I fall into camp 2 but I’m different. I cannot delude myself away from reality. What you will find is that people in camp 2 are lying to them selves. They are denying an impending reality where ai slop becomes even better than the code they write themselves.
Also it’s more than an art or a craft. It’s identity. Many people hold their coding skill as an identity they honed it over many years and it put them in the ranking they are in today. This kind of destruction of identity by AI is what causes people to deny reality.
This stuff also covers your job, even if you don’t hold coding as an identity it is still responsible for many people’s livelihoods. Like ai is convenient right now but what happens when it gets even more convenient? What happens to your job and your life especially if software was all you did for over a decade?
I’m in camp 2 and I can’t lie to myself about what’s happening. I’ve embraced ai and I now vibe code daily even though I was originally an artistic functional programmer. This ability comes at high cost. I’m able to do it because I hold zero identity. I dont identity with anything and I don’t put too much pride into anything I do or at least if I put pride into something I’m always conscious of severing the entire thing at a moments notice.
Lying to oneself is a powerful ability but it becomes a liability when society goes through an intense paradigm shift. This is what is happening now.
Honest question: Is buddihsm real? Does it have any basis in scientific and objective reality? Or is it fiction? I don't mean side stuff like meditation improves your IQ I mean does the fundamental point of buddihism have any basis in reality.
If it is fiction, why is it so popular among technical people like people who come to HN? Are the people on HN who are interested in Buddhism aware it is fiction/real?
> Is buddihsm real? Does it have any basis in scientific and objective reality? Or is it fiction?
These are Buddhist questions. :)
The Buddha famously told his followers not to accept his teaching merely because he said it, instead he told them to "go and see for yourself." The point is that if you want to know if buddhism is real, try out the practices and see if they make sense to you and make a difference. If the practices work, adopt them, if you find them worthless, abandon them.
You get free will and karma in Buddhism. Great 2-for-1 special.
Another way to come at it is to consider the good old Four Noble Truths. There are different ways to say them but this is how I learned them:
* Life is full of suffering
* Suffering is caused by attachment to desire
* There is a way beyond attachment
* Meditation and Buddhism is the way beyond attachment (or to Enlightenment, if you prefer)
+1 on most of this. A small note: I think “suffering” is an unfortunate translation as it connotes dire circumstances or real pain, whereas I understand dukkha to include simple discontent, dissatisfaction, and stress. I take the Buddha to have said roughly, “I teach the origin of unhappiness and how to liberate yourself from it.”
I think when you marry life is suffering, and resistance is suffering, you get to the root of it. Ego is ultimately the root of suffering, resisting what is. Our cravings and aversions result in us not being able to be meet the present as it is, and accept it. It causes us to artificially label experience with qualifiers such as good/bad etc
As we root out our cravings and aversions, our egoic programming, fear stops running the show, and gratitude and contentment takes it's place. We're able to meet every moment as it is and appreciate the perfection.
> I think “suffering” is an unfortunate translation as it connotes dire circumstances or real pain, whereas I understand dukkha to include simple discontent, dissatisfaction, and stress.
Agree. Suffering doesn't send the right message in terms of what the word is trying to signal. The best version I've heard is likening life to a carriage ride, and the wheel is just never quite right, so it's always just a little bit uncomfortable. Nothing's just ever quite right.
The noble truth of 'Dukha' doesn't translate to 'life is full of suffering', but rather that life contains suffering, which may sound obvious but there is a subtler meaning here.
The subtler meaning is that nothing in existence will truly and permanently satisfy you, because that is the nature of the mind. Many people obviously don't realize this as they run around chasing their first million, billion or trillion.
> If it is fiction, why is it so popular among technical people like people who come to HN? Are the people on HN who are interested in Buddhism aware it is fiction/real?
Because it sounds cool and intellectual.
This is the same reason crypto-buddhist "philosophies" became popular in the Hindu-sphere post the decline of Ancient Vedic religion, which had no concept of rebirth and rather focused on Rta (cosmic / natural order), vrata (duty), kratu (will) etc...
