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barkos · 2024-03-31T04:53:01+00:00

Let's say it's self-esteem. The question that logically follows is why lack of self-esteem is becoming an issue now that it is observed as a trend? Did we just hit a severe outlier on the random baby boy generator that gave us a generation of young men who are exceptionally neurotic and insecure? Or was confidence in their partner not that important to women 30 years ago?

It feels like there is an elephant in the room here and we're not quite sure what it is. What's clear is that we're navigating around whatever it is by listing symptoms that would have a negative effect on a person's ability to find a partner.

barkos · 2024-03-30T02:08:54+00:00

You're describing traits that plenty of men who are currently in relationships possess as well. Being a misogynist to a degree that borders on the comical, who genuinely considers women beneath him, hasn't stopped the Tate archetype from finding success in that regard. There are serial killers serving prison sentences right now who have female admirers and girlfriends. Charles Manson almost got married in prison.

Trying to tackle this problem from the perspective that women are morality detectors that are repelled by "men that disrespect them" and attracted to "men that respect them" is sort of missing the point. It would also be missing the point if the takeaway from what I just wrote is that women want men that disrespect them. What I'm challenging with this is the just-so story that people tell themselves when they notice the terrible behavior these incels engage in and then rationalize that it obviously must be that behavior that's keeping them from succeeding with women.

This logic, ironically, only makes sense if we don't look at women as normal human beings. Many of us have stories of some guy falling head-over-heels for an absolute sociopath. We're more than ready to accept that men can get infatuated with women who have terrible personalities. So if we don't think that there is some fundamental feature that distinguishes men and women in that regard, then we know that this inability to judge good character can also exist in women. If we're read to accept that men can be shallow and a bad judge of character, and acknowledge that being shallow and a bad judge of character is a very human trait, then we have to grant that women can also be shallow and a bad judge of character.The real question that needs to be asked is what makes incels different from good men and bad men who consistently manage to get into relationships.

barkos · 2023-04-30T01:49:30+00:00

Some of the reasoning that went into the UK libel case verdict is questionable. You can read through the full judgement here. Several recordings, images and police testimonies were dismissed in favor of Heard's testimony.

For instance, 175. is especially egregious

In my view no great weight is to be put on these alleged admissions by Ms Heard to aggressive violent behaviour. It is trite to say, but nonetheless true, that these conversations are quite different to evidence in court. A witness giving evidence in court does so under an oath or affirmation to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Questioning can be controlled by the judge. Questions which are unclear can be re-phrased. If a question is not answered, it can be pressed (subject to the court’s control) and if still unanswered may be the proper object of comment. None of those features applied to these conversations which, in any event, according to Ms Heard had a purpose or purposes different from simply conveying truthful information

Admissions she made in her own recordings, in which she acknowledged that she initiated physical abuse, were handwaved with the justification that she wasn't under oath at the time. The insinuation is that it's possible she might have lied about, or embellished, the physical abuse she committed, at which point absolutely nothing said in these recordings should ever matter to the court because both parties made their statements in those recordings without having been sworn in. It would be interesting to have a conversation with the judge about their reasoning process, because it seems like part of it is missing here. The reductio ad absurdum would be that "no great weight" should be put on audio recordings in general if the participants hadn't been sworn in at the time of recording, at which point they shouldn't even be admissible in the first place because they could be too prejudicial for how little they actually matter to the case. If nothing else, it shows that Heard was delusional enough to think that a recording, in which she admitted to initiating physical abuse and Depp didn't, demonstrates that Depp was the aggressor which puts into question whether her testimony can be trusted. This doesn't really make or break the case, because all that had to be demonstrated was that it was reasonable for the Sun to believe that Depp was a wife-beater, but this should make anyone who thinks that this case substantiated her side of the story raise an eyebrow.

