All of sam0345's Comments + Replies

Well, duh. Having high status people fall in love with you is an obvious sort of wish fulfillment plot.

Yet in films targeted largely at males, for example James Bond, the sex interest girls are generally low status. High status girls is not a major male wish fulfillment fantasy, whereas in romance, high status guys are as uniform as moaning in porn.. Even when the sex interest girl is a badass action girl with batman like athletic abilities, for example Yuffie the thief, she gets in trouble for stealing stuff, making her low status.

Further I doubt tha... (read more)

Yet strangely, I have never heard of a romance novel in which the heroine has an egalitarian relationship with a nice guy who picks up her socks.

a) I've never seen one that had a similar plot arch to what you describe,

Did it have an immortal vampire instead of a prince, a vampire who kills people by drinking them, instead of by chopping them up with a sword?

If so, I would say that would probably be seen by me, though not necessarily by you, as having a plot arch that was not merely similar, but for all practical purposes identical.

Much as all porns... (read more)

I'm having trouble evaluating your arguments because, as a woman with a fierce need for independence, who is really enjoying life in this day and age, I deeply disagree with your premise that less patriarchy is a Bad Thing.

Yet strangely, I have never heard of a romance novel in which the heroine has an egalitarian relationship with a nice guy who picks up her socks.

Roissy would of course dismiss your self report as a shit test and the rationalization hamster running, but then you would say that your observations are more reliable than my and Roissy's ob... (read more)

as someone had already told you once when people got angry at your defense of Roissy's writing, sometimes the tone does tell us more than the denotation! ... Im absolutely not going to tolerate this.

How then could the same facts be stated in a way that has acceptable "tone"?

How could one state in a tone that meets your approval that the socially conservative family structure that was the ideal endorsed by authority from the New Testament to the Georgian era worked and was good for everyone, and the new progressive emancipated family structure started not working in the Victorian era, and has been working less and less for everyone as it has become more and more progressive?

And that does happen in practice, I think: most everyone who lived in the USSR would agree that its brainwashing of children was benign in that particular area - teaching cooperation and suppressing zero-sum games.

I don't think so.

Compare East Germans with West Germans. Started off the same race and same culture, yet socialism made them subhuman. Germany has all the problems in assimilating East Germans that a conservative would plausibly attribute to an inferior race with inherently inferior genetics, except that in this case the problems are obviousl... (read more)

Just give me a plain answer of some sort: what do you want power structures within a family and in the workplace to look like?

Every long established functional family that I am aware of, where the couple remained married, the grown up children love and respect their parents, and so on and so forth, is quietly and furtively eighteenth century. Dad is the boss. When the kids were kids, Dad was the head of the family. The family was one person, and that person was Dad. Mum picked up the socks.

So, eighteenth century did it right, and it has all been so... (read more)

Do I even need to bring up comparably bad situations created by modern institutions? I mean we even have ones that are perfectly analogous. coughcrushingstudentdebtcough

Quite so. I am fond of pointing out that an eighteen year old girl cannot commit herself to always be sexually available to one man and never to any other, in return for a promise of undying love and guaranteed life long support for her and her children, but can commit herself a gigantic debt that can never be expunged by bankruptcy in return for a credential of uncertain, and frequently... (read more)

The problem is not nine months servitude, but twenty years servitude.

You cannot, or at least should not, ask people to contract to that which they cannot perform. Thus, moment to moment consent to sex, requires in practice moment to moment consent to marriage, which abolishes marriage. Abolishing marriage violates freedom of contract.

Which is not moral progress.

If you are hiring for an important job, family matters, because the apple does not fall far from the tree, and because you can always get more information through family connections that through formal sources.

Hiring people that have family connections is apt to be positive sum, because they cannot get away with bullshit, and because their incentives are more oriented to long term benefits.

I meant, our behaviour being closer to our CEV than Homer's behaviour was to his CEV, if that makes sense.

I don't think that makes sense. Also, I am pretty sure that Xenophon's behavior (massacre and pillage the bad guys and abduct their women) was a lot closer to his moral ideal than our behavior is to Xenophon's moral ideal.

Further, the behavior Xenophon describes others of the ten thousand performing is astonishingly close to his moral ideal, in that astonishing acts of heroism were routine, while the behavior I observe around me exhibits major disc... (read more)

For example, some dudes say that it's self-evident that all men are created equal. Then somebody notices that this doesn't really jive with the whole slavery thing. So at least some of what gets called moral progress is just people learning to live up to their own stated principles.

