FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
3mo ago
As documented in these threads, I completed NaNoWriMo in November, but that only left me with about half of a first draft. In the first two weeks of December I kept writing and wrote ~15k words on top of the 50k I knocked out in November, but then got stuck. I hate leaving things unfinished and self-imposed deadlines seem to work well for me, so my plan is to do NaNoWriMo again in February: write 1,666 words every day until I get to a first draft. Will be posting in this thread every week to keep myself honest.
FtttG
3mo ago
Meanwhile rationalist groups were still awarding these guys grants.
Which person awarded a grant was a member of this cult?
FtttG
3mo ago
★ Postbrat
What does that mean? Is it using the term in a BDSM context, or referring to the Charli XCX album?
★ Not A Person ★ it/its
FtttG
3mo ago
The difference being that Islam already has a critical mass of adherents, a sufficiently large subset of whom are willing and able to do violence on its behalf.
The entire global population of self-identified rationalists could probably fit into a single stadium with plenty of room left over; the proportion of them who are willing to do violence to further the community's goals is vanishingly small; the proportion of them who are able to do violence is smaller still.
My opinion is that, per another commenter's allusion to geeks, MOPs and sociopaths, the rationalist community currently comprises three groups:
- People who really value the truth for its own sake, even if it's uncomfortable, and who sincerely want to get better at reasoning and recognising their own biases - "not an ivory tower for people with no biases or strong emotional reactions... a dojo for people learning to resist them."
- People who are self-aware enough to recognise that many of their beliefs are probably false or rest on extremely shaky reasoning, but are reluctant to abandon them, typically because it would be socially disadvantageous to do so. Instead, they turn to rationalism in search of ever more outré and convoluted reasoning with which they can justify clinging to their obviously erroneous belief in beliefs, aiming to suppress their nagging doubts about them via overwhelming streams of abstruse jargon - essentially Gish-galloping themselves in addition to the people around them. I think @Dean is absolutely correct in describing what this group does as "rationalisation".
- Cargo-cultists who lack even the self-awareness of the second group, and who dress up the beliefs they hold (which they arrived at via the typical algorithms of social conformity) using the superficial language associated with the rationalist community, with zero understanding of the more complex and reflective insights and concepts generated by the first group. Rationalism as a community and fashion statement, and nothing more.
What's interesting is that some people who are scrupulously in group 1 most of the time can fall into group 2 only for certain specific beliefs, typically if the social pressure is great enough. Coming out and saying you're not onboard with gender ideology is a great way to get yourself disinvited from parties in the Bay Area.
I suspect that every sufficiently large community eventually undergoes such a process of degeneration, in much the same way that the moral principles explicitly endorsed by Christianity don't necessarily tell you much about the moral character of the religion's adherents. And rationalists, of all people, should know better than pulling the No True Rationalist schtick - a community is only as good as the people in it, and this episode makes it abundantly clear that the rationalist community (just like any other sufficiently large community) contains some pretty odious people who can hide in plain sight by adopting the vernacular and parroting the appropriate shibboleths. See also effective altruism and Sam Bankman-Fried.
FtttG
3mo ago
we haven’t had sex in over a year
Unless one or both of you:
- is asexual
- has some kind of medical condition
- has some kind of mental illness
- is going through some long-term personal extenuating circumstances (e.g. bereavement)
This is game over, right off the bat. I don't even need to hear anything else about your relationship - I already know it's not working.
FtttG
3mo ago
A generation of crime stats have been contaminated because of recording the perpetrator's claimed gender identity rather than their sex. Twenty years from now, criminologists will be baffled as to why the UK saw such a massive spike in "female" sex crimes over the course of five years, which then regressed to the mean in a heartbeat.
I thoroughly enjoyed the Horrible Histories entry when I was in primary school: https://www.amazon.com/Woeful-Second-World-Horrible-Histories/dp/1407163914
Despite the funny illustrations, it's remarkably unsanitised for a children's book. I think this is actually where I first learned what the Holocaust was. There's a chapter going into detail about the moral ambiguity of the conflict, pointing out that, while the Nazis were obviously evil, the Allies did some pretty questionable things too, such as the firebombing of Dresden. Surprisingly confrontational given the intended demographic.
