I’m aromantic so perhaps my view of “dating” doesn’t fit. And, before I say anything else I should preface that the sexual preferences of a random internet stranger (me) should not be taken as indicative of universal self worth or appeal. You are valid regardless of the opinions/proclivities of others, especially random internet strangers like me lol

Anyway, I am kind of on the ace spectrum. I’ve only really been with cis women and with them I’m just indifferent to sex. I thought it would be the same for men despite not feeling any attraction whatsoever towards them, so I decided to experiment.

Turns out I was quite wrong and I am actually viscerally repulsed by both men and male genitalia. I can’t just power through the grossness like I can with others.

So, I would be quite hesitant to date a nonbinary person with male genitals. My gay friends were very chill with my reaction in the experiments lol, but I get the feeling that if I did end up having a reflexive negative response to a nonbinary person, it would probably increase any dysphoria they feel and I don’t want to to do that to anyone.

I also dont feel attracted to anyone with facial hair (regardless of “biological sex”) so that might cut down on the nonbinary population I would have a desire to date too.

The main point Id like to make here is that gender in general stupid for many reasons including, in my opinion, trying to define attraction. I don’t care what pronouns someone uses or if how they dress aligns with a specific gender or what social norms they adhere to specific to genders. What is most important to attraction is, specifically, attraction.

Does this person have the seemingly random traits my brain likes and not the ones it dislikes? Great. Maybe for some people those attractive or repulsive attributes fall along gender lines perfectly but I seriously doubt that’s the case for anyone especially since gender lines are more gradients than lines in the first place.

I would probably be fine dating a nonbinary person who has the traits which I like (physical and non-physical btw, like idc if someone’s hot; if they’re rude or cruel to others, they can gtfo) and not traits I dislike but that’s kind of as specific as I can get and none of my attraction/repulsion stems directly from gender.

Anyway, I again would like to tell anyone reading this that if someone (including me) doesn’t find you attractive, it should have no bearing on how you see yourself or your perceived self worth. Tell yourself “they don’t know what they’re missing” and keep on being you because you’re awesome and they’re just some idiot whose opinion shouldn’t matter to you anyway. (Plus there is plenty more to life than sex, I mean who cares about sexual attraction when there is cool physics and mathematics to learn right?)

Alaska USA has a significant Russian population. Also I doubt ICE is trying to deport people from Alaska because it’s massive, empty, and makes money

Becoming lucid in a dream and not being able to wake up no matter how hard I tried.

Unfortunately not for certain, but I’m guessing it’s somewhere in the “Cunk on Earth” documentary series

Okay fine personal one’s first:

• I once overheard someone saying it was hard to go left on a round about because the entrance slopes right…. As in they were not using a round about like a round about. (Tbf the round about in question was originally an intersection that was poorly modified into a roundabout)
• I had a psychopathic roommate who, when I called him on it, flat out admitted that given a choice between killing himself or thousands of others he’d choose the mass murder option. I also once asked him if he thought slavery was morally acceptable and his response was “if it would benefit me then yeah.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_and_gender-based_violence_against_Palestinians_during_the_Gaza_war

There’s a wiki page for the documented systemic sexual abuse committed and encouraged by the Israeli government with citations from the UN and even Israeli court and govt references.

As for the talk, considering that the first 20min were nothing but straw man and other fallacious rhetoric; and that he does not have a research or educational background in the topics he claims are wrong without evidence; and the fact he’s giving this talk mostly to promote himself and his merchandise; I decided it wasn’t worth my time because there would likely be no actual reasoning or evidence, only “sales tactics” so to speak.

Talking with you makes me think i was exactly right since you’ve yet to give any evidence to back up any argument, except, oddly, mine by proving you fell for the feminism straw man and the queers for Palestine one as well.

If there is any actual valid argument in the entirety of the talk, please write it here. Clearly you feel like he made a persuasive case so why don’t you list what the main arguments and rationale for your opinion are? Surely you aren’t just asserting your beliefs are true without evidence? Especially since you seem to care about being “contrarian” which is exactly the definition of disregarding well established consensus

I think you misunderstood my example. Also you seem to have mistaken that quote you posted as well. Wishing for a society in which genital differences are not used as a basis for cultural stereotypes is not equivalent to saying “biology/physiology doesn’t matter at all” which was Saad’s straw man.

As for “queers for Palestine” I’m not going to watch the full video, but my guess is he says something along the lines of “you support people who kill queer people!” which again is a straw man since advocacy groups against the genocide of innocent individuals are very much not advocating for the slaughter of queer individuals, in fact I’d imagine most are against it.

Imagine there was a prison on fire. And people are saying “oh my god we need to evacuate those people!” Then imagine someone else says “oh so you support thieves and murderers and rapists? I’m an empath but not a ‘suicidal empath.’”

Obviously the latter person doesn’t actually feel empathy at all and is making a straw man argument against saving people from horrible deaths.

That’s roughly equivalent to this scenario. Except instead of prisoners it’s just a country of civilians including children, and they’re not just burning but also starving and getting hunted/raped for sport etc.

Ah yes, who better to lecture about psychology and sociology than a person with only a CS degree and an MBA who works in marketing. I’m sure he’s definitely right when he says that all the sociology and psychology professors (who actually have done research in their fields) are wrong.

