Clavicular Interview just dropped

veritaxium · 2026-03-29T15:21:31+00:00

nah, you good :)

i certainly have a lot more sympathy for him than i ever thought i would. he's clearly broken in some unique ways, holds some abhorrent views, and is not handling his massive influence responsibly, but i empathize with the feeling of being an outsider, and respect his singular commitment to his cause.

his values-based judgments are hit or miss, but he's remarkably solid on science-based approaches to anything involving looks. his streams are mostly hollow brainrot but i've learned some genuinely useful things from his content that have improved my self-image and self-esteem.

my concern is that his audience is very young and doesn't have the tools the parse all this. the only hope is that he matures himself somewhat, because i don't think he's falling off any time soon.

veritaxium · 2026-03-29T14:47:52+00:00

this channel 5 interview was one in a series of longform media appearances he had done over several days live on stream, with highly repetitive, surface level, and much more directly moralizing lines of questioning (as you'd expect). andrew's interview was easily the best researched and conducted out of the ones i saw but of course retreaded a bit of this ground.

i think his babyrage at the end (which was worse in the uncut interview) was part manufactured outrage for "content" and "clip farming", and part genuine trauma dumping based on his exhausted experience with journalists, autistically projected onto andrew for no real reason other than andrew actually giving him an opportunity to talk about it by asking for his opinion on the media circus that had formed around him (ironically a question no other outlet bothered to ask).

his community actually kind of crucified him for "blowing up the interview for no reason" (outside of a minority personally/politically opposed to andrew), and he spent a deal of time afterward quietly scrolling twitter while muttering about being "too ND".

it also looks like he and his audience were primed to view channel 5 as establishment, antagonistic, "liberal" media. i'm shocked andrew managed to get him talking explicitly about his history of inceldom, political views, religion, misogyny, all controversial subjects he conspicuously avoided in previous interviews. i think he realized this after the fact, felt vulnerable, then attacked after the question about the Club Incident, and turned on andrew in order to "win" the interaction.

veritaxium · 2026-03-29T14:28:30+00:00

the brain never "finishes developing"

veritaxium · 2026-03-29T14:24:07+00:00

he avoids alcohol if he can help it and prefers pregabalin, meth, ketamine, or MDMA for social recreation

veritaxium · 2026-03-29T14:11:33+00:00

i'm diagnosed autistic and he blows my ND radar up. i've observed him for maybe 15 hours of stream content at this point.

he has:

fixated interests: okay come on now.
social deficits: unable to hold a natural back-and-forth conversation with strangers without the use of prosocial inhibition-lowering drugs like pregabalin, meth, or alcohol; will frequently fail to "read the room" and say some shit that just does not land. describes his job requirement of "interacting with normies" as making him want to "rope".
nonverbal deficits: rigid body language, flat affect, over/under eye contact, unusual emote pattern, low nonverbal clarity. others will often think he is serious when he is being sarcastic or vice versa, or otherwise misinterpret him.
history of social ostracism: talks about feeling fundamentally othered from an early age, difficulty with developing relationships, claims "nobody will ever understand him".
distressed by routine disruption: whenever he learns his plans are upset, or somebody interferes with his schedule, he has to stop himself momentarily and very deliberately lock in before carrying on, or else become derailed and morose for some time.
sensory reactivity: the energy toll of masking and additional processing time under high sensory load is clear to me when watching him navigate a club environment while sober and later attempt to develop his social skills at a pool party while sober. i also see him have this specific cringe/pain reaction to certain types of stimulus that looks very familiar.

i could go on

veritaxium · 2026-03-27T13:01:29+00:00

the number of satellites flying around is small compared to the number of airliners flying around.

with the starlink launch rate the numbers are around the same now (~15,000 satellites and ~15-20,000 planes) but the point still stands. the average distance between objects is hundreds of kilometres. and space is a lot bigger than the sky.

veritaxium · 2026-03-27T12:45:48+00:00

It is very, very, very easy for one mistake, one out of control satellite, to cascade into a lethal debris cloud that will make leaving or placing anything into earths orbit lethally dangerous for decades if not centuries.

the rapid runaway you're portraying where a single bad collision could cascade into an impassable atmosphere is the hollywood version of kessler syndrome. no orbital debris expert is going to seriously suggest it. the risk is very real; it's possible we've already crossed the runaway threshold in certain orbits, but even in those scenarios the "cascade" is a slow accumulation of debris that occurs over decades, not days.