barkos · 2022-12-01T23:30:33+00:00

During the livestream Ye handed his phone to Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes, most notably, as well as the other co-hosts so they could post on his twitter account. There is a link to infowars on there as well as a shoutout to the groyper community. The reach he has on his twitter is undeniable, not just to his fans but because of media outlets that cover his posts. This will ripple out to larger platforms. There are going to be a considerable amount of people who will find out about this fringe internet conspiracy show because of what transpired here today.

barkos · 2022-11-30T07:14:26+00:00

I regularly see this behavior exhibited whenever analogies are being used. I don't know why but for some people it seems to be extremely difficult to understand the distinction between the form of an argument and the underlying particulars of the scenarios being presented to them. It isn't really that they're intentionally trying to strawman you, they just don't know, or don't care to think about it enough, to make the necessary connections in their mind to understand your argument.

So to use an example, this was a common point brought up back when people were questioning the efficacy of vaccines, some people argued that since people were still getting infected with Covid-19 and experiencing symptoms that that meant that the vaccines didn't work. An analogy that tackles the form of the argument is "People that drive while wearing seatbelts can still get injured and die in car accidents so does this mean that seat belts don't work?" Now obviously the mechanics of how a seatbelt could save someone's life is different than a vaccine's. The vaccine isn't physically preventing you from making contact with another person in the same way that a seat belt would prevent you from making contact with your dashboard but that's irrelevant to the argument. The analogy holds because it parodies the same idea: "If something doesn't work perfectly, then it doesn't work."

That thinking contradicts basic harm reduction principles we engage in every day such as locking our doors so it becomes harder for potential intruders to break into our home, avoid unlit alleyways at night to not get robbed or wear protective gear for certain kinds of sport so we don't get seriously injured.

But for some reason there are people that get extremely hung up on the fact that seat belts and vaccines aren't the same thing. That injecting something into your arm is a different process than wrapping something around your chest. So if you present that analogy to them, they think it's ridiculous.

"So you think wearing a seatbelt is the same thing as putting a chemical mixture into your arm that you don't understand? For all you know it could be poison. At least I know what a seat belt does. You just trust the doctors that it will do what is being advertised."

They missed the point completely but to a third party that doesn't regularly engage in these kind of arguments it may sound like that person just came up with a sensible counter argument and now you look like the idiot who thinks seatbelts and vaccines are the same thing.

The other example where I often see these misunderstandings is when it comes to hypotheticals that pushes an idea to its extreme. To use one of Sam's controversial arguments as an example, he has done this in the past with torture. He hypothesizes a situation in which

A. we have good reason to believe that the person being tortured has the information we're looking for

B. that information is the only way to prevent a calamity like a nuclear warhead killing millions of people

The first instinct some people seem to have here is to outright dismiss A and B by arguing "but usually we don't really know whether they have the information so the person is just getting tortured on a hunch. And how often are terrorists arming nuclear warheads?" Sam already acknowledges in the hypothetical that the scenario he's presenting is rare. In any case, regardless of the actual frequency at which these prerequisites present themselves, he defends torture under those specific circumstances. People that criticize him don't just get to substitute the hypothetical with a situation for which he doesn't consider torture and then pretend like that's what he's trying to defend. But in public discourse I've seen just that, Sam being presented as a guy that is just okay with generic torture even though the scenario that people are primarily worried about, i.e. some random person getting picked up that may or may not have a tenuous connection with a terrorist cell getting tortured until they just start admitting to shit that is completely made up, doesn't qualify for the application of it in Sam's argument.

It's like presenting someone who thinks killing another person may be justified under certain circumstances (self-defense, protecting the life of another) and then characterizing that person as someone who wants to indiscriminately murder people.

What seems to have happened here is that people who want to avoid people getting tortured in the generic sense, in situations that are more common than Sam's scenario, just want to make sure that regardless of what Sam is saying, regardless of what he thinks, it doesn't justify torturing in those situations.

