FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
2mo ago
My self-imposed NaNoWriMo is going far from according to plan. Since starting on February 10th I've only written ~4,300 words. Need to pick up the pace.
They don't do this because the information isn't readily available
I think I did a good job in my post outlining the fact that the information is readily available. Certainly for any novel which has been digitised, which is essentially every book which has been published this century (including reprints of older books).
few people pay much attention to these
I disagree. Netflix has a specific category called ninety minute movies. The topic of the "ideal" length for a movie recurs quite often in film discussions (e.g., e.g.).
Most people aren't doing this calculation.
Sure, but there's no reason they couldn't be. How Long to Beat? has tens of thousands of users logging how long it took them to complete a particular video game. This is helpful, because a large "wisdom of crowds" effect gives you a better idea of how long a game will take you to finish than the marketing hype which will make true-but-misleading claims like "50 hours of gameplay". Unlike books, there's no single objective answer to the question "how long is this video game?"; like books, there's enormous variability from person to person in how long it takes one to get from the start to the end. Why couldn't there be a website called How Long to Read? (or better yet, some extra fields in Goodreads) which lists the objective word count of a book (optionally excluding references, appendices etc. for non-fiction, much like How Long to Beat? segregates "main story" playthroughs from "completionist" playthroughs), along with user records of how long it took them to finish the book? I think this would be a fascinating and useful resource. Imagine if you're trying to plan for your holiday, so you pack one massive doorstopper which you expect to last you the full two weeks - and it's so absorbing you breeze through the whole thing in three days, leaving you with nothing to read for the rest of your holiday. If you knew in advance that most people breeze through the book in a few hours in spite of its intimidating length, you could have planned accordingly and brought one or more additional books.
FtttG
2mo ago
Am I going nuts, or does Ziz look like Denny from The Room?
FtttG
2mo ago
Worst song about heroin addiction? My money's on "Golden Brown". I can't remember the harpsichord ever being used in a pleasing way in either a classical or pop context, and this is no exception.
FtttG
2mo ago
FtttG
2mo ago
It did freak me out when one of my colleagues told me he uses ChatGPT extensively for drafting emails. It occurred to me that at least some of the people he's emailing are also drafting their replies using ChatGPT. What you essentially have is two instances of ChatGPT talking to each other via their respective human puppets intermediaries.
CW: an explicit condemnation of gender ideology, an assertion that trans people are deluded.
At the tail end of 2014, Scott published a pro-trans article called "The Categories were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories", arguing that there's nothing intrinsic about the words "man" and "woman" that means we have to define them based on chromosomes or gamete size, any more than there's any intrinsic reason that the word "fish" excludes mammals. He argues that there's substantial evidence that affirming trans people's claimed gender identity is an effective tool for attenuating their distress, and that therefore we should be kind* to trans people and redefine the words "man" and "woman" to take these "edge cases" into account. He concluded the post with a link to the “heartwarming” story of Joshua Norton, a man in (where else, for there is nothing new under the sun?) San Francisco in the 1870s, who declared himself “Emperor of these United States” and whose delusion was “kindly" indulged by all and sundry in the city.
@zackmdavis, an admitted autogynephile who by his own account was driven to the brink of a full-blown nervous breakdown by Scott and Eliezer’s evasiveness and hypocrisy on the trans issue, wrote a response to Scott called “The Categories were Made for Man to Make Predictions”. His main argument is fairly self-explanatory per the title: it may be “kinder” to various penised individuals to include them in the category “woman” (and vice versa), but defining these words as such has strictly worse predictive power than defining them based on biological reality - and predictive power (making your beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences) is supposedly the only thing rationalists really care about. Zack doesn’t think the story about “Emperor” Norton is heartwarming at all:
I want you to imagine yourself as a resident of 1870s San Francisco, someone who Norton trusts as one of his chief imperial advisors. One day, you encounter him at his favorite café looking very distressed.
"What's wrong, Your Highness?" you inquire, pulling up a chair to his table.
"Ah, my trusted—advisor. I've been noticing—things that don't seem to add up. Most of my subjects here in the city seem to treat me with proper respect. But the newspapers still talk about Congress and the President, even though I abolished those years ago. That seems like something I would expect not to see if my reign were as secure if everyone tells me it is. What if, what if—" his voice drops to a terrified whisper, "what if I've been mad? What if I'm not actually Emperor?"