Looking enlightened is more important than actually being enlightened.
If you were a machine, your highest basis would be electrons and related EM fields: it would be the finest level of matter you are made of, the highest level where your consciousness could reside. The idea behind buddhism and other methods is that humans have a higher basis, sometimes reaching extreme heights. In order to gain enlightenment at those levels, there is buddhism. In this thought framework, our science studies a very coarse level of molecular matter, so it's of no help for gaining enlightenment. Similarly, buddhism isn't concerned with the level of matter that's studied by science, so it's of no help for scientific endeavors. For example, buddhism talks a lot about karma. At a certain level, karma is a form of matter with very concrete properties, but to our science it's an unreachable abstraction that you may as well call fiction.
Well, if you come at it from the mindfulness angle, there are real studies showing that mindfulness works. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8083197/ and similarly, if you come at it from the religious angle, you can trace a lot of the aspects of mindfulness back to the Buddha's original teachings as recorded in canon. And if you ask if there is a fundamental point beyond those, I think the answer is that there is none recorded - the best description I have been able to get of Nirvana is that it is a state of perfect mindfulness.
There is plenty of proof, just not the type of proof likely to be accepted by people looking for a measurement from an external device, which precludes scientific proof until consciousness can be measured. Given that science cannot identify consciousness in live organisms at this time, you are going to have to wait a long time.
In general, there are three commonly accepted methods in Buddhist epistemology to know if something is true: perception, inference, and testimony. For the specific case of rebirth, common proofs use either perception, or inference.
- Perception: You train in states of concentration and use those to gain direct knowledge of past lives. Maybe some people would find this unconvincing even if they had the experience. Certainly not something likely to be accepted as scientific as Ian Stevenson's research has shown, even if the case presented was iron-clad.
- Inference: This uses Buddhist logic and an understanding of dependent origination. This specific argument comes from Dharmakīrti.
- Every moment of consciousness must have a substantial cause.
- Physical matter can serve as a cooperative condition for consciousness, but it cannot be consciousness's substantial cause, because matter and mind are fundamentally different in nature. Matter is extended, non-luminous, non-aware and consciousness is luminous and aware. If you are a scientific materialist, you will not accept this, but it must be noted that there is no scientific evidence of any kind for dead matter gaining awareness.
- Therefore, each moment of consciousness must arise from a preceding moment of consciousness of similar type.
- Then you trace this chain to the first moment of your present life. The chain must have been preceded by a moment of consciousness of similar type. The same logic applies to the last moment of your present life.
- Therefore, consciousness must be a stream that transcends physical birth and death.
Again, I am aware many people won't find this convincing, but to say that Buddhism does not attempt to prove rebirth and karma is not true.
It is difficult not to dismiss this sort of proof out of hand, because every religion engages in it. Buddhism can probably (?) coexist with many deist religions, but few of them can coexist with each other.
This is a strange question. It's like asking if Christianity has any basis in scientific and objective reality, which as a religion it does not, none do. It doesn't even make any sense to ask the question, like what does an objective reality of a religion even mean? You explicitly disclaimed discussion about the cognitive benefits of its practice so I'm not really sure what else you could be asking concretely.
I suspected that most people on HN viewed Buddhism the way you do: as something with no basis fundamentally in science and therefore reality but felt that the practices have side effect health benefits or other benefits undiscovered by science.
From the sample size of people who responded, I would say I am wrong. A good amount of HNers believe it literally as something beyond science.
I think the opposite. It will make all software matter less.
If trendlines continue... It will be faster for AI to vibe code said software to your customized specifications than to sign up for a SaaS and learn it.
"Claude, create a project management tool that simplifies jira, customize it to my workflow."
So a lot of apps will actually become closed source personalized builds.
I can already build a ticket tracker in a weekend. I’ve been on many teams that used Jira, nobody loves Jira, none of us ever bothered to DIY something good enough.
Why?
Because it’s a massive distraction. It’s really fun to build all these side apps, but then you have to maintain them.