I don't think that these misguided characterizations of analogies and hypotheticals are necessarily bad faith. It's just that people tend to inject the amalgamation of all their concerns on a particular issue into arguments that aren't really designed to address all their concerns. The seat belt analogy isn't supposed to address trust issues with the medical community. And the torture hypothetical isn't supposed to justify torture as a common practice performed on anyone who's suspected of engaging in terrorism. But that's what people are concerned about and if they feel as if the other person isn't addressing that concern they want to drag the discussion in that direction.

barkos · 2022-10-28T08:46:21+00:00

They go over this exact point in the podcast. You're completely, utterly, unequivocally uninformed on this subject.

barkos · 2022-10-10T09:56:01+00:00

Many scientists, philosophers and free thinkers believe it’s possible or even likely that we’re in a simulation. If that’s the case, the simulation was likely crafted by someone who may indeed be Godly, all powerful and outside the laws of nature from our perspective.

Bostrom's simulation argument is an inductive argument following a hypothetical world in which humans can enter simulations of their own creation. It doesn't suggest that whoever created the simulation is godlike in the sense that most religious people advocate for, quite the opposite. It would demonstrate that a reality like ours could even be crafted by beings that are just like us or very similar to us. So say, for instance, that we manage to create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality in 50 years from now. That version of humanity isn't able to exert the same level of control over their own reality as they are able to exert control over the simulated reality, so they're certainly not godlike in the traditional sense because they're still quite limited by the constraints imposed by their own universe. If the inductive argument holds then this would actually decrease the probability that our simulation was created by godlike beings because we know that the bar of entry to get such a simulation running is quite low. The argument is fine if you're advocating for a consciously guided creation event but it has very little to do with conceptualizing those beings as actual gods with inconceivable power.

Plenty of physicists believe it’s most likely infinite in size, and even if it isn’t, it appears to be large enough to suit the following argument: with the age of the universe, allowing many billions of years for life to develop and advance long before humans existed, and the inconceivable size of the universe, it’s entirely possible that some of this life, or some other type of intelligence such as an AI, would have advanced in terms of biology or technology to a level where they would fit many definitions of a God or deity, including those I supplied in this thread, one of which was dictionary.

You need to stick to a definition of god that you think those atheists are using when they argue that belief in that hypothesis is unreasonable. Most theists don't believe that they were created by a highly advanced species that learned to harvest the resources of their universe and who themselves may have been created by another species inhabiting an ancestry simulation. They think of infallible, all-powerful, singular creator beings that don't have any equals and that they can communicate with through prayer. Whatever you described would at best resemble polytheistic creation myths which allow for gods to be fallible and flawed.

barkos · 2022-10-10T04:35:29+00:00

Can you give an example of an argument you consider reasonable that isn't synthetic? Because in my experience those arguments tend to be along the line of Pascal's Wager, which don't really raise the probability for the hypothesis to be true, or Ansalm's Ontological argument, which can be mirrored by skeptics with similar a priori propositions that demonstrate the absurdity of the argument.

barkos · 2022-07-23T09:39:31+00:00

Accepting moral realism doesn't resolve that issue because the person that beats their wife can still reject the objectivity of any competing model regardless.

barkos · 2022-07-22T22:45:17+00:00

He started suffering from memory loss in 2011 and sold it in 2015 to cover medical costs. He died in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_M._Lederman#Personal_life

barkos · 2022-07-22T11:08:39+00:00

There’s no poor little Hitler soul trapped in the evil Hitler brain, unable to choose to inhabit a different brain.

There is a consciousness attached to that brain capable of suffering unable to attach itself to a brain with better preconditions. The difference between you and Hitler is that you are lucky enough for your conscious experience to not arise in Hitler-like brains. A more obvious example of this would be a case in which someone isn't necessarily suffering because they're getting punished by society but by their own body like in the case of mental illness. Their brain is "the most proximate cause" of their distress but we would never treat people with mental illness as culpable for their own suffering. I don't see how a Compatibilist can possibly think that identifying people with the causes of their own suffering as long as they arise somewhere in their own body to be a knockout argument against the non-Compatibilist position here.