"The categories were made for man, not man for the categories, Your Highness," you say. "An alternative categorization system is not an error. Category boundaries are drawn in specific ways to to capture trade-offs that we care about; they're not something that can be objectively true or false. So if we value your identification as the Emperor—"
"What?" he exclaims. He looks at you like you're crazy—and with a hint of desperation, as if to communicate that he's trusting you to be sane, and doesn't know where he could turn should that trust be betrayed.
And in that moment, caught in the old man's earnest, pleading gaze, you realize that you don't believe your own bullshit.
"No, you're right," you say. "You're not actually Emperor. People around here have just been humoring you for the last decade because we thought it was cute and it seemed to make you happy."
A beat.
"Um, sorry," you say.
He buries his head in his arms and begins to cry—long, shuddering sobs for his lost empire. Worse than lost—an empire that never existed, except in the charitable facade of people who valued him as a local in-joke, but not as a man.
For my part, I agree. If I found out that no one in my social circle really believed in the beliefs I was spouting off, but had collectively agreed to pretend to do so in order to protect my feelings, I would feel profoundly condescended to, insulted, disrespected, infantilised - perhaps I'd even go so far as to say dehumanised. If all of my friends knew my girlfriend was cheating on me behind my back but enthusiastically agreed with me when I told them about how trusting and faithful our relationship was, "kind" is just about the last word I'd use to describe their behaviour. I wouldn't think this behaviour bore even the most tenuous relationship to the "rules of human decency".
In the short-term, perhaps it is kinder to play along with trans people’s beliefs about themselves and affirm their claimed gender identities, if failing to do so makes them sad and upset. But in the long-term, you are actively encouraging them to engage in magical thinking, the fantastical idea that declaring that something is so thereby makes it so. It is not just likely but inevitable that they’ll start wondering to what other domains this magical thinking might apply: if declaring that something is so can change your gender, why couldn’t it change your species, or the behaviour of one or more of your paraselves elsewhere in the multiverse? If there's nothing intrinsic about the category "woman" that means it can't include certain penised individuals, why couldn't the category "lemur" include certain featherless bipeds with broad nails? Scott would be the first to recognise that false beliefs cannot sit in one’s model of how the world works in isolation: they are destined to spread and multiply throughout one’s network of beliefs, infecting everything in sight. Phil Platt said "Teach a man to reason and he’ll think for a lifetime". Well, teach a man that magical thinking is acceptable in one context, and he’ll quickly find that it’s acceptable in lots of contexts.
Encouraging someone to engage in magical thinking is probably not so terribly harmful if that person is an incurious dullard with no tendency towards thought of any kind. But it strikes me as uniquely dangerous if that person is an exceptionally curious and reflective person who spends a lot of time in his own head, as most first-generation "rationalists" were: the kind of person who gets "a sort of itch... when the pieces don’t fit together and [they] need to pick at them until they do". By endorsing and affirming one of that person's obviously false beliefs, you are condemning them to believe in and/or generate other false beliefs, if (as a curious person does) they want their model of the universe to be internally consistent.**
Ziz and his cohort had beliefs about themselves which were false according to the ordinary definitions of the words (“man”, “woman”) on which those beliefs were based. They were ensconced in a social milieu of people who invariably described themselves as no-bullshit facts-don’t-care-about-your-feelings truth-seekers. And all of these people (with the possible exception of Zack himself), rather than trying to gently steer Ziz and co. into recognising that their beliefs were false, enthusiastically endorsed and affirmed their delusions, using all manner of tortured motivated reasoning which they would never have lowered themselves to in any other context. The lesson being imparted, the perverse incentive being set up, is "if this specific batshit insane belief can be compatible with rationalism provided it’s justified using a sufficiently high density of ten-dollar words, then any such belief can also be, provided you do the legwork of writing out massive inscrutable screeds with the appropriate nomenclature to justify it". Can anyone really say they’re surprised that Ziz and his mates ended up believing a bunch of other crazy bullshit in addition to gender ideology, when their adherence to gender ideology was so enthusiastically affirmed by all the supposedly logical, rational people in their immediate vicinity? If you believed that the act of saying “I am a woman” can overwrite biological reality, why wouldn’t you believe that you can hence manipulate reality to your every whim?
(I’m not saying Ziz wouldn’t have ended up leading a violent abusive cult if he wasn’t ensconced in a trans-affirming milieu - gender ideology is obviously not a prerequisite for leading a violent abusive cult, as evidenced by the fact that the Zizians are probably the first known violent abusive cult of the gender ideology era. But I’m definitely saying that having his declared gender identity affirmed with tortured motivated reasoning by everyone around him certainly didn’t help.)