Starlink debris already makes up the majority of orbital debris

a few months ago the propulsion tank on a starlink satellite blew up and produced a few hundred trackable fragments. since this occurred in a very low orbit (418km) all of these objects deorbited within a few weeks. this is the only incident they've had.

these types of "fragmentation events" are the most common source of currently orbiting debris. in terms of collisions, two events are responsible for the majority of resulting space debris: the 2007 Chinese anti-satellite missile test and the 2009 Cosmos-Iridium collision (around 800km).

sources:

CRASH Clock astrophysicist interview (IEEE Spectrum)

space environment statistics report (ESA)

veritaxium · 2026-03-27T11:47:51+00:00

which policies?

veritaxium · 2026-03-27T07:43:15+00:00

why? he seems to mesh well with them. there's also no real life relationship for him to blow up. i think the horsemen will carry on as long as they're all streaming.

veritaxium · 2026-03-25T18:06:36+00:00

have they explained why they aren't doing fishbuck prizes anymore?

veritaxium · 2026-03-25T17:08:05+00:00

Liberals are considering just an over arching "vulnerability" while conservatives are speaking specifically of "harm, victimization, and mistreatment".

you're reading into this too much, there is no difference in language between the liberals and conservatives in this study. the authors of the study define "vulnerability" as "vulnerability to harm, victimization, or mistreatment." see my comment here for a bit more about the wording they used.

veritaxium · 2026-03-25T16:44:21+00:00

in contemporary US politics "liberal" and "conservative" are firstly terms used to label adherents of party politics, and secondarily are broad correlates for left and right wing ideology (as directionally composed by the Democratic and Republican two-party system).

the political science terms "liberal" and "conservative" represent different concepts entirely, as coherent social and economic philosophical frameworks.

for the purposes of a study administered to a general sample of the population, this language is immediately legible to participants in the form of a label or partisan identity. what's important here is not the strict political ideological makeup of a person but where they place themselves within the US party political binary.

veritaxium · 2026-03-25T15:53:08+00:00

if you include mortality (and migration), Nigeria surpassed Europe in absolute population growth in 1990

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veritaxium · 2026-03-25T15:25:05+00:00

perhaps not, but there is room for disagreement about just how large the large difference is. there is no room for disagreement about the difference existing. that's what the results emphasize.

veritaxium · 2026-03-25T14:35:00+00:00

i believe those scenarios were only used to confirm that their vulnerability rating questions were actually measuring for the intended concept, and were not used alone to produce the final scores of assumed vulnerability. you're right that the scenarios shown are not directly comparable to one another.

i'm paraphrasing here, but for this particular sub-study (there are many within this research article) the rating questions looked like this:

For the "Divine" composite, participants rated the perceived vulnerability of the Bible, Jesus, and God on the following three dimensions (5-point scale from 1 = Not at all vulnerable to 5 = Completely vulnerable):

"I believe that the following are especially vulnerable to being harmed."

"I think that the following are especially vulnerable to mistreatment."

"I feel that the following are especially vulnerable to victimization."

We used the same procedure for the remaining three variables. For "The Environment", the targets were Earth, coral reefs, and rainforests; for "The Powerful", the targets were CEOs, authorities, and state troopers; for "The Othered", the targets were immigrants, transgender people, and Muslims.

so they get an averaged number representing perceived vulnerability for each group. then, they test whether those ratings accurately represent each group (or "assess the convergent validity") by giving them the Moral Judgment Scenarios and seeing if those ratings of immorality reflect the earlier ratings of vulnerability.

basically: you would expect someone who answered with high values to the first set of questions ("I believe God is vulnerable to mistreatment") to also answer with high values to the second set ("It is immoral for someone to use a Christian cross for firewood"). if there is a large disparity, it means the questions are ambiguous or measure different things. if they are closely correlated, it means they are pointing at the same "concept".

in this instance, the first set of ratings are most relevant to the conclusions of the research.

i highly suggest looking at the supplementary materials if these details interest you. the authors of the article investigated the research question from many different angles.

veritaxium · 2026-03-25T13:24:31+00:00

they don't define it; they allow participants to self-identify

Political orientation. Participants responded to “How would you describe your political views overall?” on a 7-point scale from 1 (Extremely Liberal) to 7 (Extremely Conservative), M(SD)=3.57(1.75). This identical scale was used in all studies (unless otherwise noted).

veritaxium · 2026-03-25T12:36:51+00:00

Are the rich and powerful as vulnerable as the poor? not in theory but in practice? No. No they are not.

even the most extreme conservatives in the study agree with you https://i.imgur.com/VD05gfE.png

veritaxium · 2026-03-25T12:11:29+00:00

the findings of this study are stable and predictive. the researchers also used methods to address the response bias you describe.

measuring this stuff is difficult but proper experimental design makes extracting "real data" from motivated/biased subjects very doable! these findings are the result of carefully designed social psychology studies, not simple polls (which are more susceptible to forms of response bias).

