• 0 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle


  • The first step to changing someone’s mind is acknowledging that you probably won’t be able to. The other commenters are right, the red pill is stupid, it’s annoying to argue with them, and you’ll probably fail the delicate act of ideological conversion. Still want to give it a shot? Great!

    Depending on how deep down the rabbit hole they are, the answer is it could either be impossible or it’s a long term dedicated effort. First you should learn a bit about cult deprogramming techniques, as while the red pill isn’t really a cult it is an echo chamber ie. a mostly comprehensive view of the world that has built in answers that insulate from external dissent. The red pill tends to provide community, some degree of lifestyle improvement, and a feeling of secret insights into society / the world, and it’s very rare an individual will give those things up for the sake of something as abstract as logical consistency.

    You need to slowly provide alternatives to whatever positives the red pill provides, which while annoying is possible because the red pill sucks. The online sense of community is tenuous at best, so be their friend and connect them to other friends that’ll entirely replace that aspect. Additionally, the lifestyle improvement aspect is rather generic and can come from anywhere. Ask them what specific red pill people they follow and provide a gym / motivation YouTuber that better provides whatever motivation the red pill gives.

    The final element is the feeling of insight into the world that the red pill gives. This one is ironically the least important to changing someone’s mind and the most difficult, as in order to successfully provide alternatives you likely need to understand the red pill ideology better than they do. Nothing a red pill person says should stump you, you should have heard it beforehand and researched it and thought of better counter arguments. If they mention hypergamy, you should have annecdotal, theoretical, and statistical answers ready to go. You should know their ideology well so you can make annoying jokes about how ridiculous it is when applied to real life.

    If you do these things, over enough time and done diplomatically enough so they don’t leave you for a friend that doesn’t annoy them, you can probably depeogram a red pill person.



  • It’s true that it’s difficult, but it’s not true that changing the voting system will never or has never happened. Link shows the states where RCV has been enacted on state and local levels. It’s notable that it’s mainly Democrat states that have enacted RCV and it’s only Republican states that have banned it (which is fucking ridiculous). You could be the one to get RCV enacted in your city, which’ll show everyone in your city how cool it is to have more choices, which’ll then snowball into getting it enacted in your state, which long term could snowball into it getting enacted on the federal level.
    You’re nearly never more politically powerful than when you’re one of a few dozen people in a city meeting.


  • Another answer to your question is that it’s fundamentally misguided due to your assumption that good and evil are absolute concepts and that there can’t exist separate and consistent moral worldviews. Consider the historical crusaders joining a brotherhood of Christ to save their holy land from the infidels and secure safe pilgrimages for millions of their fellow Christians, and then consider a Muslim warrior defending his homeland and family in the name of Allah from crazed zealots of an imperfect prophet. Who is good there? If you asked them, they’d both say they’re the good one and the other is the evil one. They’d both say the reason they KNOW they’re the good one is ultimately due to insight into the moral fabric of the universe granted to them by God (the same god, funnily enough). Ultimately, it’s impossible to say absolutely which one is right without appealing to something like divine revelation.

    Another assumption I think you should reconsider is your implied stance that good people are necessarily absolutists in their principles. You say the good people wouldn’t use nuclear bombs, but why? Nuclear bombs have ushered humanity into the greatest and longest period of peace in human history. You say the good people would never use torture, but why? I agree with other commenters that for practical purposes torture is nearly always useless and inhumane, but suppose a hypothetical hemophobic (and Evil!) nuclear terrorist that you’d just need to barely cut (light torture!) and then he’d tell you the secrets to his dastardly plan to bomb an orphanage. Are you sure that a good person would be obligated to stand by as the orphans explode instead of giving that guy a pinprick? Suppose the “good person” sticks to their principles and lets the orphans dies, what should they do to the terrorist? This guy’s really evil, he spits on puppies and doesn’t even feel bad about it. You also know with 100% certainty that he’ll never reform, Doctor Strange told you so. If so, wouldn’t it be more moral to just kill him? Why waste resources on his useless imprisonment when it could be spent on thousands of mosquito nets saving thousands of nonevil lives from malaria? Also, why is he evil? Suppose it’s even 1% likely that evilness spreads through genes, if the good guy knew that and let him have kids wouldn’t it be partially the good guy’s fault if his nuclear terrorist baby bombs another orphanage? Perhaps you have satisfying answers to all these questions, but if you don’t you just justified the torture, killing, and eugenics-ing of “evil” people.