A few years ago, the FTX scandal forced Scott to confront the fact that were components of the effective altruist worldview which could result in some very unsavoury behavior if followed to their logical conclusions. I hope the Zizian debacle triggers a comparable reckoning, in which Scott and his ilk consider the possibility that indulging the delusions of the trans people in their midst wasn’t anything like as "kind" or harmless as they might have once thought.
*There is perhaps no two-word phrase which inspires more disgust and revulsion in me than "be kind", especially when used in the context of the transgender debate (Scott didn't use it in this specific article, but Freddie DeBoer has). It is the essence of a smarmy thought-terminating cliché, in the sense of the term popularised by Gawker.
**I feel reasonably confident that it was the most curious and intellectually scrupulous young-earth creationists who came up with pseudoscientific nonsensical contortions like c-decay, not the least.
Why aren't novels' word counts common knowledge?
Go on IMDb, look up the pilot episode of an obscure American sitcom which was cancelled after one season, and you will find its duration in minutes (a single, objective measure of how long it will take to consume that piece of media). Go on Wikipedia, look up Blade Runner and it will list the various durations of all the various theatrically released cuts, directors' cuts and so on. Any album noteworthy enough to have its own Wikipedia page will have its duration listed in minutes and seconds, broken down by individual track duration (including the duration of various special/bonus editions). If it isn't notable enough to be on Wikipedia, it will be on Rate Your Music.
Meanwhile, if you want to find out how long it will take you to read a book, Wikipedia might tell you the page count, which is next to useless given how many variables contribute to it: font, font size, page size, margin width and height, formatting decisions (a novel which uses numerous paragraph breaks will take up more pages than a novel of the same word count which uses them sparingly; putting a page break before the start of a new chapter can easily add ten pages to a novel's length; because of its bizarre formatting, House of Leaves's word count is probably 25-40% shorter than its massive page count would imply). Various editions of the same unabridged novel with the exact same wording can have enormous variation in how many pages they take up (e.g. this edition of Moby-Dick is 768 pages, while this one is 608). Last night I Googled "Finnegan's Wake word count", one of the most widely discussed novels of the twentieth century, and the first result was one of these automated websites which calculates an estimate of the word count based on the page count (under the rule of thumb that 1 page = 250 words).
I'm not asking for anyone to laboriously go through the process of counting each word by hand. Finnegan's Wake can be purchased as an ebook, which means its contents have been digitised. If you want to find out the word count, all you have to do is open the text file/EPUB file/AZW file and check. Presumably somewhere in the region of 99% of all novels composed in this century were composed using a word processor, meaning the word counts were known (or at least trivially knowable) to the author, publisher, typesetter etc. well in advance of publication.
Before you book to see a film in the cinema, you'd want to know how long it is so you can plan your day accordingly, so cinemas always include this information (although not, annoyingly, the duration of ads and trailers prior to the movie - state Congress to the rescue!). No one would accept a vague ambiguous proxy for the duration of a film like "there are 1,300 cuts in this film" or "there are 30 scenes in this film" - how long is a "scene"? By the same token, before you start reading a book, you generally want to have some kind of idea of how long it will take you to read it. The publisher has access to an objective measure of the book's length (its word count) but refuses to make this information public, instead relying on a vague proxy for its length which is prone to error and can prove enormously misleading. Why is this?
FtttG
3mo ago
Occupational licensing boards are one of many reasons Richard Hanania cites as to why he believes the US is a gerontocracy.
I agree that these boards are rent-seeking institutions which at best provide no tangible benefit to consumers and may be (probably are) net-negative in the long run.
FtttG
3mo ago
Did Genghis Khan want any of these things? Of course not - he just wanted to spread his seed.
FtttG
3mo ago
Montaillou is an absolute chore to get through. Dying to finish it so I can move on to something more interesting.
FtttG
3mo ago
Still chipping away at my novel which I started as part of last year's NaNoWriMo competition, as documented here. Knocked out a thousand words in the last hour.
An album I finished last year was released three weeks ago.
FtttG
3mo ago
The "with a penis" was implied.
Show me the relative rates of STD transmission by penetrative rape vs. other routes of transmission.
FtttG
3mo ago
I think it's unacceptable to house sexual convicts with non-sexual convicts regardless of gender. If a convicted rapist asserts that he's now a woman, then he's a woman. She still shouldn't be housed with anyone due to the nature of her crime
Okay, but given the limited resources available to the prison service, in which it isn't practical to sequester all criminals convicted of sexual offenses away from the general population, where should a convicted rapist with an intact penis who claims to identify as a woman be housed? In the male prison, or the female prison?