I’m guessing a lot of vibeware will be abandoned rather than maintained.
The hard part has always been shipping, buttoning things up, doing the design. Not the idea per say. And then if any of it is successful and starts making money guess who you're gonna call to maintain it?
These are local systems. Think of it like vibe coding your personal GUI or CLI. Each programmer uses their own custom build. There's no maintenance except only for themselves.
You typically use an off the shelf project management software because it's too time consuming to build one catered to your own preferences. But with AI, it just does it for you. I'm talking about custom one off personal solutions readily done because of AI executing on it for you.
And then you get a new hire who already knows the common SaaS products but has to re learn your vibe coded version no one else uses where no information exists online.
There is a reason why large proprietary products remain prevalent even when cheaper better alternatives exist. Being "industry standard" matters more than being the best.
It will. By translation I mean like a front end client that translates the api into a user interface they prefer. They will build something localized to their own workflow. If it doesn't end well it's localized to them only.
But then all your local stuff is based on open-source software, unlike the SaaS which is probably not all the way open.
I've always preferred my stack to be on the thinner, more vanilla, less prebuilt side than others around me, and seems like LLMs are reinforcing that approach now.
There's too much value in familiar UX. "Don't make the user think" is the golden rule these days. People used to have mental bandwidth for learning new interfaces... But now people expect uniformity
if the trendlines continue on atmospheric greenhouse gases we will all be dead from climate change so I really do hope the world is a little bit more complicated than trendlines just extrapolating out. Interestingly enough that might actually be bad for OpenAI since it will be difficult to sell their product if their customers are dying from heat stroke.
You hope. But you need to think realistically. Not hopefully.
Trendlines will continue. Even the one for greenhouse gases. That is the most realistic scenario. In fact the trendline for greenhouse gases is even stronger than AI. I am far more confident about greenhouse gases continuing to rise than I am for AI.
Telling me how another trendline points to a shitty reality doesn't change the fact that the shitty reality is still reality. It's a common mistake in debate.
I haven't stated whether I hope for one reality or the other. I'm simply stating the most probable future. You haven't even disagreed with me.
we are probably not going to keep pumping CO2 out at the rate of the worst case scenario of business because believe it or not companies are aware there is little profit to be made from dead consumers.
The realistic scenarios are still pretty bad but less so.
Just assuming LLMs will scale to the point of being more useful as all these companies are banking on is not unfounded but it's also just an educated guess because of their own optimistic prediction they will be able to bring about a new fascist world they are in charge of before they run out of money. It's very likely we are all screwed but it's also very likely LLMs will not scale up fast enough so they can replace the majority of human labor.
Look up the tragedy of the commons. It’s revelatory. If companies know it’s suicide why haven’t they stopped yesterday? If they knew yesterday and could’ve stopped yesterday then it’s clear that there’s no precedence indicating they will stop in the future.
Due to copyright laws and piracy bleed-through, one can't safely license "AI" output under some other use-case without the risk of getting sued or DMCA strikes. You can't make it GPL, or closed source... because it is not legally yours even if you paid someone for tokens.
Like all code-generators that came before, the current LLM will end up a niche product after the hype-cycle ends. "AI" only works if the models are fed other peoples real works, and the web is already >52% nonsense now. They add the Claude-contributor/flag to Git projects, so the scrapers don't consume as much of its own slop. ymmv =3
This is a temporary problem. Look at how fast things are progressing. Things will improve until none of this matters because the output is indistinguishable.
But are you ok with the trendline of ai improvement? The speed of improvement indicates humans will only get further and further removed from the loop.
I see posts like your all the time comforting themselves that humans still matter, and every-time people like you are describing a human owning an ever shrinking section of the problem space.
It used to be the case that the labs were prioritising replacing human creativity, e.g. generative art, video, writing. However, they are coming to realise that just isn't a profitable approach. The most profitable goal is actually the most human-oriented one: the AI becomes an extraordinarily powerful tool that may be able to one-shot particular tasks. But the design of the task itself is still very human, and there is no incentive to replace that part. Researchers talk a bit less about AGI now because it's a pointless goal. Alignment is more lucrative.