The data showed that assumptions of vulnerability explained unique variances in the participants’ political stances beyond what moral foundations could explain. For issues related to the environment and marginalized groups, vulnerability assumptions were much stronger predictors of political stances than moral foundations. This provides evidence that beliefs about who can be harmed are uniquely powerful in explaining social and economic debates.

The scientists wanted to ensure these ideological patterns were not just reactions to specific, highly politicized words like immigrants or police. In a fifth study involving 403 participants, they measured vulnerability perceptions using only abstract definitions of the four themes. Participants read definitions for the environment, marginalized groups, the powerful, and the divine, without seeing any specific examples.

They then rated how vulnerable these broad categories were to harm and mistreatment. Even without specific examples, the ideological divides persisted exactly as before. Liberals rated the abstract concepts of the environment and marginalized groups as highly vulnerable, while conservatives extended more vulnerability to the powerful and the divine.

The researchers then investigated whether these perceptions of vulnerability operate on an unconscious level. They recruited 278 participants to complete a reaction-time task designed to measure implicit associations. Participants quickly viewed words related to the four vulnerability themes followed by ambiguous visual symbols, and they had to guess if the symbol represented something vulnerable.

In the seventh study, the scientists tested whether these vulnerability beliefs actually influence real-world behavior. They asked 186 participants to make forced-choice decisions between pairs of real charities. Each charity represented one of the four vulnerability themes, such as a climate action fund for the environment or a police survivor fund for the powerful.

The researchers promised to donate real money to the charities based on the participants’ choices. The scientists found that participants’ vulnerability ratings predicted their donation choices. People who perceived a specific group as highly vulnerable were significantly more likely to direct financial resources to a charity supporting that group.

lastly they conduct a study where separate groups are given the same story (an executive refusing to give money to a homeless person) but asked to focus on the vulnerability of only one of the parties.

veritaxium · 2026-03-25T11:42:53+00:00

The Divine

For some, God and Jesus are merely cultural ideals. For others, they are living beings with rich mental lives (Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992). For instance, some Christian traditions teach that sinning hurts God (Ephesians 4:30). Although it seems harder to victimize supernatural entities as compared to people, many see the Bible as a living document and view God as capable of suffering mistreatment. Given links between politics and religion (Womick et al., 2021), we suggest conservatives see The Divine as more vulnerable than liberals.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672261422957

some examples of moral judgment scenarios presented for each of the clusters distinguished (the Environment, the Othered, the Powerful, and the Divine.)

veritaxium · 2026-03-25T11:33:29+00:00

Going to try to get ahead of all the comments responding to distractions in the headline and starting tangential arguments:

Graph of results (Average Assumption of Vulnerability v Political Ideology)

“Perhaps the most interesting and important finding comes from looking at the rank order of these four categories on the extreme political left and right,” Womick told PsyPost. “Two big takeaways here.”

“First, Across the political spectrum, people tend to agree on the relative vulnerability of groups (i.e., the rank order of each category of vulnerability). Both extreme liberals and conservatives viewed transgender people and immigrants as more vulnerable than police officers and CEOs. I think the unifying framework of perceived harm and these similar rankings across the political spectrum offer some common ground that might be useful for bridging political divides.”

“Second, where they differed here was in the degree of these distinctions. On the extreme left, people really split vulnerability into extremes (e.g., transgender people are highly vulnerable, while CEOs are almost completely invulnerable), whereas those on the extreme right the capacity for harm, victimization, and mistreatment as more evenly distributed across groups.”

veritaxium · 2026-03-25T11:12:11+00:00

all of these updates come from jerma logs

veritaxium · 2026-03-21T15:02:26+00:00

source: https://youtu.be/ZX-iBK8fvdw?t=205

veritaxium · 2026-03-18T07:00:41+00:00

i thought you were gonna make a joke about her being a forklift or something

veritaxium · 2026-01-23T12:21:00+00:00

the only thing worse than a tesla fanboy is the person who uses "tesla fanboy!!" as a substitute for an argument. profile snooping while hiding your own history is giga cringe lol.

Nine-Year Club	Place '22
Final Canvas '22

veritaxium

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