And I don't think there's a problem housing them together for the same reason. Women beat the shit out of eachother in prison just as much as men do
Untrue. One data point: in the period 2001-18, 1,251 male prisoners were murdered in US prisons, while the equivalent figure for female prisoners was 7. Based on the size of the US prison population in 2022, that works out at 104.29 murders/100k population among male prisoners, 7.59 murders/100k population among female prisoners. A male American inmate is nearly 14 times more likely to be murdered in prison than a female inmate. This shouldn't come as a surprise given what proportion of the male prison population is serving time for violent offenses vs. what proportion of the female, or the obvious differences in aggression and propensity to violence between the sexes, or the obvious differences in physical strength between the sexes (which are only minimally explicable by differences in body mass).
Even if it was true, there's the obvious fact that female people cannot forcibly penetrate other female people, impregnate them and/or infect them with STDs: only male people (regardless of how they "identify") can do that. I would have thought this would have been an obvious point of concern for a self-identified feminist but apparently not.
I think what should stop them is weight classes
Sorry, that's a non-starter. For example, look at this website. When I filter to look at only male people, the top of the list is John Haack, who weighs 192 lb and whose combined lift is 2,232 lb. When I filter to show only female people, the first person of approximately Haack's weight is Crystal Tate at 196 lb, and whose combined lift is 1,540 lb. There are no female people on this list who have lifted more than 2,000 lb, or indeed more than 1,800 lb.
If you think the differences in male and female strength, speed and stamina are entirely explicable by reference to weight class, I just... I'm sorry. You're wrong. I sincerely think I would have better luck arguing with a flat Earther than someone who seriously thinks that male and female people are just as strong and fast as each other. Maybe I could understand how you arrived at that erroneous conclusion if you were literally blind.
If we sorted athletes by weight class and ignored sex entirely, no female athlete would win a gold medal in the Olympics ever again, except maybe in gymnastics. Probably no female athletes would even qualify for the Olympics outside of gymnastic events either.
FtttG
3mo ago
"I do not believe that I am any taller than my friend from Japan because of how I was born. I think thinking otherwise removes agency from Japanese people - that no matter how hard they try, they're always going to be a little shorter than me - dehumanizes them and doesn't treat them as a whole person with free will and the choice to be better."
Maybe you believe that blank-slate thinking is "nicer" than recognising the genetic components of various physical and psychological traits. That doesn't mean that blank-slate thinking is true: that it makes more accurate predictions than the alternatives. I think you're getting confused on the is-ought distinction.
As an aside, I'm consistently baffled as to how blank-slatists did such a good job of marketing themselves like they're the ones who are promoting a kinder, more charitable worldview. I recognise that, genetics being what they are, some people are just smarter than other people through no fault of their own, and there's not really much they can do to change that, so they shouldn't feel bad about it. But blank-slatists would have us believe that, because there's supposedly no genetic component to intelligence, then if someone is bad at maths, the only possible explanation is that they're lazy. Which is both untrue and extremely unkind to a person who may well be driving themselves to distraction trying to understand algebra and just failing to get it for reasons entirely outside of their power to change.
Thinking a woman is secretly happier being a stay at home mother and TV shows, newscasts, movies and teachers have convinced her to be miserable removes her agency and treats her own choices as math results
You're the one who thinks that any woman in a romantic relationship with a conservative or non-feminist man is secretly miserable and filled with self-loathing but isn't consciously aware of it. I've described this attitude as condescending before and I'm happy to do so again.
or that women are inherently less funny, less intelligent, less emotionally resilient than men because of their genes
I think men are (on average) inherently less physically flexible, empathetic and emotionally intelligent than women, and more prone to aggression and violence, because of our genes. Does that mean I don't think men are people?
Or could it possibly be the case that I think men and women have different, complementary strengths and weaknesses?
FtttG
3mo ago
I’m not a woman because I have titties and estrogen, I’m a woman because I identify with the Western cultural construct of a woman
Out of curiosity, do you have a womb?
FtttG
3mo ago
I don't know if I can think of examples of feminists literally killing each other over sectarian differences
The TERF/TIRF debate has come pretty damn close at times, which is hardly surprising given that the latter denomination contains a higher proportion of male testosterone-y people than probably any nominally feminist denomination in history.
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