Basically, executives want to replace workers, not themselves.
On the contrary the depth and breadth we're becoming able to handle agentically now in software is growing very rapidly, to the point where in the last 3 months the industry has undergone a big transformation and our job functions are fundamentally starting to change. As a software engineer I feel increasingly like AGI will be a real thing within the next few years, and it's going to affect everyone.
If you look at those operating at the bleeding edge, it doesn't look anything like yesteryear. It's a real step change. Fully autonomous agentic software engineering is becoming a reality. While still in its infancy, some results are starting to be made public, and it's mind boggling. We're transitioning to a full agent-only workflow in my team at work. The engineering task has shifted from writing code to harness engineering, and essentially building a system that can safely build itself to a high quality given business requirements.
Up until recently I kinda feel like the scepticism was warranted, but after building my own harness that can autonomously produce decent quality software (at least for toy problem scale, granted), and getting hands on with autoresearch via writing a set of skills for it https://github.com/james-s-tayler/lazy-developer, I feel fundamentally different about software engineering than I did until relatively recently.
If you look at the step change from Sonnet 4.5 to Opus 4.5 and what that unlocked, and consider the rumoured Mythos model is apparently not just an incremental improvement, but another step change. Then pair it with infrastructure for operating agents at scale like https://github.com/paperclipai/paperclip and SOTA harnesses like the ones being written about on the blogs of the frontier labs... I mean... you tell me what you think is coming down the pipe?
Humans needing to ask new question due to curiosity push the boundaries further, find new directions, ways or motivations to explore, maybe invent new spaces to explore. LLMs are just tools that people use. When people are no longer needed AI serves no purpose at all.
People can use other people as tools. An LLM being a tool does not preclude it from replacing people.
Ultimately it’s a volume problem. You need at least one person to initialize the LLM. But after that, in theory, a future LLM can replace all people with the exception of the person who initializes the LLM.
I can (it's really obvious here) and wish I couldn't. Every time I run into something I might wanna read, but it turns out to be LLM "assisted" writing after I've already invested some time, it feels like I was tricked into eating cardboard.
And when I bring up that this should be clearly marked, preferably up front, it's often taken as a personal slight.
I realize this is a me problem to some extend, I shouldn't feel strongly about this, but I do.
There are some very small tells, like the constant "rule of threes" that AI loves to follow, but you're right that this is much harder to tell than it used to be.
Yeah I couldn't care less for liquid glass but it's not as horrible as people make it out to be. The amount of hate is irrational. New Coke vibes if you heard of new coke.
This is so stupid. I don't know whether AI has improved things but this is clearly cope, we're not even a year into the transition since agentic coding took over so any data you gather now is not the full story.
But people are desperate for data right? Desperate to prove that AI hasn't done shit.
Maybe. But this much is true. If AI keeps improving and if the trendline keeps going, we're not going to need data to prove something equivalent to the ground existing.
It's easy. For women the core of their power anthropologically lies with beauty. They are judged by it and the core of their power stems from it. That is why there is a beauty industry that centers around women and none for men. That is why women "care" about beauty much more than men. They know that beauty = power.
Women rely on beauty for success much more than men. It is not just in terms of "grades". Even in engineering jobs you can see it, a beautiful woman can get armies of male engineers to "help" her. I literally saw one female engineer get 2 male engineers to spend 3 weeks on a project for her just by virtue of the fact she's a woman.
And she's not even aware of this. Like she thinks people are just "nice". But men are not conditioned to ask other men for this kind of help and we can't expect 2 idiots to spend weeks on a "favor" for someone else.
We live in a world that tries to deny this reality with "gender equality" but these cultural ideas fly in the face of millions of years of biological evolution.
Now that being said. We very much expect that the grades of women should go down when not in person to a degree MUCH MUCH more than men. That is completely is expected. The question now is, why was there even a correlation of better grades and beauty among men in the first place? Why did that correlation exist when men do not rely on beauty? That is the anomaly here.