Joking aside, I will say he is good at his job. He’s a marketing professor and he was able to market his ideas and possibly books onto people like you despite having no evidence to support them whatsoever.

In case you do have the capacity for logic, I would like to note that what he does in the first fifteen minutes (and probably the rest of the time) is called “straw man” tactics.

He purposefully misrepresents movements and beliefs and entire fields of science, so he can attack the misrepresentation instead of the belief itself.

To provide an example, he says that radical feminism is the idea that all differences between men and women are purely due to patriarchal social structures and not at all related to biology. This is entirely false. You can look up the term (or just talk to a feminist) and find that idea he described is actually kind of the opposite of radical feminism.

However, he knows his audience (you) don’t actually know what radical feminism is. And he knows that his audience (you) can be easily manipulated into hatred/anger (and possibly just sexism). Thus he knows he can assert this falsehood and his audience (you) will accept it as truth without question or study.

Then he simply has to provide proof that this obviously false thing is obviously false, and his audience (you) will unwittingly believe that radical feminism is obviously false, despite the fact he hasn’t mentioned or disproven any real feminist tenets at all. In fact radical feminism does acknowledge the role genetic, anatomical, and racial differences affect women. So he was kind of agreeing with them. He just needed his audience (you) to not like them and knew his audience (you) would be easily fooled by this tactic.

He’s done his job (manipulating people) well by marketing to his audience (easily enraged people unfamiliar with persuasive rhetoric tactics (you)).

Have you ever experienced empathy?

I have had the exact same dream. I shall note your username in case any of my crazy ideas is ever profitable enough to start a company lol

When I can argue with someone rational who is willing to change their mind or has a reason for disagreeing with my or the foundations of my argument such that they can explain where I’ve made a mistake, I like arguing.

It’s even fun when you argue with rational people about irrational things for the fun of just pushing the limits of understanding. Like trying to debate ontological nihilism purely for the pain of trying to understand it.

However, I do not like arguing with people who are irrational, because there’s no point, and I know it, but I really feel like maybe if I just said something right they’d start believing in evidence.

It is also just very difficult to explain certain things to people who don’t understand the foundations of your reasoning.

There’s a saying that to a mathematician there are only two kinds of problems: impossible and trivial. When you’ve thought a lot about something, many foundational concepts seem trivial to you but not to outsiders. It’s very difficult to branch this gap in knowledge.

For example I had an argument about how the undecidability of the busy beaver numbers seem to disprove solipsism because something had to do the work to find them but it wasn’t me, so something other than me must exist for those few numbers we’ve calculated so far to be at my fingertips.

This argument means nothing to people who don’t know what undecidability means, and it is incredibly difficult (for me at least) to try and defend that proving something is “undecidable” in the first place is even possible to someone who’s never seen/done a formal math proof.

I was able to solve the first two layers of the cube when I was around 5 (I found it in the toy chest at my grandmother’s and spent the entire trip working on it)

A long time later, in highschool, I bought one and tried to solve the whole thing myself. After a couple days I gave in and looked up how to do the last bit.

Once you learn the steps it’s hard to forget them and it’s surprisingly easy to generalize them for other sizes/shapes of cubes.

Limbo and sex

(I will lose to Barbados Slim)

If we are trying to avoid losing any information due to abstraction, I’d say at least somewhere in the low hundreds.

All actions are done out of desire and human desires are numerous and often contradictory even in the same person. Many people who think they are utilitarian likely still wouldn’t be okay with the Omelas structure of torturing a single kid even if that act allowed thousands of others to live painless lives.

Is it more right to avoid violence altogether, or is violence to prevent the slaughter of others better than doing nothing?

Morality is complicated and since morality dictates much of how we interact with others, it is likely the most significant factor in politics.

The second most would be personal desires. People with weak or localized empathy don’t tend to care about any politics that doesn’t affect them or their desires directly. Since desires are also diverse, this is multidimensional too.

Now, that being said, if our goal is to reduce the dimensionality as much as possible… the answer is basically any number you want.

Data analysis techniques will let you reduce the dimensionality of n-dimensional data to whatever number you want. In fact using similar techniques to word embedding would likely be very effective even if you simply group people by how similar their views seem to be (no need for you to actually define dimensions)

If we assume that there are around as many important dimensions to politics as there are typical English words, then we can assume the number of dimensions needed for encoding a person’s politics without losing relationships would be about the same as a word embedding vector.

In typical LLMs this is anywhere from around 50-300 dimensions.

Honestly, now I’m really fucking curious. If you created a quiz with thousands of political/philosophical questions and then had a large enough number of people take the quiz, you could legitimately do this with an autoencoder and see how many hidden neurons (dimensions) you would need for a precise encoding.

You might not be able to tell what those dimensions represent, but it would be incredibly fascinating to be able to subtract political ideologies from one another like you can with word embeddings.

Like with good embeddings you can subtract “France” from “Paris” then add that to “Poland” and it will give you a vector very close to “Warsaw”

Imagine being able to map out political or philosophical ideologies like this! You could ask it how far away two ideologies are too, or ask it what the average between two ideologies is, etc.

I feel like that would be incredibly fascinating to mess around with AND like the average example it could give you an idea of gaps in our political spectrum, ideologies that don’t exist yet or haven’t been named. It could show you attractor points or clusters and give insight into inherent human nature.

Damn I want to make this.