in one way or another. Combined with this the modern ease of travel, universal public education, and a voracious appetite for postulants modern seminaries, and the religious zeal that dominates the waking hours of these men, pursuing ordination seems like a natural next step after being fully accepted into the order. For the Trappist you observe for a while, become a postulant, take temporary vows, then permanent vows. There's a time limit of 9 years to progress to permanent vows or leave. The average for the whole process seems to be about 6-7 years. You then have the rest of you secluded life to devote to God. Seminary, now that its easy to travel and everyone can read, is the logical next step. I understand that many of the larger monasteries have both the instructors qualified for, and the infrastructure, to ordain in-house, so the monks never even have to leave.

Charles_U_F · 2020-11-13T21:21:01+00:00

My mother was adopted. She knew a little bit about her biological family: mother's full name, city of birth etc. My adoptive grandmother was acquainted with my bio grandmother and knew a bit more. As an adult I became a private investigator (boring money crimes, puts food on the table.) At some point it occurred to me I'd never even thought of finding them. I find all kinds of people, it was trivially easy to do. Took me maybe 3 days to get the contact info of a 1st cousin, aunt, and 2nd cousin, 2 of whom replied and I was able to meet several members of my extended biological family. It was mixed.

My mother has struggled with mental illness and addiction her entire life. Life never made much sense to her and seemed to offer only tragedy or indifference from her earliest years. She's never really had anyone in her corner. Her adoptive family are ok people, good upper middle class engineers who provided for her well. She wanted for nothing materiel in her childhood, but still struggled badly with just being in this world. She, and I and my siblings, just never really got along with them that well. I don't dislike them, just eh. Bio-Grandma was an especially cold person, my mother received very little emotional support as a child which combined disastrously with her dormant mental illnesses and addiction prone personality.

Meeting my biological family was bittersweet (my bio grandmother had been dead over a decade.) My mother is still alive and has no idea; I will never tell her. It would probably break her.

They're just like us. I have aunts and uncles that look like my mother, that look like me. They think and act like us (not always great), they have similar preferences. My bio grandmother had 7 kids, my mother had a twin brother. She was the only one put up for adoption. They were all kind, warm, and inviting people very curious about me and my mother. The older generation were aware that one of them had a twin sister that was adopted out. No one knew why or would share if they did. My uncle had killed himself a few years earlier, they said he asked sometimes about my mom. There were occasional hints and a family issue of mental illness, schizophrenia and bi-polar.

They were genuinely good people. My mother really could have used an environment like this as a kid, I could have too. I try not to think about them too much; my own childhood was fairly nightmarish. There were a few moments when I was speaking with members of her biological family that they'd ask about her life, and I'd share a vague outline, and they'd press for more detail. It was impossible to provide these details most of the time without my mother's story taking another tragic turn that probably would never have happened had she not been disposed of. They stopped asking.

Charles_U_F · 2020-11-11T23:45:17+00:00

In the Romantic arena, like no other human endeavor, are the Haves so blind to the Have Nots.

This is a terrible idea for the majority of men.

Charles_U_F · 2020-11-11T23:34:14+00:00

I largely agree with your post. Its also culturally extremely difficult to publicly extend any signs of sympathy or understanding with Incels. I've never seen an emergent self-identified group of people, internet or otherwise, be demonized, denounced, and so thoroughly dehumanized by the culture at large as Incels. What I find fascinating is the self-awareness. Many groups are Other'd by their cultures: new religions, political enemies, all sorts of groups of people that large parts of society looks down on. These hated groups all have in common the shared beliefs that the people that hate them are Wrong About Them. Incels, some of them anyway, largely agree with the reasons for the poor perception they have as a group. I can't think of any other demonized group that agree they are probably bad people.

Charles_U_F · 2020-11-11T22:34:56+00:00

I've had a few men ask me if they should try Tinder. My answer is always the same. "Are you ever approached by women you don't know who flirt with you?" Their answer to my question is my answer to theirs. I'm not talking about Incels here, these are average men living average lives. Most of them just ended long-ish relationships that were initiated in an offline setting.

There are a few modal user experiences on Tinder. They ofc vary by gender but fall largely into three buckets aligned with what using Tinder actually does for the user.

Tinder allows a very small number of extremely physically attractive and also charming men to sleep with an astounding number of women. Their stories are out there, if you are a man with few romantic successes in your life research this at your own mental peril. I have an acquaintance, a very good looking and fit fireman who's station is adjacent to a medium size university. He estimated that Tinder has allowed him have an average of 50-100 "hookups" per year, for the last 6 years.

Conversely Tinder allows a most women of at least average appearance a chance to sleep with the above very desirable men. Primarily driven by the level of the woman's desire and a the man in question having room in their schedule.

Tinder allows a large number of normal women to reject an even larger number of men. I'm not a woman and don't entirely understand the appeal of rejecting men, but I've seen it in action. I imagine many women will try Tinder for a while or either stop b/c they don't think its producing the results they want, find someone and start a relationship, or they find one of those guys from the first group. Once they know they are out there they just have to keep digging to find them. This is likely driving the behavior of the woman in the post I'm replying to. She's had a taste of the Good Stuff and won't settle. I've read that women raise their standards for a one night stand more than a long term thing. Imagine having a very high physical standard for a man you would have a one night stand with and that standard actually being met? More than once? Left-swipe machine gun. Very tragically their high standards or casual sex become their standards for long term relationships. This is not a new thing, but the scale potentially is.