I think part of the answer is clear. Beautiful men do not rely on beauty for success. They never did hence why when you removed it as a factor the success rate did not change. What's going on I suspect is even more controversial: Beauty correlates with intelligence. This is not an insane notion. We already know that height correlates with intelligence, but it is likely beauty does too.
> That is why there is a beauty industry that centers around women and none for men.
Oh us men also have a beauty industry - or, I should rather say, an attractiveness industry. We just get sold different, and arguably far more pricier, things... luxury watches and cars, tailor-made suits and shoes, grooming, gym memberships.
And similar to how women got anorexia through unhealthy beauty standards for decades, that comes back to bite us men this time with "looksmaxxers" [1]...
> Clavicular attributes his looks to, among other things, taking testosterone from the age of 14 and smashing his jawbone with a hammer to supposedly reshape his lower face - neither of which is recommended by health professionals.
No. These aren't beauty. It's status symbols. They are symbols of power, capability and utility. Men are judged by raw power and capability. The industry for beauty for men is more of a way for men to advertise raw capability. It is not "beauty" for "beauties" sake.
The beauty industry for women is more superficial. Make up for example serves nothing for status and everything for youth and beauty.
Now there are things like expensive jewelry... but this stuff doesn't help women in terms of attractiveness. That is not to say that women don't wear symbols of power...Jewelry is more of a status symbol for women advertising their status to other women: "Look at what my man got me, look at the power and status of a man that is in love with my beauty."
That is not to say beauty doesn't help men. But it does to a much lesser degree than women. Also your citation is a news article documenting a phenomenon. You need numbers to answer the question: Is this phenomenon an anomaly?? Or is it common place?
I think the answer is obvious, I mean the stuff I talk about here isn't anything new. It's just hard to talk about it because our culture has conditioned us to look away from the truth and more at artificial ideals of equality and balance. Men and women in reality are not equal. And this inequality doesn't necessarily "balance" out like yin and yang.
First, it's very unlikely all people will become aware of it. Our culture has made it taboo to even think in this direction.
Second, nothing will change. People will still behave based off of their instincts and underlying biology. Awareness of the underlying biology doesn't change anything. Men are very much always attracted to young women with nice curves even though they are well aware that this attraction is just an irrational biological instinct. Awareness does not change behavior, therefore, society will not collapse.
Not necessarily. IMO the current demographic collapse can be mostly explained by people asking themselves whether they want children rather than just blindly putting penis into vagina.
No part of population growth was addiction to sex. Even people who didn’t want children would have children simply by wanting to fuck. That changed with birth control.
People still blindly put penises into vaginas and now more than ever women are blindly letting in more and more penises when in the past they were much more guarded.
We have sex for pleasure. The baby is a side effect and that side effect is part of what caused population growth. Eliminate the side effect via birth control and people can now have sex for pleasure with no side effects.
That is what is driving the population down.
Your sarcastic remark here in a vain attempt to expose me only exposes your own complete misunderstanding.
> Eliminate the side effect via birth control and people can now have sex for pleasure with no side effects.
And that's not a bad thing. People used to have babies even if they were nowhere near ready for it by age, emotionally, financially or in terms of housing. Particularly teen pregnancies have a massive cost on society and reinforce generational poverty.
If governments would actually want more children, they'd lower the working hours so that both parents can stay employed while being actually able to raise their children adequately (no, handing off your kids at 7 in the morning and getting them back at 6 in the evening, only to have maybe an hour of actual time with them before they have to sleep is not raising children adequately), they'd provide families with housing, they'd provide mothers with affordable healthcare instead of five figures worth of hospital bills in the US, they'd provide both parents with parental leave instead of forcing them to juggle work and adjusting to care for a toddler...
Young people everywhere see how unimportant they are to society and are resisting to fall into the same trap their parents did.
You're right. Many women know what's going on. But many actually don't.