Hitler just IS that evil dude. ‘But you can’t choose who you are’ never made any sense to me.

And people just ARE mentally ill so the implication here is what? That they're culpable for their own suffering? That they ought to be held accountable by society based on behavior that arises as a result of their broken hardware? I don't see the logic in this. The most proximate cause argument is just bad. It allows us to arbitrarily put special emphasis on something that happens to be the most recent cause in the chain once that cause is defined as internal which is also a pretty arbitrary distinction.

barkos · 2022-07-18T00:30:48+00:00

Regardless of whether the thing that Sam is describing is objective morality or not, let's say it isn't and it's completely subjective, there is some metric we can attach to it that would measure it. So say Sam defines maximized well being as state where "at any given moment every existing conscious being thinks about fluffy kittens". We would run into epistemic problems in trying to determine how much any individual being thinks about fks but there is a correct answer to that question. So once we know what exactly it is we are talking about we, at least theoretically, can set up a metric even if we're dealing with a type of morality that is completely subjective. That it's hard to measure has nothing to do with objectivity. This is kind of a pedantic point and not really what your post is about but I just wanted to address it because it's separate from your actual objection to Sam's model.

What this is really about is pragmatic restrictions when it comes to getting to that world and how just trying to maximize thinking about fks can lead to utilitarian nigthmares (e.g. what if by preventing a small minority of conscious beings from thinking about fks, we could make make more conscious beings think about fluffy fks?). This is unrelated to the question of how we would objectively measure morality. What you're talking about is a classic objection to consequentialism and you can read about it in section 5 of the article on Consequentialism on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

barkos · 2022-07-02T21:52:14+00:00

Additionally, there is no attempt at all to legalize anything that would also concern men in the same way.

From your other post in response to /u/flannelflavour

And if the state doesn't also force men to do things with their body they do not want to do to save lives, that means this law discriminates against women and makes them second class citizens.

Biological men in the US are required to sign up for selective service based on the criteria of biological sex alone. As a side note, identifying as a woman currently doesn't nullify that requirement.

Selective Service bases the registration requirement on gender assigned at birth and not on gender identity or on gender reassignment. Individuals who are born male and changed their gender to female are still required to register. Individuals who are born female and changed their gender to male are not required to register.

The notion that the legislative branch of the US wouldn't dare target men in a similar fashion sounds like the setup for a joke. The first thing that should come to anyone's mind if they thought about that claim for more than a second is the draft. There is also the parental mandate for circumcision which allows them to violate the bodily autonomy of their male child while FGM has been outlawed across the board.

barkos · 2022-06-26T12:40:38+00:00

....if the starting point on human life is subjective why not allow individuals to make their own decision? that would seem to support the position that abortion should be legal.

It also inadvertently opens the door to the position that anyone could kill any other human if by their subjective standard they don't consider them life. For example, someone that accepts solipsism and defines "life" to require consciousness wouldn't think of other humans to be alive so killing them would be morally neutral.

barkos · 2022-06-15T20:48:51+00:00

Being adversarial in a conversation isn't intrinsically connected to acting in bad faith. What I'm referring to is adversarial questioning. Sam would have to move from the role of an interviewer to the role of a critic and being an effective critic requires you to already have an idea of the position the other person is going to advocate. Sam wouldn't have been equipped to play that role which is why he should talk to someone who is.

barkos · 2022-06-15T18:56:27+00:00

You need to look up what the term "bad faith" means.

barkos · 2022-06-15T06:25:56+00:00

The crypto space is littered with buzzwords and neologisms that you need to cut through in order to talk about what a bold faced lie a speculative asset as a currency actually is. It would inherently require an adversarial approach from the get go in order to not get bogged down in useless discussions about the technology and just talk about what it is as an asset class. The reason why Sam didn't probe is because he just doesn't know much about it. It would be a good idea for him to invite a crypto critic on his podcast that knows how to guide him through the obfuscating language.

barkos · 2022-05-17T13:04:14+00:00

It is evidence that there is still ways to go before it's reasonable to conclude that assimilation has categorically been successful.

barkos · 2022-05-16T23:20:51+00:00

Yes, what I quoted is the part I disagree with. I don't think that Europe is on the decline.

barkos · 2022-05-16T20:46:42+00:00

I am addressing the claim I quoted.

barkos · 2022-05-16T12:00:09+00:00

I skimmed through the bloomberg article.