By this reasoning, abolishing slavery was moral progress, but declaring that all men are equal was moral regress.

If the fallacy is slavery, then moral progress. What if the fallacy is that all men are created equal?

By your measure, hypocritical values dissonance, we morally ... (read more)

I don't think violence has declined. State violence has increased. Further, since we are imprisoning a lot more people, looks like private violence has increased, supposing, as seems likely, most of them are being reasonably imprisoned.

Genghis Khan and the African slave trade cannot remotely match the crimes of communism.

And if it has declined, Xenophon would interpret this as us becoming pussies and cowards. Was Xenophon more violent and cruel than any similarly respectable modern man? Obviously. But he was nonetheless deservedly respectable. We r... (read more)

After 1830 or so there is a PC reluctance to mention certain facts about the Tasmanian aboriginals that people previous to that time found glaringly obvious.

We are fucked. Probably since 1914.

We have been about to be fucked ever since they declared that all men are created equal with inalienable rights, which foreshadowed the collapse of all the institutional barriers that the founding fathers created to protect against democracy.

I don't see how any amount of crypto can keep the management+board from favoring themselves in how they account the wealth.

The board contains major shareholders, who would mostly be in favor of honest accounting. It seems more likely to work, than that a democratic government would be in favor of honest vote counting.

On "rape in marriage" you are clearly wrong. Freedom of contract is morally superior, the traditional contract for the past two thousand years being that a man and a woman each gave their consent to sex once and forever:

The concept of "rape" in marriage defines marriage, as it was originally understood out of existence, marriage as it was originally understood being the power to bind our future selves to stick it out

According to the New Testament:

let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.

Let the husba

If I buy stock in the sovcorp, who protects my property rights? The sovcorp? The sovcorp is run by executives. Why would they not simply, essentially, steal the corporation?

There are cryptographic solutions to this problem: Suppose the stock/money of the corporation consists of crypto signatures. You can use threshold signatures to make heavy weapons only work for the leader most recently authorized by a majority of the board most recently authorized by majority of shareholders.

Of course the leaders could furtively @#$%^ the crypto in the heavy weapon... (read more)

But you can use "evolution" or "free market", because people are divided about this topics, because many of them just lack the basic knowledge.

Evolution is true, in the sense that there is overwhelming evidence that men evolved from apes, and that likenesses between kinds is a literal family resemblance, the result of ancestral shared blood or sap. "Evolution" is untrue, in that use of the word "evolution" tends to be almost perfectly correlated with distaste for the implications of Darwinism, and complete disbel... (read more)

Is it not at least equally likely that the present is crazy, and the past was wise?

No, it is not. Knowledge is generally cumulative, although there are occasional setbacks

There are frequent major setbacks

If it is not "at least equally likely", it is still quite likely - particularly in matters influenced by politics, where knowledge, for obvious reasons, does not accumulate.

To defend the present, one has to argue truth, not cite today's authorities. One has to compare today's authorities with the evidence on which their claims are supp... (read more)

But as far as I can tell, Marie Curie was the first scientist to realize that radiation is attributable to internal properties of atoms

Untrue - and for evidence of it being true, you would need to quote a paper by her issued before she was made into a mascot, not a paper about her after she was made into a mascot.

For her to be the first scientist to realize that, she would have to issue a paper in which she asserted that, which she did not do.

What she in fact did was measure various samples prepared for her by her husband and another of his assistants,... (read more)

From the Nobel Prize website:

This discovery was absolutely revolutionary.

I claimed history was rewritten in the period 1906, 1911. To refute that claim, you need early sources, pre 1906 sources, not today's sources.

Perhaps you should instead look at 1900 sources, stuff published shortly after Pierre Curie discovered radium, rather than post hoc rationalizations published after Marie Curie had already been made a mascot.

The original basis for making her a mascot was the discovery of radium - in which her role was minor and peripheral.

First they m... (read more)

This is a time when the Royal Institute could refuse to let her give a talk simply on the grounds that she was a woman.

I find that extraordinarily hard to believe. Can you produce an actual quote wherein the Royal institute gave that reason?

It would be as suicidal to give that reason then, as it would be now.

Of course, in practice, people do tend to quietly assume that women tend to be idiots in certain fields, and might well not allow one to speak for that reason, but they don't say the reason out loud in plain words.

Your prior should be that a mascot is fictitious until proven otherwise. That a mascot is a mascot is reason to believe that official history has been improved.