A lot of women live in this contradictory state where they know subconsciously but consciously they don't know at the same time. To help illustrate... It's the same type of human contradiction many software engineers face with AI, unable to admit that it's in the process replacing a skillset that upheld their identity. It's a form of lying to oneself... convincingly.
I would say off the seat of my pants if I were to give you very very estimated numbers.... like 45% know explicitly what they are doing, than 35% live in this contradictory state I described above, and a good 20% have no clue.
>She may have even deliberately cultivated this relationship
Oh many women do this. But they don't necessarily know that these relationships only exist because they are beautiful and that they are women. Again... many know... but not all know.
>Women aren't stupid.
This isn't true. Many women are really stupid. Many women are smart too.
> For women the core of their power anthropologically lies with beauty
Physical attractiveness is a social asset, and it's a more useful asset for a woman because men are affected by how women look more than the other way around - that's all fair enough ... but "the core of their power anthropologically lies with beauty" is a bizarre framing.
It's not bizarre. It's truth that's hard to accept in modern times. Also you need to look at this from the perspective of prehistoric times that made up most of human evolution. Modern culture and technology has made it so that a women on their own could in theory gain as much power and capability as a man so the dynamics are more equal now in terms of opportunities but they are still unequal in terms of biology and genetic behavior/instincts.
Think about who goes hunting? Who builds the house. Who farms the farm? The man. A women does not have the strength to be the primary driver behind all these tasks. She can assist, but, again, she is not the primary driver simply because she does not have the intrinsic strength to do these things. The further you go into the past, technology becomes less relevant and physical strength becomes more of a requirement for survival.
In prehistoric times, a women's status lies primarily in what man she is able to "control" to take care of her because her strength and capabilities render her biologically much less capable in the prehistoric world.
Of course this also begs the question of what happens to a woman when she gets old and ugly? Where does she get her power from? She gets it from her man. In prehistoric times, women needed to secure a man when young and at the prime of her power... than she sires his children and through that is able to secure life time protection from that man well into old age when she loses her beauty. That's how it worked for millions of years and that is what is baked genetically into her biological instincts.
You're right it does sound bizarre in modern times. Also very taboo to frame things this way. But it's also the underlying reality. You need to think of things from this perspective rather than the perspective of what's "taboo". It's only bizarre because society has conditioned you to look away from the cold hard truth.
The key here that you need to realize is that women in power is very recent phenomenon. You see women CEO's, women going for the presidency, and women founding startups. This is all very recent and enabled mostly by technology. Historically, this is not how female power presented itself.
> You need to think of things from this perspective rather than the perspective of what's "taboo". It's only bizarre because society has conditioned you to look away from the cold hard truth.
Haha good lord. Of course you have access to the cold hard truth that I'm too foolish to see! Your fixation on "power" (whatever that means) is incredibly reductive, and I expect your knowledge of human behaviour is rather limited
You’re the one being reductive. Power is an incredibly broad term that encompasses many dimensions that different across species and gender. You irreducibly assumed the singular most negative interpretation of my usage of the word and you deliberately attacked my character personally.
Please keep the debate impersonal. If you disagree and believe my arguments are without merit please attack the arguments rather than my character. Thank you.
What I find interesting about comments like this is how revelatory they are of the worldview of the people writing them. It's always interesting to see which facts about the primal human experience are left out when this kind of thing is discussed.
For example, I'm betting you're a male who likes women who's between the age of 20 and 45 and likely doesn't have children (I'm pretty sure on male between 20 and 45, but children could go either way).
Consider the assumptions present in: "Of course this also begs the question of what happens to a woman when she gets old and ugly? Where does she get her power from? She gets it from her man."