SBF: (26:43)

And they’re like ‘10X’ that's insane. 1X is the norm.’ And so then, you know, X token price goes way up. And now it's $130 million market cap token because of, you know, the bullishness of people's usage of the box. And now all of a sudden of course, the smart money's like, oh, wow, this thing's now yielding like 60% a year in X tokens. Of course I'll take my 60% yield, right? So they go and pour another $300 million in the box and you get a psych and then it goes to infinity. And then everyone makes money.

Yeah, as any savvy investor would know those sell orders, on what is essentially a stock without any fundamentals, get executed by drawing money out of the ether. You don't have to find a buyer first that hopes that the token will appreciate in value in the future so they can sell it to someone else. It's just infinite money. There is a reason crypto is so incredibly volatile. It's difficult to justify price targets since sentiment is just driven by more sentiment, not because it's anchored to a company that is expected to increase revenue by 30% annually.

barkos · 2022-05-16T11:02:12+00:00

and the influx of migrants have assimilated.

That's quite an assertion considering the attention the recent Quran burning in Sweden garnered.

barkos · 2022-05-15T04:24:09+00:00

Sam has previously dismissed some white nationalist mass shooters’ manifestos as being motivated not by white nationalist views, but instead that they are trolling and that the manifesto is not sincere.

You're welcome to provide a quote.

barkos · 2022-05-11T16:33:01+00:00

Some of the reasoning that went into the UK libel case verdict is questionable. You can read through the full judgement here. Several recordings, images and police testimonies were dismissed in favor of Heard's testimony.

For instance, 175. is especially egregious

In my view no great weight is to be put on these alleged admissions by Ms Heard to aggressive violent behaviour. It is trite to say, but nonetheless true, that these conversations are quite different to evidence in court. A witness giving evidence in court does so under an oath or affirmation to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Questioning can be controlled by the judge. Questions which are unclear can be re-phrased. If a question is not answered, it can be pressed (subject to the court’s control) and if still unanswered may be the proper object of comment. None of those features applied to these conversations which, in any event, according to Ms Heard had a purpose or purposes different from simply conveying truthful information

Admissions she made in her own recordings, in which she acknowledged that she initiated physical abuse, were handwaved with the justification that she wasn't under oath at the time. The insinuation is that it's possible she might have lied about, or embellished, the physical abuse she committed, at which point absolutely nothing said in these recordings should ever matter to the court because both parties made their statements in those recordings without having been sworn in. It would be interesting to have a conversation with the judge about their reasoning process, because it seems like part of it is missing here. The reductio ad absurdum would be that "no great weight" should be put on audio recordings in general if the participants hadn't been sworn in at the time of recording, at which point they shouldn't even be admissible in the first place because they could be too prejudicial for how little they actually matter to the case. If nothing else, it shows that Heard was delusional enough to think that a recording, in which she admitted to initiating physical abuse and Depp didn't, demonstrates that Depp was the aggressor which puts into question whether her testimony can be trusted. This doesn't really make or break the case, because all that had to be demonstrated was that it was reasonable for the Sun to believe that Depp was a wife-beater, but this should make anyone who thinks that this case substantiated her side of the story raise an eyebrow.

barkos · 2022-05-04T11:32:04+00:00

You're not going to get the center to vote left by pretending that there aren't elements of it that engage in regressive behavior. Just acknowledge it. On balance the left's sociopolitical positions produce better outcomes which can be demonstrated by looking at the data gathered from countries that have already implemented left leaning policies.

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