I finished The Trial on Friday. It was rubbish, dull as dishwater, not a patch on Metamorphosis. Kafka took a killer premise (a man is arrested but never informed what his alleged crime is, and must mount a defence in spite of not knowing what he's accused of) and squandered it: Josef K's arrest never has any material impact on his life, the allegedly nightmarishly inscrutable bureaucracy never really materialises. I've read books which induced the sensation of Kafkaesque dread and disorientation far more effectively than the book from which the term originates.
Started Montaillou today. As someone who doesn't read much "pure" history (or any, really), it's quite a challenging read, but I intend to finish it anyway.
FtttG
3mo ago
Probably weird of me but I maintain an Excel spreadsheet of many motte regulars (their usernames , I mean) with my own notations, so I can have a clearer idea who I'm interacting with or reading.
Did senpai notice me? If so, what does it say?
FtttG
3mo ago
I've watched seasons 1 and 2 and loved them, felt genuinely mature and novelistic in a way Breaking Bad never did for me. We watched the first episode of season 3 and liked it but got distracted and never picked it up again. Maybe we should.
FtttG
3mo ago
I wonder if we'll get more "edgy" hardcore bands making music videos about tattooing swastikas on Trump supporters' foreheads: https://youtube.com/watch?v=yy-SiZSlmhI?si=0pc1FG5jcplOh0yr
FtttG
3mo ago
I'm just envisioning a particular corner of the ocean to which weary sailors travel in pursuit of rough, anonymous sex.
Fair enough. Offhand I can't recall an instance in which I thought a piece of journalism was sapped of interest by overuse of the word "said" but I'll keep an eye out for it in future.
Because I have too much time on my hands, I re-read one of my favourite pieces of journalism: "Shattered Glass" by Buzz Bissinger. Out of 45 speech tags, I count 30 "saids".
The How Not to Write a Novel example is referring to the use of "said" in speech tags for directly quoted dialogue, not when summarising a series of interactions in narration. There's a separate passage in the book in which they specifically encourage writers to summarise incidental dialogue much like your second example, rather than quoting it directly. The example they gave is something to the effect of:
Making her excuses, Sarah sat down to lunch with Jane.
as opposed to
"Sorry I'm late," Sarah said. "Traffic was mental."
"Don't worry about it," Jane said. "I've only been waiting five minutes."
"Oh, that's not too bad," Sarah said.
Personally, I can't recall ever reading a book which I thought was too boring and monotonous specifically because the writer failed to use enough synonyms for "said". Maybe you're talking primarily about journalism, but I think if I read a novel which featured the speech tag Joe expanded, I would probably roll my eyes. It strikes me as part of a register which is inappropriate for most fiction.
How Not to Write a Novel:
Published authors use the word "said" almost exclusively when they wish to indicate that a particular character is saying something. "Said" is a convention so firmly established that readers for the most part do not even see it. This helps to make the dialogue realistic by keeping its superstructure invisible.
Many unpublished authors, however, become uncomfortable with the repetition of the word "said" and try to improve the technology of dialogue by substituting any verb that has ever been associated with speech or language.
A particularly egregious version of this occurs when an author conflates a stage direction with the desire to avoid the word "said" and instead of writing "You and what army,” he said, thrusting out his jaw or he asked, quirking a brow, produces something like "Hello,” he thrusted or "Are you going to finish that?” he quirked. The only thing any of this does, though, is draw attention to the unconventional verb, which reminds the reader that there is an author, who is struggling mightily to avoid the word "said".
There are of course exceptions: "asked" is used for questions, "shouted" is used for a character who is doing so, and there will occasionally be a good reason to use a word other than "said" for plain speech. But spicing things up with "importuned," "vociferated", or "clamored" will sabotage any attempt to make conversation sound real.
FtttG
3mo ago
Normally when a personality questionnaire asks you to rate how accurately an adjective describes you, they either use a single adjective (neurotic) or a series of closely related adjectives (anxious, worrisome, moody). This is the first time I recall seeing a questionnaire asking me how much a group of (to my eyes) completely independent adjectives describes me.
FtttG
3mo ago
To me, that sounds more like a person's educational attainment is irrelevant to how attractive you find them.
FtttG
3mo ago
For a second there I was like "what do you mean, make a low dynamic range work?"
FtttG
3mo ago
I'm curious why you ask "I'd like a partner who is..." and two of the options are "educated" and "uneducated". Surely the response to one of these on a Likert scale is just the inverse of the response to the other?
I was pleasantly surprised to see so many doomers here issuing mea culpas on election night and admitting that if the 2024 election wasn't rigged, the 2020 one probably wasn't either.
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