naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
Textually, it is extremely obvious in the Potter series that there is absolutely zero relationship between blood status and magical ability. Being pureblood, halfblood, or Muggleborn has nothing to do with your magical talent whatsoever, and the believe that it does is indicated to be irrational bigotry.
Yes on talent, but where the text is silent is on the ultimate relationship between "yes magic" and "no magic" beyond being clear that some people can and most people cannot, no matter their education. There is no serious exploration of whether, or how often, non-mages are born into wizarding families, or why. While there are notable "squib" characters, none are from pureblood families, and those relatively pureblood families who are not prejudiced against Muggles (e.g. the Weasleys) have distant Muggle relatives... who they don't fraternize with. The fact that all the Weasleys can do magic strongly suggests that there is a genetic component; a family that large would presumably produce some Squibs if "yes magic" were more-or-less randomly assigned.
I agree that Rowling was more influenced by ideas about class than about race, but the text she wrote seems to draw heavily from a cultural background of genetic inheritance as well, probably unconsciously. It's hard to read her books and not suspect that there is something genetic about magic use, even if the "pureblood" story isn't the correct one, or is only partly correct. Biological reality is insistent; it intrudes even on our overt fantasies!
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
What is the quality, as I am not seeing it?
The report "showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts." I assume the people who nominated this one found it interesting.
I know this isn't a democracy and it would be more work for the mods,
That isn't necessarily a dealbreaker, but you can safely assume that it will usually be a dealbreaker, yeah.
...but could we get perhaps fewer QCs, if they would be accompanied by more rationale on the editorial decisions why a nomination makes the cut and which nominations do not?
Nominations are the single most important factor in what makes the roundup. After that, it's down to moderator judgment. In practice, that means it's down to my judgment.
Some users like to complain about mod bias, the mods like to claim they are unbiased, perhaps some editorial opinion on what the mod team values positively would help.
It has never helped before, so I don't have any reason to suspect it would help now. We do take time to explain things, sometimes, and our decisions are often moderated by community feedback. But first, I don't always know why a particular post gathered many AAQC nominations, so often I would not even be in a position to say anything more than "this one got a lot of nominations and it doesn't seem to be rulebreaking, so here you go." And second, we've learned over the years that there is a threshold of effort beyond which the whole AAQC report will simply fall to the wayside. Zorba's tools make it possible for me to get this done once per month, and most of the work is just whittling the list down to a manageable size. If I had to write intricate explainers for every entry in the report, that would not merely reduce the number of AAQCs, it would eliminate the report entirely. So, I'm not going to do that.
Very generally, if you think an AAQC is undeserved, you are free to say so, but you and everyone else would be better served if you spent your time writing a better post yourself, instead of a complaint about someone else's.
With specific regard to this post, it got plenty of nominations but also I did think it made an interesting point. Real people make real decisions every day concerning whether they should or should not pass along their genes, for example because they carry a serious genetic malady. If magic did exist, and it were genetic, it might be bigoted to hate Muggles, but surely it would make perfect sense to pity them--and all the more, if they were Squibs who knew about the world of magic but could never fully participate in it. This is often a difficulty in "magical realism" novels, because the most realistic thing that would ever happen in a world with hidden magic would be for that magic to be exposed and, then, for the world to be thrown into upheaval and chaos as it adjusted to the revelation. If there were a "magic gene," I am 100% confident that our existing biotechnology industry would be completely obsessed with detecting and, if possible, replicating that gene, that parents would be screening embryos for magical aptitude, that witches would sometimes abort their Squib babies, etc. I am confident of that because IQ is not even one one-millionth as interesting as magic, and humans are already obsessed with screening for intelligent children, selecting embryos based on highly tenuous polygenic scoring, aborting babies with presumed intellectual disabilities, and so forth.
You don't have to think that's interesting to think about, but if you can't even see why others might find it interesting to think about, you might consider the possibility that you have a serious blind spot (or extremely trapped priors) here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8d ago
Congratulations! That's great.
I myself have a comfortable net worth, but I'm older than most users here and all of my children are adults (albeit still settling into stable adulthood). Most of my assets are my home and my retirement accounts--though I don't have any particular reason to ever retire (teaching college is easy money, just not very much of it). I've missed a lot of investment gains by being a nervous and conservative investor, but I've also missed a lot of losses. On average I've beaten the S&P 500 by a modest margin basically every year for the last several decades.
I've never had a success story as good as yours, but like you I often wonder about the "fairness" of such things. I'm not a 1%er but I'm a comfortable 15%er in the USA, human life honestly just doesn't get much better than that (at current tech levels). What amazes me is how precarious it often feels anyway. Over the course of my life I've seen a bad health diagnosis, a freak accident, or a series of bad or even just unlucky decisions completely wipe out the accumulated wealth of many people far better off than I am.