The assumption there being the only reason a man would protect a woman is because she's pretty and she's having sex with them, likely because the sexual relationship is the main way you're looking at women at this point in your life. Even if we assume women can only derive power from male proximity in nature, there's an obvious alternative answer to where she would derive power from: Her sons and grandsons. If she lives through her childbearing years, a woman in nature is far more likely to live to old age than her male mate: She has better resistance to famine, a better immune system, and if we assume the rigid gender role evo-psych of men = hunters and women = gatherers, she also engages in far less physically risky activities. Even if 'her man' is alive, the odds of him being crippled or simply unable to protect her from younger, fitter men are high. A 35 year old son or 18 year old grandson is far more valuable for protection, and far more stable: a man is always her son/grandson, whereas if we're assuming the red pillish evo-psych is true, 'her man' probably has wandering eyes and would like a younger woman and therefore should not be counted on to stick around once she dares to have wrinkles and saggy breasts. Additionally, a man who doesn't protect his mother is failing at one of the basic tests of belonging to a human tribe: Basic reciprocity. If a man won't give to the one person who took care of him when she gained nothing/he was at his most vulnerable, then how can his fellow hunters (who he's less attached to) trust that he'll reciprocate when they help him? This assumption also outright dismisses the bonds between say, a brother and a sister. Do you think most men wouldn't protect their sisters because they're not sex objects?
Older women are also far more able to keep contributing to the tribe than older men if we adhere to this strictly gendered idea of primitive humans. They can care for children while women in their prime gather, they can rear children whose mothers have died (and this is common due to the fatality rate of childbirth), they can take care of the sick, etc. A man who can't keep up with his male duties is far less useful - a man who is over 60 and has 60-80% of the speed and strength of his fellows, or a bad limb, or sensory impairments, is far less able to hunt than a woman over 60 is to caretake. They're more likely to live longer and therefore a better repository of historical knowledge.
Idk, I just always find it interesting which physiological and psychological aspects of humanity are ignored or unmentioned whenever someone is making some kind of argument about primal gender roles.
Bro you made many assumptions. First women today have plenty of power. A lot of times more so than men. I only refer to prehistoric times.
Men primarily drived survival in prehistoric times. Without a man a women could not survive. That doesn’t mean she couldn’t contribute it means she was not the primary driver. Women contribute a lot, but that contribution is in the end supplementary because it is not critical for survival and this definitely shapes evolved behavior. It means for survival a man is required for her, this is asymmetric for a man and you can see this in how women and men select mates. Men select based off of superficial markers for fertility. Women select more on practical markers for capability. This is because a women’s survival is dependent on the man’s capability while a man’s survival is not as much dependent on this.
Additionally please don’t make the argument personal. If you disagree attack the argument don’t attack or make assumptions about my character. Thank you.
I wasn't speaking of the modern day either; I was only addressing prehistoric times - specifically the time before agriculture since we're discussing humanity at its earliest points. Prehistoric =/= tribal, incidentally.
I brought up your identity because it's relevant to the assumptions that you're making, and specifically it's causing you to miss very wide aspects of the human experience that are very relevant to the discussion you want to have. I see this a lot in these discussions (and before you get upset, that includes from women: the bad feminist argument that prehistoric people were completely gender egalitarian or matriarchal is just as much wishcrafting). In this case, you're assuming that every single prehistoric human being approached power acquisition and gender relations the way you do.
I find these discussions intellectually dishonest: You very clearly have a point of view regarding male superiority and want to convey that using objective language to prove your rationality. I didn't make assumptions about your character, I made assumptions about your age and sex. I also did attack your argument, because it's a weak argument, and you didn't address my points at all. You're being evasive on purpose and attempting to pass yourself off as rational person making an objective argument, but you're completely ignoring extremely relevant facts and data and spewing things that are completely false.
