Huffman is standing firm on FPH being banned, so I guess that's a good thing.

Excluding dubs of Pokemon and Yu Gi Oh, my first anime was Elfen Lied.

I was hooked on anime ever since.

Your entire attitude is wrong.

It seems like you are distant from, uncomfortable with, and perhaps even deeply intimidated by, the girl you are courting. No matter what you say to her in this state or how well thought out it is, the insecurity will be visible through your body language, and it will not be attractive to anyone.

Relationships are primarily emotional and physical in nature. The first things you have to ask yourself are 1) whether you can be comfortable being very close friends with this girl, and 2) is it reasonable that she could find you physically attractive? If the answer to either of these questions is no, then either fix the problem with yourself, or seek out a relationship with a different person.

I , too, love Flatland. It's also a pretty on-point satire of Victorian society.

Never got into HPMOR though. Yudkowski's writing style is kind of headache inducing, and complicates otherwise simple concepts in an effort to impress and overawe. Sometimes when the point is explained plainly, contradictions in his ideas become obvious. Like the chapter where he goes on about how "the map is not the territory", yet does the transfiguration be reifying the "map" that is quantum field theory anyways.

It's a wonderful movie. Pixar did really well this time!

SPOILERS:

I especially liked how the moral of the story was that it is ok, and sometimes necessary, to express sadness. The rest of our culture is obsessed with telling us that we ought to be happy all the time, and if not, we should consume until we are. Inside Out was a welcome and refreshing corrective to this.

There's quite a dearth of anime suggestions here. I strongly recommend Psycho-Pass (but only Series 1), though it's more dystopian sci-fi than post-apocalyptic.

If you're into something more low-key and philosophical, I would suggest Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex, as well as the original GITS movie, which is a classic.

I'm just not sure why having children is more important than other aspirations or, for that matter, why child-rearing ought to be specific to women.

Honestly, it's because I'm working under the assumption that childcare is necessary labor to sustain the population and thus maintain society. But if you believe that most jobs are going to be automated away in the future, and so less people would be a better thing, and childcare is a non-essential choice, I can see where you're coming from. Indeed, a basic income would be liberating for everyone, including women.

But I'm still confused by your lack of concern about the lack of leverage that women have relative to men and the real indignities that it enables. Again, back to the geopolitical analogy: Would you advise a country to not maintain a standing army just because taxes infringe a bit on free choice? How, then, will the country defend itself from the threat of external aggression or secure its state interests against its competitors? Why is it any different when it comes to competition between classes?

One last thing, we do have some maternity leave in the US, but it's atrocious compared to what exists in almost every other country.

The point is that people will discriminate in favour of women, not against.

If you weren't so absurdly politically biased, you would recognize immediately that this statement doesn't follow from the conclusion of the study you linked. People "associating more positive attributes" with women is inherently tied to discrimination against women; it means they're treated like children and not like adults.

People have the same bias towards evaluating children positively too, but we don't allow children to have any responsibility.

As for the first study you linked, there's another study that follows almost an identical methodology and comes to exactly the opposite result. It's a gross distortion to present your single study as the last word of SCIENCE!!!! on gender equality in stem. Here is a good overview of the problem. Personally, I feel that college labs at least strive to be quite gender neutral on the whole (even if sometimes they don't quite succeed), and the conclusions of both studies simply reflect the known political biases of their authors.

Arguably, reforming our labor laws and subsidizing childcare would increase women's agency and the choices that women can make in their lives by removing the heavy opportunity cost between career and family. And it is estimated to be a cause of a large portion of the overall gender wage gap as well.

If anything, we should both be able to agree that this is a good idea, even if our political frameworks are completely different!

I have to say, though it's nice to be able to have conversations like this, intractable as our positions may become, without all the hostility I'm used to seeing surrounding this sort of thing.

Ikr? Hubski is amazing.

I'd say that for the most part we have changed the social system to be more fair.

Yes, we have, but clearly not enough. Example: A huge part of the overall wage gap can be attributed to the fact that most workplaces simply aren't flexible enough to accommodate women who become pregnant and have to take care of a young child for a few years. Hence there is currently a huge opportunity cost between career success and having a family. So, the mass of women who choose their career end up driving down the fertility rate, and the other mass of women who do choose to have a few children end up driving up the gender wage gap at the same time.

The obvious solution to both these problems is to get the state to extensively subsidize childcare and pay for it with increased taxes, like they do in France. But of course in America they're idiotically resistant to anything that makes sense.

Gendered oppression is often not about sexism at all; a lot of the time there's just some shitty economic or political policy behind it.