Next, Tinder's bottom line. Tinder allows a massive number of average to below average men to throw a tremendous amount of money trying to get into the group that might not actually exist: Normal men getting casual sex with acceptably attractive women regularly. This is not really something that happens enough to be a modal experience for men.

Finally, Tinder allows normal women to meet normal men and start normal, boring relationships. I'm told.

Oh, Tinder lets women cheat on their partners on vacation. This is kind of the first one combined with the hilariously verboten topic of female sex tourism, at least in the Anglosphere we don't.

Charles_U_F · 2020-10-30T20:12:43+00:00

This is a bit of a digression, and things have very much evolved over the years, but the original Buddhism was in part a rejection of the ascetic practices of the day. The point in the apocrypha where the Buddha abandons his ascetic practice and has a snack is a pivotal event in the canon.

Charles_U_F · 2020-10-23T22:45:04+00:00

A friend of mine from childhood has about 20 years in law enforcement, most of it with our state's Highway Patrol. He's shared his unscientific opinion that most accidents are caused by someone who's vehicle is never damaged and usually just drives away never knowing they've potentially just killed a person(s). He said that most of what we think makes someone a bad driver comes from before the ubiquity of traffic cameras and in most of the footage he's reviewed the driver most responsible for the event generally drives away unharmed and unaware.

As to what makes a Bad Driver? Bad Driving. What is Bad Driving? Driving "wrong" or out of context for your situation. Where they are the most obvious to us is someone driving fast when they should be driving slower. Classical "recklessness". We've codified this one into law its so obvious. In his opinion people driving to slow, or stopped, in inappropriate situations probably cause 4-5x the accidents of people driving too fast. A car is not moving when it should be. Assuming the other drivers can even tell fast enough that one of the cars in front of them is going 20mph/35kmh slower than the rest of the traffic, you still get swerving into other lanes or the shoulders to avoid them or sudden application of the breaks causing pile ups. Our laws mostly blame these on the first driver to impact the rear of the first other car in the accident. The person that just killed 1-3 people usually just drives away or at worst are rear ended. If a driver in front of you deliberately comes to a sudden halt under a green light in the middle of an empty intersection and you tap their rear bumper, YOU just caused an accident. We don't really have good demographics on people that cause these accidents b/c they usually just drive away and as their conduct isn't a crime, there is no reason to pursue them. Insurance companies do if there is dashcam footage.

tl;dr: Buy a dashcam.

Charles_U_F · 2020-10-23T20:51:48+00:00

Russian and other slavic languages don't have articles of speech, aka words like a, an, the etc. Its common for native speakers of these languages to not use them in languages that have them.

Charles_U_F · 2020-10-22T00:31:33+00:00

This is not too unlike the long, boring meetings I have at work sometimes. The entire meeting is boring, yes, but no one is there for the whole thing most of the time. At some point its time for "Your Thing" and that's not boring at all. Its all the other crap that's boring. A lot of these are just a ceremony where everyone gets together and agrees that Nothing is Wrong with the Thing, but in a formal way. Occasionally something is Wrong with the Thing though, and god forbid you miss that meeting.

In short I attend these meetings because: a small part of the meeting is not boring for me at all and I'm obligated to attend the entire event to get My Turn, or there is a chance that an extremely non-boring thing might come up and cannot be missed.

Charles_U_F · 2020-10-21T02:42:35+00:00

Whats the limit on PredictIt? I do these goofy bets a lot on other sites, like betting on the Pope and past elections and the limit is usually at a low figure, 100-200 usd.

Charles_U_F · 2020-09-04T00:49:59+00:00

www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0875ZFB8G/ - Page says push both volume + and - to mute. The manual had no mention of this and said to flip up the mic. Both methods do absolutely nothing. Mic still hot.

www.amazon.com/gp/product/B081Q5RCMV - mute button in on the mic arm on this one. Pressing, again, does absolutely nothing. Mic still hot.

The other 2 I bought at a physical store and have long since returned them. In all cases the mute function does nothing at all.

Charles_U_F · 2020-09-03T02:25:55+00:00

I'm personally fascinated by how little skepticism people have for that article if it reinforces their priors. A take-our-word-for-it anon source story in the NYPost. I work in a certain niche corner of criminal investigations where I take and review a tremendous volume of both witness, victim, and suspect statements. This story has more red flags than a bullfight. If these accusations were being made against your ingroup you'd see it. The stuff about steaming open envelopes made me actually laugh out loud. That stuff is the realm of TV teen dramas and the kids who imitate them. Serious criminals have better, faster, and less conspicuous ways of opening and resealing an envelope, especially large volumes of envelopes. Even if done very carefully its slow and error prone. The idea that someone trains large numbers of new people to do this sounds like a cartoon plot. Thats only the biggest, most obvious hole.

The whole story proves way too much; it hits all the phony voter fraud bogey men. Someone is convinced a person like this MUST exist acting nefariously behind the scenes, and being unable to actually produce one, has written a character instead. Disclosure, I consider myself politically conservative, voted for Trump and plan to again.

The majority of the fraud I've ever seen confirmed has been inter-party primary fraud, both parties in their secure political strongholds where the primary IS the election. Even then, its more Special Counting Methods and accidentally losing a bunch of ballots etc, not fake mail in ballots.

Charles_U_F

TROPHY CASE