It's adorable that you think men can survive without women (condescension fully intended). This is pre agriculture. No domesticated animals. Every single one of those men spent at least a year completely dependent on a woman: birth to 12 months. No breast milk? No men. Older men are also going to be reliant on women for caretaking, as are sick men. What you mean when you say 'men can survive without women' is 'healthy men aged 15 to 50 can survive without women on a daily basis'. Yes, men can take care of the ill, but women can also build houses. To call women's contributions supplementary when nobody would reach the age of 3 without them is fantastic. Thank you for that. It's hilarious, and it makes it so clear what your informational sources are. Infants living aren't crucial for survival? You also ignore the social ties of early humans, which is ridiculous given we're a social species. The main dangers to early human women that weren't faced by early human men are childbirth and early human men. It's likely true that a woman benefited from male protection from other men, but it's untrue that this protection is only afforded via giving sexual access. A man will protect his mother. A man will protect his sister. Hell, you even said yourself that a woman got protection by bearing him children: Did you mean only sons? Do you think early human fathers would just shrug if someone tried to hurt their daughters because they weren't having sex with her? Women and men needed each other to survive, but that is a different argument from 'the only way a woman can receive male protection is by being young, hot, and giving it up.' Likewise, a sister will tend to her brother, a daughter will care for her aging father, and a mother will help her son with his children if his wife dies. Human bonds and gender relations go far beyond sexual relationships, even if they're important, and you just are completely ignoring that so that you can feel good. That's what this argument is actually about, and that's why I think it's intellectually dishonest.
And this is still granting you the foundations of the argument, which are also bad. Yes, it's very likely that gender roles have existed since homo sapiens sapiens evolved. It's also pretty likely those roles had at least some flexibility, since complete specialization requires a certain population density and nature is cruel and full of terrors. If your entire hunting party ends up TPKed, you want at least a few women who can hunt so they can teach the oldest boys left in the tribe and the knowledge isn't lost. Likewise, you want some of the men able to perform 'feminine' duties in case something happens to the women who know those things: If the men want their culture to continue and most of their women die, they're going to want the women they kidnap to be able to do things like know what plants are edible in their particular territory, etc. Humans are adaptable before we are anything else. Being overly rigid with roles when you live in groups of ~150 in a world where you have no writing, no domesticated plants or animals, and only basic stone tools isn't going to serve you. Efficiency and resilience are trade offs, and when you have very little margin for error and replacing members of the tribe is costly, it makes more sense to spread out knowledge and tasks so that there are fewer single points of failure. You probably want your medical experts teaching multiple students so that if one dies of a fever or in a hunting accident there are other options. You probably want more than one midwife, so your tribe isn't fucked if she dies. And so on.
Bro. No. This post is offensive and personal. It’s targetted as personal and an attack on my character. Using words like “adorable” is deliberate and calculated. I stopped reading the minute you tried justify your personal attack. I will not entertain this bullshit and it’s against the rules.
I came back cos I felt a bit guilty. You're right - I was condescending and I'm sorry
I think your model of men's social status being solely based on strength, and women's on beauty, is too simplistic to be useful. Even male chimpanzees' status isn't based solely on strength (social grooming and coalition building are also really important), and female chimpanzees' status is not based on the males they attract. Human societies are complex, and people can be useful to the group in a zillion different ways. Men were never only hunters/warriors, and women were never only wives/mothers. Even in societies where almost all food was from hunting it needed to be processed and preserved, and that work was very often done by women. A beautiful woman who takes shortcuts when preserving meat and runs the risk of poisoning the whole family does not make a good wife
The core of anyone's power is how useful they are to people around them. If you're beautiful that can be part of your usefulness, but if that's all you have to offer then you're not going to be very powerful
Also it’s more than an art or a craft. It’s identity. Many people hold their coding skill as an identity they honed it over many years and it put them in the ranking they are in today. This kind of destruction of identity by AI is what causes people to deny reality.
This stuff also covers your job, even if you don’t hold coding as an identity it is still responsible for many people’s livelihoods. Like ai is convenient right now but what happens when it gets even more convenient? What happens to your job and your life especially if software was all you did for over a decade?
I’m in camp 2 and I can’t lie to myself about what’s happening. I’ve embraced ai and I now vibe code daily even though I was originally an artistic functional programmer. This ability comes at high cost. I’m able to do it because I hold zero identity. I dont identity with anything and I don’t put too much pride into anything I do or at least if I put pride into something I’m always conscious of severing the entire thing at a moments notice.
Lying to oneself is a powerful ability but it becomes a liability when society goes through an intense paradigm shift. This is what is happening now.
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