    Ultimately, the impression I want to leave is that ethics are hard and complicated and most certainly more nuanced than a good and evil divide. There exist counter arguments to some of the things I said in this comment, but I’m guessing exploration of those counter arguments would leave you with a more nuanced view of good and evil regardless.



  • To some extent you probably get more generally intelligent from practicing IQ tests in the same way you might get more generally intelligent from stretching your mind in any way. However, the increase in IQ score you achieve after practicing for the IQ test is (just guesstimating because there’s obviously no studies on this) >90% due to learning the patterns of IQ tests and <10% due to increased general intelligence as a result of studying.

    To answer as to why IQ is helpful, it’s useful for making conclusions about how different factors influence intelligence. It’s more difficult to prevent lead from poisoning people’s brains when you can’t conclusively say how much it’s poisoning. Supposing all the people with low IQ scores due to lead poisoning practiced for the test to make themselves feel better with a higher score, their studying would muddy the stats and make for weaker arguments on the side of those wishing to ban excessive lead. IQ is also relevant to certain diagnoses, such as for the diagnosis of ADHD where a deficiency in working memory and processing speed but not elsewhere supports a diagnosis.

    In terms of whether IQ / intelligence is 100% genetic, obviously not, I don’t think I said anything that could even suggest that. I’m not an expert so I’d appeal to this link for specific answers. Just skimming it seems to suggest anywhere from 50% to 80% heritability of IQ, although heritability as a concept is kinda unintuitive and hard to apply to everyday things.





  • Who trampled on the Russian tomatoes? (Don’t say the Nazis, they trampled on everyone’s tomatoes including their own) For Russia, there was some small scale support for the whites during their civil war, but otherwise trade between the Soviets and the west increased year by year during the NEP period until Stalin purposely contracted it (if someone knows more about this period, feel free to correct me. I’m working off of information I learned in classes years ago and this article that matches with what I remember). I’d propose that the Soviet issues were internal due to blindly ideological governance that crippled their economy and society. They didn’t have to make such an insane number of nukes, create the culture that caused Chernobyl, nor invade Afghanistan.

    Otherwise, who trampled the Mainland Chinese tomatoes? They basically won their civil war, their only issue was blind allegiance to chairman Mao that resulted in disaster after disaster. The West didn’t force them to try the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Down to the Countryside ‘Movement,’ nor the One Child Policy. The CCP did those to themselves, and they only found success once Mao died and they made their economy more capitalistic.

    And then once more, who trampled on the North Korean tomatoes? At the beginning of their war, they tried to crush the South’s tomatoes until a UN authorized force pushed them to the Chinese border and then a Chinese force counterbalanced to the current borders, but otherwise the North was economically better off once the stalemate began (the Japanese centered their industrial developments in the north). North Korea failed because of dramatic mismanagement and a ideology of constant militarism while the South, with ups and downs, prospered.

    Sure, there were military actions, police actions, and garden trampling that harmed both sides during the Cold War, but you can’t just blame your enemy for beating you, you have to recognize why you lost.


  • Any rational capitalist (or more realistically, mixed market supporter) should agree that other systems are theoretically possible, and should probably even support small scale scientific tests of whatever people want to realistically propose.

    This already happens with tests of UBI occurring all over and examples of coops existing in many places as well. UBI is too new to say but looks promising, and coops seem great in certain areas of the economy if properly supported but not optimal everywhere, as far as I’m aware.

    However, if someone thinks their system can only work with absolutely everyone in society participating after a revolution where the sinners (whoever they are) are eliminated, they really ought to recalibrate their beliefs or join a militia if they’re really serious.


  • Gesturing vaguely at everything is not an argument for anything. Supposing the person you’re talking to agrees that everything is bad, then it’s simply an argument for radicalism, not necessarily anticapitalism or whatever your particular strain of belief is. Someone could, while gesturing vaguely, just as easily argue that it’s because of moral decline, that society isn’t capitalist enough, for race realism, for the need for a strongman to take over, or really anything that’d promise (but almost certainly not deliver) to vaguely fix everything.