Ultimately, fair or not, the only person who can live your life is you. So, enjoy it while it lasts--and best wishes on having it last a long, long time.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11d ago
It is rage-inducing trying to use reddit on my phone. If I stay in the browser, it wants to kick me to the app. But the app is trash for search, and won't open properly to the thing I've searched for via hyperlinks in my browser... I hate "apps," and I increasingly hate reddit. The enshittification is real.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11d ago
The Wikipedia article suggests it was named after a Sesame Street character based on its physical resemblance, but I kind of love the analogy not only to the appearance of Snuffleupagus, but to the fact that this fish also remained of uncertain existence for an extended period of time. The character was originally Big Bird's "imaginary friend"--so-called because no one else in Sesame Street ever saw him. That lasted from 1971 to 1985, at which point it was decided that adults not believing a child (Big Bird is canonically 6 years old) was sending the wrong message to viewers, and "Snuffie's" invisibility went the way of Grover's Monsterpiece Theater pipe. The existence of the fish was, likewise, apparently a bit of a question mark from 1993 until today.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11d ago
I don't think there's any problem with leaving it as is--plus it has already generated some perfectly acceptable meta discussion. I just thought I had better lampshade the fact that this is the Fun Thread before anyone else decided to make any substantive commentary on what I wrote! (And I probably wouldn't have mentioned it at all if we hadn't had some recent boundary-testing of the Fun Thread.)
Probably my favorite post I've ever written was my Junebug Review. There are a lot of movies I would like to give similar treatment, but I happened to have the time and the inclination to write that one, and it just came together so well.
So I'm impressed with your ability to continue writing at your Substack. You don't have a lot of posts, but you continue writing them; it seems like most of the Substacks I see fizzle in less than a year. Sometimes I think I should blog, but... insert excuses here, I suppose. I find this kind of writing easier to do in a forum than from my own platform, for whatever reason.
naraburns
nihil supernum
12d ago
I'm glad it continues to serve you! I put a lot of thought into it.
Can I ask whether something prompted this callback? It's a pretty CW review so maybe this is not the right thread for discussing it on those terms. But as an educator I think (or hope!) that some aspects of education do belong in "Friday Fun."
naraburns
nihil supernum
12d ago
Yeah, the site has already lasted longer than the subreddit (3.5 years), which lasted (a lot) longer than the containment thread on the SSC subreddit (~2 years, I think?). One of these days I'm going to find a sufficiently nerdy hydrologist who is willing to help me understand whether this metaphor is any good, but I've started thinking of internet communities as islands of sediment in a branching river... the same forces that build us up also tear us down, and moving off of reddit slowed our "deposits" but also slowed our "erosion," in many ways.
Good post, and doubly good for inspiring the linking of the "Galbrush Paradox" below--which I had never encountered, but which I love both because it is absolutely correct and because Guybrush Threepwood is one of the greatest video game characters of all time. (Heh. Rubber tree.)
What your post mostly made me think, though, was--yeah, as it turns out, people don't usually identify and discuss problems because they are interested in obviously relevant solutions. They identify and discuss "problems" as a negotiating tactic for getting whatever it is they actually want--usually, greater leverage or control over whoever it is they're complaining to.
To give a very simple example, I was subjected to this once as part of a hiring committee. We were going over god-only-knows how many resumes from grossly underqualified applicants, and I would say "let's toss this one out because X." And someone would respond, "wait, though, X isn't necessarily the problem you're making it out to be." Then we'd come to another application with X, and that very same someone would say "let's toss this one out because X." Then I would say, "I thought you didn't think X was a problem though" and I would get kind of a nasty look, followed by vague irrelevant platitudes--not even hair splitting, just straight up gobbledygook. This is from fellow tenured faculty, by the way, PhDs the lot of them, but it became quickly clear that for at least two members of the committee, there were no real standards of evaluation in play--just "say negative things about the ones I don't like, and positive things about the ones I do." Pointing out their inconsistencies was met with dirty looks or accusations of being unnecessarily aggressive about the process.
Actually I once got a similar criticism from a law professor when I was involved in a mock appeal. I threw everything I had into giving the most thorough arguments I could, and my peers were clearly frustrated by the amount of work that created for them. The professor had to step in and give us all a "remember this is just an exercise, we're not actually deciding a case here, no need to put so much into it..." Decades later, I'm still kind of cross about it!
This is like maybe the original sin from the perspective of the contemporary Rationalist movement, which Scott Alexander has done a lot of good work articulating with his culture war writings on social signaling. Most people are not making arguments, because most people are not usually reasoning at all. They're playing a hierarchy game, and complaining is a way of subordinating others. Their arguments are trash qua arguments, but it's a category error to even evaluate them that way. It's like watching someone flip a chessboard and then patiently explaining to them that flipping the chessboard isn't a legitimate move.
