(whatever the poster looks like and wherever they live, their personality is a scrawny nerd in a basement)
I’m gonna give partial credit to the comments for pointing out that rugby/football, boxing, MMA, and violent video games all already exist and are generally available throughout rich democracies. However, I will only award full credit for a refutation of the idea that competitive violence is innate to men.
Top comment nails it
Counterpoint: while the “death” element is removed, the vast majority of videogames and virtually all of sports are some sublimation or simulation of this. Men have access to all manner of simulated warfare, up to and including actual violent combat such as boxing, kickboxing, wrestling and MMA. And of course, there are all sorts of actual wars across the globe, many of which make a reasonable use of volunteers or mercenaries. So if there really was this vast, widespread impulse to toss away one’s life for honour, why aren’t fighting leagues and gyms absolutely crowded with men brimming with this barely suppressed primal urge? Why isn’t every able-bodied male in the west rushing to Ukraine?
Answer: because to actually do it is scary, and painful, and honestly a whole lot of fucking work. You gotta, like, train and shit. And there’s still a fair chance of meeting lots of people who are just Better Than You and will kick your ass on the regular, and accepting that takes humility and a sense of proportion. Plus, a non zero risk of physical injury and/or death.
Revealed preferences tell the actual story here. Men don’t want to fight. They want to win. And since not everyone can win, and winning is work, many men simply fold back to living boring peaceful lives, pretending that it’s society that is depriving them of their God-given right to die a glorious death in battle with its dastardly emasculating ways; then they keep seeking their glory fix vicariously. If they’re sane, usually they do so by rooting for this or that sports team, or playing videogames, and nothing else. If they’re not so sane, they support demented warmongering policies and raging strongmen and then send their own sons into the meatgrinder, since they’re now too old for it. But if they were younger, oh, they’d be there on the front lines, pinky swear!
If you reintroduced the Coliseum, it’d be people desperate for money and the occasional guy with the actual agency to live out his dream fighting in it, and the aforementioned vast crowd of whiners with no self-awareness would be watching it on TV all the same, while ranting about how incompetent those gladiators are, and that they’d be much better, if only not for [insert convenient excuse here].
I realize this isn’t your post, but
Men don’t want to fight. They want to win. And since not everyone can win, and winning is work, many men simply fold back to living boring peaceful lives, pretending that it’s society that is depriving them of their God-given right to die a glorious death in battle with its dastardly emasculating ways
I think lots of us just enjoy the game.
The thought about revealed preferences is bang on though.
But if there isn’t a clearly defined end goal/utility function, then how can will I fit this information into my rationalist
fanficworld model?/unsneer though the comment was overall sobering to read, it’s good to know that not everyone on that site is insane.
Revealed preferences tell the actual story here. Men don’t want to fight. They want to win
Dangerously close to self burn, as rats don’t want to debate or even be correct, they want that smug sense of superiority that comes from feeling right
However, I will only award full credit for a refutation of the idea that competitive violence is innate to men
roller derby (as popular in the last decade and a bit) is the first (albeit not only[0]) thing that comes to mind
[0] - over here in ZA, women’s rugby teams (and in other sports) are plentiful, and they do not fuck around
Analogs of Colloseum in MMA and video games exist, but they are not “real” enough for some people. In fact, the Colloseum is not big enough for some people, they want a bigger fight and glory. Like a war.
So while the article raises interesting points it’s really proposing only half measures.
Of course, big conventional war is destructive, self-defeating, and cruel so it’s no good.
So what I propose is to direct the drive for adventure into facing the “real” of learning and creating the way technology and science does it. I wish I learned how to communicate the heroic nature of this quest .
Guys literally only want one thing (righteous death-matches) and it’s disgusting.
Epistemic status: slightly hungry.
I actually personally happen to think it’s bad when people die but you do you weird lesswrong guy
Allow the commercialization of duels, side bets on outcomes, and customized sporting arenas for such venues.
Oh come on. This has to be the root of this crazy transparent skin post
If romans liked the colosseum so much how come gladiators were slaves?