If women tend not to be as interested in working 60 hours a week as men, why should we need them to? How is that oppressing their full agency?

Because it denies them wealth and promotions, putting them in an inferior economic and social position that leaves them weak when it comes to representing their collective interests (like including women's reproductive health in company healthcare packages, or making sure they aren't sexually harassed) and defending their collective rights (perhaps if we had a few more female billionaires to lobby Congress, they wouldn't have dismantled abortion access across the South).

Again, if we were talking about two rival nations, nobody would bat an eye at the suggestion that an equal balance of power ought to be maintained between them to deter any threat of invasion. But when it comes to social classes at odds within those nations, suddenly the more powerful party objects to any such notion that everyone ought to have sufficient leverage to protect themselves against exploitation.

We all have different motivations, different beliefs and desires, different skills and preferences.

I understand that people's freedom and diversity ought not to be infringed on without compelling reason.

But what if some of these differences are such that within our social system they allow one group of people to lord over others, thus denying the oppressed full agency? Is that not a compelling reason to, at the very least, change the social system to be more fair, or if that proves unwise, to eradicate the differences?

How would you measure relational equality?

How would you measure the balance of power between states? People don't really bother to, because it isn't necessary to. What matters in the end is: Do women as a class have sufficient means at their disposal to keep the threat of exploitation at bay without having to depend on the goodwill of men?

Also, "equality of outcome/opportunity" is a nonsensical distinction. If it is true that we live in a deterministic universe, then equal opportunity must necessarily lead to equal outcome. If not, then there are unequal differences from the very beginning, whether environmental, biological, or both, that can potentially be corrected through social policy or medicine.

Equality of opportunity is a great thing to aspire to, but insisting on equal outcomes is ridiculous. Just because women tend toward some fields while men trend toward others does not mean they're being oppressed.

I'm kind of unorthodox here in that I think what some would deem "equality of outcome" in certain general metrics is actually far more important than "equality of opportunity". If women (or indeed any class of people with particular shared interests), lack sufficient social, political, and economic leverage in society as a whole, then they won't be able to defend themselves from the attempts of men to exploit, control, or oppress them. It's like the balance of power with nation states, except applied to social classes.

Rather than calling this equality of opportunity or equality of outcome (which is a distinction that really doesn't make much sense if you accept that human behavior is deterministic), it makes more sense to call this "equality of power relations" or "relational equality" for short.

But I agree that perfect gender parity in STEM isn't strictly necessary for relational equality to exist, and that feminist activists might be obsessing over it too much. We just shouldn't have open sexist discrimination and bullying happening in laboratories and startups the way it currently is.

I did find a few good subreddits where there was a culture of intellectual virtue and quality just as you describe. Are you familiar with the badacademics subs?

It will be interesting when we get some people who deliberately try to game the system and see how they dance around trying to inject their poisonous methods of discussion into threads. My feeling is that the self moderating functionality will do a good job.

Well, the main problem there is that those kinds of people are often accompanied by other people who agree with them and do appreciate their poisonous methods as "spreading the truth at any cost". It's possible that those people will end up forming their own "network" following each other, and then the same political tensions that make Reddit and Twitter toxic places will destroy Hubski as well.

Or, as the late American philosopher Richard Rorty said, “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.”

Lol, Rorty. It's good that she is familiar with him, but she could certainly have gone deeper into explaining who postempiricist/pragmatist philosophers like Rorty, Kuhn, and Feyerabend were and why their arguments against Hunt's naive philosophy of science as a search for Absolute Truth are compelling. Philosophy of science hasn't believed in such notions of absolute scientific truth for close to a century now.

The author also fails to explain the connection between patriarchy and epistemic overreach in the sciences, if there even is any.

We must seize the Memes of Production! Rise up and unite against the bourgeoise scum!

But really, I'm not sure what an internet forum being owned by its users would entail. If the site isn't a for-profit startup that the admins want to cash in at some point, then wouldn't a run-of-the-mill combination of ads, donation drives, and "freemium" perks be sufficient to keep the servers running in perpetuity, and perhaps help the admins make a living as a bonus?

This test is ridiculous and incorrect at a fundamental level. You cannot conceptualize political ideologies as things that exist in ratios of adherence to a single quantifiable set of principles.

The reason is because political ideologies all hold different principles and different interpretations of the same principles. A libertarian and a Marxist, for instance, see "equality" as completely different things, and so do not share the fundamental ground required to place them both on a single hypothetical chart with "equality" as an axis.