I apologize that this is pretty meta but the disconnect I see in so many people between identifying a problem and considering actual solutions is something I think about a lot. There is of course a gender stereotype here ("men, stop trying to solve our problems, that's not why we share them"--"if you don't want me to solve your problem, there's not really any point in listening to you talk about it"--"I'm just talking to show that I care!"--"I'm solving to show that I care!"--"if you really cared then you would stop trying to fix things!"--"okay, I guess I can't fix this relationship then, we're done"--"not like that!"). But while men and women often approach it from different angles, I've had just as many problems with men doing this sort of thing, as women. Most recently, I had a colleague come down with a serious case of AI psychosis (we should definitely start calling it cyberpsychosis) and completely lost his ability to engage with me on substance. Every disagreement we have now turns into him burying me under reams of ChatGPT-generated bullshit; when I pick it apart on substance, he says "okay I'll get back to you" and then ghosts me long enough for the discussion to go stale.
(To avoid having it suggested that I'm doing exactly what I'm complaining about, here, I will respond more directly to the substance of your post with an observation: possibly I don't hang out with the "right" kind of men, or maybe I hang out with the "wrong" kind of women, but in real life I have heard many, many women talk about their own breasts using descriptors like "perky" (or "tight" or "saggy" or "flat")--and almost never heard men speak of women's breasts that way outside of movies. I feel like "real women don't examine, describe, sexualize, or even notice their own breasts, that's something only thirsty lecherous male authors make badly-written female characters do" is the kind of egocentric misconception a teenage boy might have about the virginal purity of women. Women are of course not a monolith, probably not all women do this, but most of the women I've known in my life have been pretty casual/unconcerned/vaguely raunchy when discussing their "boobs" (the word I hear deployed most often, though maybe that is a generational thing). Sure, it's not always handled well in literature, but in reality the only people I know who are more obsessed with female breasts than young men, is young women.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
13d ago
We know this forum...
...does not allow consensus-building language, especially when it is about "this forum." This comment is also bad because it is antagonistic and perhaps sarcastic. You have already been warned to speak plainly. Now you are getting banned for a day. Engage in thoughtfully good faith or that will escalate quickly.
naraburns
nihil supernum
18d ago
First, this topic goes in the CW thread.
Second, the way you've written it is light on evidence and heavy on generalization. Write about specific rather than general groups whenever possible. Bring evidence proportional to how inflammatory your claims are likely to be read as. There are interesting things to be written about social contagion and its relationship to sex or gender, but it's going to take more effort than this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
25d ago
There is already a male romantasy genre, but it's called Harem Fantasy and considered a very low-status sub-genre of the already rather niche Progression Fantasy.
Is Progression Fantasy still "niche," with Dungeon Crawler Carl breaking containment?
Mushoku Tensei is vastly superior along every conceivable metric--except the Overton Window metric where it matters that Carl is safely asexual while Rudeus is a practicing polygamist.
I don't know whether you've read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, but this is basically where Yudkowsky arrives on the matter.
Right--which is where we wrap back around to the OP. There is no question that Rowling presents the pureblood supremacist view as both wrong and wicked. But an in-universe steelman of pureblood politics might look something like,
That's the "love" the OP suggests Malfoid (at least potentially) brings to the source material: the love for one's children that is expressed by giving them the best available start, by choosing a high quality reproductive partner. Slytherin need not be bigots to be both proud of what they have (magic is cool!) and anxious to share that inheritance with their own children.
You have suggested that the discourse is tainted by the real-world implications that the OP probably intended for at least some readers to draw vis-a-vis race mixing or the like. Where I think those implications fail is simply that there aren't very many human traits comparable to "magic Y/N," and almost all of them are discrete, identifiable disabilities: Down Syndrome Y/N, Tay-Sachs Y/N/Carrier, Sickle Cell Y/N/Carrier, etc. At present (to the best of my non-expert understanding) the really positive stuff people want to select for in embryo screenings tend to be polygenic and tentative--height, IQ, athleticism, etc. are stochastic spectra rather than binary Y/N traits. But if I were a Wizard in Rowling's world, I think it would be very easy to regard Muggledom as an identifiable disability, at least for the child of a Wizard. In much the way that clinical words for disabilities (imbecile, retard, dumb, lame, etc.) tend to evolve into insults and epithets, I can imagine the perception of Muggledom as Disability forming the psychological foundation of anti-Muggle bigotry.
But a bigotry arising from good science is still bigotry--and good science that gives occasional cover to bigotry is still good science. I think the OP in this case too often fails to fully appreciate the former, but those complaining about the OP here do not seem to fully appreciate the latter. I guess the relevant meme is, "The worst person you know just made a great point." AAQCs are not personality awards, or endorsements, or judgments of moral character. More often than not, "death of the author" applies.
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