…The vast majority of guys I know who have been in a lot of fights (me included) are quite happy never getting in a fight again? Like, there’s definitely a few weirdos and dudes with anger issues who love fighting, but the shine wears off pretty damn quick for most people, and they’d rather avoid the fight in the first place? I really don’t think real-life arenas and duels would work the way this guy thinks.
(I used to work as a bouncer in a bar, haven’t been in a fight since then, I prefer keeping it that way. Also, fair notice, I wasn’t actually a very good fighter- I was the average-sized, unintimidating bouncer, my job was to head off fights before they happened, so the bigger bouncers and bartenders didn’t have to intervene, and I was good at talking drunks down. I wrestled a decent number of drunks when I had to, but that did not an impressive fighter make, I’d suck at Colosseum fights, lol.)
What the hell happened to LessWrong? I rember it being rather humble and profound, very much like the title would imply. This article would be rightfully mocked if it were posted on 4chan, let alone on LessWrong.
LW was always bad - it was hella race-scientist right from the start, for example. These days, with the rise of public fascism, they’re much more willing to go mask-off neoreactionary.
It always was bad, there is a reason they needed a ‘this is why heartiste (jfchrist) is wrong’ article (written on slatestar but still). (and I fear that just introduced that pos to more people). Edit: after reading the post, sorry yeah this is def a decline in quality.
Wtf did I just read
neoreactionary bilge
(Assuming for the purposes of my post that this isn’t just an updated instance of Poe’s Law.)
Weird how these authors never think this through to the part where they’re the scrawny whiners spending time posting annoying things on the internet, and the obvious targets of the people training for actual things (war, paramilitarism, martial arts, target shooting competitions, et cetera) to pick fights with so they have somebody to beat up.
More succinct: Nobody think of themselves as the zombie in the apocalypse.
Ah the poster here mistakes fantasy for real life. You would expect somebody who runs in a bdsm positive community (sort of, im ignoring the abuse). (Most) people who love to be tied up and spanked during a scene would not love it if somebody randomly came into their house without their consent and sexually assaulted them.
OK, I can steelman this. Back in the day you could fill the Colosseum with water and have simulated naval battles in it. That’s pretty badass and I would actually watch some gunboats (maybe without the cannons for safety and fairness) duke it out in a pool.
Even so, we have combat sports in this day and age. Gladiators were professional athletes and the fights were arranged to seem deadly while making sure a gladiator could expect to see retirement age. Kinda like MMA with impractical anime weapons. Executions by blood sport were a separate matter, but I doubt most of the people on the receiving end felt much of a rush of the righteous warfare.
In any case I can disconfirm. Am a man, don’t wanna fight. It’s dangerous, traumatic and painful and I’m a short out of shape nerd. I’ve had more training than most people on how to maximize my K/D ratio in the woods lugging around an assault rifle, but I think just training was nightmarish enough. There are very few if any things worth being in a war for.
Is this the mid 2000s? Am I reading the idiotic edgy screeds that my tweenaged peers were writing, inspired by early internet celebrity maddox?
Also what the fuck kind of brainworm metastatization is happening in this guy’s… comment policy?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hhbibJGt2aQqKJLb7/lc-s-shortform?commentId=gC5JD9wkgaR3ueS97
Beisutsukai Tough Guy
Good rabbit hole. This guy saw Stallman dressed as St Ignutious singing ‘You’ll be free hackers you’ll be free’ and went ‘yes, that is exactly who I want to be, feed me the toe cheese’
I just looked up “beisutsukai” and took psychic damage. All I heard were shouts of “priors!” and “bayes-no-jutsu!” and before I knew it I lost a whole standard deviation of IQ.
a pain shared is a pain doubled
Dude.
People have told me with a straight face that the smartest people in the world post on LW. After this post, I am inclined to believe them.
When I see “pica” I think of a typeface, but from context, the author is using a different definition. Do men who want to fight find themselves craving the taste of dirt?
You cannot understand much of modern culture until you’ve recognized that the state’s blunt suppression of the male instinct for glory has caused widespread symptoms of pica that dominate our politics, media, and online interactions.
*pica (usually uncountable, plural picas) (pathology) A disorder characterized by appetite and craving for non-edible substances, such as chalk, clay, dirt, ice, or sand. *
