I also reduced the use of those phrases, but more because they don't do much other than making the text longer. Except for things like "in my experience" or "as I understand" to signal that they're not meant as factual statements.
Computing has made intimate sexual relationships worse.
Dating apps are skewed: men receive little attention while women have an overwhelming amount of attention.
Porn satisfies our most base sexual functions while abandoning truly intimate connections.
The ultimate goal of sexual unions has been demonized and turned into something to avoid. That being children. After school specials since the 80s have made pregnancy a horror to avoid instead of a joy to grasp.
AI is just the latest iteration of technology increasing the divide between the sexes.
The more complete version of this line of reasoning is (which I've seen more than once, but no links to hand, sorry) is:
After solidly internalizing the messaging of "teen pregnancy is the worst thing ever" & "sex leads to teen pregnancy", there's no "switch" to make those thought patterns disappear without a trace at the point at which it's "ok" (by whatever metric is relevant to the individual) to participate in sex, child-rearing, etc. So individuals find themselves dealing with long-term guilt at having sex and/or aversion to having children, neither of which is "rational" according to their values but which nonetheless is real and affects their behavior.
> After school specials since the 80s have made pregnancy a horror to avoid instead of a joy to grasp.
Pregnancy can be employment-disrupting, and a horror if you're not financially ready to raise a child. Teen pregnancy can end one's future, one's educational and career prospects, before it even begins. The steady and nearly-uninterrupted decline in teen pregnancy from its peak in the early 90s is an absolute miracle of sex education.
The birth rate for women 20-24 was cut in half from 2005 to 2023, and the birth rate for teens under 20 dropped by 2/3s[1], which is frankly amazing progress.
Somewhat off topic for the thread, but I would love more kids book recommendations for expanding their mental model of the world if we can keep them coming…
It might have been more like C&H or Far Side at one time, but by the time of the 80s when I first started reading the funny pages, Peanuts was just another mundane strip.
The spaceship beaming people up in Defender always looked like it's proportions were off. As a kid, I remember seeing the spaceship and thinking it looked like a metal glove.
Better would be a docker container for an IRC server. Something using a modern approach where you could have link attachments, replies for message threads etc. An IRC slack alternative.
> One way that thinking for yourself goes wrong is that you realize your society is wrong about something, don’t realize that you can’t outperform it, and wind up even wronger.
It is an unfortunate reality of our existence that sometimes Chesterton actually did build that fence for a good reason, a good reason that's still here.
(One of my favorite TED talks was about a failed experiment in introducing traditional Western agriculture to a people in Zambia. It turns out when you concentrate too much food in one place, the hippos come and eat it all and people can't actually out-fight hippos in large numbers. In hindsight, the people running the program should have asked how likely it was that folks in a region that had exposure to other people's agriculture for thousands of years, hadn't ever, you know... tried it. https://www.ted.com/talks/ernesto_sirolli_want_to_help_someo...)
My understanding of the emu war is that they werent dangerous so much as quick to multiply. The army couldnt whack the moles fast enough. Hippos dont strike me as animals that can go underground when threatened
Also, the Emu "war" was really "The emu invasion and a singular machine gun team". It was a good simulation of how effective Call Of Duty heros actually are.
Capital-R Rationalism also encourages you to think you can outperform it, by being smart and reasoning from first principles. That was the idea behind MetaMed, founded by LessWronger Michael Vassar - that being trained in rationalism made you better at medical research and consulting than medical school or clinical experience. Fortunately they went out of business before racking up a body count.
One lesson I've learned and seen a lot in my life is that understanding that something is wrong or what's wrong about it, and being able to come up with a better solution are distinct, and the latter is often much harder. It seems often that those that are best able to describe the problem often don't overlap much with those that can figure out how to solve, even though they think they can.
So funny how people think this is a moral crusade. You should read articles around the tech stack for payment processing at any adult site. People try to do chargebacks all of the time on these kind of services. "Hunny what is this transaction on our account for BigBussomsCom?" .. "Oh must be some kind of fraud" "then let's call the bank and straighten it out". It's variations of this, over and over that lead to the high chargeback rates. I seem to recall that chargebacks are an order of magnitude higher for adult-oriented transactions. Unless you have a system of countering this with a team devoted to it, you will have a lot of successful chargebacks. I doubt Valve has the specialized team needed to deal with the amount of chargebacks, this the CC companies trying to avoid the headache.
It's so funny that people think it's about chargeback.
If you buy smut game on Steam, your bank statement won't show the name of the game. It looks exactly like any other transaction you make on Steam.
> "Hunny what is this transaction on our account for BigBussomsCom?" .. "Oh must be some kind of fraud" "then let's call the bank and straighten it out"
This is a scenario that literally can't happen in the Steam case. It could happen with Pornhub but not with Steam.
And Steam has a very generous refund policy. If your playtime is less than 2hr you can ask for a refund with a few mouse clicks. No phone call or email needed. Actually in my experience if your playtime is just over 2hr for a bit they'll still refund you.
If you chargeback you can get your whole steam account suspended.
To add: AFAIK most adult content websites bill under a different, innocuous name as well. You don't get a charge on your credit card from BigBussomsCom, you get a charge from SuperCard or something like that. (uh... I know because of a friend...)
Yeah. Never dealt with an adult content website, but in my admittedly limited experience adult products always come in innocent packaging and generally bill under innocuous names.
If what you said were true then they would ban all porn and not just rape/incest/bestiality porn. They're banning specific genres of porn which makes it an obvious morality issue.
I can't back this up with facts but the chargeback myth smells of an old astroturfing campaign to justify the moral policing on porn in general. But nowadays porn is more commonly accepted so they're shifting to more specific genres.
The new myth seems to be that payment processors can he held legally liable for facilitating illegal transactions, but the only lawsuits vs payment processors I can find is about child pornography, which has always been banned on steam.
When added that there was an advocacy group that sent an open letter to payment processors a week ago for this same exact issue[1], then the chargeback excuse has zero merit.
So yeah, it's 100% a moral crusade. Which side you sit on the crusade it up to you.
Just came here to ask. Is it a norm to not have any personal fund cache while in a relationship? I would not like anyone, spouse included, to question me about my purchases of (redacted), nor would I want to question them on purchases of the newest (redacted) or whatnot. What's the purpose?