In 1906, when Pierre Curie died, his death was reported as follows in the French newspaper Le Matin

"M. Pierre CURIE, le savant qui découvrit le radium, a été écrasé dans la rue et tué net par un camion"

Translation "Mr. Pierre Curie, the scientist who discovered radium, was crushed in the street and killed by a truck"

As for Grace Hopper, she gets credited with the first co... (read more)

Near as I can check history, the manufacture of poster girls for science first happens at the start of the twentieth century, but the manufacture of poster girls for computer programming did not happen until much later. Thus history that makes Ada the second computer programmer can be believed, to the extent that it quotes pre twentieth century sources.

Whenever history involves mascots, it should be viewed with suspicion. If people make an undue fuss about a dancing bear, that is evidence that bears cannot dance, rather than evidence that bears can dan... (read more)

The traditional critique of democracy is that it leads to what we moderns would call class warfare, demosclerosis, and political corruption (by political corruption, I mean the regulatory state, spawned by Olsonian multiplication of special interests). All of this stuff used to be called the social war, named after the Roman civil wars leading to Sulla's reforms.

To check theory against observation, compare Britain from the restoration to the mid nineteenth century, with Britain from the mid nineteenth century to the present.

Restoration Britain founded the... (read more)

That's just an approximation. Those situations (flat space, hyperbolic space) are really just asymptotically fixed - the form of the space-time in the infinite past or the infinite future is fixed. But in between, you can have topology change.

I don't think string theory as it exists is capable of of describing a space time that undergoes topological change as a result of the dynamics of the strings. They talk about branes undergoing topological change, but they undergo topological change within a given background spacetime that acts without being acte... (read more)

There was no such stagnation. This is the period which saw M-theory, the holographic principle, and the twistor revival,

I understand M theory sufficiently well to be seriously underwhelmed.

M theory and the holographic principle suspiciously resemble postmodernism: insiders talking to each other in ways that supposedly demonstrate their erudition, without any external check to verify that they are actually erudite, or even understand each other, or even understand what they themselves are saying. Twistors are valid and erudite mathematics, but don't see... (read more)

You seem to be under the impression that Einstein's papers were not reviewed by professional physicists. That's incorrect: They were reviewed by journal editors who were professional physicists.

But Einstein only needed one journal editor to decide that his paper was good stuff that would rock the boat, whereas under peer review, he would in practice need every peer reviewer to agree that his papers did not rock the boat.

Under the old system, he needed one of n to get published. Under the new system, it tends to be closer to n of n.

Consensus, as Galil... (read more)

For example, when discussing gender-related problems, [edit] one solution may be generally better for men, while another solution may be generally better for women

Love is war.

All is fair in love and war.

Individually optimal behavior by each male doing what is best for himself, and each female doing what is best for herself, is unlikely to be optimal as for males and females as a whole, or even particular male/female couples.

Such prisoners dilemma problems are normally solved by coercion - chastity imposed on females, shotgun marriages and continued mate... (read more)

The modern peer review system is something Einstein didn't have to deal with for example.

Obviously none of his great papers could have survived peer review. Some people argue that this was merely because of trivial stylistic issues, and could have been fixed by giving citations in correct format, and so on and so forth, so that they read like modern peer reviewed papers.

Perhaps

But the fact that he got his degree with a boring trivial paper, when he had several of his greatest papers in hand, suggests that there was no fixing them. If they could not ... (read more)

I follow your comments, because you usually have something interesting to say - and usually something that gets a little close to the borders of what is permissible on less wrong.

Now, sorry to say, your recent comments have become boring. Has Less Wrong become even more repressive, or did you just run out of things to say?

Sorry, but it's hardly possible to fake such a tremendous increase in such basic statistics.

And equally hard, no doubt to fake the very similar tremendous increase in the basic statistics for North Korea, Cuba, and Ethiopia.

I notice that in the case of Marxist Ethiopia, we saw a tremendous increase in basic statistics despite bloody and unending civil war, and the massive use of artificial famine to terrorize the peasants.

And when the Marxist Ethiopian regime was finally overthrown in that bloody and terrible civil war, and peace returned, their stati... (read more)

Under Mao, life expectancy literally doubled and the literacy rate went from 20-25% to 80%. And the increase in life expectancy is largely attributed to his vast state healthcare initiatives.

I have heard similarly glorious statistics for Cuba, and, until quite recently, for North Korea.

Visiting Cuba in 1992 it was obvious to me that living standards, literacy, and health, had collapsed since the revolution. People are living in the decayed remnants of what had been decently comfortable houses fifty years ago. People were hungry, frightened, and desper... (read more)