Furthermore, political beliefs always exist within a cultural context that can differ from place to place. For instance, this compass sees support for LGBT rights as being integral to libertarianism, when really this is only true of Western political cultures. In East Asia, LGBT rights don't make any sense because they already don't care if you are gay; Chinese and Japanese social conservatism expresses itself through a desire to uphold entrenched Confucian social relationships and traditions, not to police "sinful" sexual deviance.

Yeah, I think Reddit may be the nail in the coffin that proves that open internet forum communities are not a viable business model. The only way to maintain such a community would be as non-profit oriented projects funded by a combination of donation drives, ads, and "freemium" perks.

Hopefully more soon.

Thanks!

Go somewhere else. You wouldn't like Hubski, and Hubski wouldn't like your shitty attitude.

Lol

Early Enlightenment-era theorists of liberal democracy didn't have the same knowledge of psychology that we do. Rousseau thought that people were naturally good and reasonable when allowed to be free, and most calls for expanded democracy implicitly feature this as a basic assumption.

The reality, of course, is that people naturally self-segregate into like minded blocs, view outgroups with hate and suspicion, and are prone to groupthink and collective shifts towards extremism. Hence, deliberative democracy rarely works as advertised; what always ends up happening is factionalization and interminable conflict without progress.

Another problem I've noticed is that people often make the mistake of thinking that majoritarian voting democracy is inherently founded in peaceful relations and consensus-building, when the reality is exactly the opposite. The kind of democracy that our government is based in grew out of the implicit threat of military conflict between factions, and is analogous to ritualized agonistic behavior found in the animal kingdom. It is a system where people divide themselves into rival camps, rhetorically "attack" the "opposition", and then in the end perform a vote, which is effectively a display of force in which the losing faction is forced to back down and is often humiliated. If you look at the way we usually describe democracy and debate, it is replete with military metaphors; violence is always a subtext. That isn't the kind of procedure that breeds peaceful relationships and consensus.

If you look at institutions that really are centered around consensus building, like village councils or scientific communities, they do not have voting or democracy at all. They have small groups of people linked together by mutual respect and guided by norms that encourage persuasiveness and objectivity.

I'll probably sound like an asshole saying this, but I'm kind of entertained by what's going on. I like seeing big things fall apart.

I feel you.

I'm trying to get the people from the badacademics subs to consider splitting their time between there and here.

The CEO of Reddit recently made a comment denying that this was true.

Apparently, more rumors have appeared that Reddit is about to be bought out by Google or Microsoft. I don't believe that either.

If you're going to start this whole SJW/Reactionary drama shit, then please don't stay at Hubski. The tagline here is "a thoughtful web", not "take sides and do battle".

Really, this doesn't even merit a response. You're just saying "nuh-uh" without backing anything up. But whatever:

You're asking a vast group of individuals to feel guilty about bad things some of their ancestors did a long time ago.

No I'm not. It's likely you don't understand what guilt means, and how it is distinct from sympathy.

We do sympathize the shit out of them. That's exactly why White Guilt is even a thing.

Suspicions confirmed.

Guilt implies that you did something wrong, and deserve to be punished. The vast majority of white people today never did anything wrong, so they shouldn't be supporting the cause of racial justice out of guilt. They should be supporting the cause out of universal moral duty, because the current configuration of our society is unfair and immoral.

You can't detach "the system" from the individuals. There is no systemic racism without individual racism, and since individual racism is not tolerated at all, there is no systemic racism either.

You're saying, then, that it's not possible for everyone within a system to act with particular intentions, and yet yield a result that they did not intend or desire at all due to the way the incentive structure is configured? I hope you have proof of this claim, because the field of game theory would be revolutionized.

The rest of the monogatari series, duh!

Also check out Katanagatari, it's by the same guy. The fight scenes are infrequent for an anime based on martial arts, but they're still amazingly done. The art is unique and colorful.

So how guilty should some random 16-year-old white person feel about slavery, considering he had precisely nothing to do with it?

It's not meaningful to talk about personal responsibility or guilt when it comes to dealing with issues of systemic racism. The idea is that we ought to sympathize with the struggle of oppressed groups and turn that into a push to reform the system; not out of white guilt, but out of moral conviction.

Can our white, Western culture be both hypersensitive about racial issues and racist at the same time?

Yes. Interpersonal racism is treated as an unforgivable sin and a taboo, while systemic racism lies basically untouched. "SJWs" on the internet love to shame individual people, but they never manage to do more than talk about fixing systemic racism because nobody has the courage or sheer ability to organize and engage in direct political action IRL anymore. It's all displaced rage arising from feelings of political impotence.